By the phrase "alliterative haze" I mean the obscuring, changing, and extending of the conventional denotation of words when they are placed in alliterating combinations. Below, I shall attempt to show how the special way of expression characteristic to parallel constructions in regilaulud (runo songs) disperses the imprecise haze of meaning that alliteration can give rise to. Furthermore, I shall observe how the meaning of words is transferred by means of alliteration and parallelism working in co-effect, and in the final part of the article I shall provide the numerical characteristics of their occurrence in the regilaulud of various regions. 1 1.We can take as a common principle for the study of poetics that different devices should be observed in co-influence. The main devices used in the regilaul (the typical metre, alliteration, parallelism and language usage regularly deviating from the colloquial) have mostly, thus far, been studied separately. A system of poetics that might be applied to regilaul is in some ways quite determined, and it should be observed as a result of a combination of its components. We might assume that one of the reasons for the long-term steadiness of Kalevala-metre folksong is a result of the combined functioning of the means of poetical system.In regilaulud and laments the denotations words and groups of words have in ordinary language often either do not apply, or change in the contexts of alliterative and parallel constructions (e.g. adjectives can lose their specific meanings -see: Leino 1974: 121, Saarlo 1996; parallel verses can be contradictory -see: Kaplinski 1997: 207 ff., Metslang 1981: 52). Above peculiarities are not, however, abnormal, but follow rather traditional and regular poetical conventions, and, apparently, have not caused misunderstanding among the users of regilaulud. So the issues we face here are how the structure of meaning of regilaulud differs from

In this paper, a method of hierarchical clustering and a selection of fuzzy classification algorithms are applied successively to the data set that contains measured characteristics of folk verses collected from 104 historical parishes of Estonia. The aim of the study is to detect the groups of parishes that are similar in terms of folk verse characteristics and to give us insight into the reasoning that the separation into these groups is based upon. The process of classification separates the initial groups into further subsets represented by fuzzy rules, which can be analyzed thanks to the interpretability of such rules. To emphasize the latter, most important features in individual rules are brought out by rule compression. The results of the analysis are backed by what is known from linguistic sciences.

No abstract

The article focuses on the relationship of language and metre in case of oral poetry, more exactly, to what extent and through which processes the changes in language have induced the changes in metre in case of Estonian runosong, a branch of common Finnic poetic-musical tradition. The Estonian language has gone through a series of notable phonological changes during approximately last 500 to 700 years that have systematically shortened the word forms; the extent of these changes varies across dialects. At the same time the language of runosongs has partly resisted these changes, and partly adopted; the archaic and new word forms are in concurrent use, and vary geographically. The metre of Estonian runosongs appears to be a transitional form from quantitative runosong metre (Kalevala metre) to the accentual runosong metre (both of them syllabic metres). The current study shows that the transition depends directly on the average syllabic length of the words in runosongs (the longer the words, the more quantitative the metre, and vice versa), which in turn is induced by the shortening of words in dialectal language. The closer look at the points of tensions between the metre and language, i.e. the geographical distribution of the morphological forms that are critical for building the verses in quantitative metre and have been systematically retained in runosongs (but shortened in language) shows that in two metrically innovative areas runosongs have given up preserving the archaic word forms, while in big central area between a linguistically and metrically conservative centre in the North-East of Estonia and two innovation centres in Western and Southeastern Estonia the archaic and newer word forms are used concurrently. The slight difference between the metre of western and southeastern runosongs follows the prosodic patterns of dialectal language. The side topic of the article discusses the questions of the evolution of runosong in the light of newer theories of emergence of Finnic languages (in the first millennium BC) and poetic system of runosongs, but apparently the metrical variation of runosong is entirely explicable by the impact of much later language changes (approximately 500 to 700 years ago) and seems not to be able to answer the questions related to the emergence of the poetic tradition.

Abstract:The article gives an overview of the uses and features of parallelism across different genres of Estonian poetic folklore, focusing on the genres in which grammatical parallelism forms an important means for structuring texts. Relying on her own previous research on runosongs and short forms of folklore (Sarv 1999(Sarv , 2000(Sarv , 2003, the results of the syntactic analysis of runosong texts in Helle Metslang's dissertation (1978), Juhan Peegel's definition of poetical synonyms in runosongs (Peegel 2004), and proceeding from the concept of poetical system (Sarv 2000), the author proposes a definition of the type of parallelism canonical in the Finnic runosong tradition. Two other types of parallelism, used in different genres of Estonian poetic folklore, are discerned on a similar basis, taking into account the relations between the elements of the poetical system. The proposed typology proceeds from the assumption that the regular use (or absence) of euphonic means is related to the type of parallelism used. In this case -as the study proves -the types of parallelism are distinguished by the semantic relations between the parallel elements (words or phrases) in grammatically parallel units, rather than by semantic relations between the whole parallel units or by formal features like range or length. There appears to be a clear tendency: the use of euphony (alliteration and word-structure repetitions) in parallelism types increases in relation to the diminishing of the semantic load of the parallel elements.