Category
Topic
Year
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…
Young Brockmann on poetics
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…
Variation in the partitive plural sid- and si-endings
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…
The material analysed comes from new media texts available in the text corpora of…
Soil and garden in the poetry of Debora Vaarandi
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…
Two gardens and several soils
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…
In the early poetry of the Estonian author…
Matthias Johann Eisen and his coworkers defining the folklore on Seven Moseses
The article is focused on the folktale publication „Seven Moseses. An Attempt to Explain the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses” (1896) compiled by Matthias Johann Eisen. According to Estonian folklore, the original Bible contained seven books of Moses, and although the 6th and 7th were removed from the official version long ago, some of the copies are still in use – and there are a lot of folktales telling about people who own the book and the deeds they do with the help of it.
Eisen started to amass materials for his publication in 1893 – as usual at the…
Eisen started to amass materials for his publication in 1893 – as usual at the…
Airootsi – the literary mindscape of Lauri Pilter
Ever since his first book Lauri Pilter has associated his narratives with personally meaningful places. Gradually his interlacing of fact and fiction has caused a network of real places develop into a literary mindscape fictitiously called Airootsi. In real landscape its counterpart could be seen in the Noarootsi peninsula, Western Estonia. Noarootsi is also the initial name of Pilter’s mindscape. Gradually, however, some odd place names start appearing, which blurs the possible correspondence between literary and real geography.
In the framework of different interpretations of landscape, literary mindscape and Umwelt, the article analyses the literary mappings of Noarootsi and the gradual…
In the framework of different interpretations of landscape, literary mindscape and Umwelt, the article analyses the literary mappings of Noarootsi and the gradual…
Origin of the a(h)i- ~ ä(h)i-initial toponyms in South Estonia
The paper starts with a detailed survey of the study history of the place names with ahi– ~ ähi-and ai– ~ äi-stems, which are used in South Estonia. Linguists have associated the ahi-initial toponyms (for example Ahja, Aheru), some of which have changed into ähi-and even ai– ~ äi-initial words, with the Mulgi dialect word ahikotus ’sacrificial place’. The meaning of the Estonian protoform *ahti : *ahδi– (Finno-Ugric *ašt-) has been reconstructed as ’sacrifice’, which interpretation has lately been discredited. This paper gives additional proof that the semantic development of *ahti suggested by Paul Ariste (2010 [1937]) is quite veracious.…