Raja (1. Raja; 2. Rada)
1) Boundary, border; 2) Path, walk, possibly derived from a path typically along the edge of a field. Both for its running along an N-S stretch of Nõmme district. Word from Russian край (krai, an administrative division of Russia) and ‘ultimately’ from a PIE root *krei, meaning ‘to cut’, later ‘edge’. This, of course, forked ito various Slavic derivatives – edge, end, shore, bank side, rim, border, frontier, etc. – hence Ukraine, designated as ‘in/at/by the border’, as seen in the initial digraph ‘uk’, Ꙋ, common enough in the 1st millennium but evolving into Slavic izhitsa ‘ѵ’ and gradually disappearing, from Russian at least (see Myrrh in Intro), by the 20th C. And while ‘some people’ (don’t @ me) claim this to indicate Ukraine to mean a ‘borderland’ and hence appurtenance of Russia, the earliest record of the name (1187) is considered to come from the lost Kievan Chronicle (±1200), source material for what is known as the Hypatian Code (±1425), itself primary source of knowledge about Kievan Rus’, the main city of which was Kiev, in which it referred to steppe approximately bordering the southern marches between modern-day Lviv and Kharkiv, in other words a geographical and not political designation. Obviously, all this is intricate, complex and mists-of-time material. For a better understanding, read someone who knows what they’re actually talking about, rather than this. Another meaning, usually in the plural, rajad, refers to very simple oval-shaped snowshoes or rackets made of sapling and cord for walking on snow or marshes. Part of a 3-street Pääsküla-Nõmme border zone, see Veere.
