Names
Sõjamäe (Sõjamägi) 
Tricky, literally War Hill, its meaning could range from Soldiers’ Knoll, Martial Mountain, Battle Bump, to Bruise. Military vantage point / observation post sounds good too (see Mäe for discussion). Most faithful, however, is Battle Hill, named after what is believed to be the site of a battle following the Jüriöö Ülestõus (St. George’s Night Uprising) of 1343-04-23 where the Teutonic Order killed some 3000 Estonians in an orgy of attrition and revenge (see Lasnamäe). Streets today come in all sizes: Väike-Sõjamäe, Kesk-Sõjamäe and Suur-Sõjamäe, formerly V-, K & S-Weimarschofi after manor house belonging to master butcher Johann Weymar (1815), but native Estonians long preferred the Sõjamäe variants or even, according to TT, in the 18th C, Tapomäe, where Tapo seems to come from tapp:tapa, slaughter or murder. To trivialize the uprising, the German overlords renamed or nicknamed Sõjamäe as Seamäe (Pig Hill), Schweinsberg in German, sometime in the 19th C. The name can still be seen on the 1914 map of Tallinn accompanying Baedeker’s Russia, with Teheran, Port Arthur, and Peking; handbook for travellers. Sure, that worked…
Sõle (Sõlg)
Brooch, pin, ouch (not an onomatopoeic consequence of mishandling, ‘ouch’ is derived from French, nouche, the socket of a precious stone, later the stone itself, by a linguistic process called rebracketing. Rebracketing comes in two flavors: agglutination, familiar to Shakespeare groupies where, for example ‘an uncle’ shifts to ‘a nuncle’, and deglutination, transforming the hypothetical English ‘a norange’ to ‘an orange’ although deriving ultimately from Persian nāranğ via Venetian naranza to Italian narancia and thence arancia through French orange or orenge, although the Spanish route from naranja to French is not to be ruled out). These are the famous, usually silver, but sometimes bronze or copper brooches, ranging from the small buckle-type (vitssõlg), through the ±5-cm almost-closed-horseshoe-shaped fastener (rõngasõlg, reminiscent of Viking-era brooches, although some of these might more aptly be called a Prees) and heart-shaped brooch (südamekujuline sõlg) to the >15‑cm (or up to 35 cm in the Setu area) circular, gently-conical boss (kuhiksõlg) worn by Estonian women on the breast of their traditional dress. In addition to decoration, they also served as security for food purchases in the spring of lean years. Renamed (1968-1990) during the manifestly communist period as Karl Marxi.







