Home
Jussikalda (Jussikallas)
Juss’s slope/bankside. Odd one. Jussi could be an old farm name: KNAB says nay; Pirita’s fb page says yay. Juss is short for Juhan, the name, but also means something small, short and thick, lending to other meanings such as whippersnapper, nipper, kid. This possibly explains Tammsaare A. H. choosing it for the stunted personification of death, martyrdom and self-loathing in his 5-volume masterpiece Tõde ja õigus (Truth and Justice), translated in 3 vols.: I (Vargamäe) & II (Indrek) available at good bookstores; vol. 3 pending.
Kaarla (Kaarel)
Another name for rabamurakas, cloudberry or bakeapple in the US, knotberry or knoutberry in the UK, Rubus chamaemorus. The term ‘bakeapple’ is interesting, and a tad tricky, so 2 lists are in order, the first involving 3 key Latin roots:
- Malum: largish, roundish fruit such as apple, lemon, pear, peach, quince, etc.
- Pomum: pip‑, seed‑ or nut‑fruit such as fig, date, walnut, etc.
- Poma (the late Lat. plural of the above classical Lat. pomum): seed or pome fruit (dang… ‘pome’, meaning ‘apple-like’)
The second for various fruit around Europe:
- English Pineapple (a mix of Span. piña and Eng. apple [see below, we’ll get there]
- French pomme de terre (potato: lit. earth apple, from the poma root, and while (N)Ger. Kartoffel is based on truffle (yup, grows underground...), (S)Ger. copied Fr. with Erdäpfel)
- Geman Apfelsine (lit. Chinese apple: orange, although Ger. Orange did exist, so did Apel de Sina)
- Latin malogranatum (pomegranate : in 2 parts: malum + granatum (full of seeds, i.e. grain)
- Spanish melocotón (peach: from malum cotonium, i.e. cottony apple, when malum already meant peach)
So while the pomum-based words make more obvious sense, and tended to spread through Latin languages, the PIE root for apple, *h₂ébōl or *h₂ébl̥, remained used for a while for any kind of fruit, such as the above pineapple, Old Eng. fingeræppla (finger apples, or ‘dates’), others of which I wot not, and later refined itself away from the Latins to specify actual apples, such as most Slavic languages, derived from a diminutive of Proto-Slavic *ablo: *àblъko, and Germanic languages such as Dutch appel, Faroese epli, Lith.: obuolys, etc. As to Blackfoot áípasstaamiinaamm, I dread to even guess where that came from*. See Muraka and Õuna. One of two berry streets in Raku. See Mustika.
* I dont, my doctor recommends washing.
Kaasiku (Kaasik): 
1) Birch wood, forest or grove; 2) Singer of old folk songs at weddings (archaic). This one is odd. Said to be a former village and now Ward (allasum) of Mähe, it seems to belong to Merivälja, while the only street of this name is about as far away as it could possibly be, in Pääsküla. Adding insult to injury Kaasiku used to be known not just as Junnküla (pooh village), but Junnküla küla (pooh village village). See Teeääre.







