The position of Hasso Krull in the Estonian literary landscape is somewhat paradoxical. Although he has already achieved the status of a classic, his critical texts keep emphasizing that an author needs to be selfless and impersonal. Hence the philosophical basis of his texts seems, among other things, to harbour a trickster who constantly keeps creating and revoking his own creation. The article is an attempt to analyse the opposite poles in the criticism and poetry by Hasso Krull. His critical texts reveal an interdependece of contrasting concepts, e.g. singularity and plurality. Krull’s criticism is dialogical in essence, attempting to…

According to the memoirs of Baltic-German students the role and significance of the town of Tartu was rather unambiguous: like Estonian and Latvian students, their Baltic-German peers perceived Tartu first and foremost as a  university town, which is hardly surprising as this is exactly where most of the 19th-century Baltic-German intellectuals received their higher education. Mirrored in the memoirs of about 30 people, which cover the period of 1802−1918, their student years tend to acquire a certain mythical dimension, showing Tartu as the stage of a timeless student operetta, where the progression of decades changes only the actors, while the…

If we intend that the computer will understand language (texts) the same way as humans do (meaning the result, not the process of understanding), we need to transfer our current conception of the human text understanding ability to the computer for gradual elaboration. The feedback would in turn contribute to the improvement of the theoretical conception.
The article addresses conceptual transfer between cognitive domains as one of the central mechanisms in human language competence, by which the more abstract domains are structured  on the basis of more concrete and cognitively prior ones (target domain and source domain, respectively). Such transfer is…

The legend of Madli of Muhu was introduced to public at large in the 1930s as  a result of the activities of Jakob Laul, who taught school  in Saaremaa. Madli was an old woman who had escaped to Saaremaa from a small island called Muhu. She was known as a healer who led a secluded life in the woods, living on alms and on whatever nature had to offer. Due to her untraditional lifestyle she was also reputed to be a werewolf.
Madli was told to have lived in a tree. The pine associated with her name was still there in…

Many German loan words have been adopted into the Estonian general vocabulary, and they may occur in toponyms as well. Toponyms derived from borrowed vocabulary are not discussed in this work. Contemporary settlement names are examined to find out which of them are actually German in origin and how they have been converted into Estonian. The focus is on names that are based directly either on a German family name or a German common noun.
Loan names can be divided into two main groups. The first type – adapted names – is in turn subdivided into complete adaptions, epexegetic adaptions and…

Ever since the 19th century Estonian literature has been strongly connected with the Estonian nationalist myth, which helped to create and keep national identity. The latter continued to be the main task of Estonian literature during Soviet occupation (1940–1991).
The poet Sven Kivisildnik (b. 1964) has so far had a reputation of rather an ignorer of the nationalist myth. In the early 1990s Kivisildnik made a name for himself as a radical reformer of poetry as well as a scandalist. The frequent denials of earlier Estonian classics in his oeuvre actually led to the greatest scandal in the literary life of…

The article analyses the relations between word formation and phrase formation. More or less clear parallels between the two have been found in compound structures. The main focus is derivation, but as Estonian compounding and derivation belong to the same continuum in more than one sense there is also some discussion of synthetic compounds. The relations of Estonian word formation and syntax are discussed from three aspects. First, it is studied how syntactic principles are reflected in word internal structure, i.e. what the relations are between lexical integrity and phrase structure. Second, a closer look is taken at such word…

This paper presents an overview of the following arguments in Estonian, which were originally published in Cann & Miljan (2012) and Miljan & Cann (2013): 1) case-marking should not be treated as the passive realisation of other morpho-syntactic properties of a construction but as independently bringing information to a clause; 2) this different view of case entails that precise functions of case-marked expressions may be determined by the interaction of the case marking, the meaning of the host noun, the semantics of any predicate of which it is an argument and other contextually given factors; more specifically; 3) the partitive…

A survey is given of the Lithuanian novel of the past five years. Side by side with poetry, which the Lithuanians are traditionally famous for, their recent prose has considerably advanced for diversity. A growing awareness of the importance of book marketing must have increased reader interest in home-grown prose.
The literary image of the capital of Lithuania has gained some new strata. The action of the family novel Silva Rerum (2008–2011) by Kristina Sabaliauskaitė takes place in the 17st–18st-centry Vilnius. Andrius Tapinas in his novel Vilko valanda („The Hour of the Wolf”, 2013) has invented a steampunk Vilnius reminiscent of…

The integration of the (orthodox) Setos into the Republic of Estonia established in 1918 soon revealed some conflicts due to cultural differences.  The modernized Estonians tended to patronize their „lesser brothers” and to reform their culture and lifestyle, which was considered old-fashioned and reactionary. There was a change in attitude towards Seto religious practices in Estonia, namely, their traditional fasts became a public health issue, their food offerings were discussed in relation to economy and their celebration of church holidays all of a sudden belonged to the discourse of crime and alcoholism. The economic benefits or harms of Seto religious…

The article gives a brief overview of the developments in 21st-century Latvian prose and takes a closer look at nine authors. In comparison with the roaring nineties the Latvian prose has stabilized over the recent decade. Every author has found their own poetic voice and those different poetics coexist in peace, without revealing any too clear divisions.
In this bland context,  Aivars Kļavis comes up with a surprise, as his extensive historical tetralogy Viņpus vārtiem („On the Other Side of the Gates”) demonstrates quite a liberal attitude to the traditional conception of Latvian history. The three parts of Gundega Repše’s Smagais…

Toponymy has points of contact with several other disciplines, first and foremost with linguistics, history and geography. Based on those three, the article attempts to dissipate the doubts of Taavi Pae about Paul Ariste’s etymology of Pandivere, which associates the name with the Mordvin noun panda ‘hill’. The name of Pandivere is obviously quite old, but not so much for the heights, which have been named after a manor, which in turn has got its name from a village.
From a linguistic point of view the initial component Pand(i)- may be associated with the Estonian noun põndak ‘hillock’. The word family…

Translation analysis is an effective way to refine our historical understanding of the totalitarian phenomenon. As our research into the communicative meaning of translation during the Soviet period in Estonia has shown, dichotomous oppositions such as ‘official culture’ vs ‘counter-culture’ fail to explain the dissonances that translations can introduce into the totalitarian monologue. The approach we have developed and applied to our case study is based on an exploration of different layers of translation’s historicity: starting from an analysis of systemic continuities such as censorship or state control of book production, and diachronic discontinuities like changes in the statistical figures…

The article gives an overview of the variation of the passive past participle markers in spoken Võro. In standard written Võro, two markers are possible: –t is used in the singular and –tU(q) marks the plural. However, the actual spoken language reveals some differences in the use of the markers. It seems that the paradigms of the singular and plural have lost their original designation as both markers are used to mark singular forms. The article aims to reveal a possible language change by analysing the data that has been collected in two different time periods – in 1991 and…