Adventures in Estonian (Part Four) -- and Latvian!

I'm just back from an enjoyable 3-day trip to Riga, capital of Latvia, and largest city in the three Baltic countries. The excuse for the trip was to give a philosophy talk at the University of Latvia, but I also managed to fit in a lot of sightseeing too.

It was also interesting to compare the languages of Latvian and Estonian. They are completely unrelated to each other, but Latvian -- like Estonian -- is very distant from most other languages spoken in Europe. While wandering around Riga I saw lots of signs on windowfronts saying 'Pasta'. Also lots of pizza places, but no signs saying 'Pizza.' It turns out that the Latvian transliteration of 'pizza' is 'pica'. (This works because c is pronounced 'ts' in Latvian.) Meanwhile the pasta signs were actually post offices ('pasta' is post in Latvian)!

On the topic of transliteration, as I mentioned in a previous posting Estonian lacks various letters from its alphabet, including w, x, y, and z. Also the j is pronounced as a y. This means that one word which is particularly hard to give an Estonian version of is 'jazz'. Their solution is to write it 'dzhass.'

After my seminar last night we went out to a Chinese restaurant, reputedly the best in the whole of Estonia (not that there is a whole lot of competition). The name of the restaurant is 'Tsink Plekk Pang'. The joke is that this sounds Chinese but in fact all the words are Estonian. It means 'zinc plated bucket' in Estonian (and the light fittings inside are indeed made from zinc plated buckets with holes in the bottom of them).

arb