Introduction

Ever been lost in a strange town? Or tried to find your way through a maze of meaningless names? Or just thought: why on earth did they call it that?

It started with Kopli. Kopli is at the end of tramlines 1 & 2. Not the most exciting of neighborhoods but, whatever, the question was: what does it mean? Although a place doesn’t always have a name, a place name always has a meaning. Nomen est omen they say.

Street names are tags of time, culture and identity. They tell of trades and trivia, of battles won, as well as who, what and where. And time moves on, leaving ghosts and orphans in its wake. New times, new names. How many cities have a bridge or market called New? “Where’s New Street?” you ask. “It’s in the old town”.

Invaders come. Language changes. City walls are razed and rise again, proud and built to last. Till stronger rams hit home or redundancy reclaims the stone. Scribes put names to parchment to allocate taxes or stand as collateral. They spell like pigs but do what they can, writing is rudimentary. The city goes through its early years in rough and ready fashion. Names are blunt and to the point, they indicate an essence of the place: baker’s alley, shoe-makers’ street¸ hay market, this or that church, where the cattle are led out to pasture, the iron gate... Later come proprietary titles, and burgomeisters rule. Until, one day, the town needs a more rational or authoritative way of seeing itself, and street-naming becomes official. Which language? In Tallinn it was Russian and/or German with or without Estonian (all permutations possible), translated, transliterated, transformed, then all torn down in a fit of independence to be crossed out again with pushing and shoving from east and west as Stalin and Hitler stab their vicious knives into the fleshy shield then slam the prison door and vulgar propaganda force-feeds the masses with the new heroes of glorious death. Years of dull grey dismantling of the city’s soul. Plaques cobbled up to honor dubious deeds. Victims of the Soviet lie paid, cheaply, in memoriam. Later, away from the center, in quiet suburbs seeded with new life, old farms plowed under house and garden bring hope and happier names: flowers, trees, fish, birds and butterflies, innocent creatures all. In the late 80s, timidly, Soviet names were discreetly switched for Estonian, culminating in independence, legitimate repossession and names that truly belong to the city.

A Very Brief Introduction to the Estonian Language

Estonian is weird. Beautiful, but weird. I once had a friend who lived in Finland for two years without learning the language. “How pathetic” I thought. I lived in Estonia for three years and (still) don’t speak a word, and I’m a professional translator/interpreter... So, what is it about this bizarre boreal babble? To start, everyone here speaks at least one other language. If not two, or more: Russian, German, Finnish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Swedish and, obviously, English. They have to: it’s a small country squidged in between three major cultures: Russia, Finland and the web.

So you go to school, take lessons, learn a few phrases and know how to ask where the post office is. Then try it out. And no matter what you say, it’s wrong, the ending’s this not that, and the word order is either the other way round or the round the other way. And when they reply, it’s worse. You can’t understand what they’re saying and so, after suffering enough humiliation for one day, you give up, and they reply in perfect English.

Estonian is said to be a “transitional form from an agglutinating to an inflected language”, an opinion most of us would find hard to argue with, but not very helpful either. Without going into too much detail and embarrassing myself, what it essentially boils down to is that it piles dozens of different endings (usually one at a time, thank god) onto the root of the word, and, in case that’s too easy, changes the root spelling. In English, for example, a river’s a river’s a river. OK, you tack on an ‘s’ if there’s lots of them or an apostrophe if it owns something, but that’s about it, although one or two verbs are, admittedly, a bit iffy, with speak, spake, spook, as Hyman Kaplan might have said, but Estonian? It’s on viagra... Take a look at this:

... which raises various points: this is the singular so multiply by two; no difference between ‘the’ and ‘a’; adjectives only follow suit until the translative, after which they throw up their hands in despair and go genitive (which does actually simplify things); various forms get shortened (e.g. illative jõesse to jõkke, a real ink saver that one); the inessive plural probably has two forms and no-one even mentions the instructive (or the prolative), then there’s the exceptions, the maybes, the sort-ofs, and the ones that no-one’s quite sure about. But could be worse: its relative Permian Komi has 30 cases... Rumor has it that Estonia has a 24/7 helpline for natives worried about their declining capabilities (actually it’s only Mon.-Fri. 9-12 am and 1-5 pm, +372 631 3731, or keeleabi.eki.ee)... Anyone remember German or Latin with their pathetic little band of conjugations and declensions (der, die, das; amo, amas, amat)? Estonian has 600 of the buggers. Estonia also claims 17 main dialects (ignoring, for now, the somewhat florid count of 106...), and Saagpaak, compiler of the most comprehensive (as well as criticized) Estonian-English dictionary, counts 419 declensions (along with 40 ‘variants’) and 146 conjugations, plus pronouns. Together, this gives us a potential 10,098 different declensions and conjugations to learn, which, although clearly ridiculous (nobody will ever learn all 17 dialects, or any entire vocabulary), nevertheless indicates a complexity unknown to English speakers. Add to this the fact there’s no recognizable word for ‘he’ or ‘she’, no distinct future tense, two types of infinitive, and numerals that not even a Mayan would believe. Sweet and innocent sixteen, for example, can be expressed under circumstances I’d rather not inquire into as kuueteistkümneis – indicating its station in life as ‘6 in the second set of 10s’ – consisting in a genitive kuue, a partitive teist, and a plural inessive kümneis, three different cases in one word! Although it sounds and is complicated, it is so only at the beginning. Afterwards, it gets worse. But it’s the beginning of a language that’s the killer. If you can’t even get off the ground, you ain’t flying nowhere. For a speaker of English (or any other non Finno-Ugric language), Estonian has no stickies. Remembering the German Milch for milk (Estonian piim) or French crème for cream (koor) is easier than Estonian jäätmekäitlus for recycling, admittedly an unfair comparison, but still revealing the strangeness of Estonian words. Even the simple ones are complicated: take street-names Ao, Hao, Oa and Joa, for example, if genitive Ao and Hao come from nominative Agu and Hagu, why does Oa come from Uba and Joa come from Juga? Another striking feature of Estonian is what I probably unfairly call its primitive earthiness, its seeming simplicity and huge number of short words signaling language at its very beginnings (like English ox, dog, man, house, farm, pig, water, sky and tree, words embedded deepest in our history). Excluding personal names and double words (väike something) 40% of Tallinn’s street names are 4 letters long or less. Perhaps, shackled to the culture of a servant or agricultural population for much of its history, Estonian only developed the refined words of nice society within the past 150 years or so, and many of its expressions reflect its humble origins. To be next to someone is kõrval or juures, literally ‘on the ear’ or ‘in the root’ . When you understand something, you say Käes!, “in the hand!” , if you’re hungry, it’s the rather bald kõht on tühi, or “stomach’s empty”. To tell someone to get lost, you’d say Mine metsa!, “go into the wood!”, unless your bile is really up when you might try Sõida seenele, kahe pere koer!, “Get thee to a mushroom, oh dog of two families!”, a very euphemistic, elegant and, I imagine, slightly dated way of saying “Go to hell, hypocrite!”. Take a look too at the partitive, sitting there smugly in third place. Want a pratfall? Try this: ask “D’ya want fries with that?” In English, we get the basic idea: fries, one faceful. Ask an Estonian and he goes into a spasm of psychic lipidemia. It means all the fries in the universe, now, yesterday and forever. That’s a lot. You must use the partitive, some fries, a few fries, just a tiny soupçon of the cosmic Über-carb. And it’s singular. You want lots of fries? It’s still got to be singular. Like in English. When you say, which I’m sure you do, “How many head of cattle?”, ‘Head’, singular, is a partitive indicator of number, like ‘two dozen’ (look Mom, no plural!). I hope that’s clear. 600 I say... In fact, the figure has been shrinking year by year. An early ÕS dictionary I remember seeing included about 170, their 1999 version has 69, today’s paper and online ‘explanatory dictionary’ of Estonian (Eesti keele seletav sõnaraamat) by the Estonian Language Institute (Eesti Keele Instituut) has reduced them to 49, and ÕS online is down to 38. But they all fail to point out the 30,000 exceptions. The reality, I suspect, lies somewhere between the two. Take Urmas Sutrop’s famous dialect example (cf. Ööbiku). It contains 11 different ways of writing (pronouncing is another question) the word ‘is’ (as used in the equivalent function of ‘has’ in ‘has gone’, clearer in French with its est allé, lit. ‘is gone’): aa, olo, om, on, ond, one, ono, oo, um, uo and uu. Obviously, the example has been carefully chosen to reveal the greatest possible variety, but the fact remains: the variety is there. Yes, but these are dialects and television is gradually wiping them out. Yes, too, many of Saagpakk’s types can be grouped together and probably reduced by more than half, but... English is a relatively simple language, and I’m pretty sure we have more than 38 noun and verb types. This herding the cats and bats of Estonian words into a nice uniform whole where once there never was looks more like a political or educational agenda than a reality in the field. Estonian is what can also be described as an ‘esoteric language’, a language which has essentially never needed to be learned by large numbers of adults (foreigners, in fact, non-Hanseatic merchants of the late 15th C, for example, were not even allowed to learn it) and therefore never needed simplification, unlike ‘exoteric languages’ such as English, Swahili and Mandarin, languages often simplified due to their increasing use by non-natives. Its very essence, its richness, is its complexity. That’s what makes it Estonian. You have to learn it as a child. It is rightfully known as a difficult language to learn, partly because Indo-Europeans are the ‘knowers’ and partly because it’s been left to its own devices for so long, uncontrolled and allowed to grow like ivy, as opposed to the cultivated gardens of, dare I say, ‘civilized languages’. It truly is a people’s language. And is there anything more alive than that? Just look at the damage the Académie Française has done to French... But it is, as I said, a beautiful language too, with a fascinating cloud of variation that some of the more sanitized languages have pruned or weeded out, and an intricacy of inter-dialectal loan adding layers of nuance to its rich hoard of synonyms so vital to oral tradition. Who knows, one day I might even learn it... Readers might notice that my knowledge of Russian is zero… About the Dictionary Unlike in England, if you’ll excuse the parochialism, where a street is a point-to-point linear affair off which houses may be located, the Estonian concept of street seems based on the holistic principle of a spatial unit or cadastral plot served by a thoroughfare. This could explain why so many roads look like they were designed to punish evil Buddhist postmen: ones ending in three-pronged forks, looking like bent bicycle wheels or some of the trickier Chinese characters, divorced by four lanes of highway, separate but perpendicular to one another, or ones that just stop to let a monstrous building block your passage then carry right on into numbers fringing the absurd. Check out the spaghettiform nightmare of Paldiski maantee and Õiesmãe tee or the tentacular tribulations of Kärberi or Ümera. In England, you live in a house/flat abutting onto the street. In Estonia, you live in or on the spatial unit. It is probably why people tend to refer to the name alone, and not mention the type (although this is contradicted by the US example, e.g. “Turn left on Main...”). A typical street name will be of the ‘street of X’ type, so the headword will be in the genitive. Next to this, in parentheses, the nominative form is given. Sometimes a genitive will correspond to two or more different words. If the reason for the name is not clear, the other versions are included too. Sometimes, too, out of pure bloody-mindedness, if I’ve spent hours trying to decipher a meaning and it turns out to be yet another damned farm name, I leave it in to honor the gods of anal-retentiveness. And if the name is already in the nominative, as it is for adjectives or Districts , this is indicated by a ‘0’. Proper names, with a few exceptions (often as transcribed from earlier times), are listed as Lastname A. B., which seems more logical for alphabetical ordering. Names that are struck through no longer exist and are listed purely for historical interest. Names followed by a  symbol are not (necesarily) streets but monuments, included for being important Tallinn landmarks. Other illegitimate entries include the odd road outside Tallinn, as well as the occasional park, cemetery or mall. These are usually indicated in the corresponding entry. Generally, a dash in the name usually indicates first part to be a modifier, in which case only the final word is declined, and the modifier explained in square brackets. Likewise, if the modifier comes in Suur-, Kesk- or Väike- (big, middle, small) flavors, it will only appear if the street itself is of actual interest. Since the dictionary’s 1st edition, Estonia adopted the euro at the rate of €1 = 15.64 EEK/krooni/crowns, so several references to portraits on banknotes are out of date, but kept for reasons of historical interest. The dictionary is in two parts, a brief list of Street-Name Types (street, road, avenue...) followed by the Street Names on their own, since once you’ve gathered that Kiriku tänav means ‘church street’ it will add little to the depths of your knowledge to discover that Kiriku tee means ‘church road’. Many street-names are grouped into sets (birds, butterflies, technical, etc.), and many illustrious Estonians belong to such, but they are often overlapping and include many outliers. For simplicity, I have included a List of Personal Names at the end, with tags (thanks again to Joachim Raua for the suggestion). To avoid repetition, information specific to a specific group is usually given in the first of the alphabetical series. Although I’ve obviously tried to be as accurate as possible, typos and other errors are not impossible, and the dictionary makes no claim to authoritative exactitude. For official dates, references, etc., refer to the Estonian Language Institute’s Place Names Database (KNAB: Eesti Keele Instituudi kohanimeandmebaas), although this too may be undergoing modernization and rebuilding. Some readers may note a tendency towards reading too much history into the names. Guilty as charged. But discovering Estonia’s amazing capabilities in IT, cyber-crimefighting, banking and all-round administrative efficiency is, paradoxically, less novel than the habits, tools and concepts of the past. The Soviet invasion and epoch were horrific. Perhaps a third of the population was ‘disposed of’ in one way or another: deportation, assassination, common or garden brutality... The Soviet lie, its war and propaganda machine, renamed streets en masse to honor the glory of thugs with guns. Many of these former jingoistic street names have been included for information. Some streets have been planned but not built for various reasons. Most have been left in as is, sometimes with a comment, but not struck through which is reserved for streets or street-names that did exist, be it only for a very short while. One or two may even figure here but not in Tallinn... Map-makers (and perhaps map database creators) add their own secret streets to see who’s plagiarizing their work, as so they should. About the Alphabet Estonian has 23, 27 or 32 letters according to degree of retrograde libation: Aa, Bb, Cc, Dd, Ee, Ff, Gg, Hh, Ii, Jj, Kk, Ll, Mm, Nn, Oo, Pp, Qq, Rr, Ss, Šš, Zz, Žž, Tt, Uu, Vv, Ww, Õõ, Ää, Öö, Üü, Xx, Yy. Those in bold are foreign letters used only for foreign words. Those in italic are foreign letters used only for foreign words. Yes, me neither. Unlike German or Spanish, the Estonian ‘umlaut’ (¨) and ‘tilde’ (˜) symbols are not strictly speaking accents. An accent is added to a letter to indicate variations in pronunciation (or etymology), and the underlying letters remain in their ‘standard’ alphabetical order. Northern European languages have decided otherwise. For reasons best left alone, Estonian thought the ideal place for Z was somewhere before T and, following suit in the perfect blond of Nordic alphabets, flung its irritating oohs and aahs over the shoulder like so many caltrops to inflict maximum damage on infants and cavilers alike. So beware: Õ, Ä, Ö & Ü come at the end (if you’ll excuse the sexual innuendo), and this takes some getting used to (or not). V and W are also interchangeable according to epoch. The ÕS dictionary publisher puts V before W where both Wiedemann and Villi Väravad consider them as one and the same. H is yet another kettle of fish: mainstream Estonian seems moderately comfortable with it, XXX but if Marja Kallasmaa’s Hiiumaa Kohanimed, dictionary of Hiiumaa placenames, intersperses it gaily among every single vowel the Estonian mouth can pronounce For simplicity, we follow ÕS. The Estonian alphabet offers other surprises too: although N is by far the commonest consonant based on present dictionary entries, occurring at a rate of some 16%, only 3% of words begin with it, while K which seems so prevalent due to its beginning so many words (about 15%), is actually less common at 12%. But 767 pp K, vs 190 pp for N XXX So now you know. Likewise, E is by far the commonest vowel in English and French, but comes in 3rd place at 19% after I with 23% and A with 29%. Translating Perec’s La Disparition would be a breeze... About Russian Spelling The odd Russian name may look odd, usually due to age. For example, the letter і in Hobujaama’s Станціонная was used in Russian until the October Revolution when the Bolsheviks abolished it in the spelling reform of 1917-1918, to be replaced by и or й. Likewise, Вульфъ in the entry under Aegna: prior to the 1918 reform, words couldn’t end with a consonant, hence the superfluous ъ at the end. Other reformed or abandoned letters include ѣ, replaced by е, and ѳ (not occuring it this book), replaced by ф, and ѵ – since Russian had only one word that used it: мѵро (myrrh) – which died its own quiet atheistic death. About Coordinates All this N65°43'31" E01°23'45" stuff is all very nice but... I have long been looking for a system allowing for really simple and accurate geolocation and now I have one: what3words. It’s brilliant, simple and gives you relatively easy-to-remember names for any 3m² plot of land, sea or (immobile) ice on the planet. Download the app and see. Disclaimer: I have zero financial interest in the company. If you see a bunch of words preceded by ///, it’s what3words. For various reasons, it does not work with the enclosed map of Tallinn town center... About Dates Everyone seems happy with the principle of hours, seconds and minutes, not so years, months and days. To avoid confusion as to everyday dates such as 02/03/04, I use the format of YYYY-MM-DD. For historical dates, for reasons of familiarity, I stick to Nth Month Year. Mostly. Note This is, and probably always will be beta, a work in progress. I have certainly made blunders and other embarrassing mistakes. Comments and corrections are welcome. Please send to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. All constructive criticism taken into account. With thanks. Preface to the 2nd Edition Since finishing the first version of the dictionary, time and google translate have helped rectify some of my more naïve interpretations. And, like any self-respecting city, Tallinn has kept on growing. Over the past 10 years, some 300 streets, about 20%, have been either added, renamed, rezoned, expanded or wiped off the map. The present edition includes all the latest additions to the KNAB database up to 2018-06-06 and Tallinn City notices to 2020-08-19. As Deborah Lipstadt says in her TED talk Behind the lies of Holocaust denial: “we always make mistakes, that’s why we’re glad to have second editions: correct the mistakes”.   If a fool knows he is a fool, at least in this he is wise. Dhammapada   Dedication This book is dedicated to my daughters Alexandra and Elizabeth, with apologies for the hours stolen from your youth. With all my love.