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A short guide to Latvian prose
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…
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…
Once more on Pandivere and its name
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…
From a linguistic point of view the initial component Pand(i)- may be associated with the Estonian noun põndak ‘hillock’. The word family…
Translational dissonances in the totalitarian monologue
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…
Spoken Võro in real time
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…
The trace of Ado Grenzstein in the theory of ternary quantity oppositions of Estonian sounds
It is common knowledge that the theory of ternary quantity degrees of Estonian sounds was created by Mihkel Veske (1843–1890) and first published in his book about Estonian phonetics in 1879. However, Ado Grenzstein (1849–1916), an outstanding man of letters of the late 19th century, had published an article with a number of linguistic suggestions, including an idea of three contrasting lengths of Estonian sounds, both vowels and consonants, in the newspaper Postimees at the end of 1876. The argumentation and even the examples presented by Grenzstein are astonishingly similar to those of Veske published a few years later without…
Spoken subtitles – if, how, for whom and why?
The article describes a system for automatic reading and broadcasting subtitles, based on synthetic speech files generated from TV subtitle files and transmitted to the television ether through a separate audio channel. Owing to the recent progress in the development of speech technology (speech synthesis and speech recognition) and the growing popularity of digital television, people with special linguistic needs such as those suffering from visual or reading impairments, can access various services connected with mass media. The software solution of spoken subtitles consists of two logical components, namely, an interface of automatic reading and voice editing and another interface…
Itinerant kings and ludent kings
This article introduces the concept of itinerant kingship, which is a relatively universal phenomenon in pre-modern societies where several relatively large territorial units were united under one political power, however, without extensive bureaucracy. Therefore this power was forced to regularly visit the subordinate territories in order to collect taxes, exercise judicial power and maintain political subordination. The political power under question did not necessarily have to be a king nor even a sovereign, it could be anyone exercising power over distant enough territories that needed the personal presence of the ruler to control them. Examples of such a system include…
Literary news from the northern coast of the Gulf of Finland
The article gives an overview of the Finnish literature of the current century. The focus lies on poetry and prose, leaving out drama, children’s and youth literature, and comics. What is observed as general trends are genre shift and mixing, disspation of a single ’I’ or narrator, a loss of the boundary from between fact and fiction, intertextuality, and the use of a wide range of topics defying taboos. It is pointed out that modern Finnish literature is personified and the name of an author will typically become a brand.
In prose the salient topics include war, history, the role of…
In prose the salient topics include war, history, the role of…
A creature born by force of rhyme
The article focuses on a nominal phrase or compound word invented by the translators of the first versified Estonian church hymnal (1656). Although the German versions of Lutheran church hymns had end rhyme, the hymns used to be translated into Estonian in prose and without any rhyme up to the mid-17th century. The translators of the hymnal of 1656 were the first to employ meter and rhyme following the strict versification rules established by Martin Opitz. In order to find pure rhymes various tricks were used. In five hymns, the frequent verb form on (’is, are, have, has’) was rhymed…
Urban themes in older Estonian folk song (regilaul)
Usually urban themes are not to be anticipated in older Estonian folk song.This is, firstly, because the songs presumably date back to more than two thousand years. Secondly, the background and typical themes refer regilaul to an agrarian culture. The tradition of singing in regilaul style receded from active use after the mid-19th century, with the advance of extensive changes in the economy, education and population behaviour in the present-day Estonian territory. At a closer look, however, some figures involving town names as well as mentions of urban themes can be observed. In Estonia, the first townships emerged in the…
The use of partitive case forms in Standard Estonian
The study looks at the choice of Estonian partitive case forms in modern Estonian usage by inflectional classes. In particular, the analysis is focused on the inflectional classes containing alternative parallel forms. The material analyzed comes from new media texts available in the text corpora of the University of Tartu. The preference of certain forms is explained according to the theory of natural morphology and the frequency of use. In partitive singular, the preference of using a vowel ending vs the t-ending was investigated. In partitive plural, the use of a vowel ending vs the sid-ending was studied. The si-ending,…
The cycle of postpositions
The present paper is concerned with a process observed in contemporary written Estonian that results in the development of complex postpositions. Traditionally, the category of postpositions in Estonian consists of nothing but simple items. However, in actual language use, there are numerous examples that are analyzable as complex postpositions. In this account, we aim to explain the development of complex postpositions both theoretically and empirically.
In our analysis, we draw on the schema of cyclic development of Estonian function words proposed by Habicht and Penjam (2007). It is shown that the development of complex postpositions is similar to that of complex…
In our analysis, we draw on the schema of cyclic development of Estonian function words proposed by Habicht and Penjam (2007). It is shown that the development of complex postpositions is similar to that of complex…