Umboja (Umboja)
A brook which stops (or, rather, sinks into the ground) before entering a body of water, the body here being Tallinna bay if ever a brook was there in the first place. Former farm name. As prefix, umb indicates among other things a sense of negation, completeness, or in and of itself. For example: umbkeelne refers to someone incapable of making themself (‘themself’?... Not everyone likes it, but this use of ‘they’ and derivatives as singular pronoun for a person of unspecified sex has been around since the 14th C...) understood in a foreign language; kurt is deaf and umbkurt is tone deaf; or ummik, a container made from a single length of hollowed-out tree-trunk. Two streets of this name, one extant in the northern tip of Õismäe, the other no longer existent a couple of km W. This one was first recorded in German as Umbaja (1913), which almost sounds like ‘end time’ or ‘end of time’, and could be pronounced as its replacement Umbaia (1920), ‘cul-de-sac garden’, and known as late as 1950 as Умбая, whose ‘а’, given Russian’s so-called ‘lazy’ pronunciation of vowels, could sound like an ‘o’, causing or reflecting its final name of Umboja in 1930, shedding an interesting light on possible causes of name shifts.