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…

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…