{"id":3475,"date":"2010-08-26T09:28:58","date_gmt":"2010-08-26T08:28:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=3475"},"modified":"2010-08-26T09:28:58","modified_gmt":"2010-08-26T08:28:58","slug":"word-of-the-day-paldies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=3475","title":{"rendered":"Word of the day – paldies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I learnt how to say thank you in Latvian – paldies<\/a> \/pal’dies\/ – from the Latvian lads who delivered and installed my new garden shed. Although they didn’t speak much English, we managed to communicate. When I asked where they were from, they didn’t understand the question, then one of them said, “oh, what country?” and they told me Latvia.<\/p>\n

In situations like this when I find myself speaking to people whose language I don’t know and who don’t speak much English, I tend to feel frustrated. Not by their limited English, but by the fact that I don’t know any of their language. It also helps to try saying things in various ways until you find one they understand, as the “Where are you from?” example demonstrates.<\/p>\n

Looking at the Latvian phrases<\/a> on Omniglot, it strikes me that hardly any words look familiar, apart from the lab<\/em> part of labdien<\/em> (good afternoon) and labvakar<\/em> (good evening), which resembles the Lithuanian word labas<\/em>, which is used for hello, and in such phrases as Laba diena<\/em> (good afternoon) and labas vakaras<\/em> (good evening), both of which are similar to the Latvian versions. The words dien<\/em> (day) and vakar<\/em> (evening) also resemble their equivalents in Slavic languages such as Czech – den<\/em> and ve\u010der<\/em>,and Russian – \u0434\u0435\u043d\u044c<\/em> (den’) and \u0432\u0435\u0447\u0435\u0440<\/em> (ve\u010der).<\/p>\n

Are any of you learning Latvian or planning to learn it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I learnt how to say thank you in Latvian – paldies \/pal’dies\/ – from the Latvian lads who delivered and installed my new garden shed. Although they didn’t speak much English, we managed to communicate. When I asked where they were from, they didn’t understand the question, then one of them said, “oh, what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,13,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-language-learning","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3475\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}