Naava wrote:What is the difference between keskust(e)lema and vestlema?
Prantsis wrote:There's at least a difference of frequency. Keskustelu is a lot rarer than vestlus, and keskust(e)lema seems to never be used.
These are some of those words that were coined by
Johannes Aavik during the language reform in the early 1900s, based on the model of the Finnish word
keskustella. But the verbs don't seem to have caught on. It seems that even other language reformers such as
Johannes Veski were specifically opposed to the creation of these words given that the root (
kesk, keskus) doesn't normally have this meaning in Estonian.
Nowadays most forms of the two verbs (
keskustlema and
keskustelema) get only a dozen or so google hits, many of them from archives from the first half of the 20th century.
Keskustelu seems to be used quite a bit more than the verbs (although it's harder to count google hits for it, because many of them are in Finnish).
Paul Saagpakk's dictionary lists all of them (
keskustelu,
keskustlema, and
keskustelema), plus
keskustlus (as a synonym for
keskustelu). But Saagpakk lists almost all of the language-reform words whether they are in actual use or not. (Saagpakk left Estonia in the 1940's and from what I understand, at the time he completed the dictionary in the early 80's, he had no way of knowing which words were still in use in Estonia and which were not.) How's this for rare: although Saagpakk lists it,
keskustlus gets only seven Google hits, one of which is
another dictionary from 1945. All of the others are from the first half of the 1940's as well. It does not appear at all in any of the modern dictionaries (EKSS, ŌS, etc).