Hernhuutlik usuliikumine – kas vennastekogudus või vennastekogu(d)?
A rivalry of two estonian terms for unitas fratrum: vennastekogudus or vennastekogu(d)?

Summary/Abstract: The Herrnhut religious movement has played an important role in Estonian church history as well as in our cultural and social history at large. The relevant terminology has points of contact with several different disciplines. In older German the word Gemeine was widely used in parallel with Gemeinde. Thus, nowadays, German special literature contains both the proper name Brüdergemeine and the term Brüdergemeinde. The latter denotes not only the Herrnhut movement but also its local communities. In older German and to a lesser extent also in modern scholars in the field we find the term Brüdergemeine used in the same sense. The Estonian language has a long tradition of using the vernacular term vennastekogudus to refer to both the whole organisation (Moravian Church) and its local congregations. On the example of the German parallelism of concepts as well as terms, expatriate Estonian clergyman Konrad Veem has suggested an additional Estonian term vennastekogu, which cannot, however, be recommended in view of a deliberate and systematic approach to LSP cultivation: An over-differentiation of a term will blur the precision of expression. Vennastekogudus is clearly superior to vennastekogu with reference to both the precision and clarity of the term and the principle of systematics. Later, historian Mati Laur from the University of Tartu has tried replacing the term vennastekogudus with the plural noun vennastekogud. His reasons, which are not very well founded, rely on the word, not the concept. Specifically, Laur overlooks the relation of the words Brüdergemeine and Brüdergemeinde to the concept of Moravian movement as a whole, as well as the fact that Brüdergemeine is also a proper name of the movement. His suggestion to redefine the word vennastekogudus by associating it with the Brethren’s local organisations is unclear, if not misleading. In academic writing, vennastekogudus (in its widespread sense) should certainly be preferred to vennastekogu(d).

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