Nõmme (Nõmm)

Heath, moor, moorland. An odd one: although the nõminative is Nõmm, as far as streets or Districts are concerned, it’s never used. Elsewhere (e.g. Harjuorg, etc.) the occasional District is in the nominative for reasons of geographical descriptiveness, and if the Estonians can gather their wits enough to call a Kesklinn Kesklinn, they should be able to do so here. On the other hand, elsewhere they do the opposite, calling the District Tõnismäe (genitive) and the street Tõnismägi (nominative, with neither tänav nor similar appendage). Perhaps we are entering one of those nebulous areas of linguistics where the object’s appellation has a greater or lesser semantic footprint according to what it designates. Whereas a town center or valley has a relatively identifiable quality about it, a heath is woollier, its perimeter, profile and even ‘heathiness’ morphs according to weather or season. Does its name refer to the land or the vegetation (compare the English cognates ‘heath’ and ‘heather’ and German Heide [heath (Feldmann et al.’s Baltisches historisches Ortslexikon translates nõmme as either Heide or hügeliger Sandboden, hilly/moundy sandy soil)] and Heidekraut [heather, or heath herb], all ultimately derived from proto-Indo-European *kait, open, unplowed country)? Perhaps its lack of definiteness implies more frequent usage in association with other words, in Estonia, the corollary of which is a necessary genitive. In Finnish, with which it seems to share its commonest ancestor, it’s nummi:nummen, where the nominative ends in a vowel and the accusative vice versa. The (An?) Estonian genitive used to end in -n, but this apparently disappeared sometime between the early 13^th C and the 16^th C, and seems to exist today in very few words, if not one: Maantee, but see Sompa. One of Tallinn’s 8 Districts (Linnaosad). It includes the following Asumid (Sub-districts): Hiiu, Kivimäe, Laagri, Liiva, Männiku, Nõmme, Pääsküla, Rahumäe, Raudalu and Vana-Mustamäe. See Pirita.