Edela (Edel)

South-west, south-western, south-westerly. Also süüdvest among sailors. Estonian is one of those rare languages which still has actual names for ordinal, or intercardinal, directions (NE, SE, SW & NW). Note that Estonian edel = Finnish lounas, and Est. lõuna = Fi. etelä (see table below), and that both Est. & Fi. ‘north’ are cognate with a sense of beneathness (Est. merepõhi, for example, means sea floor) as is also Old Norse norðr, poss. derived from PIE *ner-, left or below, since that’s where it is when facing the rising sun, and cognate with Sanskrit nārakaḥ, नारक, Eng. beneath and nether, and Gk νέρτερος (nerteros), under, deeper, the nether world, the dead. Similarly, west, vestr, etc., comes from a PIE root suggesting behindness, where the sun would be if you face east(ish), while Lithuanian vakar, yesterday, vakaras, evening, and vakarai, west, are all related to Latin vesper and the Greek Hesperides, the nymphs of evening and sunsets, strongly suggesting our IE ancestors’ key direction was east. For more on the oddities of Nordic compass points, see Loode. The interrelation of compass points between various Finnic languages is, shall we say, complicated... See below, for example Liv. idā does not map onto its Est. cognate ida, but kirre, South has 3 conflicting etymons, and Liv. lēņtš ≠ Est. lääs, but edel... And while Ida, East, is equivalent to ON austr – cognate with Lith. aušra, dawn, daybreak, Greek αυγή, sunlight, dawn, and even Vedic Sanskrit uṣā́s, dawn – and related to shining, gold, aurora and rosy-fingered dawn, it later gives us austral, or southern, while the Sami for east is nuorti, probably a loan-word, but suggesting a rotational effect perhaps related to latitude. I think that’s quite enough...

The street used to be in the docks, now in Kivimäe, and pointing – Tallinn toponymy oblige – south-east... See Vesikaare. Interestingly, switches such as these are not restricted to Finnic languages. The Hebrew for winter, חורף (xōref), is cognate with the Arabic for autumn, خريف (xarīf), while the Arabic for winter, شتاء (šitāʾ), is cognate with the Hebrew for autumn, סתיו (stav), which also used to mean winter, but changed at one point.