Names
Lomonossovi M. (Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov, 1711-1765)
Russian polymath, scientist, writer and poet, born in a Pomor village close to Kholmogory, about 60 km S of Archangelsk and its now, sadly, dismantled 13-storey, 44-m high, reputedly world’s tallest wooden house, the ‘Sutyagin skyscraper’, built by its eponymous local racketeer. Soviet occupation renaming (1950-1991) of Gonsiori.
Loo (Loog)
Mowed hay, cut grass on a meadow. Tricky, because often used to mean windrow (non-US), itself often considered synonymous with swathe (US), but they are not the same. It could also mean tedded hay, or hay left loosely in the field to dry, periodically turned over. In farming, a swathe is (was) the strip cut by the scythe, while a windrow is the row of cut grass, etc., left on the field to dry out (usually 80% to 20% moisture) in the wind, hence the name. The meaning of the word in Estonian seems to have shifted over time, and the fuzziness around the word is reflected in its neighbors: loog has pretty-much identical cognates in Finnish, Veps, Votic and so on, where Russian, лyг (lug) means ‘meadow’, bearing in mind that a meadow was generally a plot of land intended to be cut for hay. Likewise, its counterpart vaal (swathe, see Vaalu) is валок (valok) in Russian. Their ancestry certainly shares common ground. While EES gives loog as coming from proto-Germanic *slōǥa‑z, *slōǥijōn‑, it may be related to Russian лyг (lug, meadow) from Old Slavonic *lǫgъ, but then again maybe not. For information, genitive loo has 2 other nominatives: lood, synonymous with Alvari, and lugu, story.
Lõo (Lõo)
Short for Lõoke and Lõokene, see Lõokese, where both the ‑ke and ‑kene endings are diminutives, short and long form respectively. An odd word of Proto-Germanic origin, *laiwarikōn- or, *laiwazikōn-, losing the ‘w’ to give Eng. ‘lark’, Swed. lärkor, Ger. Lerchen, etc., as well as lõo and leevike (see Leevikese) and does not appear to exist as a standalone word anymore. Estonian diminutives are to linguists what “the one that got away” is to anglers, magnifying (or minimizing) with each telling, in which another level of diminution can be tacked onto the previous one recursively, as a form or re-emphasis, and ‘some people’, mentioning no names, suspect that the long-form ‑kene diminutive is nothing less than a ‑ne diminutive of the ‑ke diminutive. Ignoring the yellow polka-dots for the minute (if you’ll excuse the pun), an “itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny bikini” (plural in Est., dammit) could, under very strained circumstances, translate as bikiinikesekesekesekesed – (Don’t!) – although they’d probably say pisikesekesekesekesed bikiinid. Or not. WTF…
