Lõkke (Lõke)

Blaze, fire, bonfire, campfire. After the sort of things Soviet Young Pioneers (pre-Komsomol scout-like associations) would build (see street next door, Pioneeride). Previously Bienert-Straße (1879) and Erbestraße (1882) after local land-owners Friedrich Ernst Bienert, apothecary, and Eugen Eduard Erbe, town councillor.

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…

Loode (Loe)

North-west, northwesterly (also high tide, neap tide or, plural, looded, tide, ebb and flow). Also noordvest or nordvest among sailors. Compass point with a twist! Loode is possibly derived from Proto-Finnic *loodeh giving Finnish luode, northwest (itself possibly related to Finnish luoja, creator, or to a hypothetical verb such as *luotaa, to descend), Karelian luuveh for west or southwest, Livonian lūod and Ludian luodeh for vanilla west, and back to Veps and Votic with lode / lodeh and loo / looto / looõ for northwest or west, or just as possibly derived from MLG lēden, to lead, and cognate with modern English lode. During the Middle Ages, the ‘Viking compass’ was rotated some 45° to 60° clockwise from the true, geographical compass, with norðr referring to northeast, not north, and northwest thus pointing north to the Lodestar (aka Polaris or North Star), which might explain why Estonian has actual, i.e. non-compound, names for the intercardinal directions (NE, SE, etc.) which, for them, were cardinal, see Edela. Formerly (1885-1923) Nürnbergi. See also Vesikaare.