Šeit ir vieta diskutēt baltiskās valodas.

Here's room for discussing Baltic languages.

Are any of you acqainted with one Baltic language or more?

My ex-boyfriend spoke Latvian, but I never learned more than a few words. One of these was "vecmamas šķiņķis", which was the name he came up with for a preparation of ham he learned from his mother-in-law. Something tells me šķiņķis must figure in a number of Latvian tongue-twisters. It sure makes a good shibboleth!

Haha.. Yes.. Grandmother's ham..
What is a shibboleth?

Ah yes of course.. Where are you from? And how did you meet with a Latvian?

My father's from Baltimore and my mother's family is from St Louis. I live in Chicago now.


He wasn't Latvian, he just spoke the language. I've known several Lithuanians, but I've never had any Latvian friends.

Okay.. Do you speak all those languages you're mentioning in your signature..?

With widely varying degrees of competency, yes. They're basically the languages in which I will attempt a response if you write to me in them.

But this is taking us afield from the subject of the thread. My Latvian-speaking friend had the pet theory that the Latvians were descended from Finnic peoples who adopted a Baltic language, which explains why the pronunciation and morphology is so much simpler when compared to Lithuanian (which, he joked, sounded like "Old High Latvian" to Latvians).

.. I've never examined Finnish any closer so I couldn't tell.. But I see though many small similarities between Latvian and German.. It is also said by some that the Latvian language is invented by German monks some hundreds of years ago.. There is a certain amount of truth in that theory, however there are many similarities between Baltic languages and sanskrit, or even the assumed proto-indoeuropean language..

Not Finnish, Finnic. Liv and Estonian are both Finnic languages, and presumably very close to whatever other ones were once spoken in the present territory of Latvian.


Eight hundred years of contact will do that to a language.


No there isn't; it's pure malarkey. What authority insists otherwise?


For the good reason that the Proto-Indo-European language was reconstructed on the basis of both Sanskrit and the Baltic languages.