Posted on 06/15/2008 8:34:34 AM PDT by blam
What I gather from digging through hundreds of names in the Kola Peninsula and Finland (over the last 3 years or thereabouts now that I discovered where so many of the ancestors came from) it seems to me that a Sa'ami place name probably is the secondary name with a place with a regularized Finish name.
Same ought to be true for Sweden as well.
However, Finland can serve as a good template for all the other places in the Scandinavian peninsula because, ta-ta-ta-da-daa, in the imposition of the Swedish form of governance on Finland (in 1600s/1700s) the intellectual class that popped up in Helsinki (et al) thought to "fill in" all the linguistic gaps by adopting Latin words rather than German or Swedish (Gothic) words. That's what gives that utterly strange language called Finish such an otherworldly English Language feel ('cause that's what English intellectuals did as well ~ slip in lots of Latin).
So, whenever I read a place name in Finland that I can at all "understand" because of its Latin content, I know to look for a secondary name previously applied to the place. If it looks totally bizarre, and doesn't even "bounce" like Hungarian or Estonian (Finish cognates), odds are good that it's a Sa'ami name.
There are an almost unlimited number of such names BTW.
We were left with so few Sa'ami words by our ancestors (brogalis = bib overhauls worn to work with reindeer; amarugia = "reindeer" crossing; maybe some others), I can't say I'm an expert in this, but I had to learn a tremendous amount of vocabulary in Sa'ami, Finish, Latvian, Old West Gothic, to even begin to figure that out.
Folks who study French history have a secret. Learned this one years ago from some professionals in French studies who'd managed to get paid for books they'd published ~ first take a Michelin guide and learn the geographic and political reference points in the area covered by the guide (usually a couple, maybe three pre-Revolutionary provinces). Then, learn the names of all the Medieval Castles. Then, learn the names of all the Chateaux built from about 1600 onward.
That gives you a grasp of the country and will enable you to properly organize in your mind any primary or secondary source materials you might encounter, and also allow you to infiltrate that material with tertiary histories and intelligence briefings on that area.
Language is the same. With respect to Scandinavian place names they all initially seem to be nonsense words. Then you discover they are mostly abbreviated sentences, and then finally, they are also in Sa'ami ~ and you don't know any Sa'ami.
Now, to make a quick job of identifying Sa'ami names, get a couple of maps and start circling the strangest possible stuff, or anything with "mu" in it. Means "reindeer" in many Sa'ami languages. Also, all the names with "rgu" (hard g) in them.
Might help to do a google.com search for "sa'ami place names". Could get a surprise ~
It's not original with the Goths at all.
Best I can tell most the Sa'ami have blue, gray, blue/gray, or heavily pigmented eye color ~ in the same family too. Remember, colorless eyes are an aid to survival in the Far North. At the same time these guys have been part of the Iron Age for the last thousand years so they do get around!
question, what genetic test should I take, there’s a few out there which one have you heard gives the best database of results?
Neither test tells you anything about Celiac, Red vision, night vision, blue cones, Scandinavian porphyria, and so forth, all genetically controlled characteristics.
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