The Corpus of Early Written Latvian:

The history of written Latvian dates back to the late 16th century, when both Protestantism and Catholicism reigned. Although the first physically available book in Latvian – Catechismvs Catholicorum – was published not in Latvia, but in Vilnius, the capital of neighbouring Catholic Lithuanian, in 1585, texts in Latvian and copies thereof were distributed in Riga much earlier. Martin Luther’s ideas on preaching in the native language became very popular here and there is written evidence of the first book in Latvian published in 1525, but it has not survived. Research on the history of written Latvian has been carried out rather fragmentary. The delayed development of this branch of the Baltic philology might be explained by the view expressed by Jānis Endzelīns, one of the most influential and well-known Latvian linguists, that the earliest texts were “written incorrectly (by Germans!)” and that the language in the texts is “full of mistakes” (Endzelīns, 1951: 22, 20). Another prominent linguist, Artūrs Ozols, stated that early written Latvian “is a distortion of the people’s language, a grouping of the words of this language according to the model of the German language” (Ozols, 1965: 8). These statements influenced the study of the Latvian language in the first written texts until the early 1980s. This also resulted in a situation where the research on the Early Latvian texts for a long time focused on describing mistakes in separate sources, and in only a few cases some attempts were made to see the reflection of the language system of the time through the mistakes and erroneous and sometimes obscure spelling. The Corpus of Early Written Latvian named SENIE (www.ailab.lv/SENIE) is an effort to change the existing statements and to support a completely new view on the language as a system in these texts. The Corpus was first launched in January 2003, but its development is still in progress (the approximate size of the corpus is now about one million running words). The aim of the Corpus is to facilitate diachronic studies of Latvian, to support variant and language standardization studies, to serve a basis for a historical dictionary of Latvian, as well as to popularise early written sources and to support their re-evaluation.