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Sõlme (Sõlm)
Knot, loop hub. Crossing Puu, one would hope it’s not not a knot of the arboreal persuasion nor not, despite being formerly Köiepõik (after local rope workshops), a nautical knot neither. But no, named for the railway ‘hub’ connecting Hiiu and Nõmme-Väike, aka Nõmme-Kindlus, stations on Peter the Great’s Naval Fortress (see Vabaduse puiestee).
Sõmera (Sõmer)
Coarse sand, grain or granule, gravelly, shingly, gritty, the latter two not to be confused. Street named in 1931, two years after Saue, its peer, had been renamed.
Sompa (Sompa)
Named after a farm that used to be there. Perhaps related to the adverb sompa, foggy, dark or gloomy, or somp for muddy pool and/or possible shortening of an original soonpää (head/end of the marsh), with an old genitive ‑n ending but origins lost in the mists of time...
Sõnajala (Sõnajalg)
Fern (lit. word-leg or ‑foot). Oddly, Estonian does not differentiate foot from leg (both jalg) or hand from arm (both käsi). Then again, English seems unable to distinguish the stomach (part of the digestive tube) from the abdomen. Hungarian – Estonian’s, er, German cousin – however, tends to scind kéz, hand, from kar, arm, but, like a well brought up language, keeps its legs together: láb = leg and foot. If it really wants to be nice, it says lábfej, literally the ‘head of the leg’, for foot. It seems that Bulgarian and Polish have similar situations for leg, so it may not be an FU thing. And, as the very old (sorry) joke goes: “Doctor, Doctor, my feet smell and my nose is running. Am I upside down?”
