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Latvian vs. Lithuanian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Ubik Senior Member United States ubykh.wordpress.com/ Joined 5317 days ago 147 posts - 176 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Latin, Arabic (Egyptian), German, Spanish | Message 1 of 5 15 June 2010 at 12:26am | IP Logged | ||
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Now Im nowhere near picking up either of these until I finish German and Arabic (which will be at least another year), but its a question thats burning in my mind as to when I *am* ready which one of these is the better option. Im obsessed with them as a unit. I really really want to learn one of the two, but probably not both.
So my questions are thus: 1. Which one has more resources available? Quality of resources? 2. What are some of the key elements of the languages? (compare and contrast) 3. Any (besides youtubing/googling) really quality examples of the speech (preferably spoken slowly)? 4. Any other miscellaneous neato factors? 5. One of them I was reading has tones...anything like the tones in Asian languages or something different? 6. Anyone here that knows or studies both? I prefer more agglutinative languages with freer word order and more strict grammar. Thanks! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 2 of 5 15 June 2010 at 6:52am | IP Logged | ||
1) I would say that they're roughly comparable when comes to the quality of resources for foreigners. Each language has an offering in "Teach Yourself" and "Colloquial..." Each one also has at least one rather old course made by emigrés in the USA (e.g. "Easy Way to Latvian", "Introduction to Modern Lithuanian", "Easy Way to Lithuanian"). Pimsleur offers a short course in Lithuanian but not in Latvian. I've seen a few Latvian courses that originate from Latvia (e.g. "Paliga". "Do it in Latvian!") but no idea what their quality is. 2) Lithuanian is considered to be especially conservative for an Indo-European language. Latvian and Lithuanian still use cases and make distinctions in grammatical gender, but Lithuanian declension reminds me more of Latin's since it still divides nouns into several classes and declines them accordingly. Latvian declension reminds me more of a Slavonic language's declension since there seems to have been more "levelling". 3) There's a recording of some Latvian greetings at this site: www.codefusion.com/latvian/greetings/greetings.html Indiana University's audio archive hosts the accompanying audio of the old course "Introduction to Modern Lithuanian" in .mp3. languagelab.bh.indiana.edu/lithuanian_archive.html 4) I can't think of any beyond the obvious one that Lithuanian has retained some features that other living Indo-European languages (even the rather closely-related Latvian) ceased using at least a few centuries ago. Its conservatism has given rise to a certain myth or misinterpretation of historical linguistic analysis whereby Lithuanian is the oldest language in Europe (linguistic "age" is quite meaningless since languages have been changing from one mutually unintelligible form to another), a descendant of Latin (spurious in the face of comparative linguistic analysis) or its second-most closely related language is Sanskrit (thus myth gets demolished in a similar way as the aforementioned link to Latin). 5) Lithuanian has pitch-accents (like Japanese, Norwegian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian and Swedish) which are similar to tones. Latvian does not use pitch-accent. In addition Lithuanian stress can fall on any syllable whereas in Latvian it falls almost always on the first syllable. 6) I studied some Lithuanian a few years ago for a trip to Lithuania but my memory of the language has since faded badly as I haven't used it since then. I got "Easy Way to Latvian" from Audio-Forum's liquidation sale as well as a new copy of "Teach Yourself Latvian". I haven't done any serious study of Latvian yet but I haven't resisted the urge to browse through the first few chapters of each book. I don't know of any active poster who studies or knows both languages. There used to be Linas who was fluent in both languages but he hasn't posted in a few years and his account has been deactivated. Neither Latvian nor Lithuanian are classified as canonical examples of agglutinative languages (they are certainly not like Estonian which is spoken to the north and uses a fusional-agglutinative morphology). Their word orders are not overly rigid because of the dominance of fusional morphology as opposed to the noticeably analytic morphology in English. I'm not sure what you mean by strict grammar (English has rather "strict grammar" in my opinion :-P). Certainly if you're fluent in Latin, you should have less trouble with certain concepts in Latvian or Lithuanian grammar than otherwise (although vocabulary may be a bit difficult to pick up or retain because of their not being Romance or Germanic languages). Edited by Chung on 15 June 2010 at 6:59am 13 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ubik Senior Member United States ubykh.wordpress.com/ Joined 5317 days ago 147 posts - 176 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Latin, Arabic (Egyptian), German, Spanish | Message 3 of 5 15 June 2010 at 7:43am | IP Logged | ||
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You are always SO helpful Chung. Thank you very much.
See, a couple of those factors I had heard about (although I would forget which one was which), but on the one hand I really like the cool factor of just how conservative Lithuanian is, but I dont like the concept of the pitch accents so I came to a crossroads. Im still not sure becuase they both seem to have their good and bad points. Could you perhaps what you mean by the Slavonic levelling concept you were talking about? Oh, and the Lithuanian Pimsleur is at my library, but Ive always had my max (2) of Pimslaurs out at any given time so Ive never checked them out LOL. Its good to know that there ISNT a Latvian one so I can stop keeping my eyes out for it. Im going to lisaten to those samples in a moment. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ubik Senior Member United States ubykh.wordpress.com/ Joined 5317 days ago 147 posts - 176 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Latin, Arabic (Egyptian), German, Spanish | Message 4 of 5 15 June 2010 at 8:28am | IP Logged | ||
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What about phonetics of the language. Are either or both on a 1:1 ratio
(character:sound)? After listening to some samples, the Latvian definitely sounds crisper (which I like better). To my "lay-ear", Latvian sounds more like Latin/Romanian blended together and Lithuanian sounds way more Slavic. Also Latvian kinda sounds like someone playing a record backward. Loves it. And does anyone know what "neggeday" means in Latvian? Ive heard it a million timss on this video... Edited by Ubik on 15 June 2010 at 8:35am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 5 of 5 15 June 2010 at 5:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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When I use "levelling" here I mean that the inflectional diversity found in older forms of the language has faded. In other words only a few inflectional endings have become the only ones used at the expense of what had been several. An example is in English. Modern English uses only -s for the plural. However Old English used several suffixes for the plural depending on the case and gender (e.g. -as, -u, -an, -um). As the declensional system changed, the ending -s became the dominant marker of the plural. Nouns not originally using -s started taking it on with native speakers thinking that if one set of words already uses -s for the plural ending, then why not the other sets?
Most Slavonic languages have levelling when you compare them to their older forms. When it comes to Latvian and Lithuanian what you'll see is that Lithuanian declension shows more diversity than Latvian (in other words Latvian has gone through more changes which led to the dropping of some distinctions which Lithuanian still maintains). This also shows up in how Lithuanian has more apparent exceptions in its declensional patterns or classification of nouns than Latvian. Spelling in both languages is not totally phonemic (meaning each grapheme ("letter") represents one sound) as it does not show an exact 1:1 correspondence (however it is close to 1:1). Another complication is that Lithuanian spelling rarely indicates the placement of words' mobile stress or pitch-accent outside certain texts for foreigners or some linguists. Edited by Chung on 16 June 2010 at 5:47pm 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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