Compared to the 1960s, an analysis of today’s humorous narratives based on real-life events allows to identify some dynamic changes in community folklore. The most volatile factor in this study is the sociocultural situation: the topics of the narratives continue shifting forward in time, reflecting the experience that the community members have accumulated in life. The tradition shows a receding tendency in rural villages, but is more active in circles of colleagues or friends, in clubs and societies, etc. As far as humour theories are concerned, the most important point to make here is that the topicality of the repertoire…

Up to the present, Bernard Kangro’s Tartu novels („Springs of Ice” 1958, „The River Emajõgi” 1961, „Tartu” 1962, „The Stone Bridge” 1963, „The Black Book” 1965, and „Whirlwind of Fire” 1969), regarded as the core of his prose fiction, have been examined through a paradigm of literary movements. The goal of this article is to supplement and specify these so-called canonical treatments by an examination of the characteristics of baroque aesthetics as seen in Kangro’s last five Tartu novels. Among the features attributed to baroque literature are spatial representation of time, syncretism, a coexistence of different levels of meaning in…

The paper gives a panchronic overview of the central lexical uses and constructions related to the polysemous Estonian verb saama ‘to get’, from its first records in the written language until the present day. The paper concentrates on the main semantic categories that saama expresses in its lexical usage. The potential development paths of the central lexical meanings of saama and their interrelatedness have been outlined.
The conclusion is that based on documented written Estonian, the SUCCEED meaning has always been part of the semantic field of the verb saama, being present in the central grammatical functions of POSSIBILITY, NECESSITY, and…

In Estonian there are many Low German loanwords borrowed in the 13th–17th centuries. The present article seeks to define more exactly the period of time they entered the language. An important temporal landmark is the oldest Estonian-language printed material of the 16th–17th centuries. As literary Estonian is relatively young, we can find out the occurrence of loanwords in printed texts, but it is not possible to determine their first appearance in spoken language. It is very likely that the earliest loanwords were oral borrowings. Another temporal landmark is offered by source publications which make available the language of old manuscripts.…

Usually, literary history looks no closer than 50 years ago. Yet, as in Estonian literature the Soviet period is over it seems expedient to start studying its major facts and phenomena. One of them was the Russian-language collection of short stories „Estonskaja molodaja prosa” (Estonian young prose) published in 1978. It attracted a large response at the time – and it still does. In 1978 the collection was the focus of a two-day discussion at the USSR Union of Writers in Moscow. Modern re-semiotization of what was said and published on those authors and their oeuvre as well as on…

The article presents a hypothesis,with a considerable generalizing ambition, according to which Estonian literature tends to speak of home mainly as a missing or lost home. The author believes that there is a cleavage between the national ideological myth depicting Estonians as a people persistently staying at home for thousands of years and the home experience actually revealed in Estonian literature.
The first part of the article explains, based on the phenomenological method, the basic concepts used in the study. Homeness is defined as an experiential horizon with a spatial and an intersubjective aspect, versus homelessness as a consistent disturbance of…

The article draws on the author’s web publication Uusi unistusi eesti murde- ja folkloorialade piiritlemise teemal („More dreams on the areal division of Estonia as based on dialect words, riddles and proverbs”, http://www.folklore.ee/~kriku/TRANSPORT/Geotypo.pdf), which studies the corpora of Estonian dialect words, riddles and proverbs seeking for arguments to support the following assumption:
The peripheral/central position of geographic units, the rare/common character of the material and agglomeration/dispersal of groups formed of the geographic units are, essentially, dimensions of the same thing.
Our analysis of the Estonian data of three domains reveals two well-defined areas of language and culture and one less salient:
(1) South-Eastern Estonia in…

The article addresses the semantic differences of certain standard Estonian words across Estonian dialects as revealed by semantic maps. Word use appears to be the most distinctive for the main dialect groups of North Estonian and South Estonian. Within the South Estonian area it is Tartu and Võru dialects that have the most features in common. Semantic features reminiscent of Mulgi dialect now occur in the western region of Tartu dialect, in the southern region of Tartu dialect and the western region of Võru dialect. On the other hand, Mulgi dialect has features in common with the vernaculars of Pärnumaa…

The article identifies those groups of Estonian words whose etymology is essentially based on their areal distribution. Areal data are usually consulted to find out the chronological layer that the word belongs to. The areal criterion has a supportive, or even decisive function if  certain loanwords are genetically too close to enable their differentiation according to the donor language of the stem (e.g. Germanic or Baltic, in the Estonian case). In Estonian etymological studies the areal criterion has been especially popular in differentiating between various Swedish loanwords. Due to the linguistic closeness of Finnic languages and a large number of…

The study compares the acquisition of Estonian, Finnish and Sami compound nouns at an early stage of children’s linguistic development. The material derives from the spontaneous speech data collected during a longitudinal study of six children aged 1;3–3;1. Acquisition of compound word formation is analysed from the aspects of the emergence of first compound words in a child’s speech, acquisition of different patterns of compounding, independent formation of compound words, semantic transparency, and the role of the frequency of different compounding patterns in the input language.
In the three cognate languages investigated acquisition of compound word formation is rather similar, beginning…

The article tackles the question whether five languages spoken around the Baltic Sea – Estonian, Finnish, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Russian – have any common features typical to the language area or do they rather fit into the pattern of universal colour naming and categorisation. All these languages belong to stage VII languages having eight to twelve lexicalised basic colour terms, while Russian has two basic colour terms for blue, sinij and goluboj. Lithuanian also seems to have a categorical split between dark blue and light blue. Finnish lacks a basic colour term for purple and Lithuanian has no basic colour…

The present article discusses the origin and meanings of the Estonian hakkama and Livonian akkõ. Although researchers agree that these verbs are historically related, there are different views concerning their meaning development and possible counterparts in cognate languages. As the Estonian hakkama and Livonian akkõ mainly appear in the senses of ‘begin’ and ‘seize, grab’, but the phonologically similar hakata in Finnish and Karelian expresses the senses of ‘hit, beat, cut, etc.’, some researchers doubt their common origin. The situation is the opposite in the case of the South Estonian nakkama ‘stick, adhere, catch; begin’and the Salaca Livonian nakk ‘seize,…

The article discusses a couple of morphosyntactic issues of the Circum-Baltic languages, such as subject and object cases, expression of indirect command, and conveyance of indirect message, analysing their formal and functional differences and similarities. The main emphasis lies on the comparison of Estonian and Lithuanian, considering Livonian and Latvian as an intermediary link.
The formal and pragmatic analysis of subjects and objects reveals that of the Circum-Baltic languages the distinction between the partial and total objects, resp. subjects is the clearest in Estonian and Lithuanian. In Latvian and Livonian, as well as in Russian there is considerably more convergence and/or…

This article investigates variation in constructions expressing need in Estonian, based on material from the Corpus of Spoken Estonian, the 1990s Fiction Subcorpus of Written Estonian, and the Estonian Dialect Corpus. The predicates included in the study, vaja/tarvis olema ‘need’, form two basic constructions: one takes a nominal complement and expresses a need for something or a lack of something (Mul on raamatut vaja. ‘I need a book’); the other takes an infinitival complement and conveys modal semantics (Mul on vaja raamatut lugeda. ‘I need to read a book’). These constructions are characterised by considerable variability, conditioned by language-internal (both syntactic…

Languages reflect the speakers’ communication options determined by the facts of settlement history, information dissemination, and mobility. Thus, the common features of different languages and dialects can often be accounted for by geographic closeness promoting the evolution of continuous areas of speech forms and structural features. Areal distribution and variation of linguistic phenomena are of interest to several branches of linguistics, such as historical linguistics, studies of related languages, dialectology (above all to lexical and syntactic studies of dialects), areal and intragenetic typology, while cooperation among the different branches is ardently sought. The current accumulation of corpora creates enhanced opportunities…

The article presents an overview of the specific traits of Estonian word prosody as compared to other Southern Finnic languages, based on the results of experimental phonetics gained over recent years. First the Southern Finnic language group is defined on a diachronic basis. The group includes North Estonian (the basis of standard Estonian), Votic, Livonian and South Estonian. The following analysis is focused on Estonian ternary quantity alternation (consonantal and vocalic), tonal contrast in Livonian and Estonian, foot isochrony in Southern Finnic languages, the emergence of velar vowel harmony and the later disappearance of vowel harmony, reduction and peripheralization of…

The article addresses a late-17th-century translation of the Old Testament, tentatively attributed to two pastors, father and son Andreas and Adrian Virginius, who served in southern Estonia, which in those times was part of Livonia. The research question is: Which of the two variants of literary Estonian developed at the time, North-Estonian or South-Estonian,was the first target language for the Old Testament? Adrian Virginius mentions his and his father’s joint effort of translating the OT (up to the Book of Job) in the 1680s, without specifying the language variant. As to the rest of Andreas Virginius’ translations, those were, according…