Category
Topic
Year
The young Johannes Semper translating French poetry
For Johannes Semper the 1920s were a prolific period full of diverse activities, all contributing to his maturation as poet and author. These were also his most prolific years of translating French poetry, while the authors, epochs and text types chosen display wide diversity. Several of his translations of that period have become part and parcel of the Estonian canon of French poetry. Towards the end of the decade Semper published a self-compiled collection of his favourite Verhaeren.
During the intense translating process Semper delved deeply into the problems of poetic form. In his prefaces to his more substantial translations (Hugo’s…
During the intense translating process Semper delved deeply into the problems of poetic form. In his prefaces to his more substantial translations (Hugo’s…
The origin of the word stems of standard Estonian
The recently published Estonian Etymological Dictionary (EED) summarizes the research done on the origin of the word stems used in standard Estonian. The basis of the EED entry list are the stems found in the Estonian Orthological Dictionary “ÕS 2006”, with the exclusion of recent foreign stems. The given statistical overview of the stems of standard Estonian is based on the EED. In the article, a stem is defined in a narrower sense, also considering the language-historical aspect: a stem is a root morpheme carrying a lexical meaning, which does not contain any historical derivational suffixes and cannot be identified…
The press and Jakob Hurt’s and Matthias Johann Eisen’s efforts of collecting folklore
The article is focused on the press debate of 1893–1895, triggered by Jakob Hurt’s criticism of Matthias Johann Eisen’s methods of folklore collecting. Besides the invaluable role played by the press in the success of the collecting campaigns, one should also consider the multi-pronged nature of the local press sphere of the late 19th century. While the collectors used the press for their own purposes, the journalists felt free to make use of folklore topics in various other discussions and mutual disputes. Analysing the positions of four newspapers – Postimees, Olevik, Virmaline and Valgus – the article attempts to capture…
Random notes on a long-awaited etymological dictionary
The Estonian etymological dictionary by Iris Metsmägi (chief-editor), Meeli Sedrik and Sven-Erik Soosaar is welcomed as it fills a gap in the system of Estonian dictionaries. Most of the review is concentrated on technical problems of the presentation of etymologies, as well as on spelling problems and on the interrelations of primary and contemporary meanings. The reviewers recommend that, in future, a more exact spelling should be used and references to the authors of certain etymologies be added.
What is poetry? II
The present attempt to answer the question, What is poetry? has (a) delivered a minimal definition, (b) supplemented it with some prototypical features, and (c) called for historical articulation of the resulting complex. The first part of the essay reached an external and formal definition: a poem is a short text in verse. Following Werner Wolf’s attempt to distil prototypical features from a variety of earlier definitions, we concluded that besides textuality, brevity and verse, the characteristic features of lyric include a possibility of oral performance, deviation from everyday usage, a presence of unmediated consciousness, a subjective perspective, a foregrounding…
The Estonian clause of purpose
The article analyzes Estonian purpose clauses on a typological background. In Estonian, there are three kinds of purpose clauses: (1) clauses expressing the desired result of intentional action, (2) clauses expressing a function for the fulfilment of which somebody or something is necessary/unnecessary or appropriate/inappropriate, and (3) clauses expressing either a hidden purpose or, rather, a consequence and temporal succession.
The Estonian purpose clause is, by form and by content, closely connected with the complement clause as well as with the adverbial clauses of reason and result. Its similarity now with the clause of reason, now with that of result is…
The past triennial of Estonian literary studies
Monitoring the state of the art in national research is a necessary autocommunication mechanism of a culture. The present overview surveys the monographs, collections, and research articles concerning Estonian literature, which have been published during the period of 2010–2012. The overview is based on the databases ESTER and ISE of the Estonian Libraries Network Consortium. The Estonian subject thesaurus and UDC classificators were used for finding the publications classified as ‘literary studies’. An additional survey was carried out among those articles published in Estonian literary periodicals that were not indexed as ‘literary studies’. The main quantitative findings of our research…
„Kalevipoeg” as a core text
The Estonian national epic „Kalevipoeg” (1861) is a literary epic based on folklore motifs, which was created by F. R. Kreutzwald. As part of European romantic literature it stands side by side with Kalevala by Elias Lönnrot. Previous studies of „Kalevipoeg” mainly address the relationship of the epic with Estonian folklore and international myths. Cultural studies emphasize the impetus it gave to the movement of National Awakening in 19th-century Estonia. The present article is focused on the meaning of „Kalevipoeg” as a literary text. The study draws from a corpus of metatexts, which enables the researcher to follow the reception…
On the diffusion of some recently proposed Estonian words
In 2002, a new word contest was held in Estonia, which resulted in the proposition of eleven new words to replace some of the foreign loanwords often used in the context of European legislation. The main goal of this article was to investigate whether these new words have gone through successful diffusion (as described by E. Rogers, 2003) or whether they have been rejected by the general public. Additionally, through the use of corpora texts, the dynamics of the diffusion could be mapped and compared to the predictions of some recent mathematical models (such as that of Fagyal et al,…