Keywords: folklore collecting, life writing, Jakob Hurt
The focus of this article is on the life writing practices of the members of Jakob Hurt’s folklore collecting network. Jakob Hurt’s campaign of folklore collecting started in 1888. About a year later he felt that the process of collecting was as important as the collected texts and so he asked his correspondents to send him some details about their lives. Hurt’s aim was to publish a special book about the history of the campaign and the people who participated. Though Hurt never wrote the book, the results of his plea are still interesting…

Keywords: Baltic Germans, translation history, memoirs, memory places
The article addresses Baltic-German autobiographical texts as an organic part of Estonian cultural history and memory literature, which is, however, a severed and forgotten part of the collective historical memory. First, the article introduces the volume of the survived Baltic-German textual heritage, and analyses, in a historical perspective, how, why and on what grounds Baltic-German autobiographies have been collected and published. Secondly, the article examines the available Estonian translations of and the present state of research into Baltic-German autobiographies. Thirdly, some concrete biographies are used to exemplify the variety of possible study approaches.…

Keywords: Latvian-Estonian linguistic contact, etymology, microethnonyms, onomastics
The short study „Are Mulks really stupid?” published in the magazine Keel ja Kirjandus (2017/6, pp. 434–452) by Taavi Pae and Kersti Lust attempts to argue that the microethnonym mul´k does not originate in the Latvian common noun muļ΄ķis ‘fool, idiot, softhead’. The present article takes a closer look at the arguments pres­ented by Pae and Lust, concluding that their own conclusions would have been more convincing if based on true knowledge of language history, in particular, of historical derivation, and on better orientation in Baltic materials, all anchored in sound methodological expertise, as the declared aim of their study…

Keywords: speech corpus, speaking fundamental frequency, voice mutation, age and gender related variations, F0 statistics
The paper introduces the Estonian Adolescent Speech Corpus and reports cross-sectional data on speaking fundamental frequency characteristics of Estonian adolescents. 175 girls and 134 boys in the age range from 9 to 18 years were recorded while reading a text corpus containing linguistically diverse material such as digits, phone numbers, time expressions, IT terms, sentences with name entities, phonetically rich sentences. The corpus also includes several samples of spontaneous speech elicited with pictures to be described and with topics for storytelling. In total, 70 items (ca…

Keywords: Estonian literature, anxiety of influence, rhetorics, tropes, irony, misreading
The broader aim of this article is to give an overview of Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence and its applicability to analyse Estonian literature. A further objective is to develop a synchronic and diachronic method of literary analysis by confronting Bloom’s theory with the writings of its main contemporary critic Paul de Man. In my opinion, both critics’ different views on rhetoric (de Man: a system of tropes; Bloom: persuasion) are mutually complementary, which I illustrate by using them to analyse two Estonian decadence novels with a similar…

Keywords: locative demonstrative adverbs, reference, spatial semantics, syntax, motion, Estonian
Demonstratives are extremely important in all languages due to them having various pragmatic, semantic, and syntactic functions. For this reason, they are frequently studied and our current knowledge of demonstratives is also comparatively rich. However, research into demonstratives tends to concentrate mainly on demonstrative pronouns, while demonstrative adverbs have received much less attention. The same applies to Estonian linguistic tradition in that demonstrative pronouns are much more exhaustively investigated than demonstrative adverbs. The current study aims to fill this gap by analysing the use and function of locative demonstrative adverbs in…

Keywords: Johannes Semper, body studies, sports, New Woman, homosexuality
The article explores the depiction of the body of a sporting woman, especially of one playing tennis or swimming, in Johannes Semper’s short story collection„Ellinor” (1927). There are three reasons why „Ellinor” has a radical meaning in the Estonian literature of the time. Firstly, the activities are consistently portrayed through the female point of view; secondly, the stories are permeated by an enthusiastic and luxuriant sense of life, which defies the book culture as remote from life; and thirdly, both a sporting „new woman” and homosexuality were certainly novel subjects in the…

Keywords: etymology of folk names, migration, oral history
The article explores whether the widespread belief that the folk name Mulks and the region name Mulgimaa derive from the Latvian word muļķis, muļķe ‘stupid, fool’ is based on evidence and possibly justified. Phonetic similarity between the words mulk and muļķis is evident indeed, but we lack convincing evidence that the word mulk is of Latvian origin. By tracing the emergence and use of the folk name Mulks, the authors explore its social, historical and cultural context. By combining contemporary fiction, polemics in media, memorates and other forms of oral tradition, sources on settlement and migration, it appears that the folk name Mulks was most probably used by…