Aedvere (Aedvere)

Aed, as anyone who actually read the introduction will remember, means garden (but see Aia below), while the -vere suffix occurring in some 700 place-names (as well as hidden / embedded in others) deserves an entry of its own (but won’t get it). Estonian linguists have been discussing its meaning for about a hundred years and are still not certain. Various suggestions have been made for its derivation: Gothic: fera and Old High German: fiara (region, area); Finnish: verho (covering), vero (verosta in place of), vuori, vaara (hill); Estonian: vare (ruin), veri (blood), pere (family, household, farm), kõrve (forest), veer:veere (brink, border, edge, slope), *vēri (deciduous forest; note for non-linguists, the asterisk indicates a hypothetical form), *veere:*veerde (?), *veri:*veren (wood, woody hill). Not easy. An interesting angle comes from the taxation list compiled for Danish King Valdemar II in 1220-1241, Liber Census Daniae (LCD): the settlement name Serueueræ, for example, clearly looks like a Latinized name. Given the LCD was written in Latin and “probably based on the notes of Danish priests” (www.estonica.org), we have two weak links (Danish clerks hearing Estonian names and their re-transcription into possibly faulty dog Latin). Perhaps the -ueræ suffix is the result of fortuitous convergence between conceiving a Latin suffix -ver from vergo, -ěre, meaning to be turned towards, to incline or lean, and veere meaning about the same, where the two weak links may have prevented hearing a less obvious ‘Estonian’ genitive. Either way, Estonian linguist Valdek Pall concludes that “the spreading of the -vere names was connected with slash-and-burn agriculture”, Paul Alvre proposes a relation to vierre (burnt-over clearing for cultivation), and place-name specialist Marja Kallasmaa also hypothesizes that both veer:veere and *veere:*veerde were slash-and-burn terms. In Saami, similarly, roavvi means a “place in which a forest fire has occurred”. Interestingly, however, in Mordvin place names, N. V. Kazaeva differentiates veŕe (upper) from alo (lower). To conclude, with no certainty, my personal suggestion is that, since swiddeners were unlikely to build homes on top of the swidden itself, but nearby, vere may possibly have meant ‘by or beside a swidden’. Ten years down the road, it will be interesting to see how embarrassingly wrong I may be... Given its belonging to a land-clearing street-name group (see Alemaa), I suspect they’re trying to give it this more ‘ancient’ meaning*.

* According to Hamilton’s 3rd Law of Odonymy‡, the more recent the naming (here 2001), the more “olde worlde” the name.

‡ An odonym (from Greek ὁδός, road, path, way + ὄνομα, name) is a name given a street. Odonymy is thus a branch of onomastics (the study of names and their origins).