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Pleekmägi (0)
Lit. Bleach hill. Two names for two locations: Pleekmäe paik (area, place...) and Pleekmägi, which suspiciously look like they refer to the same plot, geo-referenced some 50 m apart. Bleachfields or bleaching-greens were outdoor areas used by textile workers to lay out fabric to bleach in the glorious Estonian sun, a definite improvement on the legacy Roman method of fulling, or treading it in stale urine and letting the ammonia work its magic. Despite the two names, and given the distance between them, the area probably spread SE from Pleekmäe paik just east of Kaasani church at ///knocking.trainer.fancied to Pleekmägi at ///await.blossom.glosses, a good 250 m NW of Liivamäe. Given the lengths involved and time required (1-2 months in the UK, so probably more Estonia), the area was probably quite large and may well have spread further SE, all the more so since the Tallinna Linna Plaan of 1922 seems to show the area south of then Aafrika (see Võistluse) as being a hill, which may have stretched the area even further S or E of Liivamäe. Locations first recorded in the 16th C as Pleekmäe, Bleichberg and up der bleke (Pleekmägi, TT) and Pleekmääl (1723), pleeksmäggi and der Bleichs-Berg (1732), then Blekmaye, and Bleekmay (Pleekmäe paik, KNAB), but precise dating and sequencing is unclear.
Loo (Loog)
Mowed hay, cut grass on a meadow. Tricky, because often used to mean windrow (non-US), itself often considered synonymous with swathe (US), but they are not the same. It could also mean tedded hay, or hay left loosely in the field to dry, periodically turned over. In farming, a swathe is (was) the strip cut by the scythe, while a windrow is the row of cut grass, etc., left on the field to dry out (usually 80% to 20% moisture) in the wind, hence the name. The meaning of the word in Estonian seems to have shifted over time, and the fuzziness around the word is reflected in its neighbors: loog has pretty-much identical cognates in Finnish, Veps, Votic and so on, where Russian, лyг (lug) means ‘meadow’, bearing in mind that a meadow was generally a plot of land intended to be cut for hay. Likewise, its counterpart vaal (swathe, see Vaalu) is валок (valok) in Russian. Their ancestry certainly shares common ground. While EES gives loog as coming from proto-Germanic *slōǥa‑z, *slōǥijōn‑, it may be related to Russian лyг (lug, meadow) from Old Slavonic *lǫgъ, but then again maybe not. For information, genitive loo has 2 other nominatives: lood, synonymous with Alvari, and lugu, story.
