(In response to the post “Put a language in my inbox and I’ll tell you what I like about it!”)
To tell the truth, I didn’t know anything about Latvian before receiving this ask, except that it was probably written with a mostly roman alphabet. Now I’ve read the Wikipedia page, at least, so I’ll write what I learned from there!
It mentioned extended/broken/falling syllable intonations, and I have no ideas what that means but I’m interested to find out. I like that the spelling is pretty consistent in the you see it, you pronounce it like that! I also thought it was interesting how the language is promoted within the country, and that loanwords are adopted to be spelled as is they weren’t a loanword, which reminded me slightly of how Japanese adopts words using katakana.
One thing I learned though not about the language specifically is that there’s a region called Livonia. There’s also a town in Michigan called Livonia that I hear a lot about at work, so I’m guessing now I know where they got that name from!
Okay, so for my very favorite thing that I learned, it’s very silly and probably not very nice of me to say, but I learned that another name for Latvian is “Lettish” and that just cracks me up :’D 🥬
