Lexical relations in dialects and place names: Landscape terms

By November 17, 2016,
Page 910-916
Author Vilja Oja, Marja Kallasmaa
Title Lexical relations in dialects and place names: Landscape terms
Abstract The occurrence of landscape terms in Estonian dialects and place names is compared. Material from cognate languages is also used. Analysing the areal distribution and function of appellative nouns in dialects vs. place names, their lexical differences and semantic relations are discussed. The terms nurm, põld and väli occur throughout the Estonian area and in several cognate languages. In North Estonian dialects and Northern Finnic languages nurm means ‘grassland, meadow’, while in South Estonian dialects and the Livonian and Votic languages it stands for ‘field’. An analogous semantic boundary runs through toponyms. In the Islands and Western dialects the common generic term in field names is põld, while väli is used in the North Estonian dialect east of the area. The meanings differ across dialects. Transferred names and recent farm names taken from standard Estonian stand out from the local dialectal background. Sometimes, homonymy may cause semantic confusion.
Session Posters
Keywords dialect words, place names, concept ‘field’, Estonian, Finnic.
BibTex 
@InProceedings{ELX12-090,
	   author = {Vilja Oja and Marja Kallasmaa},
	   title = {Lexical relations in dialects and place names: Landscape terms},
	   pages = {910--916},
	   booktitle = {Proceedings of the 15th EURALEX International Congress},
	   year = {2012},
	   month = {aug},
	   date = {7-11},
	   address = {Oslo,Norway},
	   editor = {Ruth Vatvedt Fjeld and Julie Matilde Torjusen},
	   publisher = {Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo},
	   isbn = {978-82-303-2228-4},
	}
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