Learning to Count in Estonian

My Estonian had not improved, let alone my Russian, by the next time I went to Tallinn’s central market. I had learned the word pool, meaning half, so that I could stop buying everything in one kilo increments. When it came to integers, however, my ability to count became a bit shaky. Cliff tried to give me useful mnemonics, like that he could remember kaks because we always bought two latkes at the delicatessen and neli was easy because you just had to remember Nellie the Elephant. Nellie who? I have no idea.

Still, I was determined not to let one bad experience ruin my impression of the market. As usual, I wandered among the stalls looking for anything that I might be able to use, smiling hopefully at the vendors until a middle-aged woman with dark shiny eyes smiled back.

She said hello in Russian and then Estonian and finally in English. I happily said hello back and I picked up a head of garlic and handed it to her. I looked for other things that I might be able to buy, as she seemed very pleasant. I remembered the word for parsley was similar to the German word, Petersilie, so I said that and she said “Da! Petersell!” and she smiled and I smiled and the sun broke out from the clouds and the bluebirds sang. Well, a hooded crow cawed, but the moment was clearly special.

My coin purse was bulging with copper coins which are sometimes difficult to tell apart, so I started counting one, two and five-cent coins to work out how many I had. She grumbled at me to pay attention; I looked up to see her pointing at the head of garlic and then at the sign, which said 2.50€. Great, I thought and went back to my counting. She cleared her throat and took the parsley and put it on a scale and looked at me expectantly: could I please pay attention? It was a rather large bundle, enough to sprinkle chopped parsley on every meal for a month, but I was feeling extravagant and I nodded, giving her a thumbs up. She smiled. I smiled. Then she said some numbers slowly in Estonian.

In the stress of the moment, I found that I had once again forgotten every number I had attempted to learn. I tried to count to ten in my head. I made it to two. Luckily, that was the number she said, kaks followed by something else which was probably 50, because she was pointing at the garlic sign again. Then she pointed at the parsley on the scale and said something else which I couldn’t quite follow and then quite clearly neli, as in Nellie the Elephant. Not helpful, brain, I thought, but sadly that was the extent of the information it was willing to share at that moment.

A woman passing by paused to watch the transaction. Seemingly I was the most interesting thing to happen all day.

The real problem here was that I could only count to two, so I said kaks again uncertainly, which did not help to further the conversation. She said neli again, her smile quite definitely slipping. I counted out three euro coins because I knew neli wasn’t one and it wasn’t two and four seemed extravagant. It wasn’t all that much parsley, after all. So.

“Three?” I held up the coins.

The market woman shrugged and said “Neli” again. The innocent bystander, it turned out, spoke English and took pity on me. “Yes, three. Three Euros.” She looked at the market woman. “Neli. Three.”

I handed over the coins and the smiling market woman smiled and I smiled and the English-speaking woman smiled and I took my parsley and my garlic and walked away.

Except that this neli thing was still bothering me. As I walked home, I tried reciting my numbers again when it hit me. The sign for the garlic said €2.50/kilo and I had not bought a kilo of garlic. I had not even bought half a kilo of garlic. I had bought a single head of not-particularly-plump garlic which couldn’t have weighed much more than a hundred grams.

But I didn’t know how much it weighed. She had only weighed the parsley.

She’d repeatedly pointed at the sign, seeding that number in my head while I was busy trying to count to ten. €2.50 might be reasonable for a freshly harvested head of elephant garlic but not this. It was the same thing that had happened with the horse radish, where the bulk of my brain was focused on language processing and cultural interactions and had become, it seemed, unable to consider even the most basic numeracy.

Elephant garlic. Nellie the Elephant. Now, finally, my brain caught up with the situation and said “That’s four. Neli is the word for the number four.”

It was. Which was even more confusing. Why did the innocent bystander conclude that three was quite enough, thank you, and four was too much?

I unpacked my priceless garlic and parsley at home and considered the new lessons learned:

Üks – 1) Learn your goddamn numbers, Wrigley. If you want to shop at the market, it really isn’t unreasonable to expect you to be able to count to ten

Kaks – 2) Smiling people are not nicer people and certainly they are not fairer people. The other vendors never rounded up, charging me the exact amount by the gram with a scowl. Chitchat and smiles cost extra.

Kolm – 3) Count your blessings that paying three euros doesn’t really hurt and maybe makes a big difference to her (although I will never shop at her stall again)

Neli – 4) Listen to Cliff when he tells you stories about English songs from his childhood.

As a postscript, I became unreasonably interested in Nellie the Elephant after this in a bout of work avoidance and I discovered that until recently, first aid training in the UK advised students to sing the chorus of the song while applying CPR. A study at the University of Coventry in 2009 sadly ended this tradition.