Dr Laimute Balode: Street-Names and Place-Names of Latvia

Dr Laimute Balode delivered two lectures in November 2008, on the topic of 'Street-Names and Place-Names of Latvia'

Event details

Lecture 1

Lecture title: Street-Names of Riga (Latvia) in Historical and Multicultural Context

Date: 6 November 2008, 5:15pm

Venue: Conference Room, 27 George Square, Edinburgh

Lecture 2

Lecture title: Place-Names in Latvia: An Overview

Date: 7 November 2008, 5:15pm

Venue: Conference Room, 27 George Square, Edinburgh

Lecture abstracts

Lecture 1

The lecture deals with the street-names of the capital of Latvia - Riga (founded in 1201), which always has been a multinational and multicultural city. Urbanonyms reflect all the multicultural contexts of the centuries.

Some street names survived from the 13-14th century until our days. But the majority of the street-names were renamed several times over as they were a weapon of the ruling ideology. Some streets were renamed six, seven or even eight times.

With the wave of awakening (in 1987) the first historical names were returned to many streets and squares in the center of Riga. Urbanonyms have been pressed by changing history most of all.

Lecture 2

The seminar gives a brief overview of the toponyms (mostly hydronyms) of Latvia - one of the Baltic States - from the etymological and derivational point of view. There are several layers of toponyms: ancient place-names of Baltic origin, borrowings from Finno-Ugric languages (Livonian, Estonian), from German, Slavonic languages (Russian, Belarusian, Polish) etc. There are a lot of so-called hybrid toponyms as well. The main derivational types of Latvian hydronyms are mentioned also.