Northern Lithuania in Latvian

Rendering place names (names of towns, rivers, lakes) of Lithuania in Latvian has been investigated in both theoretical and practical aspects; however, the region of Northern Lithuania was chosen for the first attempt to review the usage of place names of a narrower territory more thoroughly. The aim of the present research is to find out what are the tendencies of the usage of Northern Lithuanian place names and how Latvian readers are acquainted with these localities. Comparative and analytical descriptive methods were employed for the research. Various non-fiction texts, mostly publications issued in Latvia and Lithuania for tourists, both written in Latvian and translated into Latvian, were chosen as sources for the analysis. There are not many place names of Northern Lithuania in Latvian texts, and their diversity is small; however, publications for tourists include more diverse place names, not only those of cities, rivers, or other objects. The material was divided and discussed according to the following semantic groups: 1) names of regions; 2) names of towns and other settlements; 3) names of water bodies. The present paper discusses variations of alphabet (rendering a grapheme i marking palatalisation) and grammatical changes, e.g. many town names that are of masculine gender in Lithuanian were changed to feminine gender in Latvian. In general, place names of Northern Lithuania are usually Latvianised according to the rules. However, there appears a tendency to write a place name in brackets in Lithuanian besides names of little-known, smaller or other objects. Also, not matching provisions of dictionaries and /or incorrectly rendered place names of Northern Lithuania were found. Several such inaccuracies could be considered as mistakes of proof; however, it seems that there are more cases of neglected laws of rendering. Sometimes there are unreasoned variations of forms (names of regions Ziemeļlietuva and Ziemeļu Lietuva, Aukštaitija and Augštaitija)