'Skype,' 'Stand-Up' Included in New Edition of Estonian Dictionary
The latest edition of the dictionary of the Estonian language is out and among the 2,000 new entries are the verb skaipima ("to Skype") and püstijalakomöödia ("stand-up comedy").
Many of the new entries in the volume, last updated seven years ago, are prefixes or new meanings of existing entries, but there are a number of new words as well.
Some of them are slang terms derived from English that have now passed muster with the Estonian Language Foundation, which publishes the dictionary. Skoorima means "to score," covering many of the same senses as the English slang expression, and the same is true for tuunima.
But the Estonian language can't be accused of just borrowing words and re-spelling them oddly. Recent years have even seen competitions announced by the president to come up with ways of using ancient Finno-Ugric stems - or at least words that sound like them - to express modern concepts like integration or infrastructure.
Like the aforementioned püstijalakomöödia, a number of the new entries fall into this category. Tukastustõbi is the new Estonian for "narcolepsy" - not to be confused with the already existing entry for the African sleeping sickness disease (unitõbi). "Podcast" is taskuhääling.
A new entry that is in more common use is the word for on-demand streaming of audio - järelkuulama, literally "to post-listen."