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In exile and in the shadows
The article examines the poetical works by August Pihlak (1903–1970), Estonian exile poet who fled from Estonia to the USA during World War II. Although, from a strictly objective point of view, his poetry’s contribution to the Estonian sonnet tradition is remarkable, he has practically been left out from Estonian literary history. Also, none of his seven poetry collections has ever been reviewed in any literary magazine. Among other poems Pihlak’s poetry collections include 229 sonnets, which makes him one of the most productive Estonian sonneteers. Furthermore, he is the only Estonian poet who has written six heroic crowns (sonnet…
The psychoanalytical Unt
A possible approach to the oeuvre of Mati Unt (1944–2005) has to do with psychoanalysis. Mati Unt’s interest in psychology and psychiatry developed during his student years at the University of Tartu, reaching its height during the theatre reform of the 1960s–1970s. A psychoanalytical substrate can be observed in both Unt’s prose and drama, as well as in his stage productions. The analysis is based on C. G. Jung’s theories and Unt’s creative interpretation of Jung’s views. Also, some light is thrown on how Unt’s interest in psychoanalysis was kindled by his sensitive nature and some facts of his personal…
Estonian dialects in the mirror of the last Estonian census
The article addresses the results of the Estonian 2011 population and housing census which was the first census to record Estonian native-speaking residents’ self-reported capacities of Estonian dialects. While the census data cannot be perhaps interpreted as the comprehension or regular use of traditional Estonian dialects known from the end of XX century and earlier, the enumeration can still be a valuable source for investigating how the variation of Estonian is perceived in the new Millennium. Informed by perceptual dialectology (Preston 1989, 1999), our main focus is to observe the spread of less prominent dialects which are linguistically closer to…
Descriptions of the morphosyntactic variation of ambipositions by means of quantitative profiles
Certain Estonian adpositions can occur either as prepositions or as postpositions (e.g. ümber maja, maja ümber ’round the house’). In this study, we refer to these as ambipositions and the goal of this study is to find the motivation for this positional variation in usage. The data come from the Estonian Dialect Corpus, which contains natural dialectal speech, allowing us to simultaneously include both linguistic as well as dialectal factors as part of the analysis. Here, we have included five ambipositions, läbi ’through’, mööda ’along’, vastu ’against’, üle ’over’ and ümber ’around’, that occurred with sufficient frequency in both positions.…
Kaplinski’s far-away spaces
Triggered by the image suggested in Hamlet that even while bounded in a nutshell it is still possible to consider oneself the king of infinite space, the article attempts to chart the reach of the dimension of the far-away space in Jaan Kaplinski’s poetry. The point of departure is found in the chrestomatic works on space and place in humanistic geography that underscore the nature of space as „amorphous and intangible and not an entity that can be directly described and analysed” (Relph 1976: 8). Thus, while lacking stability and connoting with openness, freedom and mobility, space is made meaningful…
Les voyageurs francophones en Estonie des origines à 1990
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…
Two younger loanwords in Estonian
The article discusses the origin of the Estonian words klopp ‘block of wood’; dial. ‘piece of wood; block-shaped (part of) object’ and räsima ’shake up, entangle, tear (and hurt); disfigure by trampling or crushing etc; grab, grasp’. The word klopp is a German loanword, < Gm Kloben, Klobe ‘block of wood, split billet; small planing bench; hook; door hinge’, with the original general meaning ‘split object’. The same stem occurs in the dialectal compound kloopsaag, kloppsaag ‘two-man saw for longitudinal sawing of boards and planks’ < Gm Klobensäge, Klobsäge id. The word räsima with identical meaning is a Russian loanword,…
Is Google a mono- or disyllabic word in Estonian?
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…
Diphthongs and triphthongs in the Kihnu variety of Estonian
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…
A Baltic German novel and its author
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 word family with the kõõr-stem referring to a squint
In Estonian manifestations of strabismus are referred to by nouns and adverbs of the stem kõõr-, both in standard Estonian and in dialects. Earlier the origin of the stem has been associated with the adjective kõver ’curved’, which motivation is, however, hardly plausible either phonetically or semantically. An alternative solution emerges from an analysis of Estonian dialect words on the stem kõõr– and their possible equivalents in cognate languages. In Estonian dialects the noun kõõr occurs with final –a, -e,-i or –u in vocalic stem, referring to various circular or arched objects, e.g. ’wheel hoop’, ’loom weight’, ’circular knitting motif’,…
Childlore discussed in the framework of linguistic humour theory
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…
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…
Julius Mägiste as a researcher of the Finnic dialects spoken in Estonian Ingermanland
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,…
Why publish a monograph?
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…
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…