Languages 1

This is going to be a series of posts about language and the complicated language politics of Latvia. I will spread it out over the next few days.

First, a little linguistic background. I realize now that I am not going to learn a lot of Latvian -- or, for that matter, Russian -- in my short stay here because the languages are just too complicated to really master without serious daily study, which I don't have time for with my teaching duties, and you would really need to study over a couple of years. That's just how it is.

The issue here is that both Latvian and Russian are heavily inflected languages, and English is not (though it used to be, as my history of the English language course is making clear to my students here and in the States). An inflection, for those of you who have not studied languages -- and I'll just insert a commercial here and say that everybody should study a second language -- is a change to a word to indicate a change in its grammatical function, usually a change in the root of the word or the addition of a prefix or suffix. For example, in English, we indicate the plural of a noun, a change in grammatical function, by adding an "s," with a few exceptions. That's an inflection. Adding a "d" or "ed" to the end of most verbs to indicate the past tense is also an inflection. So is changing the root vowel of the word, as in the irregular verb "swim swam swum."

In heavily inflected languages, inflections occur to mark all kinds of grammatical functions. For example, in English we can say I gave John a gift, meaning a I [the subject of the sentence] gave a gift [the direct object of the verb] to John [the indirect object of the verb, the object of the preposition to]. If we made John a direct object of the verb, as in I greeted John, the word John does not change its form, though its grammatical function in the sentence does. Likewise, we can inflect nouns to mark the possessive: John becomes John's as in John's gift,which is really a shorter way of saying the gift of John. In this second version of the possessive, we don't actually change the noun's form. It's just that, if we choose to, we can, as in the first version of the possessive, the one that we use normally. 

In Latvian and Russian and lots of other languages, those changes in grammatical form must be marked with endings on the noun -- a set of endings to indicate whether the word is the subject of a sentence, the object of the verb, the object of a preposition, a indicator of place (as in in the bedroom or on the table), and a possessive, as well as a couple of other functions. There are six or seven cases in Latvian, a case being the grammatical function of the noun and the set of endings that you add to indicate that function. (I keep hearing differences of opinion about how many cases Latvian has, so let's just go with seven for now. I'm not sure how many Russian has -- six, I think. Perhaps one of my Latvian acquaintances will clarify this for me.) But wait! There's more!

Latvian and Russian also have gender, as indeed most European languages do, English being an unusual exception. Gender can mean biological gender, though it typically doesn't. It simply means a classification system that all nouns fall into: they are either in one class or another, depending on the number of genders. Typically, in European languages there are two or three: male, female, and if there's a third, neuter. Both Latvian and Russian have three genders. Again, don't think of gender as something tied to biological gender; we could just as well say that nouns have color, and all nouns are either red, blue, or yellow. But for whatever reason, we classify nouns by using the term gender, and in many languages all nouns, including inanimate objects and abstractions, have gender. Drawing from French, the European language I know some about, there is nothing inherently masculine about a table, but it French le table is masculine. Nor is there anything inherently feminine about a chair, but in French it's la chaise. (The word the, in French le and la, is inflected, as you can see; it has a masculine and feminine form which must match, or agree, with the noun with which it is associated.)

Now, then, back to Latvian: seven cases and three genders for nouns. That means for any noun in the language, there are 21 different possible endings, depending on its gender and its case, that is, how it's functioning in the sentence. (Latvian's relative Lithuanian is even harder because I am told that it has twelve cases. Good Lord.) And remember that this is just a general overview for nouns: adjectives and verbs are all inflected too, and if you think nouns would be hard, just wait until you start to try to learn the verb forms. This long intro to very basic language structure is just the tip of the iceberg. (I'll talk about verbs later.) 

Does this mean that English is just an easier language to learn? Not at all. English has cases too, and speakers do all the same things that Latvian and Russian speakers do, but they just do it differently. For example, word order matters in English: subjects come before verbs and objects come after them. John greeted Mary does not mean the same thing as Mary greeted John; where the nouns come in the sentence determines how they are functioning. In Latvian and Russian, word order is far less important because the case endings do the work that word order does, so you can mess around with where you put words in Latvian and Russian, and as long as the case endings are correct, it doesn't matter so much.

Likewise, in English we make heavy use of prepositions to do the work of case endings. Think about the word to, for example: what does it mean to say I gave a gift to John? What exactly does to mean in this context? What does it mean in Let's toast to life? Put the pedal to the metal? It fits him to a tee? Get in the lean-to? To the point you're making? Take it to the limit? Up to date? To all the young men? In each example, to means something different, and this is just the surface of all the meanings of this one single preposition. (Its definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, as indeed is the case for all prepositions, runs for pages and pages and pages.) English speakers just learn all the shades of meaning for every preposition, use them flawlessly, and never, ever think about them. Latvian and Russian speakers just know what case to put on any noun, put them on flawlessly, and never, ever think about them as well.

Again, all this discussion is only about one single part of speech, the noun. I haven't even started on adjectives, verbs, and adverbs, and those are the just the basic parts of speech. So learning Latvian is a struggle for an English speaker unused to such a complicated inflectional structure. But you know what? Latvian and Russian are both inflected heavily, and the inflectional systems don't bear any relationship to each other, but my students go back and forth between the two constantly and with an ease that make my jaw drop. It's not that one can't learn a heavily inflected language any more than one can't learn a less inflected one like English. Because you know what? They have mastered that language as well. And they are all studying a fourth language at university. My gut sense is that Americans are at a huge disadvantage living in a place where they hear only one language all the time; easy or difficult, the more languages that you have to negotiate, the more you will negotiate them. My students here are superb linguists, even if they don't know it. But for them, it's just, well, everyday life.