Trips, Traps, Trull, Sina Oled Kull
Estonian Names for the Tag Game

Summary/Abstract: Tag is a well-known children’s game popular all over Europe. This is a chase game where usually one player chases all the rest. The game has a lot of variants and names. As revealed by the 1992 contest of school lore collection the four most popular Estonian names for the game are kull, läts ~ lets, mats and leka. The article discusses the possible origin of the names. The name kull is probably motivated by the general term for a bird of prey; a similar term has been used for the catcher in older Estonian song games. On the northern coast its transference from a song game to a chase game may have been fostered by the influence of Swedish Finnish dialects, cf. SwF kull interj, kωllω ‘tag game’. As for läts ~ lets, the term is a borrowing from the local version of German: Gm Letzter ‘tag game’, cf. letzt ‘last’, which has been interpreted as the tag or pat (Est ‘pats’) given to a caught runner to mark his new position as pursuer. Another, semantically close term for the game is mats. The term leka is a Russian loanword: Rus лепкa, ляпкa ‘catcher in tag games’, лепки, ляпки ’tag game’.

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