Estonian

Text-type determines the linguistic and paralinguistic means for convey-ing the message. The present study investigates how to discriminate between text-types and which types should be focused on in language teaching. One of the distinctive features of text-type is text formality, determinable from its part-of-speech structure. Our formality analysis concerns 28 oral and written texts. The results indicate that written texts are more formal than oral ones, and monologues more formal than dialogues. The results are applicable in FLT as well as in language technology for automatic identification of text-types.

This study focuses on forced grammaticalization, in which a new form or construction is introduced into a language on the basis of the material of that same language, but without a prior step-by-step development or bridging contexts. Two types of forced grammaticalization can be distinguished: contactinduced and language-internal forced grammaticalization. In the course of contact-induced forced grammaticalization, the result of a grammaticalization process is adopted from the model language into the replica language without there being a grammaticalization process in the latter. The developers of Old Written Estonian, for whom Estonian was a second language,  proceeded in this fashion, introducing, for instance, articles and future constructions into the language. Language-internal forced grammaticalization involves the introduction of innovations which are based on the language’s own material, but for
which no natural evolution can be observed. Innovations in Estonian brought
about through language-internal forced grammaticalization include new orphological verb and adjective forms as well as back-formed verbs. The development of Standard Estonian has seen examples of both types of forced grammaticalization. The mechanisms, causes and scope of these phenomena require further investigation.

英文摘要Organochlorine pesticides (OCPs), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) were analysed in selected Estonian soils. The sample collection included agricultural-rural (Ahja, Eerika), industrial-urban (Kohtla-Järve, ...

This article offers a comparative analysis of several morphosyntactic and phonological features in the South Estonian language islands: Leivu, Lutsi, and Kraasna. The objective is to give an overview of the distribution of selected features, their (in)stability over time, and discuss their form and use in a broader areal context. To achieve this goal, comparative information was also included from the closest cognate varieties (Estonian and the South Estonian varieties, Courland Livonian and Salaca Livonian) and the main contact varieties (Latgalian, Latvian, and Russian). The data analysed in this study originated from various sources: text collections, dictionaries, and language corpora. The results reveal a multitude of linguistic patterns and distribution patterns, which means that the studied varieties are similar to / different from one another in various ways and points to multifaceted contact situations and outcomes in this area. Kokkuvõte. Miina Norvik, Uldis Balodis, Valt...

Hardly any other folklore subject or motif can offer a more colourful bouquet in genre than apparent death, ranging from fairy tales and romantic legends to rumours, ballads, and jokes. The historical origin of stories of apparent death extends back to antiquity, probably also relying on some true events; however, the formation and spread of folktales on this subject falls into the Enlightenment period in Europe. The emergence and development of this topic relate to medical and religious practices, journalism and literature. The article focuses on the traditional context of apparent death in eighteenth-nineteenth-century Europe, including Estonia.

Text-type determines the linguistic and paralinguistic means for convey-ing the message. The present study investigates how to discriminate between text-types and which types should be focused on in language teaching. One of the distinctive features of text-type is text formality, determinable from its part-of-speech structure. Our formality analysis concerns 28 oral and written texts. The results indicate that written texts are more formal than oral ones, and monologues more formal than dialogues. The results are applicable in FLT as well as in language technology for automatic identification of text-types.

This article explores the ways in which different external and internal factors (especially politics and economics) have encouraged or hindered the evolution of Estonian Public Broadcasting. This article argues that the Estonian government’s ‘idealisation’ of market forces that is supported by European Union (EU) media policy and driven by the common market ideology does not take into account the actual abilities of a small country’s media companies to provide a wide range of media services, and thereby limits the offerings of high-quality local content. The research methodology is based on an analysis of EU media policy documents, Estonian media legislation and broadcasters’ annual reports in the period from 1992 to 2014. The main finding of this article is that official Estonian media policy is largely shaped by the financial results of private media companies.

The EU Copernicus project Multext-East has created a multi-lingual corpus of text and speech data, covering the six languages of the project: Bulgarian, Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovene. In addition, wordform lexicons for each of the languages were developed. The corpus includes a parallel component consisting of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, with versions in all six languages tagged for part-of-speech and aligned to English (also tagged for POS). We describe the encoding format and data architecture designed especially for this corpus, which is generally usable for encoding linguistic corpora. We also describe the methodology for the development of a harmonized set of morphosyntactic descriptions (MSDs), which builds upon the scheme for western European languages developed within the EAGLES project. We discuss the special concerns for handling the six project languages, which cover three distinct language families.

The article analyses the life and activity of Estonian ethnomusicologist and folklorist Herbert Tampere (1909-1975), as well as the research history of Estonian folk songs until 1945, also paying attention to the influence of the Estonian Folklore Archives and its head Oskar Loorits. The historical background to Tampere’s activity is the establishment of independent statehood in Estonia (1919) after Estonians had existed as an ethic minority group subjected to the ruling classes of other nationalities for hundreds of years. The scientific and cultural background is constituted by the development of European folkloristics and ethnomusicology and the increasing prestige of folk music and non-western music in Europe, which contributed to the rise of the cultural self-awareness of Estonians as a nation with oral lore different from Indo-European culture. The approach is framed with the metaphor of life and death, which in Herderian way of thinking corresponded to the growth and fading o...

We analyze subword-based language models (LMs) in large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition across four “morphologically rich” languages: Finnish, Estonian, Turkish, and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic. By estimating n-gram LMs over sequences of morphs instead of words, better vocabulary coverage and reduced data sparsity is obtained. Standard word LMs suffer from high out-of-vocabulary (OOV) rates, whereas the morph LMs can recognize previously unseen word forms by concatenating morphs. We show that the morph LMs generally outperform the word LMs and that they perform fairly well on OOVs without compromising the accuracy obtained for in-vocabulary words.

The coastal zone of the Eastern Gulf of Finland is actively changed under the influence of complicated natural and anthropogenic factors. The easternmost part of the gulf, a valuable area for recreation, is characterized by very intense coastal processes and is dominated by erosion. Analysis of historical materials, archive aerial photographs and modern high-resolution satellite images together with on-land investigations

The Estonian emotional speech corpus (EEKK) is being created in the framework of the National Programme for Estonian Language Technology in the Institute of the Estonian Language. The corpus contains recordings of read speech sentences expressing anger, joy and sadness, and neutral sentences. The corpus serves two objectives: 1) to form an acoustic basis of corpus-based emotional text-to-speech synthesis; 2) to provide a reliable database for studying emotions rendered by speech. The underlying principle of the corpus is that emotions can be relatively well recognised in natural, non-acted speech which is a precondition for synthesising natural speech (see Iida et al. 2003). The reliability of the corpus is ensured by perception tests: each corpus sentence is provided with perception test results on the recognisability of an emotion. The corpus is now in the testing stage. The present article gives an overview of the stages of corpus creation and results of perception tests.

Text-type determines the linguistic and paralinguistic means for conveying the message. The present study investigates how to discriminate between text-types and which types should be focused on in language teaching. One of the distinctive features of text-type is text formality, determinable from its part-of-speech structure. Our formality analysis concerns 28 oral and written texts. The results indicate that written texts are more formal than oral ones, and monologues more formal than dialogues. The results are applicable in FLT as well as in language technology for automatic identification of text types.

This article presents linguistic innovations which are typical of both Courland and Salaca Livonian and are also known in the neighbouring Estonian dialect areas. These innovative features are phonological, morphological, and morphosyntactic. The features are present mainly in western and southwestern Estonia, but also more specifically in areas close to the current western border between Estonia and Latvia. This article discusses the nature and chronology of these linguistic features, taking into account their distribution. Broadly spread common features can be mostly explained as inherent innovations of western Finnic when they are not shown to be caused by contacts with Germanic or Baltic languages. Features which are spread in the immediate vicinity of the former Livonian language area can be classified as a Livonian substrate in sub-dialects of western and insular Estonian.Kokkuvõte. Patrick O’Rourke, Karl Pajusalu: Liivi jooned eesti murretes. Artikkel käsitleb keeleuuendusi, ...

This article offers a comparative analysis of several morphosyntactic and phonological features in the South Estonian language islands: Leivu, Lutsi, and Kraasna. The objective is to give an overview of the distribution of selected features, their (in)stability over time, and discuss their form and use in a broader areal context. To achieve this goal, comparative information was also included from the closest cognate varieties (Estonian and the South Estonian varieties, Courland Livonian and Salaca Livonian) and the main contact varieties (Latgalian, Latvian, and Russian). The data analysed in this study originated from various sources: text collections, dictionaries, and language corpora. The results reveal a multitude of linguistic patterns and distribution patterns, which means that the studied varieties are similar to / different from one another in various ways and points to multifaceted contact situations and outcomes in this area. Kokkuvõte. Miina Norvik, Uldis Balodis, Valt...

The purpose of the study is to evaluate how supportive is Estonian national innovation system toward the launching of new innovative products by high technology firms. The article intends to combine two broad areas of research – national innovation system approach and the different models of the new product launching. Based on the literature review and in-depth analysis of three case studies of Estonian high-tech company’s major barriers as well success factors of highly innovative product launches were identified. The barriers of the new product launching were linked with the systemic failures of the national innovation system. The most relevant failures of Estonian national innovation system inhibiting the new product development are capability and networking failures. The sources of innovation of high-technology firms are too narrow, linkages with domestic firms and higher education institutions as well with foreign firms are poorly developed. High-tech firms have also serious ca...

The Estonian Etymological Dictionary (EED) has been a project of the Institute of the Estonian Language (IEL) since 2003. Due to the urgent necessity for an etymological dictionary it was decided to start from a short and not too detailed version tailored for the general public with no philological background and to broaden this version later in order to compile a scientific dictionary. The next step involved concrete decisions about the material to be included into the first version of the dictionary.

Whenever I edit a poorly written manu-script, I wish that the authors were aware of the importance of writing concisely and clearly and of the proper structuring of a research report. That knowledge would save both their time and my time, and scientists who are not proficient in English could also save the money they may have to pay translators or author’s editors for sub-stantial corrections of their manuscripts. We can alleviate the problem by provid-ing instructions for scientists and science translators. However, to be effective, the instructions must be concise and clear. That is why in 2010 the European Association of Science Editors (EASE) published its