Temperatuurisõnad ja - skaalad
Temperature terms and scales

Summary/Abstract: There are about two hundred temperature terms in Estonian and its dialects. However, only a dozen of them are used actively. The main question is how Estonians organize the semantic field of temperature. To answer this question, at first, some Estonian temperature scales constructed by a professional linguist are introduced. Second, the author provides an overview of the theory of constructing linguistic scales. Third, the results of three empirical tests using field methods with 80 subjects are reported. The findings of the list task (cognitive salience index) show that there are four basic temperature terms külm ‘cold’, soe ‘warm’, kuum, ‘hot’, and jahe ‘cool, chilly’ in Estonian. The first two belong to the primary group, and the latter two belong to the secondary group of the basic temperature terms. Two non-basic terms palav ‘burning, hot’ and leige ‘lukewarm, tepid’ share some properties with the basic terms and form the transitional group. In the antonym naming task mainly basic and transitional temperature terms were used. The most important opposition in Estonian is soe : külm ‘warm : cold’ (not ‘hot : cold’). Finally, a subjective temperature scale is constructed. Most subjects used basic terms, half of them used also transitional terms, and up to 25 per cent of the informants used other non-basic terms for their individual scales. The surface structure of the temperature scale of Estonian resembles the German one.

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