PILGUHEIT EESTIKEELSE SÕJANDUSSÕNAVARA KUJUNEMISELE AASTATEL 1885–1913

AN OVERVIEW OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF ESTONIAN MILITARY VOCABULARY IN 1885–1913

Abstract

The article explores a period that can be regarded as a preliminary stage in the purposeful development of Estonian military vocabulary: the years 1885–1913. This period began with a translation made by Jakob Hurt and ended with the outbreak of the First World War; by then, the Estonian military vocabulary was already developing under very different circumstances. Over the period from 1885 to 1913, three books were published in Estonian for the Estonian soldiers serving in the Russian army, two of them translations and the third one an original print: A Handbook for Estonian soldiers („Abinõu noorte Eesti soldatite õpetamise juures“, 1885) translated by Jakob Hurt, A Dictionary for Estonian Soldiers („Soldati sõnaraamat”, 1890) by Ado Grenzstein, and A Handbook for Estonian Non-Commissioned Officers („Käsiraamat alamwäeteenijate Eestlaste tarwis“, 1896) translated by Johann Elend. While Estonians know Hurt and Grenzstein as important cultural and social figures, Elend’s name is rather unknown today and there is little information about him. We observed the circumstances under which the Estonian military vocabulary began to take shape, examined the linguistic views of said authors, and offered examples on the use of language in the cited works. The period in question has been little studied so far. This is partially due to the fact that Estonians took part in the military activities of the Russian Empire during 1885–1913 quite moderately, compared to the subsequent period. Therefore, research material is scarce. It can also be assumed that in the context of topics such as Russification and its consequences (e.g. the agrarian issues), language-related questions may have remained only a niche. The authors of this paper compensated the deficit of materials to study with an interdisciplinary approach. We based our work on the thesis that combining historical science with a philological methodology allows us to get a more extensive picture of the overall period, the language development, and the factors that affected it. The topic was examined from three viewpoints: non-linguistic, linguistic, and metalinguistic.