| Abstrakt: |
Rendering of foreign proper names according to the phonetic principle is an important and topical issue in Latvian. The present paper is dedicated to the rendering of Czech and Slovak proper names in Latvian in the 1920s and 1930s. Analysis is based on the data from the online database Periodika.lv, including such text genres as news, articles, sports commentaries, scientific texts, reviews and obituaries. Also Latvian Encyclopaedia (Latviešu konversācijas vārdnīca) was used as a reference material. The activities and efforts of linguists in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as new national laws and official text books of Latvian grammar created a more favourable environment for consistent rendering of proper nouns in Latvian, however, rendering principles were not yet fully implemented in practice, and analysis of Czech and Slovak proper names rendered in Latvian shows an inconsistency and a variety of the principles of rendering proper names, as well as the diversity of variants of the rendered proper nouns and rendering errors due to the impact of the intermediary language and a lack of the authors' linguistic understanding. However, the overall situation of the rendering of Czech and Slovak proper names in Latvian in this particular period can be considered as quite accurate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
