Uldis Balodis

Happy New Year in some of the languages of the Baltic countries, including: Livonian, Mulgi South Estonian, Latgalian, Lithuanian, Võro and Seto South Estonian, Latvian Romany, Krevin Votic, Lutsi South Estonian, Leivu South Estonian, Estonian, Latvian, and Karaim. Image created by Uldis Balodis.

Happy New Year in (some of) the languages of the Baltic countries! 🇪🇪🇱🇻🇸🇱🇱🇹

Merry Christmas in (some of) the languages of the Baltic countries! 🇪🇪🇱🇻🇸🇱🇱🇹

Lutsi and Livonian: Perspectives on Finnic language orthographies in Latvia This article focuses on three endangered and/or dormant Finnic languages – Courland Livonian, Salaca Livonian, and Lutsi South Estonian – spoken in Latvia at the northern end of the Amber Road and the...

Three of Latvia's Finnic languages – Courland Livonian, Salaca Livonian, Lutsi South Estonian – have developed popular written forms. Read about these orthographies, their development, and how they changed as these communities changed in my recently published article.

tinyurl.com/latviaonthea...

Lutsi kiele lementar | Ludzas igauņu valodas ābece An introduction to the Lutsi (Ludza Estonian) language, which includes a grammatical sketch of Lutsi, example sentences, examples of connected speech, a Latvian-Lutsi-Latgalian topical dictionary (~60...

I also use 'q' in the Lutsi South Estonian orthography (tinyurl.com/ludza) But I came to love 'q' in South Estonian when Jüvä Sullõv showed a graphical reasoning for its use in the context of nominative plural.

d – North Estonian is north so it points ↑
q - South Estonian is south so it points ↓

Lutsi kiele lementar | Ludzas igauņu valodas ābece An introduction to the Lutsi (Ludza Estonian) language, which includes a grammatical sketch of Lutsi, example sentences, examples of connected speech, a Latvian-Lutsi-Latgalian topical dictionary (~60...

I really appreciate your kind words, Saulė! Thanks! Also, you may find my Lutsi primer interesting. I published it a few years ago in Latvian, but it gives an intro to Lutsi and shows what their communities were like historically and now.

tinyurl.com/ludza

Skaisti! Arizonā uzaugu un šādi skati man ir tuvi sirdij. Monument Valley ir tālu no visa un tur pats arī tikai vienu reizi nokļuvu -- un tad vairs Arizonā nedzīvoju.

YouTube video by Scott Gairdner Hall Of Inaccurate Presidents

This so makes me think of this video.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9CE...

🤣😂😭

Definitely a peak Baltic mood.

Vārda izcelsme droši vien ir somugru. Mīlenbaha-Endzelīna vārdnīcā "roida" parādās vietās, kurām ir saistība ar lībiešiem (Salaca) un igauņiem (Rūjiena). Vārdnīcā arī ir atbilsme igauņu valodā: roid 'rupjas smiltis, grants, putekļi' (grober Sand, Kies, Staub).

mev.tezaurs.lv/roida

I love this -- this is so interesting! I bought a Tocharian course last year, but haven't used it yet. I did study Sanskrit for a bit, and then I noticed similarities with Latvian in verb and noun inflection. Also some words that in Latvian show up in old lexical layers like folk song lg.

Livonian gives another kind of feel. It has had more direct Latvian influence, but still is quite different in its lexicon. One of the dialects of Latvian -- the Livonic or Livonian-like dialect (lībiskais dialekts) -- mostly formed where Livonian was spoken. It has even more Finnic features.

I've spent like a decade and a half talking about these things with one of my close Estonian colleagues and it never stops being kind of crazy amazing for both of us. Like how can these lgs look so different but be so similar?

Discovering that deep similarity was like finding a long lost sibling. While the similarities to Lithuanian are undeniable, they're different. When I studied Estonian, the similarity to Latvian felt more visceral and deep. They also extend beyond lg and into culture, expressions, ways of being.

And the similarities are really wide-ranging -- also syntactically. When I first started learning Estonian, it felt like someone had taken Latvian, turned it upside down, given it a good shake so all the words would fall out, and then just refilled the gaps with different-looking words. 😄

Right now I'm part of a project at the University of that's looking at how deep these similarities go. This article from a few years back sort of lays the groundwork for that work and also talks about the phonological similarities between the lgs of Latvia & Estonia.

ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/je...

There's been a lot of mutual influence between Latvian and its Finnic neighbors. Latvian has the 1st-syllable stress of a Finnic lg and Livonian (and other Finnic lgs spoken in Latvia) has broken tone (stød) like Latvian. Latvian also has something a bit like vowel harmony. Latgalian even more.

Pret izstāšanos no Stambulas konvencijas: manabalss.lv/i/3739
un par to, lai Manabalss.lv pastāvētu

This kind of happened to me once. I was in Italy with my husband and was wearing a shirt with a big Livonian flag on it. The woman working at the front desk of our hostel was actually from Sierra Leone and she was so excited because she thought I was wearing a shirt with her country's flag on it. 🙂

Not a perfect method, but just useful shorthand when posting content in several languages at once.

The reason I use the Sierra Leone flag emoji when writing about Livonian. 🇸🇱🇸🇱🇸🇱

Runeberga vārdā nosauktā kūciņa ir viens no somu kulinārijas augstākajiem sasniegumiem. Tik garda! Iemācījos tās cept, bet kaut kā nekad nesanāk tik garšīgi, kā pērkot no pārdevēja, kas janvārī tās tirgo no galdiņa ārpus K Market pārtikas veikala Helsinku galvenās stacijas pagraba stāvā.

An important one for me -- since I've been doing this for a while. 😄

I don't remember a specific expression off the top of my head right now, but I remember some words having many idioms connected to them, especially body parts. Like sidām 'heart' had so many. At least Latvian and Livonian often had similar expressions, so it helped figuring them out.

During the last 3 years I translated the dictionary into English. These idioms were fun...but also sometimes a bit tough to get just right in English. 😄

And the examples are all from actual documentation of spoken Livonian -- much from speakers who were still born on the coast. So, it's a really rich resource.

Follow @livokel.bsky.social and learn a little bit of Livonian every day!

Yeah, they have some pretty neat stuff! And they'll also add books to their collection that borrowers are interested in. So, there are some unique things there to find.

It was amazing what I could get! And it was so great that the library was really invested in getting me obscure stuff. I've been (slowly) writing articles on Native American lgs for the Latvian National Encyclopedia over the last years and the Chicago library got me so many cool books for those.

My years in Chicago were so great for this. When I was a grad student in California, I had what I like to describe as "god-like interlibrary loan powers". And the only time I've ever had nearly the same degree of ability to get nearly any book I wanted was when I had a Chicago Public Library card.