Keywords: municipality names, municipality reform, Estonianisation of names
 
By changing place names, authorities have always had the chance to impose their ideology. Therefore, every power changed those names in their own way – some of them more extensively, some just slightly. The aim of this study was to find out which were the main aspects of changing municipality names in the 1930s and who had the most impact on the process that was especially related to the municipality reform finalised in 1939. The study is based on archive materials from the Estonian National Archives. Some additional information was found from newspapers…

Keywords: Estonian poetry, 21st century, antihumanism, ideology, humour, poetics, psychoanalysis
In keeping with Kivisildnik’s disposition of construing poetry, which opposes any socially or culturally dominant value or meaning, his poetry of the first half of the current decade – especially in the collections Liivlased ja saurused („Livonians and dinosaurs”, 2011), (:)soari evangeelium („The Gospel of (:)soar”, 2012) published in collaboration with Navitrolla, and Inimsööja taksojuht („The man-eating taxi-driver”, 2013), but also Enne sõda ja kõike seda („Before the war and all this”, 2012) – strikes the eye with some antihumanist traits. Although Kivisildnik’s palette of literary devices had always implicitly spoken of antihumanist ideas („machine poetry”), the above collections mark…

Stichwörter: deutschbaltisch, Genderforschung, Reisen, 18. Jahrhundert, Tagebücher, Romantik
1797–1799 führte eine Europareise Gustav und Sophie von Stackelberg, zwei Adlige aus Estland, nach Deutschland, Österreich und in die Schweiz. Das eigentliche Reiseziel – Italien – konnte wegen Besetzung durch napoleonische Truppen nicht besucht werden. Während der Reise haben beide Ehepartner separat ein Tagebuch geführt. Dies gibt Gelegenheit, dieselbe Reise aus zwei verschiedenen Blickwinkeln bzw. aus männlicher und weiblicher Perspektive zu beobachten. Das Tagebuch der Frau ist wesentlich umfangreicher. Es setzt schon fast am Anfang der Reise an, für die Frau war die Fahrt von Anbeginn bis zum Ende ein Abenteuer. Das Tagebuch…

Keywords: Marie Under, Boris Pasternak, Poems of Doctor Zhivago, poetics and strategies of translation
The present article is focused on the first Estonian translation of Doctor Zhivago’s last chapter „The Poems of Yuri Zhivago”. This translation was published in 1960 by the publishing house Vaba Maa in Stockholm shortly after Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature (1958). Artur Adson translated the prose, while „The Poems of Yuri Zhivago” were translated by Marie Under.
The article aims to reproduce a succession of some facts related to the translation process and the translation itself with the purpose of helping readers to…

Keywords: complement clauses, sequence of tenses, indirect speech, indirect perception, discourse vs. narrative, deictic points of orientation, absolute and relative tense, translation theory
Testing Adrian Barentsen’s insights regarding tense in Russian complement sentences on Estonian material, the article examines the use of the present and preterite tenses in Estonian complement clauses if the main clause verb is in the preterite. The starting point is the well-known observation that some languages show a shift in verb tense (sequence of tenses) in indirect speech, while some others do not. Estonian, while not having tense shift in indirect speech, has it in sentences embedded…

Keywords: August Kitzberg, Jaan Lattik, Ernst Enno, Hermann Julius Schmalz, Estonian prose, South Estonian, dialects, language in literature Although the turn of the 20th century marked a retreat of the South Estonian literary language, also called Tartu language, from the printed word, the period brought some new ways to use dialects in fiction. The most prominent users of South Estonian dialects in the prose of the time were August Kitzberg, Jaan Lattik, Ernst Enno and Hermann Julius Schmalz, which makes the four authors responsible for bringing South Estonian back to literature.
Kitzberg, who was the first of the four to start…

Keywords: Estonian philology, figurative language, Lutheran hymns, Pietist hymnal, translation, old Literary Estonian
In the development of Estonian philology, two phases can be distinguished: the phase of the so-called external view, when the meta-language of philological discussions was German, and the phase of the internal view, when since the 19th century, Estonian began to be used as the meta-language for speaking and writing about the Estonian language and folklore as well as about the emerging literature. The emergence of Estonian authors’ literature and literary criticism presupposed a literary language expressive enough to describe the emotional life and trains of thought of…

Keywords: deixis, indexicality, emotional/modal deixis, deictic network, deictic plot, pragmapoetics, close reading, poetry
The article suggests, inspired from practical didactics, the use of pragmapoetic deixis analysis as an approach to enrich close reading of poetry. When applying the pragmalinguistic theory of deixis and the analytic philosophical theory of indexicals to poetic texts one will soon notice that beside the traditional spatial, temporal and personal deixis it is necessary to speak of emotional, or modal, deixis. The latter functions on the scale of positive and negative connotations, or of subjective distance, which is the mental counterpart of spatial relations. In addition, poetry…

Keywords: philology, national identity, discovery and invention, theory and technology, measurements, deduction
The academic discipline of philology may have a different content in different cultures, but obviously philology as research of language (mother tongue), folklore, and national literature is important for national identity and the self-concept of a nation, even more so for small nations. In Estonia the scope of Estonian philology took shape in connection with the national movement in the second half of the 19th century, and more clearly at the beginning of the 20th century. Since the early 1920s Estonian Philology has been a subject taught at Tartu…

Keywords: history of folkloristics, folklore theory and methodology, philology of the vernacular
It has become customary in Estonian research tradition to consider folkloristics as a philological discipline, while the scholarship has had a retrospective and archival orientation. Presupposing the existence of a primeval cultural unity, now lost, and considering folklore as part of the Finno-Ugric heritage has certainly contributed to the philological thought. However, interest in the social environment of folklore and research of its non-verbal forms already appeared before the Second World War, manifested in the works of several scholars, such as Oskar Loorits, Rudolf Põldmäe, Richard Viidalepp, and Herbert…

Keywords: philology, identity, normativity, research methodology, Friedrich Nietzsche
For about a century, philology as a discipline has been eroding. This has largely been due to the emancipation of some of its subdisciplines, but a marginalisation of the humanities in the contemporary society has catalysed the process, too. This essay attempts to analyse the nature of philology relying on the vision outlined by Friedrich Nietzsche in his inaugural lecture „Homer and classical philology”. According to Nietzsche, philology consists of three subdisciplines: history, language science, and aesthetics, all mixed together in a rather unsystematic way. For Nietzsche, philology has always had pedagogical aims,…

Keywords: linguistics, literary studies, conversation analysis, analysis of literary dialogue
The first half of the article provides a survey of the main directions of the 20th century divergence of linguistics and literary studies.
In the first half of the 20th century, mainstream studies took a synchronic approach to language and literature, addressing language as a system and focusing on individual literary works, their language and style.
The mid-century brought a great divergence. Linguistics changed to embrace functionalism, empiricism and objective analysis. Literary studies, however, fell for the postmodern critical theory, which basically questions the quest for objective knowledge. Literary studies focused on modernism…

Causation is generally defined through its valency-increasing property to bring an additional causer argument onto a basic clause, restricting the focus of research on the verbal predicates and the core sentence. This study argues for the inclusion of the forms belonging outside the core sentence to the scope of linguistic causation. The article discusses the subordinate structures or adjuncts that have a causative relationship to the matrix sentence within the conceptual semantics framework. A two-way causative relationship between the matrix sentence and the adjunct structure is proposed: (i) the adjunct structure causes the situation in the matrix sentence (the beacuse…

The article addresses the relationships of literature and disease on the example of the life and activities of Lilli Suburg (1841–1923).
The life and creative activity of Suburg was affected, on the one hand, by a peculiarity of her appearance, notably, a scar left after a congenital tumor had been removed from her face, due to which she would wear a kerchief over her jaw throughout her life. On the other hand, for many years she suffered from hemorrhages forcing her to bed for long periods, incapacitated to help out her parents with farmwork. That affliction, however, gave Suburg a chance…

The article discusses the inspiring literary commentary published by mentor Ain Kaalep alias O. Muusapoeg ‘lit. O. Son of the Muses’ in the 1960s editions of the magazine Noorus („Youth”), which was officially addressed to the Communist youth of the Estonian SSR. It highlights the rhetoric of irony cleverly hidden between the lines, which could be regarded as critical counterpropaganda. On the one hand, the writings carried an important mission of educating the rising generation in classic literature, Estonian as well as world and from the Antique to the exuberant current literature, trying to fulfil the deficiency in aesthetic knowledge…

The article examines the pragmatics of the Crimean War based texts by Friedrich Nikolai Russow and Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald, who were both figures of the early stage of the Estonian National Awakening. The texts analysed include Tallinna koddaniko ramat omma söbbradele male („A book from a citizen of Tallinn to his friends in the country”, 1854–1857) and the short poem Söalaul Eestima tüttarlastele („A war song to Estonian girls”, 1854) by Russow, to which F. R. Kreutzwald responded with his poem Sõda („War”, 1854). Although both authors glorify the Tzar and the double-headed eagle, they hardly deserve to be called…