Category
Topic
Year
The various aspects of home
Keywords: exile, Estonian exile literature, Estonian diaspora, correspondence, home
Writer Valev Uibopuu (1913–1997) lived in exile from 1943 until his death. During the whole exile period he held an active correspondence, especially with Estonians living in Estonia and with members of the Estonian diaspora, as well as with his first wife Tuuli Reijonen, who lived in Finland. These letters lay the foundation to this article, which is focused on his changing experience of home in exile. Thus I tried to find out what home meant to Uibopuu, how his concept of home developed in exile and how Uibopuu began to feel…
Writer Valev Uibopuu (1913–1997) lived in exile from 1943 until his death. During the whole exile period he held an active correspondence, especially with Estonians living in Estonia and with members of the Estonian diaspora, as well as with his first wife Tuuli Reijonen, who lived in Finland. These letters lay the foundation to this article, which is focused on his changing experience of home in exile. Thus I tried to find out what home meant to Uibopuu, how his concept of home developed in exile and how Uibopuu began to feel…
Analysis of quantity degrees by synthesis
Keywords: quantity degrees, analysis by synthesis, speech synthesis, machine learning
The article is the first attempt to provide a fresh view of the quantity degree as a phonological category by using synthesis and machine learning. The results of the analysis are compared with recorded natural speech and with synthetic speech achieved by different methods of synthesis. Self-training speech synthesizers based on hidden Markov models (HMM), on deep neural netrworks (DNN) and on recurrent neural networks (RNN) were used. The input for machine learning consisted of written Estonian texts (ca 1000 sentences) and audio texts recorded from different informants who used the…
The article is the first attempt to provide a fresh view of the quantity degree as a phonological category by using synthesis and machine learning. The results of the analysis are compared with recorded natural speech and with synthetic speech achieved by different methods of synthesis. Self-training speech synthesizers based on hidden Markov models (HMM), on deep neural netrworks (DNN) and on recurrent neural networks (RNN) were used. The input for machine learning consisted of written Estonian texts (ca 1000 sentences) and audio texts recorded from different informants who used the…
Language change vs. sociolinguistic change
Keywords: language change, sociolinguistic change, periodization, mediatization, big data, small data, English, Estonian
In this article, we discuss the meaning of language change and sociolinguistic change, review some periodizations which describe changes in and around Estonian, and suggest new directions for future research. We approach the issue from the perspective of the 2014 volume edited by Jannis Androutsopoulos, who invites researchers to overcome the dualism of structuralist and post-structuralist paradigms in studying language change and to bring the study of language and society closer together. Sociolinguistic change is not limited to a single sound, lexical or syntactic element in a language,…
In this article, we discuss the meaning of language change and sociolinguistic change, review some periodizations which describe changes in and around Estonian, and suggest new directions for future research. We approach the issue from the perspective of the 2014 volume edited by Jannis Androutsopoulos, who invites researchers to overcome the dualism of structuralist and post-structuralist paradigms in studying language change and to bring the study of language and society closer together. Sociolinguistic change is not limited to a single sound, lexical or syntactic element in a language,…
MAKE-causative on the example of Estonian ajama
Keywords: polysemy, grammaticalization, causative construction, verb ajama, literary language, Estonian
This paper examines the polysemy of the Estonian core verb ajama (‘to move something; to force someone’) and focuses on the development and use of the ajama-(lit. drive)-causative (MAKE-causative; henceforth ajama-causative). The analysis draws on corpus data consisting of written Estonian texts from the 16th century until the present day. As many as 2,366 cases of ajama were analysed in order to decide over the meaning groups of the verb and the relations between its meanings.
The lexical meanings of the verb ajama are ‘to move or push something’, ‘to force or direct someone’, ‘to deal with something (continually)’ and ‘to move’. A…
This paper examines the polysemy of the Estonian core verb ajama (‘to move something; to force someone’) and focuses on the development and use of the ajama-(lit. drive)-causative (MAKE-causative; henceforth ajama-causative). The analysis draws on corpus data consisting of written Estonian texts from the 16th century until the present day. As many as 2,366 cases of ajama were analysed in order to decide over the meaning groups of the verb and the relations between its meanings.
The lexical meanings of the verb ajama are ‘to move or push something’, ‘to force or direct someone’, ‘to deal with something (continually)’ and ‘to move’. A…
Public transport in Estonian literature
Keywords: literary urban studies, Estonian literature, public transport, urban space, Tallinn
The article deals with the depiction of urban transport in Estonian fiction from the second half of the 19th century to the present day. Examples from the prose of Eduard Vilde, A. H. Tammsaare, Peet Vallak, Raimond Kaugver, Mati Unt, Mats Traat, Holger Kaints, Veronika Kivisilla and some other authors have been analysed, pointing out the rich variety of aspects the description of public transport offers to authors for creating, mediating and interpreting urban environment. The prevalent fictional coverage of Tallinn public transport is compared with two Estonian descriptions of…
The article deals with the depiction of urban transport in Estonian fiction from the second half of the 19th century to the present day. Examples from the prose of Eduard Vilde, A. H. Tammsaare, Peet Vallak, Raimond Kaugver, Mati Unt, Mats Traat, Holger Kaints, Veronika Kivisilla and some other authors have been analysed, pointing out the rich variety of aspects the description of public transport offers to authors for creating, mediating and interpreting urban environment. The prevalent fictional coverage of Tallinn public transport is compared with two Estonian descriptions of…
The dimensional text model: A theoretical overview
Keywords: corpus linguistics, text classification, text typology, functional text dimensions, multidimensional analysis
Corpus linguists and language technologists are increasingly turning to the Web as a source of language data. However, automatically crawled corpora have some shortcomings: lots of data but the content is unknown. This has created a need for software which is able to extract all the necessary information from the raw corpus. One such information extraction task in natural language processing is automatic text classification, which in practice imposes several challenges, such as confusion around the terminology, the absence of a generally accepted taxonomy, etc. Even if the latter…
Corpus linguists and language technologists are increasingly turning to the Web as a source of language data. However, automatically crawled corpora have some shortcomings: lots of data but the content is unknown. This has created a need for software which is able to extract all the necessary information from the raw corpus. One such information extraction task in natural language processing is automatic text classification, which in practice imposes several challenges, such as confusion around the terminology, the absence of a generally accepted taxonomy, etc. Even if the latter…
Standardisation of meanings in Estonian corpus planning on the example of the verb vabandama
Keywords: Estonian corpus planning, word meanings, language change
Estonian corpus planning relies noticeably on traditions, not on up-to-date language research, which there is none. For example, in 1980 the Orthological Committee decided that the meanings of the words should not be standardized since they change rapidly, but the Dictionary of Standard Estonian (ÕS) published in 1999 still had some restrictions in the definitions and some of the meanings still continue to be inadvisable. The Language Committee of the Estonian Mother Tongue Society, active since 1993, expanded the meanings of some words, but merely a few words have been inspected.
One of the…
Estonian corpus planning relies noticeably on traditions, not on up-to-date language research, which there is none. For example, in 1980 the Orthological Committee decided that the meanings of the words should not be standardized since they change rapidly, but the Dictionary of Standard Estonian (ÕS) published in 1999 still had some restrictions in the definitions and some of the meanings still continue to be inadvisable. The Language Committee of the Estonian Mother Tongue Society, active since 1993, expanded the meanings of some words, but merely a few words have been inspected.
One of the…
The diary of Märt Siipsen as a means of self-positioning
Keywords: diary keeping, Märt Siipsen, genre, vernacular literacy
The article focuses on the diary of miller Märt Siipsen (1846–1916), written in the years 1896–1897. Siipsen only had the minimal three-year schooling, which makes him a great example of a vernacular writer (not connected to institutions dedicated to the spread of literacy). The diary is part of Siipsen’s personal archive, which is kept in the Cultural History Archives of Estonian Literary Museum. Besides the diary there are notebooks filled with poems, short stories, religious contemplations etc.
The document analysed here (EKM EKLA, f 169, m 133: 5) stands out in this collection…
The article focuses on the diary of miller Märt Siipsen (1846–1916), written in the years 1896–1897. Siipsen only had the minimal three-year schooling, which makes him a great example of a vernacular writer (not connected to institutions dedicated to the spread of literacy). The diary is part of Siipsen’s personal archive, which is kept in the Cultural History Archives of Estonian Literary Museum. Besides the diary there are notebooks filled with poems, short stories, religious contemplations etc.
The document analysed here (EKM EKLA, f 169, m 133: 5) stands out in this collection…
In search of a lost city: The palimpsest of post-war Tartu in Bernard Kangro’s and Jaan Kaplinski’s novels
Keywords: urban literature, palimpsest, bridges, monuments, Tartu, Bernard Kangro, Jaan Kaplinski, Michel de Certeau
The article focuses on two literary depictions of the city of Tartu as examples of palimpsestic treatment of a city space recovering from major damage incurred in WWII and reshaping itself in the changed political climate of the ensuing Soviet occupation. The novels Tartu (1962) by Bernard Kangro and The Same River (2007) by Jaan Kaplinski feature the same cityscape from around 1960 that the authors have been unable to access directly during the time of writing. The distance is spatial in case of Kangro, whose novel…
The article focuses on two literary depictions of the city of Tartu as examples of palimpsestic treatment of a city space recovering from major damage incurred in WWII and reshaping itself in the changed political climate of the ensuing Soviet occupation. The novels Tartu (1962) by Bernard Kangro and The Same River (2007) by Jaan Kaplinski feature the same cityscape from around 1960 that the authors have been unable to access directly during the time of writing. The distance is spatial in case of Kangro, whose novel…
On the perception of space, its linguistic and cultural coding and poetics of representation in Desmond Hogan’s short story “The Last Time”
Keywords: phenomenology of space perception, social space, linguistic and cultural representation of space, extracoding of real and ideal spaces, phenomenology of translation
The present article studies the perception of space in “The Last Time” (a short story written by Desmond Hogan, first published in 1979) by Maria (a former orphan in the nunnery of Ballinasloe, a small town in western Ireland, close after WW II), who makes an attempt in her first person narrative to represent and understand, twenty years later, the circumstances and the emotions of her love for a young man from a socially high-ranking family, which probably…
The present article studies the perception of space in “The Last Time” (a short story written by Desmond Hogan, first published in 1979) by Maria (a former orphan in the nunnery of Ballinasloe, a small town in western Ireland, close after WW II), who makes an attempt in her first person narrative to represent and understand, twenty years later, the circumstances and the emotions of her love for a young man from a socially high-ranking family, which probably…