Names
Ääre (Äär)
Edge, border, brim, margin. Doesn’t seem to be any particular edge or border here… Formerly Raba.
Aasa (Aas):
Meadow. There is both an Aasa tänav, this one here in Uus Maailm, and a Roheline aas in Kadriorg.
Ääsi (Ääs)
Forge. From MLG ēse, esse, hearth or forge. Part of a mini iron-working group. See Keevise.
Aate (Aade):
Idea, ideal. Not a very old street name: the word aade was borrowed (and the chance of them returning it is almost nil) from Finnish aate, idea, in 1884. Despite the tarmac, part of a metaphysical street-name group. See Edu.
Aaviku (Aavik)
Found on some maps of Tallinn, where it doesn’t exist, but does in nearby Rae. Named after a farm and not, regrettably, after the best known of the Aavik family: Johannes (1880-1973), inventor of numerous language reforms and neologisms (oddly, the ones most people recall, dare we raise the cranial lid on the Estonian subconscious, are relv, weapon, from revolver, and mõrv, murder, from German Mord), as well as translator (although some would say ‘re-writer’) of Maupassant, Edgar Allen Poe, Turgenev, Mika Waltari, and a dab of Sophocles, Apuleius, etc., An all-round linguist with, in addition to the languages implied above, German, Livonian, Mordvin, Swedish, and varying degrees of familiarity with Arabic, plus other Slavic and Finnic languages... Either way, given Estonia’s istory of ‘H’-denial (see Wiedemann’s orthographically nightmarish dictionary Ehstnisch-deutsches Wörterbuch), the name probably derives from haavik anyway (see Haaviku).
