Intro­duc­tion

This sur­vey is intend­ed to give the read­er a basic idea of the nature of Livo­ni­an gram­mar. Unless oth­er­wise not­ed, exam­ples are tak­en from Līvõ kēļ (Boiko 2000) and the Livo­ni­an-Esto­ni­an-Lat­vian dic­tio­nary (Viit­so & Ernštre­its 2012). The basic text is tak­en from Pētõr Damberg’s Jemakīel lugdõbrān­tõz skūol ja kuod pierast (Moth­er Tongue Read­ing Book for School and Home), how­ev­er, the trans­la­tion is my own. The expres­sions at the end of this sec­tion are tak­en from the Lat­vian-Livo­ni­an-Eng­lish Phrase Book by Val­da Šuvcāne. The sec­tion on stød is tak­en direct­ly, with some small changes, from Balodis 2008:12–14.

Gen­er­al Com­ments

As stat­ed else­where on this site, Livo­ni­an is a Finnic lan­guage. Livo­ni­an shares a num­ber of fea­tures with its clos­est rel­a­tives. Like oth­er Finnic lan­guages, pri­ma­ry stress in Livo­ni­an gen­er­al­ly occurs on the first syl­la­ble of each word. Length is dis­tin­guished in Livo­ni­an for vow­els, con­so­nants, and some diph­thongs and triph­thongs. Though vow­el har­mony is a fea­ture of many Finnic lan­guages (Finnish, Vote, South Esto­ni­an, etc.), it is absent in Livo­ni­an. Like its Finnic rel­a­tives, Livo­ni­an has an exten­sive sys­tem of noun cas­es (dis­cussed fur­ther below). How­ev­er, the use of the exter­nal loca­tive cas­es (abla­tive, adessive, alla­tive) is some­what more lim­it­ed in Livo­ni­an com­pared to their use in oth­er Finnic lan­guages. Livo­ni­an also shows some inter­est­ing inno­va­tions, includ­ing a dative case. Like oth­er Finnic lan­guages his­tor­i­cal­ly in con­tact with Lat­vian, includ­ing Krevin Vote (his­tor­i­cal­ly spo­ken near Bauska) and the Leivu and Lut­si South Esto­ni­an lan­guage islands of east­ern Latvia, Livo­ni­an has a prosod­ic fea­ture called “stød” or the “bro­ken tone” (dis­cussed below). Of the­se lan­guage, this sys­tem of tonal oppo­si­tion was the most exten­sive in Livo­ni­an where stød devel­oped into a lex­i­cal con­trast, while in lan­guages like Lut­si South Esto­ni­an, stød remained an occa­sion­al phe­nom­e­non result­ing from the eli­sion of inter­vo­cal­ic glot­tal con­so­nants. For a detailed dis­cus­sion and more infor­ma­tion on the sound sys­tems of the dialects of Livo­ni­an, see Tuisk 2016. For infor­ma­tion on stød in Lut­si and Leivu, see Balodis et al. 2016.

Kurze­me (Cour­land) Livo­ni­an has a West­ern and East­ern dialect with a tran­si­tion­al dialect hav­ing been spo­ken in the vil­lage of Īra (Lielir­be). This dialect divi­sion is said to have arisen from a his­tor­i­cal divi­sion of the Livo­ni­an Coast between two dif­fer­ent manor ter­ri­to­ries. The mod­ern Livo­ni­an lit­er­ary lan­guage is based on the East­ern Livo­ni­an dialect. The map below shows the Livo­ni­an dialect divi­sion.

Tone (Stød)

Stød is the term used to refer to the lex­i­cal pitch accent fea­ture in Livo­ni­an. Sound­ing much like the Lat­vian bro­ken into­na­tion and Dan­ish stød, from where the name derives in Livo­ni­an lin­guis­tic schol­ar­ship (Thom­sen 1890:59), stød is a con­trastive fea­ture in Livo­ni­an and the only exam­ple of lex­i­cal pitch accent to be found in any cur­rent­ly spo­ken Bal­to-Finnic lan­guage.

The extinct Krevin dialect of Votic, also a Finnic lan­guage, may have had a prosod­ic fea­ture sim­i­lar to stød. Krevin was spo­ken near the south­ern Lat­vian city of Bauska and became extinct in the lat­ter half of the nine­teen­th cen­tu­ry. As no sound record­ings of Krevin exist, it is impos­si­ble to be cer­tain that it indeed pos­sessed pitch accent, though Win­kler (1997:225–237) posits that Krevin had a sys­tem mak­ing a two-way or three-way pitch accent dis­tinc­tion.

Stud­ies have also been car­ried out exam­in­ing the per­cep­tion that the three vow­el quan­ti­ties of Esto­ni­an are asso­ci­at­ed with unique pitch con­tours, as it has been claimed in the past that pitch rather than quan­ti­ty is the pri­ma­ry fac­tor in dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing among the three vow­el lengths. How­ev­er, it was shown by Lehis­te (1960:60–62) that the­se pitch con­tours were asso­ci­at­ed with com­plete utter­ances rather than par­tic­u­lar words and that in Esto­ni­an “pitch does not con­tribute an indis­pens­able clue for assign­ment of a word into a quan­ti­ty cat­e­go­ry.“

Kiparsky (2006:4) gives the fol­low­ing sum­ma­ry of the the­o­ries con­cern­ing the orig­in of stød: “Ket­tunen and Vih­man sug­gest that stød first arose as a reflex of h in words like raha > ro’o ‘mon­ey’. And, in line with a pop­u­lar account of Dan­ish stød, Posti sug­gests that it devel­oped as a glot­tal stop from ris­ing pitch which arose when the fol­low­ing syl­la­ble was lost. On Wiik’s (1989) account, stød arose by phonol­o­giza­tion of syl­la­ble bound­aries, though he is non-com­mit­tal about exact­ly what phono­log­i­cal enti­tites the syl­la­ble bound­aries were phonol­o­gized as.”

Kiparsky (2006:1) describes the dis­tri­b­u­tion of Livo­ni­an stød as fol­lows: “The Livo­ni­an stød appears on stressed VV or VC syl­la­bles, where C is a voiced con­so­nant (the same con­fig­u­ra­tion as the “stød base” of Dan­ish)… Stød is con­strastive on stressed CVV and CVVC syl­la­bles, in mono­syl­lab­ic as well as poly­syl­lab­ic words. It is also con­strastive on stressed non­fi­nal CVC syl­la­bles.” As stød can only occur in heavy syl­la­bles, syl­la­bles with stød are not treat­ed sep­a­rate­ly in the cur­rent study. In the East­ern Livo­ni­an dialect a stød-like pitch con­tour can also occur on half-long vow­els in even-num­bered syl­la­bles. (Ket­tunen 1925:5–6, Posti 1942:XIX) This pitch con­tour, how­ev­er, is not con­trastive.

A short series of stød/non-stød min­i­mal pairs given by Kiparsky (2006:2) is repro­duced below. (Note: The tran­scrip­tion used by Kiparsky has been mod­i­fied to match the stan­dard Livo­ni­an orthog­ra­phy. As is cus­tom­ary in Livo­ni­an lin­guis­tic schol­ar­ship, stød is marked with an apos­tro­phe in the syl­la­ble where it occurs.) For more in depth infor­ma­tion on and exper­i­men­ta­tion relat­ing to stød, see the Lehis­te et al. 2008 monog­ra­phy “Livo­ni­an prosody” and Vihman’s 1971 exper­i­men­tal study of stød in Dan­ish and Livo­ni­an.

Stød minimal pairs (Kiparsky 2006:2)

Nouns

Livo­ni­an, just as its Finnic rel­a­tives, does not dis­tin­guish gram­mat­i­cal gen­der for nouns or pro­nouns. This means that unlike in many Indo-Euro­pean lan­guages, there are no affix­es or oth­er spe­cial words (such as arti­cles) asso­ci­at­ed with Livo­ni­an nouns, which specif­i­cal­ly indi­cate the gen­der of the ref­er­ent. There­fore, words like stu­dent ‘stu­dent’, līvli ‘a Livo­ni­an per­son’, and lețli ‘a Lat­vian per­son’ can refer to either a male or female indi­vid­u­al. How­ev­er, there are, of course, plen­ty of nouns in Livo­ni­an, which inher­ent­ly dis­tin­guish gen­der just by the virtue of the infor­ma­tion with­in the word itself, for exam­ple, nai ‘wom­an; wife’ vs. mīez ‘man; hus­band’, kēņig ‘king’ vs. kēņig­jemānd ‘queen’; kanā ‘hen’ vs. kik ‘roost­er’; etc.

Livo­ni­an is typ­i­cal of oth­er Finnic lan­guages in that it has a large num­ber of noun cas­es. Com­pared to the case sys­tems of its close rel­a­tives among the Finnic lan­guages, the Livo­ni­an case sys­tem appears some­what reduced. In her arti­cle, “Latviešu un lībiešu val­o­das savs­tarpējā ietek­me” (Mutu­al Influ­ence between Lat­vian and Livo­ni­an), lin­guist Mar­ta Rudzīte (1994) large­ly attrib­ut­es this sim­pli­fi­ca­tion to the influ­ence of Lat­vian on Livo­ni­an. This is espe­cial­ly notice­able in the sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of loca­tive expres­sions, as well as, the com­bi­na­tion of the once inde­pen­dent transla­tive and comi­ta­tive cas­es into a sin­gle case, the instru­men­tal.

Viit­so & Ernštre­its (2012:393–4) give as many as 17 noun cas­es for Livo­ni­an. 8–9 of the­se cas­es can be formed con­sis­tent­ly for most nouns (nom­i­na­tive, gen­i­tive, par­ti­tive, dative, instru­men­tal, transla­tive (often grouped togeth­er with the instru­men­tal as a sin­gle case), illa­tive, ines­sive, ela­tive) and 3 fur­ther cas­es (abla­tive, adessive, alla­tive) are formed for some place names (e.g., (adessive) Lețmōl ‘in Latvia’, (alla­tive) Ēstimōld ‘from Esto­nia’) or found in oth­er loca­tive expres­sions. The remain­ing cas­es (instruc­tive, abessive, lative, essive, exes­sive) are not formed for nouns in gen­er­al and exist in a lim­it­ed range of words and frozen expres­sions. Instruc­tive, lative, essive, and exes­sive forms func­tion as adverbs. A com­mon­ly cit­ed exam­ple of the instruc­tive case is jāl­giņ ‘by foot’ (< jāl­ga ‘foot; leg’). Tak­ing all of this into account, one can there­fore say that typ­i­cal­ly there are 8–9 or occa­sion­al­ly as many as 11–12 cas­es for nouns in Livo­ni­an. The tables below shows two exam­ples of declined nouns.

līvli ‘a Livonian person’

ve’ž ‘water’

Sin­gu­lar case forms (with the excep­tion of the par­ti­tive and illa­tive sin­gu­lars) and the nom­i­na­tive and gen­i­tive plu­ral forms (which are iden­ti­cal to each oth­er) are formed by attach­ing a case end­ing to the gen­i­tive sin­gu­lar case form. The par­ti­tive and illa­tive sin­gu­lar, while show­ing a mul­ti­tude of dif­fer­ent pat­terns with­in each case itself, are not reg­u­lar in the sense that they are not formed by attach­ing an end­ing to a par­tic­u­lar noun root. The end­ings given for the­se two cas­es in the table below are those typ­i­cal­ly seen at the end of par­ti­tive and illa­tive sin­gu­lar nouns, but are not to be under­stood as end­ings attached to the same gen­i­tive root as is done for oth­er sin­gu­lar noun cas­es. The table below is repro­duced from Viit­so & Ernštre­its 2012:393–4 with the table labels trans­lat­ed by me from Lat­vian. Viit­so & Ernštre­its note that the sounds given in paren­the­ses (e.g., õ in forms such as ines­sive -s(õ), z in illa­tive -õ(z)) were pro­nounced based on a vari­ety of cri­te­ria includ­ing sen­tence posi­tion and pre­ced­ing sound, but were more like­ly to be pro­nounced in the east­ern Livo­ni­an dialect area in the region between Kuoštrõg (Košrags) and Vaid (Vaide), which was char­ac­ter­ized by more con­ser­vatism in its mor­phol­o­gy.

Livonian Noun Case Endings (Viitso & Ernštreits 2012:393–4)

Due to the large vari­a­tion in case end­ings and also vari­a­tion with­in par­tic­u­lar cas­es, such as the afore­men­tioned par­ti­tive, Livo­ni­an nouns are grouped into sev­er­al hun­dred declen­sion types. Each type describes the exact way in which nouns in that group are declined for all cas­es and each group is assigned a unique numer­i­cal index, which appears in dic­tio­nar­ies alongside each noun. The same method is used for describ­ing the sim­i­lar­ly com­plex declen­sion sys­tems of Esto­ni­an (e.g., Saag­pakk 2000) and Võro (South Esto­ni­an) (e.g., Faster 2014). The most com­pre­hen­sive and exten­sive descrip­tion of Livo­ni­an declen­sion types can be found Viit­so & Ernštre­its 2012 as well as in the dictionary’s online ver­sion.

Livonian Noun Case Functions

Pro­nouns and Ques­tion Words

Livo­ni­an pro­nouns are declined accord­ing to case. The table below shows the declined forms of the Livo­ni­an per­son­al pro­nouns. Note that the nom­i­na­tive sin­gu­lar pro­nouns have a long form (minā, sinā, tämā) and a short form (ma, sa, ta). The plu­ral form of the pronoun/determiner se ‘it, this, that’ (and its declined forms) is ne (and its declined forms). No gen­der dis­tinc­tion exists for third per­son pro­nouns. There­fore, the sin­gu­lar forms (tämā, ta) are equiv­a­lent to either ‘she’ or ‘he’ in Livo­ni­an. Sim­i­lar­ly, the plu­ral form (ne) is also equal­ly applic­a­ble to groups of third per­son ref­er­ents regard­less of their gen­der. The infor­ma­tion in the table is drawn from Viit­so & Ernštre­its 2012, Boiko 2000, and Ket­tunen 1938 (to check the ines­sive forms).

Livonian Pronouns

Ques­tion words are also declined accord­ing to case. In Livo­ni­an, as in oth­er Finnic lan­guages, there are two series of ques­tion words dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed by ani­ma­cy. Ques­tion words derived from kis are used for liv­ing beings and those derived from mis are used for inan­i­mate objects. This is rough­ly the same as the dis­tinc­tion in Eng­lish between who and what. The forms in the table below are tak­en from Viit­so & Ernštre­its 2012 and Vääri 1994:274 (the forms kīngazõ, mis­sõz). The ines­sive plu­ral form kīenši was not explic­it­ly given in either source and just inter­pret­ed by me to be the cor­rect form based on the forms in the declen­sion type table in Viit­so & Ernštre­its 2012. There are no plu­ral forms for mis.

Livonian Question Words

Verbs

Livo­ni­an has two tens­es (past, present) and five moods (indica­tive, con­di­tion­al, imper­a­tive, quo­ta­tive, jus­sive). In addi­tion, there also exist a num­ber of com­pound tens­es. Livo­ni­an lacks a mor­pho­log­i­cal future tense. Instead, the present tense and the future tense verb līdõ ‘to be (in the future)’ are used when speak­ing about future events. The table below sum­ma­rizes the end­ings of Livo­ni­an verbs across mood, tense, and per­son and is repro­duced from Viit­so & Ernštre­its 2012:396 (with its labels trans­lat­ed from Lat­vian into Eng­lish by me). Much as nouns are grouped into declen­sion types, which iden­ti­fy the exact way in which a par­tic­u­lar group of nouns is declined, verbs are grouped into con­ju­ga­tion types iden­ti­fy­ing the exact way in which par­tic­u­lar groups of verbs are con­ju­gat­ed. In Livo­ni­an dic­tio­nar­ies, con­ju­ga­tion types are given as a numer­i­cal index with each verb entry.

Livonian Verb Endings by Mood, Tense, and Person (Viitso & Ernštreits 2012:396)

As in the oth­er Finnic lan­guages, verbs in Livo­ni­an are negat­ed using a spe­cial neg­a­tive verb used in con­junc­tion with a root form of the lex­i­cal verb. The Livo­ni­an neg­a­tive verb is con­ju­gat­ed for tense and per­son. The tables below shows the affir­ma­tive and neg­a­tive forms of lǟ’dõ ‘to go’ and lu’ggõ ‘to read’ in the present and past tense.

lǟ’dõ ‘to go’

lu’ggõ ‘to read’

In addi­tion, the fol­low­ing table shows the affir­ma­tive and neg­a­tive forms of the verb vȱl­da ‘to be’ in the present and past tense as well as the present per­fect tense. This is not an exhaus­tive list of forms for vȱl­da (or for lǟ’dõ or lu’ggõ shown above). The present tense affir­ma­tive and neg­a­tive forms of līdõ ‘to be (in the future)’ are also shown below.

vȱlda ‘to be’

līdõ ‘to be (in the future)’

The table below (repro­duced from Viit­so & Ernštre­its 2012:396–7 with the orig­i­nal Lat­vian labels trans­lat­ed by me) sum­ma­rizes the end­ings of non-finite verb forms in Livo­ni­an.

Livonian Non-Finite Verb Forms (Viitso & Ernštreits 2012:396–7)

Adpo­si­tions

There are both post­po­si­tions and prepo­si­tions in Livo­ni­an. Many loca­tive post­po­si­tions have three forms cor­re­spond­ing to the three-way dis­tinc­tion (towards/in/from) present in the loca­tive noun cas­es. For exam­ple, alā ‘down­ward’, allõ ‘under’, aldõst ‘from under­neath’. Post­po­si­tions such as the­se can also func­tion as adverbs lend­ing a per­fec­tive mean­ing to the verbs they occur with and also col­or­ing their mean­ing. (e.g., pān­da ‘to put’ vs. alā pān­da ‘to put under­neath’; kēratõ ‘to write’ vs. alā kēratõ ‘to sign’; etc.) Some exam­ples of post­po­si­tions include allõ ‘under’ (tam allõ ‘under the oak tree’), jūs ‘by at’ (umbli­jiz jūs ‘by/at the seam­stress’), pǟl ‘on’ (vie’d pǟl ‘on the water’), sizāl ‘inside’ (kougõl sizāl ‘inside the bread mix­ing bowl’), sōņõ ‘until, up to’ (mie’r sōņõ ‘up to the sea’). An exam­ple of a prepo­si­tion is i’ļ ‘about’ (i’ļ sīe ‘about it’). All of the post­po­si­tions and the prepo­si­tion in the­se exam­ples take nouns in the gen­i­tive case. How­ev­er, there are oth­er adpo­si­tions, which take nouns in oth­er cas­es.

Ref­er­ences

Balodis, Uld­is. 2008. Acoustic cor­re­lates of stress in Livo­ni­an. MA The­sis, Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, San­ta Bar­bara.

Balodis, Uld­is, Karl Pajusalu, Pire Teras. 2016. “Bro­ken Tone in South Esto­ni­an Dialects in Latvia.” Lin­guis­ti­ca Let­ti­ca, 24:98–114.

Boiko, Ker­sti. 2000. Līvõ kēļ. Rīga: Līvõd Īt.

Damberg, Pētõr. 1935. Jemakīel lugdõbrān­tõz skūol ja kuod pierast. Helsinki: Suo­ma­laisen Kir­jal­lisu­u­den Seu­ran Kir­japain­on OY.

Ernštre­its, Valts. 1995. Lībiešu-latviešu val­o­das vārd­nī­ca. Unpub­lished man­u­script.

Faster, Mariko. 2014. Eesti-võro sõnaraa­mat. Võru, Esto­nia: Võro Insti­tu­ut.

Ket­tunen, Lau­ri. 1925. Unter­suchung über die livis­che Sprache, Phonetis­che Einführung, Sprach­proben. Tar­tu, Esto­nia: E. K. Ü. “Pos­time­he” trükk.

Ket­tunen, Lau­ri. 1938. Livis­ches Wörter­buch mit gram­ma­tis­cher Ein­leitung. Helsinki: Suo­ma­lais-Ugri­lainen Seu­ra.

Kiparsky, Paul. 2006. Livo­ni­an Stød. Unpub­lished man­u­script.

Lehis­te, Ilse. 1960. Seg­men­tal and Syl­lab­ic Quan­ti­ty in Esto­ni­an. In Amer­i­can Stud­ies in Ural­ic Lin­guis­tics, ed. Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty Com­mit­tee on Ural­ic Stud­ies. Bloom­ing­ton, Indi­ana: Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty Press.

Posti, Lau­ri. 1942. Grundzüge der livis­chen Laut­geschichte. Helsinki: Der finnis­chen Lit­er­aturge­sellschaft.

Rudzīte, Mar­ta. 1994. “Latviešu un lībiešu val­o­das savs­tarpējā ietek­me.” In Lībieši, ed. Ker­sti Boiko. Rīga: Zināt­ne.

Saag­pakk, Paul Fri­idrih. 2000. Eesti-inglise sõnaraa­mat. Tallinn: Kolib­ri.

Šuvcāne, Val­da. 1999. Lat­vian-Livo­ni­an-Eng­lish Phrase Book. Rīga: Līvõd Īt.

Thom­sen, Vilh. 1890. Beröringer mellem de finske og de baltiske (litauisk-let­tiske) Sprog, En sproghis­torisk Under­søgelse. Copen­hagen: Bian­co Lunos Kgl. Hof-Bogtrykkeri (F. Drey­er).

Tuisk, Tuuli. 2016. “Main Fea­tures of the Livo­ni­an Sound Sys­tem and Pro­nun­ci­a­tion.” ESUKA – JEFUL 2016, 7–1: 121–143.

Vääri, Eduard (Eduards Vēri). 1994. “Īss lībiešu val­o­das aprak­sts.” In Lībieši, ed. Ker­sti Boiko, arti­cle trans­lat­ed into Lat­vian by Ker­sti Boiko and Sar­mīte Lagzdiņa. Rīga: Zināt­ne.

Vih­man, Mar­i­lyn. 1971. Livo­ni­an Phonol­o­gy, with and Appen­dix on Stød in Dan­ish and Livo­ni­an. Ph.D. Dis­ser­ta­tion, Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley.

Viit­so, Tiit-Rein and Valts Ernštre­its. 2012. Līvõkīel-ēstikīel-lețkīel sõnārōn­tõz. Tar­tu: Tar­tu Ülikool.

Wiik, Kale­vi. 1989. Liiv­in katko. Turku: Turun Yliopis­to.

Win­kler, Eber­hard. 1997. Krewinis­ch, zur Erschließung ein­er aus­gestor­be­nen ost­seefinis­chen Sprach­form. Wies­baden: Har­ras­sow­itz Ver­lag.