Balts mind their language

RIGA - The Riga City Council culture, art and religious affairs committee has sent Riga mayor Janis Birks and heads of various committees a letter suggesting a Latvian translation of the term 'park and ride'.

The term would be applied to three large parking facilities the local authority is planning to build on the outskirts of the capital city in the next three years' time, the press service of the city council told Baltic News Service.

The committee has offered the Latvian term 'noliec un brauc' instead of 'park & ride' as it "describes the purpose precisely - to reduce in the central part of the city the traffic of private cars that arrive each day in Riga from its suburbs, and it is unambiguous. In other words, you park and then you ride.

The committee has urged adoption of the Latvian term to avoid "unnecessary pollution of the Latvian language and misunderstandings."

"This indeed is not a case when we should borrow and use in our documents words of a foreign language only because we are unable to find a fitting phrase in Latvian," said Helmi Stalte, chairwoman of the Riga City Council committee.

Many hours of analysis and discussion are spent on ways to protect the Latvian language from such linguistic "pollution" every year, though plenty of English-language words make it through the net. The Spice (which should properly be pronounced 'Speetzuh', not in the manner of a flavor-enhancer) shopping mall was fined recently for running an advertising campaign in which it shortened words in order to reflect its reduced sale prices. In effect, it was penalised for punning.

Linguistic precision has also been exercising minds in Estoia and Lithuania.

The office of Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves has issued a statement clarifying comments he made to BBC interviewer Tim Whewell last November but which have only just been published on the BBC's website.

According to the BBC report, when asked why he did not speak Russian, Ilves is quoted saying it would mean "accepting 50 years of Soviet brutalisation."

The report goes on to say: "When I pressed him, saying surely it would only mean being able to communicate with a large number of his fellow countrymen in their own language, he replied - as heads of state have every right to do: 'This is a real dead end, I don't want to discuss it.'"

The president's office said that Ilves can speak English, German and Spanish as well as Estonian, and is now learning French.

"President Ilves answered to a question according to the context of which occupation and its consequences should be the reason for learning a foreign language," the president's office said. "The answer to such a narrowly interpreted question inevitably carries a negation - occupation is not the reason for learning a foreign language."

Meanwhile in Lithuania people have been told by Culture Minister Jonas Jucas that they should protect their language by using Lithuanian letters in SMS text messages even though doing so could be more costly than using unmodified Latin script.