Description

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This book is the first comprehensive treatment of the Russian loanwords in literary Estonian, a language belonging to the Finnic branch of the Uralic language family and spoken by approximately 1 million people. Estonian has been in contact with East Slavic and Russian since approximately AD 700, and has been under strong Russian infl uence for long periods between 1721 and 1991. For historical reasons, however, the infl uence of Russian on Estonian has either been exaggerated or understated, and this volume, which contains a brief history of Estonian-Russian historical and linguistic contact, an overview of previous studies on the subject, a detailed etymological treatment of some 1000 Russian loanwords excerpted from all existing lexicographic sources of Estonian, and a phonological, morphological, semantic and statistic loanword analysis, also attempts to place the linguistic contacts between these two peoples in a correct perspective.