Paljassaare asum (Paljassaar) 
Bare or bleak island. Northernmost Sub-district of Põhja-Tallinn, Paljassaar is as much peninsula, road, harbor, bird reserve as host to Tallinn’s primary sewage plant with 20 settling tanks and 200,000 m² of sludge-drying beds. It was also, 10,000 years ago, not even there. Neither was Tallinn. Kopli began appearing about 4-5000 years ago, and Paljassaar only came into existence a 100-odd years ago, emerging first from two islands, Suur-Karli and Väike-Karli, or der große Karl and der kleine Karl (big & little ‘Charles’, they say, a point to which we will return). About 2000 years ago, Kopli was half peninsula and half island, and Paljassaar was represented by maybe half an inch of Suur-Karli, at low tide. One thousand years later, Kopli had grown into a fully-formed peninsula and Väike-Karli was a few hundred meters long, which sort of explains the name. Although it doesn’t… The islands were first recorded in 1250 as Karlsö (Karl’s/Charles’ island), although no obvious ‘Karl’, king, karl or otherwise, comes to mind. Fast forward to 1689. Holmberg’s map states Kahl Holmar (Kahl Islets) which could well suggest ‘bare/bald’ from MLG kāl or kael (bald) and while the h seems more MHG (kahl) it cannot be categorically dismissed. All the more so since early Swed. kal, also meaning ‘bald’, was also used to describe leafless trees, or bare land not covered by soil or vegetation, as possibly did Danish too, although etymological dates don’t go back far enough for any degree of certainly. Returning to Karlsö, while the s looks like a genitive and would not apply to an adjective, the name was probably in use long before it was first recorded, and we should not forget that names in multilingual settings are sometimes misconstrued, with errors due to tautologies and word duplication. To take a typical example, ‘Mekong River’ consists in ‘Mae’ (short for ‘river’ in Thai) and ‘khong’ (an Austroasiatic word for ‘river’), leading to ‘River river river’, or another (in)famous and questionable example: Torpenhow Hill in the UK, from OE torr (hill) + Welsh pen (hill) + how from OE hōh (ridge) with the added (but non-existent) designation ‘hill’ thrown in for show to create ‘Hill hill hill hill’ (see Õismäe or Teeääre). What makes more sense? Naming a sandbank or tiny island after a random Karl, or just naming it, um, bleak or barren island? I rest my case. Either way, by 1297 the islands were known by Blocekarl and Rughenkarl, with Bloce probably from MLG blōt and MHG blōz (bare, empty, uncultivated…), and Rughen, less certain admittedly, from MLG rūch, ruv, rouw, etc. (rough) leading to alt-named Blotekarl and Rughenkarl as ‘bare barren island’ and ‘rough barren island’. But it doesn’t sound right. The main issue is the lack of polarity. Paired names tend to have ones that spell the difference out, such as their later modifiers of Large and Small. So maybe not bare and rough, but something else? It was precisely in 1297 that Erik VI Menved, son of Danish King Erik V Klipping (see Paks Margareeta), issued a law limiting the use of Estonian islands, banning particularly the cutting of trees and referring specifically to Blocekarl and Rughekarl (sic) islands. So if it was actually known that trees grew there, it would provide the counterpoint in names and allow the possibility of other crops, and rughen could then be one of the multiple spellings of rye: rogke, rockghe, roche, roggen, rōge, rōgen, rōke, rugge, ruggen, rūge, the difference being useless vs useful. Perhaps the earliest depiction of the islands was the fanciful map of Livonia of unknown authorship in the 16-17th C but misplaced and located off the coast of Lithuania. Waxelberg’s map of 1688 has none, and one year later Woltemate’s map of 1689 shows the islands by name only, without even the hint of an outline, while the above-mentioned Holmberg’s shows 2 islands, each perhaps 200m² with a string of 3 islets heading SW. By the time von Franckenberg copied Woltemate in 1726, they had increased in size with sandbanks stretching nearly all the way to Kopli). In 1865, the General Karte der Stadt Reval presents an almost complete union of the two islands into a single unit, perhaps connected by sandbanks or shoals, of about 2km² about 300 m from the mainland and by the time the Russian military mapped Tallinn in 1900 the peninsula had formed, although extensively sandy on the eastern coast of Paljassaare laht (bay). Lastly, since tectonic activity continues (see Liiva) and the peninsula is surging upwards at the exhausting rate of approx. 2.4 mm per year (but perhaps confounded by the corresponding rise in sea level of about 1.8 mm / year over the past 500 years) we may even see a mountain one day (according to Estonian conditions [see Mäe], in about 83,000 years)...
