Mida teha suremusega?
What to do with the Estonian term suremus ‘mortality’?

Summary/Abstract: One of the central terms in demography, epidemiology, health statistics and some other disciplines is mortality (Est. ‘suremus’). In Estonian this term is used in three senses: to denote the number of deaths, the number of deaths in relation to population size, and a population process. A possible way to overcome such terminological ambiguity is to stick to the ideas developed in demography and general theory of statistics, and introduced in Estonia more systematically by Uno Mereste in the 1960’s and 1970’s.Mortality is a population process measured by absolute and relative numbers. Various relative numbers, including general mortality rate, age-specific rate and age-standardized rate, are the basic measures to quantify multiple aspects of mortality in a population. The choice of a specific relative number is determined by the purpose for which the measurements are made and by the level of abstraction.As shown by terminologists, in the Estonian language a word suremus belongs to a group of -mus derivatives referring to the „numerically measurable result of an event”. Considering that the process of mortality is a mass event formed by the sequence of death events, i.e., the mass event is the result of individual events that have occurred in a population, there are no lexicological obstacles to interpreting suremus as a process. Bearing in mind that mortality rate can be regarded as a measure both of mortality level and of speed of occurrence of deaths, its changes may be characterized with verbs tõusma ‘to rise’, langema ‘to fall’, suurenema ‘to increase’, vähenema ‘to decrease’. It is assumed that a clear distinction between the terms mortality, absolute number of deaths and mortality rate is extremely important to advance some specialized languages as well as general language.

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