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Pikk (Adj.)
Among the oldest streets in Tallinn, first known as strantstrate (1362), beach street (whither it led); followed by longa rega (1367), then beach street again: strant platea (1369); lange / longa strate and longa platea, or long main road (all late 14th); and platea stagnali (1375). Later names (1732) include Ger. Langstraße with its old Est./Rus. pitk ulits, later dropping the Russianesque ulits, and retranslated into Russian with Морская ул. (marine, 1907) and Длинная ул. (long, 1920?). It is the platea stagnali which poses the problem. The first idea that came to mind was its present-day cognate of ‘stagnant’, a perfect euphemism for any pools of waste that the modern mind assumes medieval towns allowed to collect at their lowest points, but no matter how well it fits into stereotypes of medieval cities, it doesn’t stand scrutiny. Public announcements (MLG būrsprāke, cf. Ger. Bürgersprache, or ‘Burgher speak’) required residents take household trash to designated locations outside the town. Whereas in classical Latin stagnalis referred more to standing-water, i.e. non-flowing, as in pools, ponds and even baths, sluggish water and all the way to ‘bottom of the sea’, its use in medieval Tallinn seems more limited. And while source records such as Nottbeck II’s: ortum, prope mare situm, ‘garden located close to the sea’, make no horticultural sense, his appendices do: ‘mare (see stagnum)’ and ‘stagnum (see mare)’: mare and stagnum mean the same thing. But do they mean ‘sea’? In classical Latin, mare did mean sea, but in MLG the hybrid mare, mār, maer had already forked into meaning Meer (sea), See (lake) and Wassergraben (moat), which does lead somewhere. In 1345, Danish king Valdemar IV granted the city the right to bring water and create mills along the SE quarter of the city walls, creating a partial moat around the city. Doing so involved dykes and resulted in 3 reservoirs: one W of Harju värav one SW of Karja värav, and one S of Viru värav. The stagnum/stagna may well refer to these, and having gardens nearby now makes sense. Which means there’s an error somewhere. Pikk is nowhere near a stagnum implied in Nottbeck’s first reference to platea stagnali on 1375-01-13 when Albert Hundebeke bequeathed property there. The error is more likely in the original manuscript than on his part, because of the detailed nature of his transcription, notes and all, and because he states that, one year later, Hundebeke bequeaths further property sitam in platea, que dicitur leemstrate (located in the street called leemstrate), or Viru tänav. Obviously, he could have multiple properties in various locations, but given the meaning and locations of the stagna, the platea stagnali cannot refer to Pikk. The next oddity is rega. It occurs again in brevis rega iuxta forum so it’s not a typo but is limited to Pikk and Mündi. Despite being used in the middle of a Latin formulation, it does not seem to occur in classical Latin, but finds itself first in Bede (±672-735) as riga, meaning line, ray or furrow. By the 13th C, the Occitans were also using the riga spelling for row (e.g. of vines) or furrow, as did later medieval French, rege, row of vines (mod. Fr. raie, also the parting in your hair) or even unit of land area, evolving into the lines drawn on manuscripts for neat copywriting, and/or stripes. German cognates include MLG reghe, ryge, rege(n), etc, for a string of onions, garlic and so on*, so a sense of linearity seems clear. Here, it looks like a dog-Latin back-translation of MLG rēge, reige, reghe, rē, meaning, other than line or row (cf. mod. Ger. Reihe), narrow passageway, which fits for Mündi but less so Pikk. Perhaps it was just yet another word for street, as implied in Nottbeck... The next bit might be completely wrong, but let’s see (feedback welcome). Since Pikk could hardly be described as either narrow or a passageway (although Pikk Jalg could, especially the part wheezing asthmatically up the hill from Nunne), MLG rēge, etc., related to MLG rēgen, to rain, also meant Rinne (borrowed into Estonian as renn, see Veerenni), channel / gutter to which, along with MLG rīde, stream or watercourse, it is also loosely related etymologically. Given the date of naming, could this refer to the aqueduct? The route – from Kullassepa, across Raekoja plats, through Mündi and onto Pikk – suggests it was, but since the aqueduct was built from 1420-23, and both brevis and longa rega precede this by 50 years, it cannot refer to the aqueduct itself. At this time, water was transported by both professionals (acqueductore, 1337) and certain taxable city residents (vattervorer, watervorer, 1360, see Salminen) and while this may have satisfied human consumption, it may have been too costly for other uses (manufacturing, washing, horses, etc.). One possibility is that the aqueduct was to up-grade an already-existing water channel, a banked-up ditch, flume or similar, and the names (or designations) were thus ‘long-’ and ‘short ditch street’ or whatnot. I do not, however, have a shred of evidence. Former occupants of Pikk have included a Soviet phone-tapping center at No.20, and a KGB interrogation center and jail at No.59. According to an old Estonian joke, this was the tallest building in town: you could see Siberia from its cellars.
* But, NB, totally unrelated linguistically to German Stiege/Steige, or its Nordic equivalents tjog or tjue (Swedish), sneis (nynorsk), snes (bokmal), or Danish snes, Faroese sneis or Icelandic skor. For details on this exciting topic, check out QUE FAIT LE FRANÇAIS APRÈS SOIXANTE-NEUF? somewhere, one day, in frogologue.com.
Rataskaevu (Rataskaev)
See previous entry for the meaning of the well itself. As to the street name, we need to go back a bit... This is going to be a bit long, so settle down with a drink in a comfortable armchair, cancel the milk and say goodbye to anybody over 50... The street was first recorded in 1328 as platea dicta dummestrate (street known as dummestrate), then sub monte (1348) and sub monte sitam penes machina (below the hill near the machine / apparatus, 1381), and sternestrate (sterne street, 1489-1521), after the well (see Rataskaev), putting it into 3 neat, separate phases: 1. street name; 2. temporary feature; 3. permanent feature. The first word to look at is dummestrate. We can ignore the different spellings – dume for Aleksander Kivi, and dumme for Zobel, KNAB and others – 1 ‘m’ or 2 is a minor issue. But what does it mean? For Kivi (and most people since then), it translates to hoob, generally understood as a cudgel or a wooden beam or stave used for levering or prying (cf. German Hebel), but Kivi goes on to suggest it describes a machine or device for lowering blocks or slabs quarried from the Toompea limestone bank for local construction. In principle, this seems eminently sensible since this activity would likely have continued for centuries. But hoob doesn’t seem to map onto machina. One’s a stick, the other’s an apparatus. MLG dumme/dume seems to derive from the PIE root *dheu‑ or *dʰueh₂ which gives us modern English words such as dizzy, dust, death, deer and donkey, a rather motley bunch, but let’s look at how it spread among various IE languages. It may look complicated, but actually it’s not. Just relax and enjoy the bizarre scripts and spellings for what they are, attempts to pin down ‘now’ for all time. We start with the oldest languages and move up:
- Hittite: duḫḫuiš, smoke
- Ugaritic: dġṯ, smoke, incense
- Sanskrit: धूलि (dhUli) dust, and धूम (dhUma-) smoke, fume, but also mist, wheat and... saint!
- Ancient Greek: θῡμός (thūmós), soul, breath, rage and life; or θῡμος (unaccentuated o), thymus or warty excrescences found on the genitals, anus or other parts of the body, but also modern Greek, θύμος, thyme, and other strong-smelling plants
- Latin: fumus: smoke, steam or sign, and its cognate fimus, manure and later Latin, shit, leading to French fumier (manure) and fiente (guano, PC for birdshit) and so on
- Old Church Slavonic: дꙑмъ (dymŭ), smoke
- Gothic: 𐌳𐌰𐌿𐌽𐍃 (dauns) smell, odor
- Old Norse: daunn, stink
- MHG: dunst or tunst, steam, mist or smell, as well as doum, bung or blockage
- MLG: either düst / dust for dust, chaff, pod, hull, etc., or dūne for down.
- Low Dutch: donst, dust, down (chick feathers)
- Lithuanian: dulkės, dust; dustininkas, alcoholic with bad breath, poss. due to their adding dùstas, insecticide (but this could be anecdotal)
- Polish: dymy, smoke (cf. Dymy nad Birkenau [Smoke over Birkenau] by Seweryna Szmaglewska)
- Bengali: ধোঁয়া (dʰõa), smoke
- Armenian ծուխ (dzukh), smoke
I think we can agree there’s no clear-cut solution but plenty of mixed signals, e.g. English ‘death’ vs Greek ‘life’, remembering that English ‘black’ is cognate with French blanc (white cf., blank), and this is what language is all about: it’s subtle, slippery and mercurial. But there are principles. And words did not not exist just because there’s no record of them, which is why linguists use the * symbol to propose words and meanings either probable or deduced. Here, the overall sense is twofold: 1) something ethereal, both outside and in, hence death, breath, dizzy, fragrance and soul; and 2) something collective, physical, light and dispersed, hence mist, smoke, dust and down. As to donkeys, this may simply be a by-product of the color dun, close to those associated with smoke, dingy, ash-grey or browny-yellow. So, bringing these various threads together, I propose the following: *dūme, a dusty haze or a foul smell. Is there any corroborating evidence? If we can assume that the street did indeed have a limestone bank quarried for building material, as it was known to have had, then dust would be inevitable. And what is the characteristic feature of a limestone quarry? The smell. Of what? Basically: farts, hydrogen sulfide, H2S. A number of limestones smell of rotten eggs when struck together, some may contain pyrite (FeS2), adding grit if not glitter to the flatulent mill. In the Mendip Hills of Somerset, Britain, for example, there is a carboniferous limestone that locals call ‘stink stone’ due to the smell it produces on quarrying. And so on. And if that ain’t quod erat bloody demonstrandum, I don’t know what is (it’s not). Moving on the the next one, if (and we may or may not) we can dismiss the idea of a machine or device for quarrying, what do we replace it by? Salminen suggests that machina refers to the mint’s coin-stamping die, which sorta sounds feasible (see Dunkri), but I’m not convinced that something almost necessarily kept out of sight would be used as an identifying feature. Was it a metonym for the mint building itself? Maybe, but perhaps there is another interpretation, also involving – PARENTAL ADVISORY – the removal of rocks... Firstly, a well in a city blessed with water does not seem a noteworthy landmark in itself, although on a hill it may admittedly be useful, but in a city as certifiably soggy as Tallinn I’m not so sure, all the more so since there were half a dozen in the area (although more to the NW). Secondly, other than salient features, medieval street names often reflected their main activity or occupants – Kinga, Kullassepa, Munga, etc. In some countries, street names where prostitutes plied their trade were often crude and clear, such as Paris’s rue Brise-Miche (Bum-buster Boulevard) or rue du Poil-au-con (Twat-Thatch Road, now rue du Pélican, Pelican rd). England had its Gropecunt Lanes and Lift-the-Skirt Alleys. When they disappeared, bowdlerized to Grope and Grape, for example, it was along with the Protestant reformation or the spread of syphilis (about which Catholics were unsure which was worse) which, in Tallinn 1586, caused prostitution to be banned and the lõbunaised (pleasure-women) driven out of town. Prior to this, they seem to have been tolerated, to the extent of being allowed to pay taxes. Thirdly... gets a bit complicated here: dume may well mean what Kivi suggests but, as they say in French, un train peut en cacher un autre, there may be more to this than meets the eye. In MLG, dume, duum, or duym meant ‘thumb’, as in MHG, dûme, Old Friesian, thûma, Old English þūma, Middle English thombe, etc., DTV’s Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen tracing its etymology back to “der Geschwollene, Dicke, Starke” (that which is swollen, thick and strong), cf. PIE *tum- ‘swell’, Eng. tumulus, tump (from Welsh twm, tymp, tympath: mound of earth), etc., Lithuanian tumėti, ‘to thicken, clot’) and the thumb has long been a symbol for the penis: the ‘phallic hand’, for example, a gesture dating at least back to Roman times, the erroneously-named ‘fig gesture’ or mano fica, etc., in modern Italian: a clenched hand with the thumb protruding between the fingers symbolizing the coupling of male and female organs, where fica is slang for the vulva, not ‘fig’ which is fico. Next, again Kivi may well be right in his interpreting of sub monte penes machina but a) penes in this situation means ‘at, by or near’ and, governing the accusative, should be followed by machinam (sing.) or machinas (plur.) not machina; b) penes is also the Latin plural of ‘penis’ (derived from ‘tail’) and, c) although machina was a device or a crane, etc., it was also the place above a stage where the gods appeared and spoke (whence the expression deus ex machina) or a platform for displaying slaves for sale, and the Latin prostituere, prior to its current and more immediate meaning of to actually prostitute, meant ‘to expose publicly for prostitution’, deriving from prostāre, to stand before, to expose oneself to view. Grammatically, it might not match (although Latin had been going downhill for at least a 1000 years by this time), but a pun or euphemism may well have been intended: in medieval English and French, a brothel could be known as a convent and a madam an abbess. Further, prostitutes in medieval Europe often congregated around wells, which opens up yet another bag of snakes: modern-day French pute or Italian puttana (whore) seem likely to come from Latin putidus stinking, which also reflects man’s love-shame-loathing relationship with sex (one 16th‑C English slang term for prostitute was fling-stink), puter:putris means corrupt, wanton, lascivious (the expression in Venerem putris means giving oneself up to the deliquescent pleasures of Venus...), and a well is puteus (an orifice available to all... What better metaphor for a prostitute), all of which are close enough for confusion and conflation to occur. Lastly, the well is very roughly equidistant (±250 m) between Neitsi torn and the historic bath-houses (with which prostitutes have been associated since Roman times) either side of present-day Nunne. As to whether the latter sisters actually rented rooms to them I shall not even discuss, but see Müürivahe. So, putatively, if you will forgive the unfortunate pun, we conclude that Rataskaevu might have been one of Tallinn’s medieval red-light districts. Or might not. The evidence is not conclusive. As an aside, in the very early 1930s, a certain Anna Maria Anspuu, nicknamed Dunkri Lonni, plied her trade as prostitute in a house on the corner of Dunkri and Rataskaevu, described by one journalist as pealinna kõige hirmsama koha (the most fearsome place in the capital), before being murdered on 1932-02-25. To wrap up on a calmer note, in the 1920s, along with standard hotel names such as Kuld Lõwi (golden lion), Commerz, Tsentral, etc., Tallinn seemed quite francophile, with hotels such as Franzia, Belgia and, in this street, to the delight of B&W film buffs, a Hôtel du Nord. All beaten by St Petersburg Hotel, claiming existence since the 14th C. During the Soviet period, street renamed (1950-1987) as Rüütli.
Oleviste (Olevist?)
Olev’s, after the church alongside which it runs (built by Olev the giant [no relation to Olevi] and/or fairytale stranger who promptly died upon completing the spire. Please do not doubt this, although some skeptics insist on claiming it was named for Saint Olaf, 995-1030, enslaved as a young lad on Saaremaa, later King Olaf II of Norway); church reputed to be (in other words, probably wasn’t) the tallest building in the world from 1549 to 1625, at which point (pun intended) the spire burnt down due to lightning. Interestingly, Ben Franklin was one of the first to write about the arrogance of putting lightning-conductors on church steeples. Since lightning was considered an ‘Act of God’, who are mortals to block His meteorological spam? Since the spire was struck by lightning about 10 times, kudos to the Estonians for trying. The –(i)ste ending may be from the old Norse.
Pagari (Pagar)
Baker. Originally Bäckerstraße (1837-1942). Named for a fairly probable reason. See Leiva. Estonia, incidentally, has perhaps the most delicious bread in the world. There was a KGB prison on the corner of this street and Pikk from 1944-1991 during the Soviet occupation, today a museum.
