Yngwe skrev:Jaska skrev:
To my knowledge, historians are very unanimous about it. Swedes arrived in the north some centuries later than Finns. Still, there are placenames which testify Proto- or West-Norse presence in the Bottenviken area: island names ending -ei. They could come from Proto- or West Norse *ey 'island', but not from East-Norse *öy or Swedish ö.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ey#Icelandic
Sagas tell about old Norwegians travelling on that area, and placenames thus confirm this. To my knowledge, there are no equally old Swedish placenames. Therefore: no Swedish speakers or ethnic Swedes until around 1300 AD, which timeframe the historians seem to agree.
Nu vet historikern ganska lite om saken eftersom et helt saknas källor. Arkeologerna ser lite mer, och i t.ex, Sangisgraven med omgivning finns likheter med mellannorrland, som i sig har påtagliga norska inslag.
När det gäller platsnamn är det ju besvärligt då det förutsätter dels att vi känner åldern på de som finns. dels förutsätter att total kontinuitet råder. Att använda fornvästnodiska soch förnstnordiska som indikator är också besvärligt då inga markanta gränser finns kopplade till något historiskt Sverige eller Norge. I grunden är ju t.ex. -ei egentligen bara en diftong som förr förekom överallt i Norden och som dessutom fortsatt vara vanlig t.ex. i Österbotten.
Jag försöker inte säga att svenskar varit först, bara att man nog får försöka se med öppna ögon på de fakta som faktiskt finns. Och då blir det mer komplicerat än att svenskar kom dit först i en koloniseringsvåg under 1300-talet.
Rent logiskt är det aningen problematiskt att man skulle ha begett sig långt in i dagens Ryssland redan under 800-tal men inte sökt sig norrut längs sin egna kustlinje...
I'm not sure if we are talking about the same subject... But let's try.
It is not so complicated, when we have results from different disciplines and they point to the same direction - or they don't, but we know where the error is.
Archaeological continuity is very untrustworthy method, which cannot question results from any other discipline. Archaeological continuity is practically always present everywhere in the world - it is almost impossible to have a situation where no features at all were inherited from the older culture to the younger culture of certain area.
Yet we know that present-day languages and ethnicities are very recent newcomers in all over the world, including Europe. So, only following the local archaeological continuity we get a series of wrong answers. Archaeological cultures have many roots, but languages only have one root, their familial lineage.
http://www.elisanet.fi/alkupera/Uralic.html
Concerning Sweden, we could follow the archaeological continuity from modern Swedes to the earliest post-glacial inhabitants; we could follow the archaeological continuity from modern Finns/meänkieliset to the earliest post-glacial inhabitants; and we could follow the archaeological continuity from modern Saamis to the earliest post-glacial inhabitants. Still, all these results would be wrong! The first inhabitants did not speak a language related to any modern languages spoken in Sweden. It is not possible to see from the archaeological data, when a new language has arrived to certain area: there is always a continuity, even when we know it is false.
So, we know that there spread cultural influences from one area to other - from Southern Sweden to Northern Sweden, for example. if there is a whole intrusive cultural complex to a new area, we can say that there were a true "colony" (but we cannot say, if they managed to spread their language to the new area.) But usually all we see is an interactive network, in which trade products spread to a wide area. Gradual shift in buildings, graves and so on can always present a diffusion of cultural ideas - it does not automatically mean that people moved.
The Finnish placenames with -ei can testify that the people who gave those names were not Swedes. But they could have been linguistic ancestors of Swedes and other Scandinavians; or they could have been Norwegians.