obadus and plinder

Lembit Vaba

doi:https://doi.org/10.54013/kk816a3

Keywords: Estonian vocabulary, etymology, loanwords

Quite a blow

According to Julius Mägiste, obadus ’metal loop’ is a Russian loanword; cf. Russian óбод ’hoop, ring; arched fastening’ and dialectal обóдь ’ring, hook, clasp, bow’. The article notes that the meaning ’blow, hit’ developed in the semantic field of obadus within the Estonian linguistic context, where many fastening devices have acquired a secondary sense ’blow, hit’. Examples include haak ’hook, part of a latch or fastening’ ⇒ ’a boxing hook delivered from below or the side with a bent arm’; kiil ’iron or wooden wedge used for joining or sealing objects or their parts’ ⇒ ’blow, hit’; kõrvakiil ’a slap, a hit to the ear with the hand’; põõn ’a cross-board used to join and reinforce wooden items’ ⇒ ’blow, hit’.

In a bind

The article argues that the colloquial plinder ’difficult situation, bind, predicament, deprivation’ is a loan from the German dialect word Splinter ’(wood) splinter, sliver’, whose more widespread Standard German form is Splitter (without the nasal in the stem). From plinder, the shortened, irregular dialectal form plinn is likely to have developed. The semantics of lack or deprivation are reflected in the German adjectives splitternack, resp. splinternackt, splinternackend, etc. ’naked, bare(-wood)’, literally ’splinter-bare’. Baltic German also attests the adjective splinterkahl ’completely bare, stripped bare’. In Estonian, plinder has not been recorded with the meaning ’wood splinter, sliver, etc.’, which invites a consideration of expressions in which unpleasant situations someone may get into (or find themselves in) are described using imagery involving an ork ’spike’, (puu)pind ’ (wood) splinter’, or (puu)pulgad ’(wooden) sticks’.

Lembit Vaba (b. 1945), PhD, Foreign Member of the Latvian Academy of Sciences, phorest45@gmail.com

obadus and plinder

Kirjandus