The article examines the language use, with related cultural attitudes and identity manifestations, in the novel series Minge üles mägedele („Over the Mountains”) by Mats Traat. Most of the character speech in the novels represents South Estonian, more specifically, the Tartu language. The narrator’s speech, however, is in standard Estonian, which is largely based on North Estonian dialects. Such division is typical of South Estonian prose, although not absolute. Notably, this novel series by Traat stands out in Estonian literary history as the most voluminous text of fiction where the Tartu language is consistently used. Moreover, the fate of the…

The article discusses a biographical circumstance concerning Friedrich Robert Faehlmann (1798–1850), notably his relations with Marie (Méry) von Bruiningk (1818–1853) from the Lieven family. Estonian historiography knows Marie von Bruiningk as a revolutionary of 1848, a democrat and, possibly, a revolutionary agitator, the spiritual leader of the circle associated with the Bruiningk family in the 1840s. Also, her association with Karl Marx and the Russian revolutionary Alexander Herzen has been pointed out. Friedrich Robert Faehlmann was the family doctor and friend of the Bruiningks. His putative relations with Marie von Bruiningk have enhanced the political weight of his activity, while…

 
The article follows the poetic formation of the oldest living Estonian author Liidia Tuulse. The roles of Bernard Kangro, Helmi Mäelo, Marie Under, Arno Vihalemm, Õie Fleig-Tamm and others in that process are pointed out. The mutual relations of the expatriate authors, emergence of creative impulses and the phenomenally smooth evolution of Lidia Tuulse into a poetess are discussed.
Bernard Kangro’s interest in Liidia Tuulse’s poetic career was based on their shared school memories from Valga and a mystical South-Estonian sense of nature.
The talent of the young Liidia Tuulse was also noticed by Marie Under, whose supportive attitude enhanced her self-confidence.…

Eight years ago, in 2003 Martin Ehala and Katrin Niglas conducted a representative study among Estonian school students. The aim was to get an overview of the attitudes that could influence young people’s language preferences in situations or environments where their choice is between Estonian and English, such as Internet communications, entertainment, school and university, in the workplace and with family. The results showed that in the eyes of the students Estonian has quite a strong integrative value which cannot be said about the instrumental value. A similar survey conducted in 2011 shows that language attitudes of students have generally…

In Estonian mythology landscape is an image of a primordial time, when the earth was created. This mythical time can be compared to some of the oldest and remotest oral traditions, like Dreamtime among Aboriginal Australians or the First Order among African Bushmen. There were two principal figures: one was the first, or more perfect creator, and the other a trickster, who added necessary imperfections and continued the process of creation. The first creator is often called Grandfather (Vanaisa), while the trickster is called Old Pagan (Vanapagan). Together they form a creator pair that functions in a supplementary manner: while…

The first translators of the Estonian Bible had to cope with the fact that the Estonian language expresses passivity and impersonality differently from the source languages. During the long road to the first full Bible, the preferences of the translators changed a lot. An observation of 16 versions of the New Testament (NT) from the period 1632–1739 has revealed a decisive change in the late 17th century. Until then, the most popular construction was saama + passive past participle, and the impersonal forms of the Estonian verb were used modestly. The situation reversed in the 1680s: from that point on,…

Without doubt, Johannes Aavik (1880–1973) is one of the most popular and widely known personalities in Estonian linguistics. His activity in the 1910–20s was focused on a renewal of literary Estonian, aimed at enriching its vocabulary and grammar. For this purpose he borrowed words from Estonian dialects and from Finnish, but his most famous achievements are concerned with coining new stems. His idea was to provide Estonian with new invented words enabling translation of any nuance of the words or expressions used in the most cultivated languages.
Although Aavik is a disputed personality, only very few researchers have dared to ask…

The Causative Emotion Construction (CEC) is one of the constructions for expressing experiential events in Estonian. In a CEC, the experiencer is marked as an object and the stimulus as a subject. In this paper, the CEC is examined in respect of the occurrence of the stimulus, a subject’s behavioural properties of the object argument (semantically: experiencer) and the effect of the agentivity of the subject argument (semantically: stimulus). The data are compared with those of Latvian and Russian as contact languages, and with those of the other Finnic languages.
The Estonian CEC deviates from the respective constructions used in other…

In January 1961 all papers wrote about the seizure of the Portuguese liner „Santa Maria” in protest against the dictatorship ruling Portugal at the time. In occupied Estonia „Santa Maria” became a symbol of freedom and rebellion whose use in arts and literature is best exemplified by a painting by Aleksander Suuman and a romantic freedom-singing poem by Paul-Eerik Rummo. Even a cafe ship in Tartu on the river Emajõgi was popularly christened „Santa Maria”. Those were marks of the social optimism raised in Estonia by the political „thaw” of the early 1960s, soon, however, running into the sands of…