Swedish settlers in America and another of Dutch people near the river Delaware in Pennsylvania in the seventeenth century.[1] These settlers were soon absorbed among the English-speaking colonists and their distinctive ethnological characters lost. So it must have been in England, the dialects of the tribal settlers from the Baltic and their ethnological characters became in a few generations absorbed in the Old English.
The Fins have left the name by which they were called by the Frisians, Saxons, and other Germans, in some Fin place-names in England, which are mentioned in Anglo-Saxon charters and other early records. Whether these places were so called after individual settlers called by the tribal name or after a community, the significance is the same. They have also left their own name, by which they were known to the Goths, Norse, and Danes who spoke the Old Northern language—the name Cwæn—in a number of English place-names which have a similar significance, but with this difference: where we find a place mentioned apparently as the abode of a Fin or Fins we may look for Saxon or German neighbours, and where Cwæn or Quen occurs as an equivalent, we may look for neighbours who were Scandians.
It should be remembered that King Alfred, in describing the voyage up the Baltic, gives some account of the Esthonians and their customs, thus leading us to suppose he must have thought this information would be of interest to his countrymen.
The ancient nations known as the Eastmen, on the east of the Baltic Sea and south of the Gulf of Finland—i.e., the Esthonians, Livonians, Lechs, and Lithuanians—were, without doubt, partly allied in race to those other old nations and tribes from which the bulk of the settlers in England came. Their ethnological characteristics of the present day, their dialects or language, and their
- ↑ Winsor, Justin, ‘History of America.’ iv. 452. 496, etc., and State Papers. Colonial Series, 1677–1680, p. 623.
