![]() ![]() When Livland changed from the name of an ethnic tribal land to the name of Old Livonia, the change was both spatial (Daugava river to Salaca (Salis) Memel to Narva) and categorical (tribal land German confederation). The name was no longer at the same level as the names of Lettland (Latgale), Courland, Zemgale and Estland, but had become a hyperonym whose hyponyms were the names of Estland, Lettland and Courland. When Saaremaa was linked to Livonia, the name Livland retained both its categorical status (as the name of a province) and its spatial status (as the antithesis of Estland). As the previous usage remained alongside the newer usage, a polysemous relationship was formed (e.g. in the seventeenth century Livland referred to the territory of Old Livonia as well as the then province). The Finns had used the name Viroi(nmaa) to refer to the neighbouring land south across the water, whereas to the Estonians the same Viru(maa) was the name of a tribal province. The name may initially have referred to a tribal province in Finnish too, but its semantic meaning was land on the other side of the Gulf of Finland. With the events described above, the land on the opposite shore was now Livonia. The names remained unchanged, however, as is typical with country names, and thus the Finnish Viroi(nmaa) became equivalent to Livland, at least in physical terms. The equivalence remained when the province of Livland was designated, and thus the area to which the Finnish word Viroi(nmaa) referred excluded the Virumaa region. The original justification for the name, its transparency, thus lost its relevance, which was also the case with Livonia, as this no longer meant the tribal area. ![]() The Estonian Viru(maa) could not have acquired the function of the name Livland because it was the name of a region and therefore in opposition to names at the same level in the hierarchy (e.g. ![]() When a name is no longer used in its proper function within a language community it becomes forgotten and a semantic vacuum is formed which must be filled. This occurred with the Estonian name Liivlandi and originally with the quasi-name Maarjamaa: the word is formally the same but no longer a proper noun.“Still the noise in the mind, that is the first task,” wrote musicologist R. Murray Schafer in his defining book The Soundscape. “Then everything else will follow in time.” Nova Scotia four-piece Mauno sound like they’re striving for similar clarity on their adventurous new album Tuning - a record named after the book’s subtitle, and similarly brimming with grand ideas. “The Soundscape changed my life,” says singer/guitarist Nick Everett. “It completely changed the way I move through the world.” The book is full of theories about the emotional attachments we form with our sonic environments. Tuning is therefore threaded with field recordings captured everywhere from Mauno's home in Halifax to Berlin and Heidelberg. “We wanted to include little pieces of the places we’ve lived,” says Everett. ![]()
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