Ebook: The Russian Loanwords in Literary Estonian (Veroffentlichungen Der Societas Uralo-Altaic)

The Russian Loanwords in Literary Estonian

The aim of this project is to obtain an exhaustive treatment of the Russian loanwords that have entered the vocabulary of Estonian (a Finno-Ugric language of the Finnic branch). Slavic and older Russian loanwords have already, though in no way exhaustively, been the object of research, but the newer Russian loanwords in Estonian have only been treated sketchily, with no thorough works on this subject whatsoever. This is an odd situation, given the enormous impact Russian has had and still has on Estonian. Two periods of especially pervasive Russification and Sovietization (1881-1918; 1940-1990) have left their mark on the Estonian language; there were even attempts to introduce the Cyrillic alphabet.

An attempt will be made to develop a non-empirical method do delineate Russian loanwords from other loanwords and native vocabulary with the aid of a comparison off the phonotactic and morphotactic structure of Estonian and Russian.

The Russian loanwords will also have to be grouped according to origin; simply 'Russian' is not informative enough, as these loanwords were borrowed from various sources: Orthodox priests, Old Believers, Lake Peipsi fishermen, Russian merchants from Tallinn, Tsarist officials, Tsarist and Soviet soldiers, Orthodox Estonians etc. Not all Russian loanwords in literary Estonian are thus from literary Russian; the Russian dialects of eastern Estonia and north-western Russia will have contributed too; these will have to be differentiated.

Literary Estonian will form the basis of the material from which the loanwords will be excerpted, as well as relevant secondary material. A corpus will be made based on all available dictionaries of Estonian. With the aid of older dictionaries and grammars the first attested appearance of the loanword in question will be determined. The theoretical part will deal with, amongst others, the history of Estonian-Russian contacts, the phonological adaptation of Russian loanwords to Estonian through time, the role of the accent, morphology, semantics, stylistic register and chronology.