Keskialasaksalaiset tekijännimet vanhassa kirjasuomessa ja vanhassa kirjavirossa
Middle Low German agent nouns in Old Literary Finnish and Old Literary Estonian

Summary/Abstract: In the Middle Ages, the cities of the Baltic Sea region formed a culturally unified area. This unity was based above all on commercial factors and the spread of German urban culture to the whole Baltic Sea region. One of the central unifying factors was Middle Low German, the language generally used in the towns and cities along the Baltic Sea coast. Together with new objects, ideas and concepts, numerous loanwords from Middle Low German were adopted by the languages of the region. These loanwords belong to a typical cultural vocabulary; among them, an important group consists of agent nouns which typically refer to professionals of various kinds, such as Fin. kuppari ‘cupping therapist, blood-letter’, mestari ‘master’, muurari ‘bricklayer’, mylläri ‘miller’, suutari ‘shoemaker’ and parkkari ‘tanner’. Etymologically, these words can be traced back to a derivational type based on Latin derivatives in -arius. #is article examines mediaeval borrowed agent nouns in Old Literary Finnish and Old Literary Estonian. Despite their common origins, these agent nouns have different forms in Finnish and Estonian, the Finnish words reflecting the model of Swedish (cf. e.g. Fin. kuppari, lukkari ‘bell-ringer, sacristan’, mestari, mylläri, porvari ‘burgher’ and Swedish koppare, klockare, mästare, borgare), while the Estonian words often show the suffix in the form -er as in German (cf. Est. köster, meister, mölder and German Küster, Meister, Müller). Both in Finnish and in Estonian, the derivative type already appears to be firmly established in the first known texts. Although in the Middle Ages both Finland and Estonia belonged to the German-language cultural area of the Baltic Sea region, there were clear differences between these societies. From the early 14th century on, Finland was part of the kingdom of Sweden, and the Swedish language was used not only in administration, but in general as a language of urban culture; Sweden was also geographically a close neighbour of Finland. By contrast, in Estonia the long-time dominance of the German upper class and the geographical proximity of Germany played an important role throughout the centuries. Extralinguistic factors form an interesting background for the borrowing of this derivational type as part of a common European cultural lexicon. Recently, some linguists have claimed that much more than has previously been assumed, Finnish may contain relatively much more recent loanwords borrowed directly from Middle Low German (and not just through Swedish). However, the phonology of the loanwords examined here strongly indicates borrowing from Swedish. This would mean that the usual basic assumption would not hold: these cultural loanwords would not have been borrowed from the same direction as the concepts to which they refer.

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