Keywords: world literature, literatures of western Europe, Hispanic studies, continuity in teaching world literature
The article deals with the transition from the Soviet-era concept of foreign ­literature (väliskirjandus) to the historically justified concept world literature (maailma­kirjandus) in Estonian literary studies and the role of Professor Jüri Talvet (b. 1945) of the University of Tartu in this process. Although the concept of world literature was not taboo in the Soviet Union, its content was hardly found taught in institutions of higher education. Instead, there was a subject called Foreign Literature, which mainly included literatures of western Europe since early Middle Ages. In…

Keywords: exile, correspondence, linguistics, dialectology, informants
The article describes the correspondence between two language professors of the University of Tartu before the Second World War, Julius Mägiste (1900–1978) and Andrus Saareste (1892–1964), which lasted for nearly two decades in exile from 1944 to 1964. There are 68 letters from the former Finnic professor Mägiste and 80 from the Estonian professor Saareste. The letters are kept at the Cultural History Archives of the Estonian Literary Museum (EKM EKLA, f 254, m 22:22; EKM EKLA, f 340, m 30:23).
After staying in refugee camps both professors found jobs in Swedish universities: Mägiste as…

Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic tradition, folkloristics, folklore reuse, memes, narratives, proverbs
The aim of the article is to provide an overview of the reuse of folklore as a way of coping, based on the narratives related to COVID-19 pandemic collected from written, oral and online sources from March to June 2020. By giving examples of thematic religious and belief tradition, memes and proverbs, we point out how each new epidemic revives certain core motifs and root texts, some of which are exceptionally productive. We conclude that such a creative reuse of certain well-known and tested motifs in the interpretation of the disease…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…