The status of the locative case in early Latvian grammars

The earliest grammars of Latvian were written during the 17th century, at a time when European linguistic theory was dominated by the view that the structure of Latin was not only the most logical and the most perfected system possible, but also the underlying universal model in terms of which all other languages had of necessity to be described. Although the early writers on Latvian, being mostly German clergymen, can hardly be considered professional grammarians, they were certainly well-schooled in Latin, and were as convinced as everybody else of the centrality of Latin to matters of grammatical description. The views of the time had a considerable impact on the descriptions of Latvian offered by the earliest grammarians, and led to the creation of spurious forms such as the ablative and the future infinitive, neither of which is appropriate to any reasonable description of Latvian. The first known Latvian grammar is the Manvdvctio Ad Lingvam Lettonicam... of Johann Georg Rehehusen,1 which appeared in 1644, although it may well have been written, if we are to believe the Introduction, as early as 1629. Remembering that the traditional analysis of Latin nouns requires six cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, and ablative), we have at hand a simple explanation of the otherwise rather surprising claim by Rehehusen that the Latvian noun is to be analyzed as having six cases, viz. nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, and ablative. The ablative, which in Latin is the by, with, or from case, is given by Rehehusen for Latvian as the case which follows the preposition no 'from,' and as such is clearly redundant, since no can be adequately catered for by allowing it to govern other cases: the genitive singular and dative plural. Our concern, however, is not with this unnecessary multiplication of entities, but rather with the fact that Rehehusen has made no mention of the locative

Latvian · Linguistics · Locative case · Natural language processing · Rule-based machine translation · Computer Science · Linguistics and language evolution · Mathematics · Philosophy