LUNCH - midday meal. Scholars explain its etymology as follows: 'Recorded since 1580; presumably short for luncheon, but earliest found also as lunshin, lunching, equivalent to lunch +‎ -ing, with the suffix -ing later modified to simulate a French origin. Lunch is possibly a variant of lump (as hunch is for hump, etc.), or represents an alteration ( Read more... )

Earlier this month I was in Riga, Latvia for a week, never having visited it before, and enjoying an unfamiliar but vaguely understandable language (a have a recollection that there used to be a Balto-Slavic branch of languages mentioned in popular literature; now it seems that Baltic and Slavic languages are not grouped anymore ( Read more... )

I work at a museum about Latvian emigration, and we just got a shipment of books in, including this book that I think is in Arabic. It has to be related in some way to Latvia, since it has the Latvian coat of arms on it, but being as I don't read Arabic, I don't know precisely what it is about.

Can anyone help out? Picture behind cut.

( Photo of book cover )

So I was looking through old Latvian genealogical records (c. 1900), which are in that time period typically written in Russian or German, when I came across an entry where the child in question was not born locally in Latvia, but rather in China (I guess his parents were Imperial Russian diplomats or traders or servants to one of the above or ( Read more... )

This is a question for our resident Balticists, and it's both a how-do-you-say (sorry!), and a question about contemporary sociolinguistic and language-policy situations ( Read more... )

The French name for Latvian (ISO 639-1/2A/2B=lv/lav/lav) is apparently "Letton", but I'm unsure whether that's still the accepted name, and what caused the insertion or deletion of the v (assuming the English and French names are cognates or otherwise etymologically related). Anyone has a clue or a pointer?

There's a famous Latvian song (a lullaby):

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At the risk of being laughed at, I really enjoy the Latvian Eurovision entry of a few years ago "My Star" by Brainstorm. So much so, in fact, that I'm trying to sing along with the Latvian version despite the notable handicap of not having the faintest clue what I'm singing. Is there anyone here who can translate the lyrics?

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My Classical Literature class is writing an epic, and we're collecting names for our characters. So far we've been using Baltic names, Lithuanian and Latvian, which I've found mostly at Behind the Name and other random google searches ( Read more... )