Balti Jaam (0)

Lit. Baltic Station. Not a street, but Tallinn’s main railway station. Odd… While Estonia borrowed Vaksal from Russian which borrowed it from English Vauxhall which borrowed and inversed it from Anglo-Norman la Sale Faukes, (cf. Vaksali), they also borrowed jaam (ям) from the 13^th-18^th-C postal stations providing horses and accommodation in what is now Russia, which had already borrowed it from a Turkic language, poss. Tatar ям (yam) < дзям (dzyam, road), or similar in Uyghur or Chagatai meaning ‘post station or horses’, which borrowed it from a Mongolian word for ministry or office, but who themselves used Өртөө (Örtöö, checkpoint) for the message relay system originally established by Ögedei Khan (1186-1241). A number of former Russian Empire towns originated thus and are accordingly prefixed by ‘Ям’, the various Ямская (Yamskaya), for example, and others (see Kingissepa V.). Not all though: what used to be Сі́верськ (Siversk) in Ukraine, destroyed by Russia in 2022, used also to be Я́ма (Yama), but named after the river, meaning ‘pit’ due to its depth. Starting-point of, inter alia, the Tallinn-Pärnu and Tallinn-Viljandi railway lines.