Räägu (Rääk)

Aka rukkirääk, corn crake or corncrake, Crex crex. Breeds in Estonia. Where Roman or English corncrakes go crex crex, Estonian ones have to borrow the vulgar anatine prääks. Grossly unfair: all they had to do is change one letter and get crääks. Part of the Lilleküla bird-name group of streets. See also Siidisaba.

Raamatukogu (Raamatukogu)

Library, public library, lit. book collection. Soviet occupation renaming (1950-1989) of Kiriku. While raamat is a loan from old Pskov and Novgorod Russian гра́мота (gramota, book or writing-paper), borrowed from Greek γράμματα (grammata, letters, evolving into modern ‘grammar’), modern Russian for book is кни́га (kniga, said to trace back through Danube-Bulgarian *küiniv and ancient Turkic *küinig to a Chinese word for ‘scroll’). Interestingly, while this part (loosely) of the world’s history uses birch bark as writing substrate (see Tohu), Germanic languages’ ‘book’ comes from Proto-Germanic *bōk(ō)-, from *bokiz (beech) and Italic languages’ ‘liber’‑type words from Latin librum, the inner bark of trees.

• Deadname