Lõhmuse (Lõhmus)

Linden, lime tree. The English name was once lind, the -en being added to create the adjective (see e.g. wood > wooden, etc.), and mutating over time to become a noun again. Alternative / Earlier name for pärn (see Pärnade). Odd word, whereas lõhmus and its Finnish, Ludian and Veps equivalents (lehmus, lehmuz & l’ehmuz) mean linden, in Erzya and Moksha (l’evš & l’evəš), it refers to the more economically relevant part of the tree, its bast. And lõhmus was also called Niinepuu, or bast tree, before gradually giving way to its present name. Likewise, lehm, cow, shares its meaning with most western FU languages, except Erzya and Moksha again (l’išme & l’išmä) where it means horse or saddle-horse. Disparate though they may seem, all three seem to have the same phonetic origins, a word implying softness and malleability, bast rather than wood, cows rather than bulls and, saddle-horses rather than draft-horses. Where the current word for soft, pehme, got its ‘p’ from is another kettle of fish. Linden bast has quite a long pedigree in human usage: the sheath of Ötzi the Iceman’s dagger was made from it some 5000+ years ago. Tallinn had 2 Lõhmuse põik, one in Merivälja (see Lõhmuse põik), the other in Männiku renamed as Võidu põik in 1959. While the Soviet authorities decided to simply transliterate the name into Выйду, пер. (Vyydu per.), where пер. is the abbreviation of переу́лок, or lane, but can also translate as “I’ll go out first.”, the onomast’s way of saying “I’ll see myself out!”