MARIKO FASTER (Võru) OBSCURE PLACE NAME ELEMENTS ura AND ora IN SOUTH ESTONIAN Abstract. The article discusses South Estonian place name elements ura and ora ’stream, little river’ which appear in the Estonian, Livonian and Latvian language and place names. The appearance and semantics of the word variants and the etymologies in the Finnic languages is analysed. Both South Estonian ura and ora are the variants of the word *urka, because the spread of the u-initial vari- ants is wider and there is no proof of the form *orka. Although the researchers have suggested earlier that *orka and *orko are connected, doubts still remain because of the different stem vowels. However, we may associate *urka with Finnish urkama ’cavity, pit, river bed’ and with an old Uralic word *ura ’road, path; watercourse, river bed’. Keywords. place names, landscape related appellatives, South Estonian, lexi- cology, etymology. In this article two semantically and etymologically obscured apellatives that have spread in southern and western parts of Estonia (i.e. in Võrumaa and Pärnumaa) and in Latvia (i.e. in Ludza (Est. Lutsi), in the area between Alūksne and Gaujiena (Est. Leivu), in Courland and also in the Latvian historical language areas) are introduced. Linguistically, this area includes the part of the western dialects of North Estonian in southeastern Pärnumaa, South Estonian (Võru), South Estonian linguistic enclaves (Leivu and Lutsi), and Livonian. These appellatives are *urka (Võru and Leivu urg (Gen. ura, Part., Ill. `urga)), Võru ura (Gen. ura, Part., Ill. `urga), Livonian ūrga (Part., Ill. urgõ), Salaca Livonian ūrg), and *orka (Estonian and Võru ora (Gen. ora, Part., Ill. `orga) and the meaning is ’stream or little river’, cf. Palmeos 1959 : 103; Pall 1997 : 30; Kettunen 1938: ūrga. The apellative urga occurs also in Latvian as a generic term 1 (Laumane 1996 : 260—261; Kagaine 2004 : 221). It is thought to be a Finnic loanword (Karulis 2001: urga) that has settled well in the Latvian language (Laimute Balode’s verbal quote). The diminutive form urdziņa is also used and it appears in the place names as a generic term but less often. The verb urdzēt ’bubble, gurgle, sizzle, burble’ has been derived from urga (Laimute Balode’s e-mail 27.03.2009). 299 1 Generic term (also determinative part of a name) (Fin. perusosa, Est. liigisõna) is the part of a place name, which refers to the class of a place, e.g. stream, hill, ditch, lake, marsh, etc. LINGUISTICA URALICA XLV 2009 4 doi:10.3176/lu.2009.4.05