Thursday, March 22, 2007
Its 'EE'
The Estonian for 'Estonian' is 'Eesti'. What about the web country code for Estonia? -- its 'ee'. And that is 'Eesti' backwards ...! This is all by way of preamble to an insight I had recently about why the Estonian language is so difficult. It turns out that a lot of Estonian words contain English words written backwards. For example, consider the sign on the shop just around the corner from our apartment;
Here you can see, in succession, the English words "dank", "desk", and "dirt", each reversed and placed at the end to hide what's going on ...! There are plenty of other examples I could point to in support of this theory, but the clincher for us is the jar (which, incidentally, contains mustard) pictured at the top of this post.
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1 comment:
Wow, funnily enough living here all these years, I never noticed that we had backwards words.
S'pretty funny now that I look at it.
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