#latvian

LATVIAN MIKU🇱🇻🇱🇻🇱🇻🇱🇻🍻🍞🌾

VIntage 'Three Kings' necklace with Baltic amber drops, Latvian (£367, eBay)

ok so after his severe baltic lady experience at the embassy Dude has resolved to learn Latvian. Sure, fine.

Well it's not on Duolingo, so he had to find a paid course. Fine. He's doing it, I'm doing it with him. Great.

Meanwhile I'm trying to compile a phrasebook of useful things, because while it's a great idea long-term to try and get the underpinnings of grammar and some kind of systematic whatsit, I know that the most useful thing is always vocabulary. To actually communicate, you have to know what things are called.

I started off, in time-honored fashion, by looking up a bunch of shit in google translate (double-checking with a printed glossary we own), and then making labels and putting them onto things in our house. (The refrigerator is neatly labeled as leduskapis. The door is durvis. etc. etc. The funniest one though is that the knife block is labeled nazis because that's the word for knife. but it really does look extremely funny just hanging out in our kitchen. Plural would be naži so maybe I'll change it to that but honestly just having my knife block inexplicably labeled nazis makes me laugh so many times in a day I don't know that I can give it up.)

(No, I don't understand how plurals work yet, don't ask.)

We were lightly discussing this yesterday at Easter dinner with his mother, and she said oh yeah, prioritizing the words you need is good. And I don't remember which of us brought it up, but she was like oh yeah asking for the bathroom is crucial. And then she was like wait. what is that called? And had a solitary moment of consternation before declaring with great confidence, oh, of course, it's the maza māja, how could I forget.

But in the moment of consternation I had already asked Google Translate, and it said, tualete.

Well, she said. Literally maza māja means little house, like, the outhouse. But that's what you call it. That's what we always called it.

I tapped through various synonyms, etc, and never found that anywhere. I looked up water closet and rest room and bathroom and all kinds of synonyms in English and got a whole constellation of possibilities. But I could only get it to give me maza māja as a literal translation for "little house".

It was only then that we realized that of course, Dude's mom's people had lived in a very rural area, and had fled in 1943. They hadn't had indoor plumbing there yet.

Imagine, Dude said, being in a trendy restaurant in Riga, and asking them where their outhouse is...