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“Hot-Blooded” Estonians. on Estonians' Folk Category Of “HOT-BLOODED” ESTONIANS. ON ESTONIANS’ FOLK CATEGORY OF EMOTIONS Ene Vainik Latvians have a teasing phrase for Estonians – ‘hot-blooded’, which ironically refers to the emotional dullness and inadequate – either apparent or actual – calmness of Estonians. This article1 does not aim to compare the ethnopsychology of Esto- nians and Latvians, nor to measure the psychological characteris- tics inherent to the nation of Estonians (Tulviste 1998). It does strive to take a look at the folk psychology of Estonians – what is the attitude of Estonians to emotions and how the so-called average Estonian deals with emotions. By the end of this article it should also become clear why Latvians refer to us as they do. The term folk psychology is used here to denote the understanding of psychic phenomena on the part of common people. Not the un- derstanding of a single person, but that of the so-called average person. Admittedly, folk psychology is connected with the culture in which it has developed and the language people have taken into use for analysing such phenomena. Similarly to other unsophisticated treatments, the terms of folk psychology are not clearly definable or in direct correspondence with the words which are used at ran- dom and in parallel. Thus, Estonian folk psychology does not make a substantial difference between the meanings of the words emotsioon ‘emotion’ and tunne ‘feeling’. These two words are used parallel, like numerous other pairs consisting of a foreign and a native word, where the use of the foreign word is more prestigious. For example, the Estonian equivalent of ‘positive emotion’ sounds more elegant than the simple ‘good feeling’. In modern Estonian folk psychology the word emotsionaalne ‘emo- tional’ tends to be used as an evaluative adjective. For instance, the sentence Ta on nii emotsionaalne, temaga ei saa rääkida ‘She is so emotional, there’s no point in talking to her’ is likely to mean that the person in question is too emotional (which is bad) or Ärgem http://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol21/emotions.pdfwww.folklore.ee/folklore/vol21 26 laskugem emotsioonidesse! ‘Let’s not descend to emotions!’ (emo- tions are something to descend to and it would be better not to do it, otherwise võivad [---] emotsioonid üle pea kokku lüüa ‘emotions could close in above your head’). If there was an “emotional conver- sation” between the boss and the employee, it rather meant calling names than expressing warm feelings. It seems that if the positive or negative mark of an emotion has not been pointed out explicitly, the default connotation and evaluation is negative. So it must be admitted that in Estonian folk psychology the cat- egory of emotion is vague rather than delimited, in addition it seems to carry an evaluative mark. While neither the nation, culture nor language is invariable in time, there are changes in the concepts and beliefs of folk psychology, too. To get a better overview of what the categories of emotion of Estonians is like at the beginning of the 21st century, I decided to conduct an empirical study of emotion vocabulary (Vainik 2001). STARTING POINTS The ideological basis for this approach originates from the linguis- tic relativity hypothesis (Whorf 1956): one’s native language with its concepts influences and shapes the way how the world is seen and interpreted. This hypothesis leads to at least two substantial conclusions – one at the individual and the other at the collective level. For an individual it is important that linguistic competence significantly determines how he/she manages socially and emotion- ally. On the level of the society the conclusion is that through lan- guage research information about the culture and the people who carry it can be obtained. A major role is played by concepts which have formed in the culture and crystallised in the language, and by means of which information is conveyed. In the collective consciousness the language-supported concepts in a specific field form a body of universal knowledge about this field, which is common to the majority of speakers of this language. For example the vocabulary that in a language is used to denote emo- tions and differentiate the nuances and intensity or duration levels plays a significant role in how emotions are popularly treated by the speakers of this language.2 27 www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol21 Each person’s relation to vocabulary and to concepts that it medi- ates is different. Some words are easily remembered and elicited – they are in active use. Others are in passive use – one knows that such words and concepts exist, but it is more difficult to use them. Our daily life and how we succeed is more dependent on the words and concepts that are in active use, always at hand. The choice of emotion words that are in active use and easily available for a cer- tain group of people, e.g. speakers of the Estonian language, shows which concepts are important for and frequently used by the spe- cific group at a specific time. Consequently, by studying the avail- able emotion vocabulary of Estonians we can get an idea which emotions are important for Estonians, which is their level of cogni- zance and how organised is a common person’s view of the so-called internal world, i.e. what does an average Estonian’s map of emo- tion landscape look like. ABOUT THE RESEARCH It is said that the concepts of a field of study, actually all concepts, and the words that represent them are not chaotically located in a person’s head– on the contrary, they are located in quite a system- atic way which facilitates classification (Viberg 1994: 170–171). If this statement is true, it should be easy for people – for instance in the tasks of free listing – to “leaf through their systematic cata- logues” and present words by categories. On the basis of this pre- sumption an empirical study was conducted using the so-called field method:3 in the course of oral interviews one hundred people of different sex, age and educational background were asked to make attempts of free listing emotions.4 The linguistic material collected as a result of the interviews was sequenced according to frequency and the position of naming; the form and meaning of recurring phrases was analysed (Vainik 2001). The number of phrases collected in the course of these interviews was nearly five thousand and they were not directly emotion terms only. As the people were not to feel restricted during the experi- ments – they were encouraged to mention anything they could re- member in connection with emotions in random order (similarly to the free associations method used in psychoanalysis) – a large part of the total corpus of this vocabulary is made up of people’s indi- www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol21 28 vidual associations with emotions (for example ‘cosmos’, ‘cow’, ‘vio- let’ etc). The recurring part of the vocabulary (3+n times), however, revealed the cognitive domains on which the category of emotions borders in the consciousness of Estonians, how the area of emo- tions is structured, which concepts belong to the basic level and which are the prototypical emotions of Estonians. But it also showed which emotions are not willingly acknowledged by Estonians or even prevented from entering the collective consciousness. POSITION OF FOLK CATEGORY OF EMOTION IN ESTONIANS’ COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS The semantic space of a language, which could also be called the collective consciousness of the users of this language, is said to consist of cognitive domains that concentrate knowledge, experi- ences and meanings by subjects (Langacker 1987). Such cognitive domain or at least an independent natural category is also made up of emotion-related cognitive knowledge and experiences, which have crystallised in the language as emotion lexis. On the basis of the results of this empirical study it is possible to outline which are the principal and prototypical representatives of the Estonians’ field of emotions and which are peripheral, staying in the zone where the field of emotions borders on and intersects other cognitive domains. Naturally, it is not presumed that the fields are separated from each other by inflexible borders. According to the semantic grouping of the words and concepts that emerged repeatedly (3+n times) it can be concluded that in the col- lective consciousness of Estonians the emotion category is located in the intersection of three cognitive domains – the subjective physi- cal space, the social space and the intrapsychic space. Figure 1 schematises these three main cognitive domains and the letter E marks the position of emotions in their intersection. Each natural category has its centre and periphery. The most fre- quently and first mentioned words in the tasks of free listing are the basic terms of this category (Sutrop 2000), i.e. the basic terms of emotions in the Estonian language. These words are in corre- spondence with the basic-level objects of the Estonian folk emotion 29 www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol21 Diagram 1. Cognitive salience indices in the task of free listing of emotion terms. The total salience of the first four members of the folk category of emotion makes up 44 per cent of the total salience of all the words that emerged in the task of free listing, which means that the objects on the basic level of this category cover 44 per cent of the collective emotional consciousness of Estonians. The remaining 56 per cent of the collective emotional consciousness was divided among 54 words. Such division expressly shows that in Estonians’ common knowledge of emotions there is a compact core of the basic level, but off the basic level the folk category of emotion is diffusive.
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