The scene for discussing the sustainability of Estonian was set by early Estonian nation-builders’ – doctors Faehlmann (1843) and Kreutzwald (1857) – existentialist writings such as a foreword to the Estonian national epic „Kalevipoeg” (cf. Undusk 2004). While the endangerment of Estonian has been a topical issue for centuries already, there are no serious academic attempts of, except for a couple of Martin Ehala’s (2006; 2010; 2011) writings, judging its vitality and sustainability. The paper first sheds some light into the wilderness of ecolinguistic theory and then offers a new ecolinguistic approach which increasingly takes into account environmental factors of…

The article uses the notions of both mental geography and semiotic Umwelt to analyse the autobiographical novel Paradiis („Paradise”) (2009) by Tõnu Õnnepalu. The book tells a personal experience of a real village on the western coast of Hiiumaa, an island of the Baltic Sea, where the author had lived for a dozen years. While based on a recognizable geographical reality, the spatial milieu also comprises several different temporal layers and the particular place is given the metaphorical toponym of Paradise. The subjective poetic world depicted in the book combines elements of the real world, on-site experience and autobiographical nuances…

The stumbling block in the texts resulting from consciously spontaneous écriture automatique as used by the surrealist André Breton is integrity, which should be an inherent quality of a work of art. At about the same time the same question of integrity was raised in connection with dodecaphonic serialism. An answer can be found in the psychology of thinking, where thinking is defined as problem solving, while a difference is made between motoric, imaginative and rational ways of thinking. Ecriture automatique represents instinctive thinking, which is a synthesis of motoric and imaginary thinking. This is something we share with animals…

This paper presents five practice-based reflections on the translation of philosophical texts into Estonian. It is mainly the translation of analytic philosophy that is taken into consideration. The main claims of the paper are the following: 1) The variety of philosophy itself should not be overlooked when discussing the translation of philosophy; 2) Special terms should be translated consistently but only in the contexts wherein these words occur as terms; 3) Translating philosophy cultivates the language to be used for doing original philosophy in the native language; 4) The language of translation should make sense and be free from exaggeration…

The article discusses some points of contact between folkloristics and historical studies. The general framework is based on Peter Burke’s schema, which describes the previous development of the relations between the two disciplines as consisting of three periods: the age of harmony, the age of suspicion, and the age of rapprochement. The focus lies on the age of suspicion (1920s–1970s), when folkloristics and historical studies used to develop separately and in parallel. Nevertheless, folklorists appear to have used some historical data in their studies. How exactly and in what context it was done is analysed on the example of the…

The article introduces the first version of the Estonian Interlanguage Corpus (EIC) of Tallinn University, surveying the corpus structure, multilevel statistics, corpus annotation, linguistic error taxonomy, system of requesting, options of automatic analysis (morphological and syntactic analysis, n-grams) of Estonian learner language, and current EIC-based research.
EIC is a resource consisting of Estonian texts written by learners of Estonian as an official and foreign language. The corpus has hitherto provided material for empirical and applied research on morphosyntactic usage patterns and lexical variation of Estonian, the morphosyntactic complexity and lexical richness of learner language, developments in the Estonian language system, gradual…

Kersti Merilaas (1913–1986) and August Sang (1914–1969) have, both in their early poems and later years, written poignantly about loss in the broadest sense of the word: losing loved ones to death, dreams to reality, freedom to totalitarianism. Yet their poetry remains, if not entirely optimistic, always attentive to ways in which life, love and creative work inevitably continue in a world where the experience of loss is also inevitable. On the one hand, their poetry shows clear understanding of the limits of human reality. On the other hand, while they realize that certain lines cannot be crossed, neither in…

In the 1860s a sharp controversy arose between the Baltic-German and Russian papers over the future of the Baltic provinces. The Baltic Germans would have the Latvians and Estonians integrated into the German language and frame of mind, whereas the Russians would have preferred them to rally around the Russian Empire, language and the Orthodox Church. It looked as if the future of these peripheral provinces, the national question included, was up to the local Estonians and Latvians. However, they could hardly overrule the interests of the Empire, which were now protected not only by strengthening of the positions of…

The article gives a survey of Hungarian literary life and the trends of Hungarian literature over the past fifteen years, with a thematic focus. The main attention is paid to novels, while short stories, drama and poetry are discussed more briefly. In novels the thematic highlights are history, both recent and distant, as well as pseudo-historical stories, family histories, various traumas, such as Soviet informers, Holocaust, or the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Poetry is quickest to respond to whatever is happening in society, but topical social criticism is also found in short stories and drama. Hungarian identity has risen on…

The study focuses on the characteristic features of consonant palatalization in spontaneous Estonian. In Standard Estonian, coarticulatory palatalization occurs with alveolar consonants l, n, s, t (d) which are palatalized at the syllable boundary before i and j, e.g. pal’ju ’a lot of’, tel’lis ’he/she ordered’, pańi ’he/she put’ (palatalization is marked with an acute). In i-stem nouns where i has disappeared due to apocope in the nominative case, palatalization also occurs word-finally, e.g. końt ’bone, sg.nom.’ : kondi ’bone, sg.gen.’.
The materials for the current analysis come from the Tartu University Phonetic Corpus of Estonian Spontaneous Speech. Two types of i-stem words where in the nominative case a stem vowel is missing were analysed in detail. The results show that in the…