The Death of Imagination

Looks like my muse has spoken and my language of the moment is Latvian. Last night while looking for my learner's dictionary of Ukrainian, I came across Colloquial Latvian, which I think I may have picked up on a past trip to Bookworks. The grammar index leaves everything to be desired, but fortunately I found this site which has its deficiencies but it pretty sweet overall. Especially fortunate since it turns out we have crap in the stacks: two crumbling German-language grammars and a smattering of volumes in Russian or Latvian alone.

Last time I was interested in Latvian, I was living with two speakers of it: Nuphy and his daughter. His ex-wife is a refugee and a fluent speaker and she insisted on bringing up all the children bilingual. Nuphy learned enough to be conversational, and he deferred to his daughter on questions of grammar. But for her the language is intimately linked with her mother and she was understandably reluctant to help me learn much. So my memories of it are a bit fuzzy: simpler and more attractive than Lithuanian (which I had to tangle with for a phonology project in college) but at the end of the day not terribly different from a Slavic language.

Revisiting it, the biggest surprise is the verbal system: three synthetic tenses ("imperfect", present, future) as opposed to the two of most Slavic languages (although there's some overlap in forms--dzivoju, for instance, can mean "I live" or "I lived") and three corresponding perfect tenses built from the past active participle together with an auxiliary. And, on top of this, three additional agglutinative verbal constructions which express respectively evidential, irrealis, and deontic modality.

So while conjugating the verbs isn't particularly tricky (at least to anyone accustomed to an Indo-European language), finding the right construction can be. Take the verb phrase of the first clause in the title of this entry: būtu vajadzējis iemācīties which expresses "should have learned". The first verb is the "be"-auxiliary with the irrealis ending -u (indentical for all persons and number), the second is the past active participle of vajadzēt "be necessary", and the third is the infinitive for "to learn" which is mācīt "to teach" with a reflexive ending and a perfective prefix.

To get that right, I had to appeal to Nuphy to ask Namuci who in turn asked her mother--clearly not a chain I want to avail myself of too often since I imagine her animosity toward me over the destruction of her marriage hasn't dimmed much in fifteen years. Google helps, but I'm quite frustrated I can't find my old school edition of Teach yourself Latvian since those were stuffed with enough grammar to choke a horse--a good balance to the grammar-light communication-oriented textbooks of today.

(The translation of the title, by the way, is "I should have learned Latvian when I was still living with two Latvian speakers". Nuphy initially tried to answer my question with his translation app, which came out hilariously wrong. My favourite part was how "Latvian speakers" became "loudspeakers from Latvia".)

Oh, one other thing to hold against that stupid show I watched on Sunday night: It influenced my dreams, leading to the prominent featuring of a Roma prostitute. (In the show, the whores were Bosnian, so I suspect that detail comes from an article I read that day about the plans of a Czech city to wall off a predominately Roma-occupied housing estate from their predominately Bohemian neighbours. In this day and age!) There were compensations, though, especially a very vivid guest appearance by grunter's pert butt. All in all, I would've been better off meeting up with spookyfruit after the pie was gone.

Last night I was with Nuphy and ended up watching an episode of "Frazer". It's not bad now that Joe Keenan's back, but I've never regained the interest I had before Niles and Daphne got married. Before that plot twist, they were two characters I had a lot of regard for, but the that was handled just made them seem like unfeeling jerks. He's hoping to be released by the end of the week, but I wonder how easy it's going to be for him to get by on his own. He's still on IV (which at least obviates the need to go food shopping) and rather weak. It's going to be a dreary Thanksgiving for him if he's not back on solid food already!