Category
Topic
Year
The origin of Estonian oht and ohter
Keywords: etymology, origin of Finnic phonetics, Germanic borrowings, Scandinavian borrowings, derivatives
The dictionary of Estonian dialects (EMS) lists oht as three lexical items: oht1 (= South Estonian oht) ‘1 peril, danger, menace; jeopardy, risk, hazard; 2 distress’; oht2 ‘(herbal) medicine, drug, antidote’; and the partitive-only ohtu ‘-like, -ish, resembling, as good as’. Mägiste (1929) has connected oht1 to Votic and Ingrian ohto ‘enough’ and further with Estonian oher (in literary language ohter) ‘abundant, plentiful; liberal, bountiful; rich; opulent; profuse’, explaining the meaning ‘distress’ as derived from ‘abundance of distress’.
I equate the Estonian, Votic and Ingrian words with the Finnish and Karelian ehto ‘condition;…
The dictionary of Estonian dialects (EMS) lists oht as three lexical items: oht1 (= South Estonian oht) ‘1 peril, danger, menace; jeopardy, risk, hazard; 2 distress’; oht2 ‘(herbal) medicine, drug, antidote’; and the partitive-only ohtu ‘-like, -ish, resembling, as good as’. Mägiste (1929) has connected oht1 to Votic and Ingrian ohto ‘enough’ and further with Estonian oher (in literary language ohter) ‘abundant, plentiful; liberal, bountiful; rich; opulent; profuse’, explaining the meaning ‘distress’ as derived from ‘abundance of distress’.
I equate the Estonian, Votic and Ingrian words with the Finnish and Karelian ehto ‘condition;…
Struggle over the ages II
Keywords: rhetoric, “The Anxiety of Influence”, synecdoche, hyperbole, metalepsis, Harold Bloom, Paul de Man
This article is a sequel to “Struggle over the ages I: Reading Kreutzwald’s “Kalevipoeg” as opposite in meaning to Goethe’s “Faust”” (Parksepp 2023). The pair of articles aims to exemplify how Harold Bloom’s and Paul de Man’s complementary views on rhetoric and tropes help to reveal the differences and similarities between Goethe’s and Kreutzwald’s masterpieces. The objective of the first article was to describe how, according to the anxiety of influence theory, the limiting tropes of irony, metonymy and metaphor can be used to depict the change…
This article is a sequel to “Struggle over the ages I: Reading Kreutzwald’s “Kalevipoeg” as opposite in meaning to Goethe’s “Faust”” (Parksepp 2023). The pair of articles aims to exemplify how Harold Bloom’s and Paul de Man’s complementary views on rhetoric and tropes help to reveal the differences and similarities between Goethe’s and Kreutzwald’s masterpieces. The objective of the first article was to describe how, according to the anxiety of influence theory, the limiting tropes of irony, metonymy and metaphor can be used to depict the change…
Mothers and daughters in life narratives
Keywords: family relationships, life narrative, life writing, personal experience stories, trauma
Recent public debates on family-related issues (What constitutes a traditional family? How widespread is domestic violence? What is the purpose of child protective services?) prompted an examination of these themes from the perspective of people’s personal experience. The article is based on manuscripts of life narratives obtained from the collection of Estonian Life Histories in the Estonian Cultural History Archives (EKM EKLA, f 350). The narratives were written down between 1989 and 2017 and provide a glimpse into the societal changes that took place between the 1930s and the early 21st century. The favoured narrative…
Recent public debates on family-related issues (What constitutes a traditional family? How widespread is domestic violence? What is the purpose of child protective services?) prompted an examination of these themes from the perspective of people’s personal experience. The article is based on manuscripts of life narratives obtained from the collection of Estonian Life Histories in the Estonian Cultural History Archives (EKM EKLA, f 350). The narratives were written down between 1989 and 2017 and provide a glimpse into the societal changes that took place between the 1930s and the early 21st century. The favoured narrative…
On the variation of French loanword spellings in Estonian
Keywords: corpus planning, standards of written language, spelling variants, culinary terms, adaptation of borrowings, French borrowings
The article looks at the ways the spelling of foreign words of French origin has become fixed in Estonian, with a focus on the adaptation into Estonian of words pronounced with an open e in French. In Estonian, the spelling of foreign words typically follows their pronunciation, i.e., the spelling is based on the approximate pronunciation in the (original) language. Hence, the variations in the spelling of the Estonian adaptations likely derive from the French pronunciation instructions provided in Estonian sources and possibly from the…
The article looks at the ways the spelling of foreign words of French origin has become fixed in Estonian, with a focus on the adaptation into Estonian of words pronounced with an open e in French. In Estonian, the spelling of foreign words typically follows their pronunciation, i.e., the spelling is based on the approximate pronunciation in the (original) language. Hence, the variations in the spelling of the Estonian adaptations likely derive from the French pronunciation instructions provided in Estonian sources and possibly from the…
Friends in Life and Death in Belarusian, Russian and Estonian Folklore
Keywords: life after death, categories of time, travels in the land of the dead, religious tales
The article presents a comparative historical analysis of fairy tales of the Friends in Life and Death (ATU/SUS 470) plot type, their features and distribution among Belarusians, Russians and Estonians. In the Estonian and Belarusian material, stories of this type are in some cases contaminated with the ATU 470A and 471A types.
We examine differences in the flow of time in the real world and other worlds, and consider the features of the chronotope of fairy tales and the organization of artistic space within them, as…
The article presents a comparative historical analysis of fairy tales of the Friends in Life and Death (ATU/SUS 470) plot type, their features and distribution among Belarusians, Russians and Estonians. In the Estonian and Belarusian material, stories of this type are in some cases contaminated with the ATU 470A and 471A types.
We examine differences in the flow of time in the real world and other worlds, and consider the features of the chronotope of fairy tales and the organization of artistic space within them, as…
Struggle over the ages I
Keywords: rhetoric, „The Anxiety of Influence”, irony, metonymy, metaphor, Harold Bloom, Paul de Man
The inspiration for this article came from Jüri Talvet’s observation that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s „Faust” and Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald’s „Kalevipoeg” show some remarkable similarities in their philosophical structure and plot. This article therefore aims to compare these two masterpieces by using Harold Bloom’s and Paul de Man’s understanding of tropes. While allusion and intertextuality studies typically focus on a limited number of similarities between two texts, Bloom’s anxiety of influence theory helps to apprehend both texts as a whole. This objective is achievable with two constraints.…
The inspiration for this article came from Jüri Talvet’s observation that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s „Faust” and Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald’s „Kalevipoeg” show some remarkable similarities in their philosophical structure and plot. This article therefore aims to compare these two masterpieces by using Harold Bloom’s and Paul de Man’s understanding of tropes. While allusion and intertextuality studies typically focus on a limited number of similarities between two texts, Bloom’s anxiety of influence theory helps to apprehend both texts as a whole. This objective is achievable with two constraints.…
Systematic polysemy patterns of Estonian tactile adjectives
Keywords: semantic types, polysemy, lexicography, lexicology, perception adjectives, corpus linguistics, Estonian
The article aims to identify the patterns of systematic polysemy for Estonian tactile adjectives using semantic types and corpus data. It also discusses the presentation of semantic patterns in a dictionary. This will help to provide a theoretical basis for lexicographers and to align the presentation of adjective polysemy in dictionaries. The dataset for the study consists of 265 tactile adjectives.
The corpus manager and text analysis software Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004, 2014) is used for corpus context analysis. The program allows to observe the collocations of a…
The article aims to identify the patterns of systematic polysemy for Estonian tactile adjectives using semantic types and corpus data. It also discusses the presentation of semantic patterns in a dictionary. This will help to provide a theoretical basis for lexicographers and to align the presentation of adjective polysemy in dictionaries. The dataset for the study consists of 265 tactile adjectives.
The corpus manager and text analysis software Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004, 2014) is used for corpus context analysis. The program allows to observe the collocations of a…
Who is chairwoman?
Keywords: corpus planning, gender marked words, meanings
So far, Estonian language planners have been advising to reserve the word esinaine (chairwoman) for the director of an all-female organization only. In this article I looked at data from the text corpora of different eras (1920s–1940s, 1950s–1970s, 1990–2008, 2013 and 2021) to find out whether the word occurs in its recommended meaning only in the past usage or if it also holds true in modern language. The results showed that this usage was dominant mainly during the 1920s and 1940s, where over 90% of the analyzed examples indicated the meaning of a director…
So far, Estonian language planners have been advising to reserve the word esinaine (chairwoman) for the director of an all-female organization only. In this article I looked at data from the text corpora of different eras (1920s–1940s, 1950s–1970s, 1990–2008, 2013 and 2021) to find out whether the word occurs in its recommended meaning only in the past usage or if it also holds true in modern language. The results showed that this usage was dominant mainly during the 1920s and 1940s, where over 90% of the analyzed examples indicated the meaning of a director…
Linguistics and language planning in Estonia on the example of case selection patterns of verbs
Keywords: usage-based linguistics, corpus linguistics, language planning, corpus planning, verb government, Estonian
For over a century, attempts have been made in Estonian language planning to standardize the oblique case selection of verbs (traditionally: verb government), but variation persists in actual language use. In this paper we look at the case selection patterns of a number of verbs, with which variation is said to occur without any semantic difference.
We look at the historical process of how corpus planning has decided on the “right” case-selection and compare it to actual language use from 1900–1939 and 2019–2021. Our analysis shows that variation is still…
For over a century, attempts have been made in Estonian language planning to standardize the oblique case selection of verbs (traditionally: verb government), but variation persists in actual language use. In this paper we look at the case selection patterns of a number of verbs, with which variation is said to occur without any semantic difference.
We look at the historical process of how corpus planning has decided on the “right” case-selection and compare it to actual language use from 1900–1939 and 2019–2021. Our analysis shows that variation is still…
Nature in the autobiographical writings of two men born in the mid-19th century
Keywords: autobiographical writings, modernity, nature, vernacular literarcy
The article looks at nature references in texts written in the 1890s by two men born in the middle of the 19th century: namely, the autobiographical writings of farmer and school teacher Paulus Paurmann (1850–1903), and the diary of miller Märt Siipsen (1846–1916). Paurmann and Siipsen can be called vernacular literati – despite their poor education they were eager to participate in the modern literary sphere as both readers and writers. Both men depended on nature in their livelihood – this combined with their interest in contemporary literary matters makes them good examples of…
The article looks at nature references in texts written in the 1890s by two men born in the middle of the 19th century: namely, the autobiographical writings of farmer and school teacher Paulus Paurmann (1850–1903), and the diary of miller Märt Siipsen (1846–1916). Paurmann and Siipsen can be called vernacular literati – despite their poor education they were eager to participate in the modern literary sphere as both readers and writers. Both men depended on nature in their livelihood – this combined with their interest in contemporary literary matters makes them good examples of…
Concerns and breaking points in natureculture
Keywords: 21st century literature, eco-fiction, citizen science, ornithology
The article compares birdwatchers’ experience of nature with the natural environment as conveyed in literary fiction. The source materials comprise, first of all, interviews conducted with (mostly amateur) Estonian birdwatchers and, secondly, contemporary Estonian and Swedish literary fiction: Maarja Pärtna’s prose poetry collection “The Living City” (Elav linn, 2022), Andrus Kivirähk’s book “Flight to the Moon” (Lend Kuule, 2022), Tõnis Tootsen’s novel “Pâté of the Apes: One Primate’s Thoughts and Memories” (Ahvide pasteet, 2022) and Kerstin Ekman’s novel “The Wolf Run” (Löpa varg, 2021; Estonian translation 2022). The focus is on whether and…
The article compares birdwatchers’ experience of nature with the natural environment as conveyed in literary fiction. The source materials comprise, first of all, interviews conducted with (mostly amateur) Estonian birdwatchers and, secondly, contemporary Estonian and Swedish literary fiction: Maarja Pärtna’s prose poetry collection “The Living City” (Elav linn, 2022), Andrus Kivirähk’s book “Flight to the Moon” (Lend Kuule, 2022), Tõnis Tootsen’s novel “Pâté of the Apes: One Primate’s Thoughts and Memories” (Ahvide pasteet, 2022) and Kerstin Ekman’s novel “The Wolf Run” (Löpa varg, 2021; Estonian translation 2022). The focus is on whether and…
Literary education in Soviet schools
Keywords: Estonian literature, curricula, literary education, Soviet schools, ideology, identity
The article looks at changes in the literature curriculum throughout the Soviet occupation. It discusses the content of the curricula, the ideological context, as well as the proportion of the curriculum dedicated to literary education. Due to the sheer volume of the material available, the article limits itself to mapping out the topic: whether and how the ideological emphases evolved during different periods (Stalinism, the Khrushchev Thaw, the Era of Stagnation); the ratio of Russian (Soviet) to Estonian authors covered in the literary curriculum; the educational system paradoxes involved in literature…
The article looks at changes in the literature curriculum throughout the Soviet occupation. It discusses the content of the curricula, the ideological context, as well as the proportion of the curriculum dedicated to literary education. Due to the sheer volume of the material available, the article limits itself to mapping out the topic: whether and how the ideological emphases evolved during different periods (Stalinism, the Khrushchev Thaw, the Era of Stagnation); the ratio of Russian (Soviet) to Estonian authors covered in the literary curriculum; the educational system paradoxes involved in literature…