The Soviet regime could hardly favour the
studying of early literary Estonian as most of the relevant texts
were religious. Nevertheless the period yielded two essential
works: Eesti kirjakeele ajaloost ("On the History
of Literary Estonian") I, II by Arnold Kask (1970) and Eesti
vanema kirjakeele lood ("Tales of Early Literary Estonian")
by Uku Masing (published posthumously in 1999). The article compares
the attitudes of the two authors towards their object of study,
and the meaning of their studies for possible future research.
Uku Masing had a great erudition and a high-flown fantasy. His
texts make an exciting reading, but his train of thought is risky
to follow for lack of proof. Arnold Kask, on the contrary, was
an extremely accurate and reliable author, whose book provides
solid ground for research to follow. The article outlines some
perspectives for future studies of literary Estonian. One of
the most promising prospects would probably be an analysis of
the dynamics of the morphosyntactic categories in the early literary
language to be done from the language typological point of view.
Although essentially the book by Arnold Kask belongs to the first
period of language studies, focusing on the mapping and description
of the material, it could well serve as a starting point for
future analyses.
