Please check the list of popular Latvian baby names to understand which we have made for you and choose the best. Most of these Latvian names are used in the Latvian countries of Northern Europe. In Latvian culture, Latvian surnames and initial names as baby names play an important role. Here is a list of some of the most beautiful and popular names in Latvian for boys. Following is a list of some of the most beautiful names in Latvian for girls with their meanings.
Are you interested in learning more about the Latvian language other than names in Latvian? If your answer is yes, feel free to search and read up on some of the best practices regarding pronouns in Latvia, the best ways to learn essential words and phrases , and either how to say love words and phrases in Latvian.
For more thorough learning of the Latvian language, try to learn with the Ling app. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. June 21, Amnah Khan. Masculine Names In Latvian. Latvian Female Names.
Start learning Latvian for free now. Share this post facebook. Say goodbye to school books Fun mini-games and quizzes help you mastering a new language quickly. Practice hundreds of dialogues on the go. You I believe are commenting from documents translated into Latvian language. Prior to Latvia's independence documents were recorded either in Russian or German.
For they were supposed to be in Russian but for whatever reason there were exceptions -- for the church where your grandmother's birth was recorded it was in German. In modern Latvian most Latvian male names end in "s".
In pre-independence times the Latvian language was Germanized and the Latvian names did not end in s. In post independence times there is difference between first names and last names. Male first names end in s, rarely in o. The standard explanation is that this is necessary so that people can decline nouns correctly.
Hence my own Latvian name, Vils, can also change in many ways. If I am addressed directly — e. All of this might make it sound that this kind of inflexibility derives from a lack of familiarity with other cultures, other customs, other ways of arranging sounds.
Indeed, for most of the last millennium, Latvian has been a language with very low social status. The Baltic region was the last part of Europe to be Christianised, its remoteness, wildness and forbidding climate meaning it was spared the attention given to lands further south.
That changed at the end of the 12th century, when the Teutonic Knights, who were essentially German mercenaries pushing Christianity, launched the Northern Crusade, with the intention of converting the Baltic heathens. They built fortresses along the coast, including what is now the city of Riga, and over a period of almost a hundred years of warfare with the native people, the entirety of the area of modern Latvia and Estonia was subdued and its people converted, often with great brutality.
With the conquest of the territory of Latvia, a strict ethnic hierarchy was established: the Germans, although never making up more than a small percentage of the population, owned almost all the land and were also disproportionately represented among merchants and city-dwellers; Latvians remained overwhelmingly rural, uneducated and poor. Although it was not unheard of for talented Latvians to better the station, it was generally expected that these intelligent few would adopt German customs and the German language.
This societal structure remained remarkably unchanged even after the Livonian Order the administrative branch of the Teutonic Knights lost power in the region in the 16th century, and control passed to in succession , Poland, Sweden and Russia. All ruled mostly by proxy through the Baltic German aristocracy, who retained their privileges in return for loyalty to the foreign monarch.
The Baltic Germans retained their monopoly over most aspects of life in the region — to be educated meant to speak German. In the decades that followed, a Latvian intelligentsia began to develop — writers, musicians, architects and politicians proud of their origins and disinclined to try to pass as German or Russian. During the period many Germans, in both Latvia and Estonia, also developed a fascination with the indigenous culture and language of the region.
This growing national consciousness would culminate in with the declaration of an independent Latvian state, but there were many battles to fight before this. One of the fiercest, perhaps surprisingly, was over the language — and specifically, how to create a standardised set of orthographical conventions.
There was also massive inconsistency over how to represent the fact that in speech Latvians invariably added case endings to all names, foreign or not. Similarly, in Latvian texts, Russian names were transliterated to the Latin alphabet, but Latvian endings were rarely added. The extent of the confusion can be shown by the fact that within a forty-year period, no fewer than eight spellings of the English prime minister Lord Salisbury were recorded in Latvian.
Something needed to change. They had set out to find a form for Latvian that worked on its own terms, and also wanted to limit German influence, and what they came up with was a strikingly elegant set of letters. All curlicues, notches and geometrical lines, it seems a language designed for exquisite calligraphy.
Latvian was to be a model of efficiency — just about as close as any language could come to one sound, one letter. The first banknotes issued by independent Latvia. How to represent it in his native language was thus a long-standing problem — and at least five other variant spellings have been recorded. His party carried the day: from now on Latvian would represent all foreign names systematically, as they sounded to Latvian ears, following Latvian phonetic and grammar rules.
So maximum efficiency and consistency in orthography, maximum convenience and simplicity for users, right?
0コメント