Grammar 2.1:

Introduction To Latvian Word Classes:

2.1.01 Latvian is a highly inflected language; it uses many inflections (suffixes) where English relies on the word order and function markers to clarify the relationships of words within an utterance.

2.1.02 The word classes (parts of speech) can be divided up into three systems:

a. THE DECLENSIONAL SYSTEM uses two numbers (singular and plural), two genders (masculine and feminine), 5-6 declensional cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, locative and sometimes vocative). The declinable word classes are the nouns and their replacers or modifiers: pronouns, numerals and adjectives.

b. THE VERBAL (CONJUGATIONAL) SYSTEM uses three voices (active, passive, reflexive, five moods (indicative, imperative, conditional, relative, debitive), three tenses (present, past, future), three persons (first, second, third), two numbers (singular, plural.) Besides, there are several states - "modes" of action, such as the general (imperfective), perfective, inchoative, durative, assertive, accidental and others.

The verbs constitute this system; the participles participate in both inflectional systems, the conjugational and also declensional.

c. UNINFLECTED WORD CLASSES include the adverbs, the prepositions, the various categories of particles (function words), such as the connectives, clause introducers, negatives and others.

2.1.03 Latvian lacks two features that are important in English:

a. There are no articles comparable to a/an and the in English. In translations the appropriate articles are inserted into the English texts:

b. Latvian cannot express the difference between a general and an ongoing action. Usually the contexts give the clues for correct English translations:

2.1.1 THE NOUNS have two genders, masculine and feminine.

Note that the masculine nouns have either the ending –is or –s, the feminine nouns either -a or -e.

2.1.11 The masculine nouns with –s belong to a different declensional stem than the same gender nouns with -is. A similar distinction between the feminine nouns with –a and -e places them also in two different declensional classes.

A declensional stem is a pattern of endings that a noun must take to form its various declensional case. The endings given above are for the case of the nominative singular.

2.1.12 In the dative singular, the differences in the genders and declensional stems are continued:

Note that here all the masculine nouns have -m as the last element of the ending. Likewise, all the feminine nouns have –i. These are gender markers.

The vowel before the gender marker is the declensional stem vowel. It appears in the dative singlar ending of all nouns and helps to classify them. In our sample, we have masculine i-stem and a-stem nouns and feminine a-stem and e-stem nouns.

2.1.13 The principal parts of the nouns. Since the dative singular ending reveals so much essential information, you must memorize every new noun not just by its nominative, but also by the dative form. These two forms are used as the principal parts of the noun. If you know both of them, you can handle correctly all the other endings in the remaining declensional cases.

In your vocabulary, the principal parts of the above nouns will be listed in the following manner:

The first entry is the nominative, the second is the dative singular form of each noun.

2.1.2 THE USES OF THE DECLENSIONAL CASES. To indicate the subject, object and other sentence elements, Latvian uses the declensional cases, each marked by their distinctive endings. In this lesson we’ll study the main uses of each of the two cases that are to be learned as the principal parts of the nouns.

2.1.21 THE NOMINATIVE is the who- or what- case. It is used as the sentence subject:

The nominative is also used as a complement after a linking verb:

2.1.22 THE DATIVE is the to- or for- case. It is used as the indirect object with the verbs that demand it. Here we’re using verbs of telling, asking and answering:

Note that in English you have to use the word order patterns or function words (here a preposition) to indicate the relationships that in Latvian are shown by the means of the case endings.

2.1.23 THE VOCATIVE is the direct address case. It has distinctive forms only in the singular. The vocative forms are made by chopping off the last element of the nominative:

When a female person must be addressed, the use of the special vocative form is optional. The nominative ending is usually dropped when the feminine noun has three or more syllables; two syllable words more often remain unchanged.

With the masculine names there is no option: when a male person is addressed, his name (or reference noun) must be in the vocative form. It sounds very strange when this rule is not followed.

2.1.3 THE PRONOUNS replace nouns, modify nouns, and introduce certain questions. In this lesson we have the pronouns of the first and the last types.

2.1.31 THE PERSONAL PRONOUNS used here are:

The 2nd person pronoun tu/tev refers to one person only (as did the now defunct English pronoun thou/thee). We'll translate it as 'you'—keeping in mind, though, that it is "you-one".

The 3rd person pronouns show the gender distinction; the 1st and 2nd person pronouns do not.

2.1.32 THE QUESTION INTRODUCER PRONOUN in this lesson is kas? 'who?' or 'what?', kam? 'to/for whom?' or 'to/for what?'; ko? 'whom?' or 'what?' The last is the accusative (direct object) case form.

2.1.4 THE VERBS too use inflections (endings) to mark the person, number, tense and other aspects. The interchanges of the verbal endings are called conjugation.

2.1.41 THE CONJUGATION OF THE VERB būt -- 'BE' AND nebūt -- 'NOT BE' IN THE PRESENT TENSE SINGULAR:

This verb is called irregular because of the different shapes of the 3rd person form and the insertion of -m- in the 1st person.

2.1.42 The 3rd person verb, instead of having viņš or viņa, may go with any subject, except es, tu and the plural counterparts of these two.

2.1.43 The same 3rd person form is used also with all the plural subjects. This is true of all Latvian verbs. For these reasons, the third person is called "the third common person".

2.1.5.1 SENTENCE STRUCTURES. In Latvian there are three basic sentence structures: the linking verb (descriptive) sentences, the active verb sentences and the dative subject sentences. This lesson makes use of the first two of them.

2.1.51.1 LINKING VERB SENTENCES used here rename the subject by a noun, which is called the predicate noun. Like the subject itself, it is in the nominative case:

2.1.52 ACTIVE VERB SENTENCES have certain variations:

a. They may have only a subject and a verb:

b. They may add an indirect object in the dative case:

c. For now our direct objects are the whole questions and answers (bold):

NOTE: Single noun (pronoun) direct objects must take the accusative case, which we will study later.

2.1.6 QUESTIONS. All the above sentence structures can be remade into questions. There are two types of question sentences: Vai-questions and K-questions.

2.1.61 VAI-QUESTIONS are also called "yes/no questions" because they demand an affirmative or negative answer. In Latvian no verb-subject inversion or any other structure change takes place: to form this type of question, the particle Vai is placed before a sentence expressing a statement:

Note that these questions can be answered by either "yes" or "no".

2.1.62 K-QUESTIONS in Latvian correspond to the Wh-questions in English. They are introduced by a question word beginning with K-, and they ask for a particular sentence element in the answer.

a. K-word asks for the subject in the answer:

b. K-word asks for the predicate noun in the answer:

c. K-word asks for the indirect object in the answer:

d. K-word asks for the direct object in the answer:

e. K-phrase asks for the verb in the answer:

2.1.7 VERB-OBJECT INVERSION. A pronoun object usually comes before the verb: