Karjavärava (Karjavärav)

Cattle gate. Various permutations. Today a square, Karjavärava plats, the original cattle gate was some 50-100 m further south and first recorded (1365) as porta pecorum (Lat.) or veporte (MLG, vē and its multiple spellings – veh, vehe, vey, vie, vei – and meanings: cattle, ranging through pretty much any four-legged animal to plain old property), meandering through karja wärraw (1732) and Karripforte (1890), with ‘gate’ in the sense of passage into a city, like London’s Bishopsgate, and not in the former Nordic sense of ‘way’, ‘street’ (cf. Swedish gata, Danish gade) as in Nottingham’s Fisher or Carter gate, etc. Gate has an odd, two-path etymology. The first from PIE *ǵʰéd-, hole, or to defecate, via Greek, χέζω, shit, to Proto-Germanic *gatą to Old English ġeat (both meaning hole, opening and, in MLG, that or anus) and thence to our more modern meanings of passage, and the second, from Proto-Germanic *gatwǭ (which looks clearly related to its cousin above, cf. Lith. gatve < Gothic  𐌲𐌰𐍄𐍅𐍉 (gatwō) through Old Norse gata which seems to be a logical offshoot of an earlier stage of the other meaning which almost by definition implies a path of some sort. Later names include Михайловскія ворота, Michael’s gate, reflecting an earlier name of Suur-Karja. Karjavärava puiestee was an early-20^th-C name for Vabaduse puiestee.