I gave more detail in a later posting, but
just to make my position as clear as possible: I don't want to imply that the
Scandinavian names of Saaremaa and mainland Estonia were given by the 16th
century Danish occupants, though that occupation presumably helped to them
to remain in use. Even German Ösel and Latinised Osilia go back to the time when
the area was controlled by the Livonian Order (13th-16th c.). Sagas written down between the 12th and 14th
centuries and composed orally perhaps as early as the 9th century, as well as
Alfred's translation of Orosius' "History of the World", testify to the
early existence of the names -- say ca. AD 800.
But they can scarcely be much earlier
than that. They are transparent Old Norse formations, displaying uniquely North
Germanic phonetic developments and containing the element -sýsla found at that
time throughout North Germanic. It is derived from a native verb root,
so it can't be an exotic import. However, since it doesn't occur (as far as
I know) anywhere in North Sea Germanic, High German or Gothic, it doesn't seem
reasonable to date its origin before the Ingveonic/Scandinavian
split.
Finally, if the names Eysysla and Adalsysla
had been coined several centuries before AD 800, their original form would have
been very different (e.g. with common Germanic *auja- for East Scandinavian ö or
West Scandinavian öy/ey). One would expect such archaic forms to survive
somewhere among the Baltic Finnic speakers (e.g. *auja- > *aiva- like
*flauja- > Finnish laiva 'ship'), but I'm not aware of any such traces.
Actually Ey-sysla is a mere semantic calque: Saare-maa means literally
'island-land' -- a name more logical from the point of view of the Finnic
natives, for whom it has always been "The Island". Adal-sysla may also translate
a parallel native term.
The linguistic chronology matches very well
the East Baltic expansion of the Swear, hence my suspicion that they were the
namers.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2001 10:45 AM
Subject: [tied] Re: Language - Area - Routes
I know the island was Danish later on. Estonia was also
Danish in the
13th and 14th century, in case you shold want to raise that
point
later. But one might wonder: why use the name of an adminstrative
division which at that time within Denmark was used only in Jutland,
when the state of Denmark by then was based on Sjælland and Scania?
"The
name doesn't go back..." Absence of proof... etc