Cet article présente l’évolution de l’image de l’Estonie et des Estoniens à travers un corpus de 27 récits de voyage écrits en français du XVe siècle à 1990. Il analyse le rôle du récit de voyage en tant que mode de construction des savoirs francophones sur l’Estonie. Jusqu’à l’indépendance, l’Estonie était très rarement le but principal des voyages, mais plutôt une étape d’un voyage en Russie. Elle ne devient une destination à part entière qu’à la fin des années 1920 et dans les années 1930. Si les textes les plus anciens contiennent surtout des informations historiques et pratiques sur les…

The article addresses Estonian syllabification as reflected in practical word inflection. According to the traditional view the nucleus of an Estonian syllable is invariably a vowel, while the next syllable begins with the last consonant of an intervocalic consonant sequence. There are, however, some foreign names like Google [ɡu:ɡl], for example, which despite being monosyllabic in terms of the traditional definition of the Estonian syllable can only be declined like a two-syllable consonant-final word, e.g. PartSg Google’it. In addition there are several disyllabic words of the second quantity degree, i.e. nouns of the C*VC-CV structure like ratsu ‘steed’, where in…

The main focus of the current study is on the investigation of component durations in diphthongs in the second (Q2) and third (Q3) quantity degree. Additionally, temporal patterns of triphthongs as well as the quality of monophthongs, diphthongs and triphthongs is studied. The analysis is based on read materials from 13 speakers of the Kihnu variety of Estonian. Application of the method of formant dynamics enables to follow the change in vowel quality throughout the whole vowel. While monophthongs have short trajectories, indicating that the vowel quality stays roughly the same around the target, the trajectories of diphthongs are longer…

The article discusses the Russian historical novel „Constantin Loeven (From my memoirs)” (1831) by Baron Karl Georg Woldemar Friedrich von Rosen (1800–1860), who was born in Estonia. Rosen’s literary activities started from writing poetry in Latin, of which no example has survived. He used German to publish criticism and translations, but most of his oeuvre is in Russian. He started learning Russian at the age of 19. Since 1825 he published in Russian, as his ambition was to become not only a Russian author, but also a Russian national ideologist. So he wrote some plays on themes of Russian history…

The article discusses the funny statements sent in to the all-Estonian contest (October 2010 – January 2011) of collecting kindergarten lore. The resulting corpus of child jokes or child humour is analysed from folkloristic and humour theoretical aspects.
The main focus is on child jokes observed in kindergarten, and the teacher’s perspective. In many kindergarten groups the teachers have started a tradition of noting down the children’s cool and witty statements on a running basis. Sometimes, opportunity permitting and good will not far away, such notes have been collected and published as group tradition to be enjoyed by everyone involved as…

December 19, 2015 is the 115th anniversary of the birth of Estonian linguist Julius Mägiste. One of the earliest scholarly studies by Mägiste was his Master’s thesis Rosona (Eesti Ingeri) murde pääjooned („The main features of Rosona (Estonian Ingermanland) dialect”), defended in 1923 and published in 1925, which provides a systematic survey of two dialects spoken in the western part of Ingermanland. The linguists of the time did not consider Ingrian a separate language, but rather classified it among Finnish dialects. In his study Mägiste has grouped the dialects discussed in his thesis by the religious affiliation of the speakers,…

The research question is whether conscious choices are totally or at least predominantly economic, based on a calculation of gains and losses. The article does not seek a final solution, though, narrowing down to the conceivable principles of publishing a humanities monograph in Estonian. Case analysis is applied to the author’s recent experience in monograph publishing.
Part One explores the possibility of interpreting a book (monograph) to be published as an economic item. The analysis is not confined within the classical system of market economy as the prospective book is also discussed as symbolic capital and even as a source of…

One of the challenges in the reconstruction of the poetological program of Reiner Brockmann (1609–1648), the author of the first secular poems in Estonian, is the absence of personalia from his youth. Therefore it is difficult to decide which of his poetic principles had been acquired in Germany and which of them evolved in Estonia. Three Brockmann’s autographs from September 1629 to October 1633 are retained in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Library in Hannover, among the correspondence of the German scholarly  family Meibom of the early modern era. In addition, Brockmann published 1630 a greeting poem on the occasion of the…

This study investigates the choice between the partitive plural case sid– and si-endings as manifested in Internet Estonian. The sid-ending is grammatically correct in Standard Estonian, whereas the si-ending is not. However, the si-ending is known to occur in student essays as well as in online communications. The research question examined in this study was which words exhibit more variation in terms of the sid– and si-endings. The words were considered from the aspects of inflectional type, part of speech, phrase analogy, and position in the turn.
The material analysed comes from new media texts available in the text corpora of…

Soil constitutes the living ground from which cultures stem, alongside with all other manifestations of life. Soil has been an important trope in the poetry of Debora Vaarandi (1916–2007), one of the leading poets of mid-20th century Estonia. She grew up in the countryside and agricultural work was an essential part of her life experience. Political conditions left their mark on Vaarandi’s poems: in her propagandistic poetry of the 1950s soil appears only as an emblem of socialist agriculture. The poem „Dear soil. . . .” (1954) marks a turning point; from there on, an intimate and emotionally enriching bond with soil appears…

The garden as a literary trope has a time-honoured tradition behind it. Its classic manifestations include locus amoenus, a pleasant and delightful space in perpetual bloom, as well as hortus conclusus,an enclosed leafy space bearing religious connotations. Gardening as an occupation has been compared to a continuation of God’s work of creation on earth. However, these traditional tropes need not pay much attention to soil that has a crucial role in the cycle of matter between the living and the nonliving parts of the environment and makes the cultivation of surface vegetation possible.
In the early poetry of the Estonian author…