The aim of the historical dictionary project is to create a full-type corpus-based dictionary of the early written Latvian texts. The main tasks cover the whole scope of the dictionary making process: to develop a necessary methodology, to write sample entries covering all POS, to make an electronic version of the entries; a further task is to find or to create a lexicographer’s workbench.

Till now ca 500 entries have been compiled (~ 300 appellatives and ~ 200 proper names) and guidelines on dictionary entry writing have been set.

The present report deals with issues concerning corpus compilation, finding spelling variants of the headword, detecting the meaning for lexemes with a small and a large number of occurrences. Special emphasis is put on the description of the origin of the lexeme, detecting lexical, derivational and semantic loans (according to Betz 1959 terminology Lehnwörter; Lehnbildungen; Lehnbedeutungen). Loans could be found among collocations and idioms, as well as in the syntax (German Lehnwendungen; Lehnsyntax. As the early sources are mainly religious texts, the special interest lies in religious discourse analysis.

The Dictionary is the first and for the moment the only known corpus-based dictionary in Latvia. The input data is the Corpus of the Early Latvian Texts ‘SENIE’. The Corpus includes 43 full-text sources with almost 965, 000 tokens covering the 16–18th c.

All main sources of the 16th c. are represented in the Corpus, but more data could be explored: 1) The Lord’s Prayer published in different collections; 2) manuscript data (songs, separate sentences). The huge quantity of 17th c. data should be added to the Corpus, e.g., The Old Testament; dictionaries, both printed and manuscripts; grammars; texts of the late 17 th c. and manuscripts (both ecclesiastic and clerical texts).

One of the issues of corpus development is the unavailability of the early sources in Latvian libraries. Thus, international co-operation should be established in order to raise awareness of the Latvian texts kept in foreign collections and, if possible, to digitalize them.

The early texts are rich in spelling variants which puzzle lexicographers, see five versions of  the root māja ‘house’ written as follows: mahj-, mahy-, mai-, maj- and may-. In order to facilitate finding all the occurrences of the head word, a time-consuming solution is to rewrite all the texts in standardized form or to use some software to detect all the spelling variants. Such a solution is found for the Old English texts (software VARD — Variant Detector and the adoption of this practice is worth considering.

In detecting the meaning of a lexeme, problems are caused by words with one or two occurrences in the Corpus and those with several thousand occurrences. By means of the concordance program one is able to process words with up to 2,000 occurrences. See the entry pasaule ‘world’ (1,528 occur at the moment of writing this entry) where not only word meanings with the first and the last citation are listed, but also a number of collocations are presented. While processing a headword with a large number of occurrences (e.g., the conjunction ka ‘that’ with >16,000 occurrences or Dievs ‘God’ > 11,000 occur.) the compilers decided to analyze only two sources per century in detail.

If only one occurrence is met in the Corpus, additional sources should be examined to determine the meaning: other 17–18th c. dictionaries, dictionaries of different vernaculars, studies in history and botany, the Mülenbach-Endzelin dictionary, Grimm’s Das Deutsche Wörterbuch, in some cases (delete the) Luther’s Bible is consulted (e.g. pakaļazobi — Luther’s Backenzähne ‘molars’).

The on-going Dictionary supplies new data for studies of the origin of Latvian words, it detects more precisely the time of the lexeme’s entry into the written language which in most cases is identical to the time of the word’s origin in general.

The compilers of the Dictionary explore the former studies of semantic and lexical loans and only some new explanations or previously unrecognized lexemes are expected to be found. Derivational loans are a challenge for researchers, and new examples are found in corpus analysis, e.g., next to kapsēta ‘graveyard’ we can find the lexeme baznīcsēta ‘churchyard’, which is a derivational loan from Middle Low German kerkhof. In contemporary German Kirchhof is encountered, the same as Swedish kyrkogård.

Early Latvian texts are rich in derivations and compounds the origins of which are still to be clarified. Hopefully, work with corpus, careful text analysis and comparison to possible source texts can supply new data for a historical dictionary and studies of the early religious lexis.

The names of railway stations and halts along the earliest railway lines on Lithuanian territory have been studied, i.e. along those railway lines built between 1861 and 1873. Especially, attention has been drawn to names that are not obvious regarding the geographical location of the station or halt. Some 50 percent of the names are showing some kind of irregularity in this respect. Most common (about 30 examples) are stations or halts that are serving a population centre situated at some distance from the station, but still bearing the name of that population centre. Another group of interesting cases is where the names have been changed over history for different reasons. These examples are about 20 in number. Among the examples of changed names are those, mostly minor halts, initially with no name but just a number, but later on provided with proper names. Most striking examples of name giving policy of the stations are railway junctions or border stations like Kaišiadorys, Virbalis/Kybartai, Švenčionėliai, Sniečkus/Visaginas, Maţeikiai/Muravjevo and Turmantas. Another dimension regarding names of railway stations in Lithuania is the fact that several languages (Lithuanian, Russian, Polish and German) have been used officially during the 150 years of the existence of Lithuanian railways.

This work concerns the book "Litauiska noveller" [Lithuanian Short Stories],  a collection of nine Lithuanian short stories translated into Swedish by noted Finnish diplomat Ragnar Öller (1893-1960) and tutor and  journalist Nils Bohman (1902-1943).  

The authors of the nine short stories are Jonas Biliūnas, Vincas Krėvė-Mickevičius, Antanas Žukauskas-Vienuolis, Ignas Jurkunas-Scheynius, Jurgis Savickis, Petras Cvirka, and Petronėlė Orintaitė.

The 242-page book published 1940 in Stockholm, was the first translation of literary texts from the Lithuanian appearing in the Swedish language. In spite of a professionally carried out translation, the book never gained the attention of Swedish literary circles, and has more or less been forgotten throughout the post war period and up to the present.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the history leading up to the publication of the book within the context of Swedish-Lithuanian relations, and analyse the possible reasons of why this work remained unnoticed for so many decades. Why was the book not reviewed in the Swedish daily press? Was the book ignored because of the choice of authors of the novels? Was the disregard due to the political situation?

A discussion from a few selected points of view follows on some possible reasons of why the launch of "Litauiska noveller" failed in 1940.

An appendix listing published works of Lithuanian authors in the Scandinavian languages (Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Icelandic) up to 1996 is attached.

Syftet med uppsatsen är att undersöka hur den lettiska konstutställningen arrangerades, hur den bemöttes i Stockholm 1927 och vilka följdverkningar detta fick.

A German-Latvian dictionary Liber memorialis Letticus (1748) compiled by Caspar Elvers (1680–1750), the pastor of the Latvian parish at St John’s church in Riga, is the second printed bilingual dictionary with Latvian as the target language in Livonian-Couronian tradition after the pioneering work Lettus (1638) compiled by Georg Mancelius.

The little interest in this source could be the reason why researchers had not discovered that one of the seven copies of the dictionary at the Academic Library of the University of Latvia in Riga partly differs from others. This copy does not have a printed title page and the first nine sheets (A–J, pp 1—144) are not identical with these sheets in the other copies. Differences between the versions are seen in all the levels of the Latvian part of the text.

The comparison of two versions of the first nine sheets of Elvers’s Liber memorialis Letticus enables to assume that the newly found version is probably an earlier copy than the regular one. It may represent the initial shape of the dictionary, which might have already been printed in 1734. Several questions still remain – is the author of both versions the same person; who could be the possible assistant of Caspar Elvers in preparing the final version of the dictionary. The answers to these questions could help to clarify the history of the Latvian lexicography in the middle of the 18th century.

The Lithuanian 3rd person future forms of monosyllabic acute stems arementioned as one of the categories where the examples of a phenomenoncalled “monosyllabic circumflexion” or “monosyllabic metatony” are found,e.g., dúoti – duõs ‘to give.’ However, there are several exceptions, e.g., lìs (lýti ‘to rain’), bùs ( būti ‘to be’), etc. Yet, the condition of the exceptionshas not been fully analyzed in the context of the verbal systeminvolving other tense paradigms. In this paper, a thorough examination willbe conducted on the 3rd person future forms and their paradigms in Lithuanian.It is found that the verbs which have shortened 3rd person future formsalways have the nasal infix present. Based on this result, a possible interpretationwill be presented as to how certain 3rd person future forms have beenshortened. Also, I will propose that the shortening of the 3rd person futureforms is a secondary development, whereas MC could be the regular processfor the 3rd person future forms.

I have analyzed the collection of Irma Grebzde's short stories "Where the Mountains Meet the Sky", published (in the Latvian language) in 1962 in New York, USA, and found that the times and venues in Grebzde's narratives correspond to the chronotope models developed by literary historian Juris Rozītis for novels written in the immediate post-Second World War years. I have expanded upon the Rozītis' models, and created a new model called "Alone in the New Country". This new model describes and positions Irma Grebzde's short stories in Canada - the new country. It also places the parallel space of Latvia, now occupied by the Soviets - outside the immediate circle of the abstract external chronotope, since in Grebzde's short stories, the old homeland no longer has such a dominating function.

The aim of this paper is to examine how Latvian idiomatic expressions are understood and how often they are used by Latvians in Sweden. The Swedish Latvians can be grouped as follows: those that arrived in Sweden as a result of the Second World War and have lived here for a greater part of their lives, those that were born in Sweden of Latvian parents, and those that moved here after the reinstatement of Latvian independence in 1991. I shall examine if the Swedish Latvians who have grown up and/or lived in Sweden for many years a) know the meaning of Latvian idiomatic expressions; b) use these idiomatic expressions; and, if used, c) which idiomatic expressions are used most often?