Department of Slavic and Baltic Studies, Finnish, Dutch and German
Section for Baltic Studies at the XIVth Congress of Balticists
Prof. Pēteris Vanags and PhD students from the Section for Baltic studies — Signe Rirdance and Everita Andronova — attended the XIVth Congress of Balticists, held October 22–25, 2025 at Vilnius University, Lithuania.
In his talk ‘Georg Mancelius’s Lettus (1638): Sources and influences‘ at the closing plenary session, Pēteris Vanags traced the main sources of the first German-Latvian dictionary, which have not been documented before, thus providing a better understanding of Mancelius’s strategies in compiling the list of German headwords in Lettus, as well as stating that two other parts — Phraseologia Lettica and the ten dialogues — are original data, although they correspond to traditions common in multilingual Europe in the 16th and 17th c.
Signe Rirdance shared her observations on the context and tendencies of a very popular genre — cookbooks. In the presentation ‘Tracing language contact and the emergence of heritage Latvian in diaspora cookbooks: A diachronic perspective’, Signe explored language contacts, language shift, and the emergence of heritage Latvian within the collection of Latvian diaspora cookbooks published in the US, the UK, and Sweden between 1948 and 2008.
Everita Andronova gave a presentation ‘Challenges and some observations about part-of-speech tagging for early Latvian texts’ addressing key issues regarding the application of the modern Latvian POS tagger on historical texts and discussing a tag-set that should be implemented to capture the language features in the 17th c. texts.
Signe and Everita had a joint presentation, ‘Towards a digital philology of Early Latvian: Observations and possibilities’, which introduced the National Graduate School in Digital Philology at SU and looked in detail at handwritten text recognition and NLP applications in a more general way. Arguing for collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches, the speakers pointed out possible directions for advancing the study of Latvian historical texts using digital methods.
Networking and receiving feedback, as well as a nicely organised cultural programme, were a great bonus. See you in 5 years in Latvia!
