Fennell Trevor G., Gelsen Henry. A Grammar of Modern Latvian. Volume 3

De Gruyter Mouton, 1980. — xii, 919-1370 p. — (Slavistic Printings and Reprintings 304/3).The number of works on modern Latvian grammar available to English speaking students is very small. Even if one were to add to this the works which have appeared in French, German and Russian, the total is still far from large. If one further considers only those to have appeared since 1945, since earlier works are now largely out of date as a result of revisions to the orthography and quite considerable changes in lexicon, then to the best of our knowledge there are in existence only three grammars for the foreign student, one each in English, Russian and German.1 There are, of course, works in Latvian, but these, by definition, can be of little help to the English-speaking student. On the historical side, much work has been done by Latvian and foreign investigators, but the relevance of this to synchronic description is limited. The present work .was envisaged in an attempt to fill the need for a comprehensive synchronic description, which as far as possible would leave aside questions of historical evolution. We believe that such a description can serve a dual purpose, and the aim of this work is thus two-fold. We are concerned with the description per se, which we trust will be of interest not only to linguists in the Baltic and Slavic fields, but also to a wider spectrum of investigators within the Indo-European framework, for which the significance of the Baltic languages needs no exposition here. On the other hand, such a description is of obvious practical significance to those who merely wish to learn the language or to elucidate problems in a language they already possess.