taarna mõistatus
The mystery of taarn

Summary/Abstract: In the glossary of Heinrich Göseken’s (1641–1681) Estonian handbook Manuductio ad Linguam Oesthonicam. Anführung zur Öhstnischen Sprache (1660) the word taarn is explained as follows: Abgrund / tarn / süggaw paick ‘abyss’ (p. 98) and Grundlos / Taarn (p. 507). The relevant information presented in the Estnisch-deutsches Wörterbuch by F. J. Wiedemann, which was first published in 1869, comes from Göseken. Estonian dialect collectors have never recorded the word from actual usage. In the 1920s, the word taarn was proposed as a geographic term denoting ‘a narrow abyss with vertical walls’. In some cases the word has also been used in Estonian poetry. No plausible etymological association has ever been established between taarn and any other Finnic word stem. Julius Mägiste has hesitantly related the word with the plant name tarn : tarna, Fin taarna, tarna ‘Carex, Catabrosa, Scirpus etc.’, assuming the development ‘high-growing aquatic plant’  ‘place covered with such plants’  ‘steep-sloped lowland, abyss’. The assumption does not sound credible, though. Apart from descriptive words, most of the Estonian words with an intra-stem rn-sequence without a morpheme boundary are loanwords. The article weighs the possibility that taarn may have been borrowed from the Proto-Slavic source word *starnā, whose descendants include, e.g., Bulg странà ‘land, locality, direction; side, cheek’, стърнà ‘nearly vertical slope, steep river bank’, стърнъ̀ ‘escarpment’, Rus dial. сторона́ ‘hillside’, сторона́, сторо́нка ‘ashpit’. Analogous loanwords are the Estonian sarn : sarn ‘cheekbone’ and varn : varna ‘peg in the wall, hook etc.’, which must have also been borrowed from a very archaic pre-pleophonic variant of Slavic.

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