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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?”
Söödi (Sööt)
Fallow land. Part of a fodder and staples street-name group. See Timuti.
Sookaskede (Sookased [pl.])
Sing.: sookask aka karune kask (hairy birch), sokikask (although this reads like ‘sock’ birch, Wiedemann gives it as a genitive of sokk:soki ‘juice’, i.e. the sap that locals drink [see Mähe], I mean, the buggers don’t just stop at hugging trees…), sookõiv (marsh birch), suukõiv (‘mouth’ birch, but poss. a dialect form of soo), downy, white, European white or hairy birch, Betula pubescens, presumably the one that younger Estonians use to flagellate themselves in the sauna.
Soone (Soon)
Little spring or stream, after the (now essentially covered, see Trummi) winding brooklet it crosses, Iisaku soon (Iisaku spring, source about 1 km WSW away). Iisaku itself probably comes from the Ger. name Isaak. The same word also means: 1) a groove or a slot; 2) a lode or a vein; 3) a vessel, vein, artery or duct; 4) a gutter or channel; and 5) for those with an inordinate interest in insects: trachea (for humans, it tends to be hingetoru (lit. soul‑ or, more reasonably, breath-tube) or trahhea. I'll stop and won't mention the thingies inside fiber-optic cables that ferry the pulse of modern existence.







