Adventures in Estonian: Part 3

I've mentioned in an earlier posting that Estonian lacks 6 letters of the English alphabet (c, q, w, x, y, z), but adds several more accented vowels, which are considered to be separate letters, such as ä, and ü. (Incidentally, our Estonian dictionary has only two entries for 'W': Wales, and WC.)


We were intrigued when the bus passed a supermarket on the outskirts of Tallinn called Ülemiste, whose symbol is just a single Ü. We took the above picture of the sign.

Another previous post on a linguistic theme mentioned that the Estonian word, "jäääär", meaning "edge of ice", holds the world record for most consecutive repetitions of the same vowel in a single word. We were excited, therefore, when posters advertizing a performance of a band called Jäääär started appearing in Tartu last week. Unfortunately I was away in Sweden on the day of the concert, so we still don't know what they look like or sound like. In fact the rest of the poster (see below) proved to be a challenge to decipher.


The key phrase is "Naistepäeva järelkontsert." From my scanty knowledge of Estonian, I already knew that "päeva" means "day", and that "kontsert" means "concert." But what day were they talking about? I knew it wasn't one of the days of the week, so I tried looking up "naiste" in our handy pocket Estonian-English dictionary. They didn't have that exact word, but the closest match was "naistepesu", which apparently means "lingerie." A lingerie-day concert? The mind boggles. It was not until several days later that the mystery was solved. The prefix "nais-" turns out to mean "woman". Estonia celebrates 'Women's Day' on March 9th, apparently a relic of the Soviet era, and this was what the concert was in honor of. Meanwhile, "naistepesu" in literal translation means "women's laundry", i.e. lingerie. (I might have been able to guess this if I had thought about it, because one of the first Estonian words we learned was "pesupulber", which means "laundry detergent".)

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