Johannes Aavik found that Estonian, which had for centuries been the language of peasants, needed innovation, as its sphere of usage widened rapidly with the emergence of a modern nation. There was a need for standardization of grammar and orthography as well as new technical terminology. Aavik added that the language also needed to be versatile and euphonic. In 1912 he started writing articles to literary journals, making propositions how to develop Estonian language. He suggested intensive borrowing from Finnish; many of his suggestions were quickly widely accepted and have become part of standard Estonian vocabulary. From 1914 he started to artificially create well sounding new word stems to replace awkward compound words. Thus, he proposed relv instead of sõjariist, roim instead of kuritöö and veenma instead of uskuma panema. He generally tried to avoid the soundst and s and preferred shorter words to longer ones. He also favoured o in successive syllables to u, as is common in the South Estonian dialects. Aavik considered many of his neologisms as created out of nothing. However, according to Ghil'ad Zuckermann, many of Aavik's neologisms were influenced by foreign lexical items, for example words from Russian, German, French, Finnish, English and Swedish. For example, roim might have been influenced by the English word crime; relv might have been influenced by the English word revolver; and taunima might have been influenced by the Finnish word tuomita. Aavik tried to modernize even the grammar. He advocated the usage of i-plural instead of t-plural and the i-superlative instead of the ordinary superlative, as well as –nd instead of –nud in active past participle. He proposed inflectional affixes to the ma-infinitive, but only some of them entered into popular usage. He also tried to introduce a future form of verbs and a female personal pronoun, but these got little positive response. Aavik published numerous essays and translations to propagate his ideas; he had vocal supporters as well as opponents. In 1919, he published a dictionary of 2000 novelty words. His principles were summarized in "Keeleuuenduse äärmised võimalused". Language innovation slowly died away after the 1927 act that made it compulsory for schools to teach standard Estonian as put down in Estonian Orthographic Dictionary and Estonian Grammar. However, some words proposed by Aavik and fallen into oblivion have been picked up and re-introduced by more recent literati. An essay on linguistic innovation in Estonian by Paul Saagpakk can be found in his Estonian-English Dictionary.
