Paperback: ISBN: 3895862282 Pages: 74 Price: Europe EURO 32
Abstract:
Latvian is the official language of the Republic of Latvia, where about 1.4
million people speak it as a native language, and an increasing number of
mainly Russian speaking persons use it as a second language. This sketch
concentrates on morphology and syntax, with a short introduction to
Latvian phonology. The sample text, as well as most of the examples that
illustrate grammatical points, are taken from autobiographical narratives
collected by the Latvian Archive for Oral History.
Compared to Lithuanian, the only other living Baltic language, Latvian has
further diverged from its Indo-European heritage in that it has abandoned
certain inflectional forms and categories and developed new ones. The fact
that, for centuries, speakers of Latvian have been in close contact with
speakers of Baltofinnic, Germanic and Slavic languages has certainly been
an important factor for innovations in all parts of the grammar. However,
Latvian still resembles the well known old Indo-European languages in
certain respects more closely than Standard Average European languages do.
Latvian is a fusional language with some traits of agglutination. The
morphology is strikingly regular, especially with nominals. Nominal
inflectional categories are gender, number, case, and definiteness, which
is marked on adjectives. The five morphological cases have clear syntactic
and/or semantic functions. Particularly noteworthy in the verbal
inflectional paradigm are evidentiality and the debitive mood, a Latvian
innovation. Characteristic features of the syntax are non-verbal predicates
and converb constructions.
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