Interesting, maybe I can help provide some background.Ye-Quor is more of an enigma. I first encountered it while looking for maps of the Strait of Anian; I used a map by Thomas Jefferys for most of its route. Interestingly, the map appears to indicate that a Japanese expedition had taken place on Alaska and in the Arctic Sea. Up at the top of the map are the islands of Ye-Quor, and that's so far been the only reference I've been able to find online. If I were more familiar with the Japanese literature of the era or the exploration of the Pacific Northwest I might be able to find something related. As I develop the Hyperborean continent, I'll have to take a deeper dive on it.
When I read this part what came up to my mind was this old Japanese map which, according to the Harvard University in which is stored, was printed in the 1850s during the Tokugawa Period. I went to check and there were indeed several islands up in the Arctic Circle in the same place indicated there which are labeled, written right-to-left, as 夜人国 (yajin-koku, basically "land of the people of the night"), and even there I started noticing a curious assonance.
Another search around and I find out that there exists a vocabulary entry actually for 夜国 (ya-koku, meaning more simply "land of the night"), which is lifted from Nihon Kokugo Daijiten, according to Wikipedia one of the largest and more comprehensive dictionaries to be published in recent times. What's more, the term with this same exact meaning as below, is attested in two Japanese manuscripts, one from 1787 and another in 1751, which overlaps the same time period as the Tomas Jeffreys map perfectly.
Turns out that it simply designates, not so surprisingly and a bit anticlimactically, those territories which are situated so upper north that, as the name says, for the greatest part of the year it's perpetual night and there's no sunlight to be seen.
Unfortunately i see no mention of dwaves even in the quotes provided as examples: the 1787 source (which is a "Dutch Studies" compendium apparently, so I don't know how much it was information the Japanese simply heard from the Dutch rather than finding out themselves) simply states that as the sun sinks further south, the ya-koku get darker and darker.
Sooo... Just a theory of mine based on this short research, but even factoring in what possible differences in pronounciation there was at the time (not knowledgeable on this at all), maybe the "ye-que" on the map is a distortion of what "ya-koku" might have sounded like to an untrained foreign ear?
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