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I'm impressed! I'm a native Latvian speaker, and am not used to the idea of foreigners learning the language, let alone someone who doesn't live in Latvia full-
by ACS_Solver 6y ago
I'm impressed! I'm a native Latvian speaker, and am not used to the idea of foreigners learning the language, let alone someone who doesn't live in Latvia full-time. As speakers of a small, globally unimportant language that's not even mutually intelligible with its only surviving relative, we tend to be very impressed with foreigners that can put even basic sentences together.
- yorwba 6y ago> not even mutually intelligible with its only surviving relative Wikipedia lists four surviving descendants of the Eastern Baltic branch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_languages#Eastern_Baltic_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_languages#Eastern_Balti... : Latvian, Latgalian, Lithuanian and Samogitian. Though apparently Latgalian and Samogitian are frequently considered dialects of Latvian and Lithuanian respectively. So in a way it's tautological that related languages don't have high mutual intelligibility since otherwise they'd likely be considered dialects of the same language.
- ACS_Solver 6y agoIt's not necessarily tautological because of how fluid the language/dialect distinction itself is, and often related to politics. The treatment of Latgalian as a Latvian dialect is certainly at least somewhat political, there's a case to be made for it being a different language. But for a counter-example, take the Scandinavian languages. They're always treated as different languages, even though they're highly mutually intelligible. Then there are the Czech and Slovak languages, extremely similar but not considered dialects.
- markvdb 6y agoThank you for the kind words. It's incredible how many doors even basic language skills opened...