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Daugava (river)
The Daugava ( ), also known as the Western Dvina or the Väina River, is a large river rising in the Valdai Hills of Russia that flows through Belarus and Latvia into the Gulf of Riga of the Baltic Sea. The Daugava rises close to the source of the Volga. It is in length, of which are in Latvia and in Russia. It is a westward-flowing river, tracing out a great south-bending curve as it passes through northern Belarus. The city of Ķekava is located 6 miles south of the west bank of the river. Latvia's capital, Riga, bridges the river's estuary four times. Built on both riverbanks, the city centre is from the river's mouth and is a significant port. Etymology According to Max Vasmer's ''Etymological Dictionary'', the toponym Dvina cannot stem from a Uralic language; instead, it possibly comes from an Indo-European languages, Indo-European word which used to mean 'river' or 'stream'. The name ''Dvina'' strongly resembles ''Danube, Danuvius'' which is itself derived from the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Valdai Hills
The Valdai Hills, sometimes shortened to Valdai, are an upland region in the north-west of central European Russia running north–south, about midway between Saint Petersburg and Moscow, spanning Leningrad, Novgorod, Tver, Pskov, and Smolensk Oblasts. The Valdai Hills are a popular tourist destination, particularly for fishing. The towns of Ostashkov and Valday are also known for their historical associations. Valdaysky National Park was established in 1990 in the southern part of Novgorod Oblast to protect the landscapes of the highest part of the hills. The park includes Lake Valdayskoye and the northern section of Lake Seliger, as well as the town of Valday. Since 2004, the National Park has the status of a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. Geography and geology The hills are a northward extension of the Central Russian Upland. To the northwest stretches the Vepsian Upland. The ridge is overlain by deposited glacial materials in the form of terminal moraines and other det ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ķekava
Ķekava (historical ) is a city in Latvia, in the historical region of Vidzeme. It is on the left side of the , a tributary of the Daugava River. Ķekava serves as the center of Ķekava Municipality and Ķekava Parish. Etymology According to the version of the etymologist , "Ķekava" is a word of Baltic origin: in ancient Indo-European languages, the root "kek" means "bend, bend", and "av(e)" means "moisten, dehydrate, flow". This hydronym probably reflects the course of the : in the upper reaches it runs parallel to the Daugava, but in the middle reaches there are some sharp bends, turning towards the mouth of the Daugava. History In 1916, the First Battle of Kekava and Second Battle of Kekava were fought at Ķekava. Ķekava was a small village until 1970s (with a population of 333 in 1967). After the creation of the Ķekava kolkhoz and the construction of the poultry factory (''Ķekavas putnu fabrika''), the village's population increased. Following the Singing Re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proto-Finnic
Proto-Finnic or Proto-Baltic-Finnic is the common ancestor of the Finnic languages, which include the national languages Finnish language, Finnish and Estonian language, Estonian. Proto-Finnic is not attested in any texts, but has been linguistic reconstruction, reconstructed by linguists. Proto-Finnic is itself descended ultimately from Proto-Uralic language, Proto-Uralic. Background Three stages of Proto-Finnic are distinguished in literature. * Early Proto-Finnic, the last common ancestor of the Finnic languages and its closest external relatives — usually understood to be the Sami languages, though also the Mordvinic languages may derive from this stage (see Finno-Samic languages). This reconstruction state appears to be almost identical to Proto-Uralic. * Middle Proto-Finnic, an earlier stage in the development on Finnic, used in Kallio (2007) for the point at which the language had developed its most characteristic differences from Proto-Uralic language, Proto-Uralic (ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Finnish Language
Finnish (endonym: or ) is a Finnic languages, Finnic language of the Uralic languages, Uralic language family, spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside of Finland. Finnish is one of the two official languages of Finland, alongside Swedish language, Swedish. In Sweden, both Finnish and Meänkieli (which has significant mutual intelligibility with Finnish) are official minority languages. Kven language, Kven, which like Meänkieli is mutually intelligible with Finnish, is spoken in the Norway, Norwegian counties of Troms and Finnmark by a minority of Finnish descent. Finnish is morphological typology, typologically agglutinative language, agglutinative and uses almost exclusively Suffix, suffixal affixation. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, Numeral (linguistics), numerals and verbs are inflection, inflected depending on their role in the Sentence (linguistics), sentence. Sentences are normally formed with subject–verb–object word order, alth ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Estonian Language
Estonian ( ) is a Finnic language and the official language of Estonia. It is written in the Latin script and is the first language of the majority of the country's population; it is also an official language of the European Union. Estonian is spoken natively by about 1.1 million people: 922,000 people in Estonia and 160,000 elsewhere. Classification By Convention (norm), conventions of historical linguistics, Estonian is classified as a part of the Finnic languages, Finnic (a.k.a. Baltic Finnic) branch of the Uralic languages, Uralic (a.k.a. Uralian, or Finno-Ugric languages, Finno-Ugric) language family. Other Finnic languages include Finnish language, Finnish and several endangered languages spoken around the Baltic Sea and in northwestern Russia. Estonian is typically subclassified as a Southern Finnic language, and it is the second-most-spoken language among all the Finnic languages. Alongside Finnish, Hungarian language, Hungarian and Maltese language, Maltese, Estonian is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Livonian Language
Livonian ( or ) is a Finnic language whose native land is the Livonian Coast of the Gulf of Riga, located in the north of the Kurzeme peninsula in Latvia but also used to be spoken in the Salaca River valley. Although its last known native speaker died in 2013, a child, Kuldi Medne, born in 2020, is reported to be a native speaker of Livonian. Her parents are Livonian language revival activists Jānis Mednis and Renāte Medne. Also, there are about 40 reported L2 speakers and 210 having reported some knowledge of the language. Possibly uniquely among the Uralic languages but similarly to Latvian and Lithuanian, Livonian has been described as a pitch-accent language (or ''restricted tone language'', see below). Some ethnic Livonians are learning or have learned Livonian in an attempt to revive it, but because ethnic Livonians are a small minority, opportunities to use Livonian are limited. The Estonian newspaper erroneously announced that Viktors Bertholds, who died o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Finno-Ugric Languages
Finno-Ugric () is a traditional linguistic grouping of all languages in the Uralic language family except for the Samoyedic languages. Its once commonly accepted status as a subfamily of Uralic is based on criteria formulated in the 19th century and is criticized by contemporary linguists such as Tapani Salminen and Ante Aikio. The three most spoken Uralic languages, Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian, are all included in Finno-Ugric. The term ''Finno-Ugric'', which originally referred to the entire family, is occasionally used as a synonym for the term ''Uralic'', which includes the Samoyedic languages, as commonly happens when a language family is expanded with further discoveries. Before the 20th century, the language family might be referred to as ''Finnish'', ''Ugric'', ''Finno-Hungarian'' or with a variety of other names. The name ''Finno-Ugric'' came into general use in the late 19th or early 20th century. Status The validity of Finno-Ugric as a phylogenic grouping is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Danube
The Danube ( ; see also #Names and etymology, other names) is the List of rivers of Europe#Longest rivers, second-longest river in Europe, after the Volga in Russia. It flows through Central and Southeastern Europe, from the Black Forest south into the Black Sea. A large and historically important river, it was once a frontier of the Roman Empire. In the 21st century, it connects ten European countries, running through their territories or marking a border. Originating in Germany, the Danube flows southeast for , passing through or bordering Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, and Ukraine. Among the many List of cities and towns on the river Danube, cities on the river are four national capitals: Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, and Belgrade. Its drainage basin amounts to and extends into nine more countries. The Danube's longest headstream, the Breg (river), Breg, rises in Furtwangen im Schwarzwald, while the river carries its name from its ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indo-European Languages
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the northern Indian subcontinent, most of Europe, and the Iranian plateau with additional native branches found in regions such as Sri Lanka, the Maldives, parts of Central Asia (e.g., Tajikistan and Afghanistan), Armenia, and areas of southern India. Historically, Indo-European languages were also spoken in Anatolia. Some European languages of this family—English language, English, French language, French, Portuguese language, Portuguese, Russian language, Russian, Spanish language, Spanish, and Dutch language, Dutch—have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several continents. The Indo-European family is divided into several branches or sub-families, including Albanian language, Albanian, Armenian language, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic languages, Celtic, Germanic languages, Germanic, Hellenic languages, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian languages, Indo-Iranian, and Italic languages, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Uralic Language
The Uralic languages ( ), sometimes called the Uralian languages ( ), are spoken predominantly in Europe and North Asia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian. Other languages with speakers above 100,000 are Erzya, Moksha, Mari, Udmurt and Komi spoken in the European parts of the Russian Federation. Still smaller minority languages are Sámi languages of the northern Fennoscandia; other members of the Finnic languages, ranging from Livonian in northern Latvia to Karelian in northwesternmost Russia; the Samoyedic languages and the others of members of the Ugric languages, Mansi and Khanty spoken in Western Siberia. The name ''Uralic'' derives from the family's purported "original homeland" (''Urheimat'') hypothesized to have been somewhere in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains, and was first proposed by Julius Klaproth in ''Asia Polyglotta'' (1823). Finno-Ugric is sometimes used as a synonym for Uralic but more accu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Toponym
Toponymy, toponymics, or toponomastics is the study of ''wikt:toponym, toponyms'' (proper names of places, also known as place names and geographic names), including their origins, meanings, usage, and types. ''Toponym'' is the general term for a proper name of any geographical feature, and full scope of the term also includes proper names of all cosmographical features. In a more specific sense, the term ''toponymy'' refers to an inventory of toponyms, while the discipline researching such names is referred to as ''toponymics'' or ''toponomastics''. Toponymy is a branch of onomastics, the study of proper names of all kinds. A person who studies toponymy is called ''toponymist''. Etymology The term ''toponymy'' comes from / , 'place', and / , 'name'. The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' records ''toponymy'' (meaning "place name") first appearing in English in 1876 in the context of geographical studies. Since then, ''toponym'' has come to replace the term ''place-name'' in profe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Max Vasmer
Max Julius Friedrich Vasmer (; ; 28 February 1886 – 30 November 1962) was a Russian and German linguist. He studied problems of etymology in Indo-European, Finno-Ugric and Turkic languages and worked on the history of Slavic, Baltic, Iranian, and Finno-Ugric peoples. Biography Max Vasmer was born on 28 February 1886 to German parents in Saint Petersburg. Vasmer graduated from Saint Petersburg University in 1907 as a student of Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and Aleksey Shakhmatov. From 1907 to 1908, he studied Greek dialects and the Albanian language in Greece. He continued to study at the universities of Krakow and Vienna from 1908 to 1910. From 1910, he delivered lectures and taught at the Bestuzhev Courses in 1912. During the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922, he worked in the universities of Saratov (1917–1918) and Dorpat (1918–1921). From 1921 to 1925, he taught at the University of Leipzig, and from 1925 to 1945, he taught at the University of Berlin. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
