Sigurd Wettenhovi-Aspa, ca 1930s, Museoviraston kokoelma, Creative Commons 4.0
Wettenhovi-Aspa was one of the more remarkable multi-talented artists and scholars in Finland, probably most famous for his writings and linguistic theories (an archetypal pseudolinguist)
According to Wettenhovi-Aspa, the similarities he found between Finnish / Uralic languages and ancient Egyptians were the proof that the ancestors of Finns were the basis of ancient Egyptian civilization.
Most people find his similarities spurious and consider his theories false. Nevertheless, I am going to use an analogous methodology to prove that The Republic of Finland is actually The Republic of Fairyland (the Fairy Kingdom having been annexed first by Sweden and then taken over by Russia.)
The name Finn was weird to me when I was growing up – why couldn’t the foreigners call us suomalainen as we called ourselves? The origin of Suomi is unknown, and many theories have been floated (of which I vaguely remember suomu = scale, somehow indicative of Finns predilection towards fishy things; suo maa = bog land, a very good description of terrain that is 30% bog or swamp). I would consider Suomi among the same group of names as Sápmi (land inhabited by the Sámi people) and Sumy (a city in Ukraine) and leave the mystery as is.
However, I later learned that Finn, as used in Elder Edda, such as Völundarkviða, could mean either Sami or alfar (elf). The etymology of word finn could be derived from Norse finnr / finna (spelling varies depending on source, but the word is usually translated as finder, hunter-gatherer). However, I would also consider possibility of celtic fionn / finn (fair, blonde).
If we go with the meanings ‘elf’ or ‘fair’, a Finn could be translated as ‘a person of fair folk’, or fairy for shorts.
Thus, using the Wettenhovi-Aspa approach, it can be proven that The Republic of Finland actually should be called The Republic of Fairyland.
PlanktonPunkt 