Names
Tammsaare A.H.
(Anton Hansen Tammsaare, 1878-1940)
One of the best-known Estonian novelists, author of the 5-volume masterpiece, Tõde ja Õigus (Truth and Justice, 1926-1933) chronicling the change from life on the land to life in town in 20th-C Estonia, and currently being translated into 3 volumes. Vol. 1, Vargamäe, and Vol. 2, Indrek, are available from your local bookshop. See also his Tammsaare museum in Koidula. His portrait is on the 25-krooni note (for information on Estonian currency, see Krooni). Clearly, there’s never much money in it for writers... on the other hand, embryologists get even less. Karl Ernst von Baer (1792-1876) – first to establish that mammals develop from eggs – is only worth a 2-krooni banknote, but he was one of Darwin’s major critics. Bastard.
Tanuma (Tanum)
Village lane between houses or fences (cf. tänav, in Intro, originally a village lane), or cow path. Mainly a south Estonian word, also tannom (Mulgi, Tartu and Võro dialects), or tammõq in Võro.
Täpiku (Täpik)
Dotted or speckled. But probably short for, in order, väike-täpikpunnpea, the grizzled skipper (as the late [drowned at sea] French sailor Eric Tabarly once wrote: a man overboard should never be on a boat in the first place...), Pyrgus malvae; täpikpõrnikas, the white-spotted rose beetle, a chafer or dung beetle which the French call the drap mortuaire, or winding sheet, Oxythyrea funesta; kase-täpikvaksik, the birch mocha, Cyclophora albipunctata. As to which one… Ooh, look: shiny object! Part of a lepidopteran group. See also Udeselja.
Tarabella (0)
Not the obscure mythological deity it has been assumed to represent, but the name of city councilor and arbitrageur Albert Koba’s dog. Born 1878, Koba was also a busy real-estate developer, creating and naming streets in Lilleküla (see Endla), Pelgulinn (this one, see below) and Sikupilli (Asunduse), many named after the more bipedal members of his family. Despite the rumors, there seem to be only five (maybe six) ‘Kobaesque’ street names attributed to him in all: the present one, renamed Timuti in 1939; his own: Alberti, now Roo; Olga, his blameless better half (divorced 1927), now Pebre (another Olga once existed, now Vainu, but perhaps a bit far from his usual haunts); Oskari, now Ristiku, and Grigori, now Õie, both after after local alderman Oskar Gregory (friend? business partner? in-law? bear or seal?...). Another street, poss. the sixth, Sambla, now Nabra, named on the same date as Olga, can be seen on the 1922 map of Tallinn, but no information on this found so far. Koba’s name seems to have once been spelled Kooba, a word related to (from?) the Võro* (his parents were from Tartu) kooba, an outdoor, semi-underground cellar for storing potatoes. That’s growth.
* For spelling, see Kõivu.
