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Lätte (Läte)
Source, spring, fountain. Southern Estonian dialect for well. Named, like its parallel peer Allika, after a spring in the courtyard of Tatari 24. Both streets claim its ancestor as Quellenstrasse, spring street, but where the other was thus known from 1890 to 1942, this street was only thus recorded once in 1942: in Ein Führer für deutsche Soldaten durch Reval mit Stadtplan, Strassenverzeichnis, 10 Bildern und kleinem deutsch-estnischen Wörterbuch (A guide through Tallinn for German soldiers, with map, street index, 10 photos and short German-Estonian dictionary) by Dr. Friedrich Klau, a book known for its haphazard rendering of local names, which may well have mistaken it for Allika. Renamed (1948?-1991) as Lätte A. during the Soviet occupation.
Leiva (Leib)
Bread. Named, 2014, for the HQ of Leibur at No.1: Estonian bakery first documented in 1762 when its founder Julius Valentin Jaeksch bought a property on the corner of Vaimu and Lai. See also Pagari. From Proto-Germanic *khlaibuz or *χlaiƀa-z, to Mod. Ger. Laib, Eng. loaf, Gothic hlaifs, as well as Russian хлеб and Polish chleb or even, perhaps, Lat. lībum (flat [unleavened?] bread) and lībāre (perform a sacrifice), hence Eng. libation, indicating the huge socio-cultural importance of bread, but beware, tempting though it is to think Pol. sklep (shop) is a metonym of bread (as in saying ‘motor’ for ‘car’, but the other way round), this comes from sklepienie, vault or cellar, then figuratively stall or trade. As such, this highlights the origins of the boden in Raekoja tänav and Dunkri, for more details, see Kinga.
Kentmanni (Wilhelm Gottfried Kentmann, ca.1800-ca.1874)
Pedagogue and headmaster of a charity school for poor children (Luthers Armenschule, funded by Christian Luther) from 1830-1874 (attended, among others, by Bornhöhe E. and Vilde E.). The street was also named for short periods (1939-1940 & 1941-1944) after Konstantin Päts (trivia drop: päts, or loaf of (corn)bread, is a possible cognate of Georgian ფეჩი, peči or ‘cast-iron stove’ and the street is 350 m from Ahju), 1st President of the Republic of Estonia (died 1956 at a Soviet psychiatric hospital while undergoing a rest for the insanity of believing he actually was President of the Republic of Estonia), interspersed by Kreuksi J. in the Soviet occupation (1940-1941 & 1944-1989) and, seemingly but uncertainly, a brief, few-day interlude in 1942 after Hermann Göring. Street namesake often confused Kentmann senior and junior, the latter, Woldemar Friedrich, was author of Koolilaste Geograahwia raamat (Geography book for schoolchildren, 1875) and Geograahwia kaardid koolilaste geograahwia-raamatu lisaks (Maps for a geography textbook, 1884).
