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Latvian grammar


The Latvian language is a moderately inflected language, with complex nominal and verbal morphology. Word order is relatively free, but the unmarked order is SVO. Latvian has pre-nominal adjectives and both prepositions and postpositions. There are no articles in Latvian, but definiteness can be indicated by the endings of adjectives.

Latvian has two grammatical genders (masculine and feminine) and seven cases. There are no articles in this language. Adjectives generally precede the nouns they modify, and agree in case, number, and gender. In addition, adjectives take distinct endings to indicate definite and indefinite interpretation:

For details about the nominal morphology of Latvian (inflection of nouns, pronouns, numerals, and adjectives), see Latvian declension.

Latvian has three simple tenses (present, past and future), and three compound perfect constructions: present perfect, past perfect, future perfect.

Latvian verbs are used in five moods:

The relations between tenses and moods are shown in the following table. (The table does not include quotative.)

Latvian verbs have two voices, active and passive. The passive voice is analytic, combining an auxiliary verb (tikt "become", būt "be", or more rarely, tapt "become") and the past passive participle form of the verb. Reflexive verbs are marked morphologically by the suffix -s.

Unlike, for example, Romance languages where conjugation classes are assigned based on thematic vowels (e.g., -are, -ere, -ire forming, respectively, the 1st, 2nd and 3rd conjugation in Italian) Latvian verbs are classified in conjugations regardless of whether they end in -āt, -ēt, -īt, -ot or -t. The classification depends on whether the verb stem has a thematic vowel, and if so, whether it is retained in present tense.


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