The Estonians say külma käes, vihma, päikese, tuule käes ('in the hand of the cold, rain, sun, wind'), or ta sai koerte käest hammustada (literally 'he was bitten from the hand of dogs' i. e. 'he was bitten by dogs') or ta sai nõgeste käest kõrvetada (literally 'he was stung from the hand of nettles'). Quite obviously, nobody any longer thinks that the wind, rain, dogs or nettles actually have hands. But in ancient times the moving, often personified natural phenomena, to say nothing about animals and plants, were believed to have certain powers. These powers, sometimes exerting control over human beings, were symbolised by a hand. Hence the contemporary Estonian käskima ('to order'; can be translated 'to give orders with one's hand'), käsilane ('handyman').
In all the above Estonian expressions 'hand' occurs in the singular. This is associated with the integral concept of the world of our ancestors. Everything formed a whole, a totality, also the paired parts of body which were used only in the singular. If one wanted to speak about one hand, one had to say pool kätt ('half a hand'). Hence the division of the holistic world into the right and left halves, right and left sides.
Even now, Estonians find their bearings spatially by using parts of the body, mostly without being aware of it themselves. If something is kõrval ('beside', 'next to'), an Estonian speaker does not even notice that what he is actually saying is that something is 'on his ear' (kõrv, kõrva meaning 'ear' and suffix -l corresponding roughly to the English preposition 'on'). The Estonian postposition peal('on') means literally 'on the head' (pea 'head' + -l); juures (juur, juure + -s which corresponds in modern Estonian to the English 'in' but in earlier times stood for 'near' as well) means that something or somebody is close to the speaker's juur ('root'), i.e. the place where he touches the ground.
No comments:
Post a Comment