Languagle #72: Estonian
Töö kiidab tegijat
"The work praises the one who did it."
What it means
Good work speaks for itself, so there is no need to boast. A well-made thing tells everyone how skilled its maker was. Said in praise of someone's handiwork, or as a nudge to let results do the talking.
How to say it
TUR KEE-dap TEH-gi-yat
Estonian always stresses the first syllable. Töö sounds like a long 'ur', as in 'fur' without the r. B, d and g are soft, closer to p, t and k.
Word by word
- Töö tur: work
- kiidab KEE-dap: praises
- tegijat TEH-gi-yat: the doer (tegema, to do)
Where it was written down
Written down in Matthias Johann Eisen's collection Eesti vanasõnad (Estonian Proverbs), now on Estonian Wikisource.
Similar sayings
- English: The proof of the pudding is in the eating
How to recognise Estonian
Estonian's giveaway is õ, an o with a tilde, which Finnish doesn't have. It also uses ä, ö and ü, and lots of double vowels. Where Finnish writes y, Estonian writes ü, so village is kylä in Finnish and küla in Estonian. Hungarian, a distant cousin, uses ő and sz instead.
About the Estonian language
Estonian is a Finnic language of the Uralic family, spoken by around 1.1 million people, mostly in Estonia. Unlike most languages of Europe it is not Indo-European; its closest major relative is Finnish. It has 14 noun cases, no grammatical gender and no future tense, and its sounds can be short, long or extra long, so a small change in length can change a word. It uses the Latin alphabet with õ, ä, ö and ü.