Do words in Latvian have the same roots as words in English?

Blakey1990

Yes, some what. Latvian is a mix of Germanic and Slavic languages, with a little Romanian mixed in, which is Latin. English is a Germanic language with certain Franco-Norman undertones. So we share a base language Apr 12 06, 1:58 PM

lanfranco

The Latvian language is a Baltic tongue belonging to the Indo-European family and apparently preserving some features of Proto-Indo-European, so yes, there would be some very archaic shared roots. Latvian, in fact, is of special interest to linguists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latvian_language Apr 12 06, 2:09 PM

bloomsby

Latvian is neither a Germanic nor a Slavonic language, but belongs to the Baltic family, as Lanfranco points out. (The presence of loanwords from German and Russian doesn't affect the language family ...) Apr 12 06, 2:33 PM

Baloo55th

The English 'two' in Latvian is 'divi', for one example. The trouble with tracing roots in languages is that people move. A type of tree found in one area has a name in one language very similar to a totally different tree in another language. Early peoples weren't scientists defining trees, so they reapplied names they were familiar with when they moved. An example (not trees) is the German word Lachs (lax or lox in other Germanic languages) meaning 'salmon'. Latvian 'lasis' is 'trout'. (The equivalent word 'laks' in the far-off Tocharian A just meant 'fish'.) Modern people, too. Look at the difference between a British robin and an American robin. As to Latvian being a mix of Germanic and Slavic - sorry, no. There's no Romanian there either. Not in the language itself. It does have many loanwords from neighbouring languages (just as English and French have): Swedish, German, Polish and Russian, and probably from the related Baltic language Lithuanian and the extinct Baltic language Old Prussian as well. These would be harder to tag, as loan words are easier to spot from languages further apart in origins. As Frankie says, we do share a base language with Latvian, Proto-Indoeuropean. That's a long way back. A very long way back. Apr 12 06, 2:52 PM