There may be nobody out there as fond of multilingual maps as I am (I can't tell you how excited I was, years ago, to get hold of a trilingual map of Transylvania), but I'm going to blog this anyway: a Finnish/Russian map of the Karelian Isthmus (the region north and northwest of St. Petersburg that was taken from Finland after World War Two and added to Leningrad Oblast). It's in a dozen sections; click on any of them and it opens up in a separate window, and if you click on that it expands to the point where you can easily read the names of every little feature of the landscape. I had given up on trying to find out exactly where Mustamäki and Neuvola (or Neivola) were from other internet and printed sources, but this section locates them precisely (northwest of Roshchino/Raivola). I know I've said this many times before, but: I love the internet. (Found via this Russian page on the Yalkala Museum.)
Addendum. I've discovered a more detailed online map of the southern part of Karelia, also bilingual (Finnish/Russian).
Posted by languagehat at January 14, 2007 06:28 PMThanks for this! The map is great and the museum link has some interesting Finno-Ugric links to explore. I was interested also to see that the church symbols shown in red mean that they have been destroyed.
Posted by: marja-leena at January 14, 2007 07:45 PMInteresting find. Blagodarju!
Posted by: bz at January 14, 2007 08:05 PMFWIW, I suspect that many, many of us are intrigued by maps with strange town names on (strange to us, I mean). The thrill of decoding the names in another language for lake, mountain and river, and learning some tiny, useless facts just for the sake of it is a pleasure that never fades.
Posted by: Dr Zen at January 14, 2007 08:10 PMNice link, but I really would like to know is where you found the trilingual map of Transylvania!
Posted by: John at January 15, 2007 06:47 PMIn a no longer extant travel bookstore, I'm afraid. Here's the LibraryThing link for my copy, if it's any help.
Posted by: language hat at January 15, 2007 08:05 PMThanks for the link, now I'm on the search . . .
Posted by: John at January 16, 2007 07:04 AMThanks a lot for this link. As a Fenno- and Russophile who lived in St. Pete, I had wondered about how far to the city the Finnish/Karelian lands once stretched. Pretty far, it turns out, even some city parts have adapted Finnish names.
Also, I was puzzled about strange-sounding placenames like 'Kolomyagi' and 'Luppolovo' and 'Kavgolovo', turns out they're really the run-off-the-mill Finnish placenames like Kolomaeki, Luuppola and Kaukola. Any idea where the '-vo' ending comes from?
Posted by: Bruno van Wayenburg at January 16, 2007 09:41 AMI think the Transylvania map was done by a Hungarian publisher (but not Cartographia), in Hungarian, Rumanian and German. I bought a copy not long after the first edition came out. There has been at least one more edition - Omni Resources carries it and says the new one came out in 2003, at an enlarged scale of 1:400,000 (I think the first one was at 1:500,000). It's $12.95 through them (http://www.omnimap.com/catalog/int/romania.htm#p5). I'd like to know where we could get this Karelia map on a paper copy.
Posted by: Lloyd S. at January 16, 2007 10:44 AMPretty far, it turns out, even some city parts have adapted Finnish names.
Is it Finnish, or Votic, or something else?
Posted by: David Marjanovi? at January 16, 2007 10:48 AMDavid, this was done with a Mac, using Firefox: Marjanović. (Fingers crossed that it will work).
Posted by: bathrobe at January 22, 2007 05:33 AM
