It doesn't talk about perceptions but if you're interested in name statistics, this one is in English and has all the first names that are in the population register (pretty much everyone born since the beginning of 20th century, if I remember correctly). There are lists of the most popular names and you can search for names (which is less useful, if you don't know Finnish names already but here are the statistics for Aarre for example). I really like that site, I find it interesting to see the naming trends, though as they also include middle names it doesn't really show what first names are popular. At the moment old-fashioned names are in, but not really romantic, old-fashioned names but the sort of short practical names that were popular in maybe 1920s (which means Urho, "brave", Jalo, "noble", Helmi, "pearl", Onni, "happiness" and names that don't mean anything in particular like Unto, Vilho, Eino). Nature names have been popular too, like super trendy Lumi (snow), Aamu (morning), Lilja (lily), Valo (light) and I've met one Tuisku (snow storm).
Awesome! Thank you, that's really cool. Another question, for Ereine but also anyone--so if you say the name Aamu means "morning," does that mean, it's the Finnish way to say "morning," like "Nice morning, isn't it?" would contain the word "aamu"? Or do you mean that if you looked the name Aamu up in a name book, it would tell you it derives from an Old Finnish word meaning "morning"?
It's actually the other way around, Aamu is the modern word for morning and for a greeting you would say "hyvää huomenta" where huomen is an old-fashioned word for morning. I think that names with literal meanings are pretty common in Finland, partly I believe because of a nationalistic (in the sense of building a nation) movement in the late 19th century when Finland was a very oppressed part of Russia. Before that it was a part of Sweden for centuries and Finnish language for mostly for servants and crafts people. So people became interested in building a Finnish national identity and part of it was inventing Finnish names (before that I think that the names tended to be Finnish versions of international biblical or other religious names, like my name Katri which shares root with Katherine and its variants). Some of them where pagan names (or meant to sound like them) and some were just Finnish words which symbolized the sort of things they found important (like Taisto, fight/war, Tarmo, vigor) and I think that nature names were popular because nature was seen as a large part of our identity. Some of the names are words that are used in everyday language (like Tuuli, wind, Meri, sea, Satu, fairytale) and some are more old-fashioned or poetic (like Suvi, summer, when kesä is the modern word or Lempi, love and rakkaus is the modern word) but I think that they tend to be mostly words whose meanings people would understand and not derived from some ancient word.
