 The Germanic toponym ("Aldeigja" ~ "Aldoga") was soon borrowed by the Slavic population and transformed by means of the Old East Slavic metathesis "ald- → lad-" to .The Old Norse intermediary word between Finnish and Old East Slavic word is fully supported by archeology, since the Scandinavians first appeared in Ladoga in the early 750s, that is, a couple of decades before the Slavs.Other hypotheses about the origin of the name derive it from 'wave' and 'wavy', or from the Russian dialectal word алодь, meaning 'open lake, extensive water field'.