Why Do I Like ... Latvian?

Three years after learning my first latvian words - "towel", "brick" and the numbers from one to ten, as far as I can remember - I'm still spending time with this language. Which is not spoken by anyone in my immediate vicinity, but by a relatively small population worldwide, most of them in a country that I probably won't be able to visit again in the foreseeable future, if ever.

So the question is: Why? What is it about Latvian specifically, that keeps me coming back to it again and again?

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Sure, meeting some cool Latvians helped, in the beginning. I had such a hard time trying to pronounce the word ķieģelis for over a month, failing and failing again, to the amusement of said Latvians around me.

But if it was just that, I would have moved on to other languages by now. So what do I like about Latvian?

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First of all, it is an indo-european language, which means whatever is left of the latin grammar I learned at school can in theory be applied. In fact, there are quite a few words that are recognizably close to Latin. ignis (latin) uguns (latvian) comes to mind.

Second, it is neither a germanic nor a romanic, nor a slavic language, albeit the latter is somewhat arguable - slavic and baltic language share a lot of similarities. I wanted something that is a little different - both romanic and germanic languages are ubiquitous in Europe, and, well, the next big city from where I live is the capital of a slavic country. If I sit in the Viennese underground long enough, I will inevitably hear people speak several different slavic languages. Learning Czech would simply have made too much sense, which is boring to me.

So if I wanted to stay within the indo-european family, and staying with a latin script (because learning a different writing system is not something I enjoy), I still had several options: Albanian, celtic languages, and baltic languages. Celtic languages are cool and I definitely enjoyed them as well, but .. for now, at least, Latvian won this little contest. The rest is Sunk Cost Fallacy. ;-)

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Latvian spelling went to several reforms; if I look at how it was spelled before the 20st century, I can barely it - the spelling back then was based on german to large extent.

The current system has a lot of extra letters, some of which are shared with slavic languages, some of which are unique. Sadly, the letter Ŗ had been removed in one of the reforms, but Ķ, Ņ, Ļ remain and are so characteristic that you can basically immediatly tell that a text is latvian if you see one of them.

The grammar is strictly gendered. You might assume that I hate that, and you're not wrong, but on the other hand, I like how strict it is applied to words. Male nouns have to end on -s, female nouns have to end either on the vowels -e, -a or on -s. In nominative case, anyways.

And since Latvians have only gained autonomy at the end of the last century, there is a strong tendency to overdo it, when it comes to keeping their language clean. (Yes, this has a nationalist vibe, and I don't like nationalisms, ever - but I'm speaking about the aesthetics of the language itself here.)

Foreign names are rigorously translated, and the grammatical gender is attached to it. Thus, New York becomes Ņujorka, Würzburg becomes Vircburga, Nordrhein-Westfalen becomes Ziemeļreina-Vestfālene. Yes, cities are always female, apparently. The same happens to persons: Arnold Schoenberg is Arnolds Šēnbergs, there is Volfgangs Amadejs Mocarts, Angela Merkele, and Džoanna Roulinga.

Grammar sometimes even overrules spelling, leading to words like spožs, in which the final -s is not spoken. I rather like that feature. Also viss is written like that so that you know the declination - there are normally no double consonants.

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"Native" latvian words lack the letters f and h.  The language is rich with my favourite vowel - u - and there are a lot of consonant clusters, but it's not as fiendishly clustered as czech. The letter o is a diphtong, except in loan-words.

Speaking of loan-words, there are quite a few... a lot are from different variations of german, but also from swedish and nordic languages - and since Old Norse is basically one of the ancestors of modern english, there are occasionally weird similarities where you just wouldn't expect them.

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Latvian grammar is hard. The declinations and conjugations overlap in a way that most of the time, I have trouble to even decide if some word is a verb or a noun, or something else. There are no articles, and the only way to make a distinction between a book and the book is in ... adjectives. Which means you can only say the book if you say the red book. I thought this was weird, but I have to admit it kind of makes sense - after all, if you speak about a specific thing, you might as well throw in an adjective to tell which one.

Anyway, I have been rambling a lot. I can't possibly give an impression of a whole language in a blog post. It is very likely that I will find some other language that fascinates me, and for better reasons, maybe ... but for now I mostly stick to Latvian.

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Appendix... a list of some of my favourite latvian words:

trokšņot

ķieģelis

tumšs

raksts

tauriņš

uguns

galdauts

raktuve

neaizmirstule

šausmīgs

koks

bet

viņš

desmit

sarkans

rags

pils

dvielis

Okay, that was extremely random. :-D