Greetings from Estonia

[hint]

Hello everyone.

Been following this board on rather regular bases for about a year now, to keep an eye on and see how our boy Margus is doing, and finally figured i should register and let you know that Ponies actually have some fans in Europe as well.

Cant wait for season opener and seems like I stumbled here on the best possible time last year, when things finally started to move up again and everyone were really excited, has been great to visit such an active board with dedicated fans!

I myself knew nothing of this game about a year ago, but I'm starting to like it more and more. Managed to see a few games in the end of last season+bowl and hopefully, if I can stay up late enough(or wake up early enough) and am able to find a working internet stream, I could follow most of this season as well.

GO PONIES!!!

[cutter]

hint,
welcome! great to have Estonia cheering on Margus and the Mustangs. it looks like he'll have a bigger role than last year, since he's acquired the skills for the game. I hope you lose some (but, not too much) sleep as you follow the games.

[Pony Soup]

Where in Estonia?

[Water Pony]

Where in Estonia?

Welcome Hint to Ponyfans and our world of college football, one of the best spectator sports on the planet.

And, Soup, our new fan is from the eastern Baltic. A former Soviet Republic, who now enjoys European Life (and apparently, American College Football.) Go Estonia, beat Russia!

[Mestengo]

Welcome!

[couch 'em]

Estonia was settled near the end of the last glacial era, beginning from around 8500 BC. Before the German invasions in the 13th century proto-Estonians of the Ancient Estonia worshipped the spirits of nature.[citation needed] Since the Northern Crusades Estonia became a battleground for centuries where Denmark, Germany, Russia, Sweden and Poland fought their many wars over controlling the important geographical position of the country as a gateway between East and West.[1]

Being conquered by Danes and Germans in 1227, Estonia was ruled initially by Denmark in the north, by the Livonian Order, an autonomous part of the Monastic state of the Teutonic Knights and Baltic German ecclesiastical states of the Holy Roman Empire. From 1418–1562 the whole of Estonia was part of the Livonian Confederation. After the Livonian War, Estonia became part of the Swedish Empire from the 16th century to 1710/1721, when it was ceded to the Russian Empire as the result of the Great Northern War. Throughout this period the Baltic German nobility enjoyed autonomy, where the language of administration and education was German.

The Estophile Enlightenment Period 1750–1840 led to the Estonian national awakening in the middle of the 19th century. In 1918 the Estonian Declaration of Independence was issued. The Estonian War of Independence ensued on two fronts between the newly-proclaimed state and Bolshevist Russia to the east and the forces of the United Baltic Duchy (the Baltische Landeswehr) to the south, resulting in the Tartu Peace Treaty recognising Estonian independence in perpetuity. Prior to the Second World War, Estonia was occupied and according to the USA,[2] the EU,[3] and the European Court of Human Rights [4] illegally annexed by the Soviet Union as a result of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. During the war Estonia was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1941, then reoccupied by the Soviet Union in 1944. Estonia regained independence in 1991 after the collapse of the USSR and joined the European Union in 2004.

[smupony94]

He asked where in Estonia, not where is Estonia

[Water Pony]

He asked where in Estonia, not where is Estonia

You are correct and my apologies to Soup. Perhaps the answer, as asked in Jeparody is "What is Tallinn?", the capital.

[couch 'em]

Estonian (eesti keel; pronounced [ˈeːsti ˈkeːl] ) is the official language of Estonia, spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and tens of thousands in various émigré communities. It is a Uralic language and is closely related to Finnish.

One distinctive feature that has caused a great amount of interest in linguists is what is traditionally seen as three degrees of phoneme length: short, long, and "overlong", such that /toto/, /toˑto/ and /toːto/ are distinct. In actuality, the distinction is not purely in the phoneme length, and the underlying phonological mechanism is still disputed.

Estonian belongs to the Baltic Finnic branch of the Uralic languages. Estonian is thus closely related to Finnish, spoken on the other side of the Gulf of Finland, and is one of the few languages of Europe that is not Indo-European. Despite some overlaps in the vocabulary due to borrowings, in terms of its origin, Estonian is not proven to be related to its nearest neighbours, Swedish, Latvian and Russian, which are all Indo-European languages.

Estonian is distantly related to Hungarian (there is no mutual intelligibility between the two). It has been influenced by Swedish, German (initially Middle Low German, later also standard German), Russian, and Latvian, though it is not related to them genetically.

Like Finnish and Hungarian, Estonian is an agglutinative language, but unlike them, it has lost the vowel harmony of Proto-Uralic, although in older texts the vowel harmony is still to be recognized. Furthermore, the apocope of word-final sounds is extensive and has caused a shift from a purely agglutinative to a fusional language. The basic word order is Subject Verb Object.

[No Quarter]

I am curious as well about your location in Estonia. More than that, would you share with us at what age you began to learn English in your sachool system? How many English speakers are you in contact with and particularly Americans, that you have such a nice idiomatic conversational style in your writing? Ar4 you acquainted with our football player and his family in any way?

Please tell us there are two more like him coming along that might be Mustangs some day!

[BUS]

Welcome to SMU and TExas. You should pack up and come visit next summer and stay around for a few LIVE football games.
Peace be with you.

[Webmaster]

Just FYI, I checked hint's IP address. It does, in fact, originate from Estonia.

So hint, I guess you officially win our PonyFans Long Distance Fan Award. Congratulations and welcome aboard!!

[ponyte]

Looks like Estonia has more than Margus to offer.

Miss Estonia 2007: Viktoria Azovskaja

[Pony Soup]

He asked where in Estonia, not where is Estonia

You are correct and my apologies to Soup. Perhaps the answer, as asked in Jeparody is "What is Tallinn?", the capital.

No problem - I took a bus from Russia to Estonia so I was curious. Most surprising thing I found in Tallinn was that thhe locals who enjoy a little kareoke prefer to sing the cranberries' song "Zombie" repeatedly, one after the next, over and over - all night.

Must say though that I enjoyed my time there and we did apologize repeatedly after breaking up the Zombie competition with out poor interpretations of Jerry Jeff Walker songs.

[ponyte]

The water and beaches in Estonia are absolutely breath taking.