This just in from my friend Svetlana, who is a native Russian speaker, fluent in Latvian, and very good in English. I have edited her comments slightly:
"Good afternoon, Robert! How are you? I have read your blog about languages today. Your comparison of the grammar of languages is very interesting. I decided to correct you a little in connection with the ending of the nouns.
"The Latvian language has seven cases, singular and plural forms, and two genders (feminine and masculine). Also there is common gender, but Latvian has very few such words.
"Taking into account the gender of nouns and case endings, they are divided into six declinations.
Nouns of the masculine gender relate to the first three declinations (7x3 = 21 – singular form). In the plural form, these nouns have the same endings for these three declinations. (7x1 = 7). Nouns of the feminine gender refer to the second three (4-6) declinations. They have different endings as in singular and plural. ( 7x6=42 )
"If we take reflexive nouns then to this number we can add 17 more endings. A total: there are 87 different possible endings. Plus, there are various exceptions. This is what I remember from the school course. Your colleagues linguists will enlighten you better than I will, of course."
So there you have it. I completely forgot about number, that is, singular and plural (and some languages have more numbers than that -- forms for nouns that are two in number, and different forms for nouns that are three or more) in addition to gender and case. So, if you thought that Latvian nouns would be hard to learn, it turns out that it's even worse than you thought. Which makes me gnash my teeth at native Latvian speakers who just produce the right forms constantly without even thinking about it -- or speakers like Svetlana and my students who do this kind of complex ending dance with two unrelated, inflected languages, and still manage it flawlessly and without giving it a bit of thought. Arrrrgggh!
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