Balto-Finnic Personal Name Suffixes

The Balto-Finnic peoples have always formed their personal names using primarily personal name suffixes. After Christianizing, these peoples as most other European peoples have had Christian names: the Orthodox (Greek-Catholic) people (Karelians, Vepsians, Votes and Ingrians or Izhorians) mostly names of Greek origin, the Roman-Catholics (from the 16th century the Lutherans) (Finns, Estonians, Livonians) names of Latin origin. The Balto-Finnic name suffixes occur in the hypocoristic modifications of the Christian names. The most popular and with great probability also the oldest Balto-Finnic name suffix is-oi (-ęi). According to old documents it occurs already in the pre-Christian names. The old Balto-Finnic place name with the suffix-la also consists of a personal name with the suffix-oi before the place name suffix-la. The suffix-oi is originally a diminutive suffix, although it has lost its diminutive character in names. In different Balto-Finnic languages it has preserved its primary phonetic form (in Finnish, Karelian and Ingrian) or it developed phonetically (Votic-oi>-o, Estonian-oi>-o>-u). In addition to-oi there are some other personal name suffixes which occur in different Balto-Finnic languages:-u, the plosive + s (-ts,-ks,-ps)-ne(n),-uk(ka) /-kas,-k(k)i, and others. Very little investigation has been done into Balto-Finnic personal names. However, surveys on the Balto-Finnic personal name system were recently published together with studies on the personal name systems of other European peoples (Brendler and Brendler 2007). These surveys are basically the first attempts at studying the personal name systems of those Balto-Finnic peoples that have a smaller number of speakers – Karelians, Vepsians, Ingrians or Izhorians