Jānis Endzelīns’ Letter of March 28, 1960
Jānis Endzelīns’ Letter of March 28, 1960

Summary/Abstract: Soon after I received my doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania in 1956 my former teacher, Prof. Antanas Salys, lamenting the lack of English language text-books for his courses, suggested that we translate Jānis Endzelīns’ Baltu valodu skaņas un formas into English. Since Lithuanian has always been easier for me than Latvian I began to translate his work from the Lithuanian translation Baltų kalbų garsai ir formos (Vilnius, 1957).1 Actually I could have translated the book from Latvian, but I would have had to spend more time on that. For the Lithuanian I merely had to put the typewriter (how archaic!) and book in front of me and type. Prof. Salys soon became too busy to help and I was fortunate enough to be able to recruit the Latvian linguist Prof. Benjamiņš Jēgers from Northern Illinois University to compare my English translation with the Latvian original. In one way or another numerous other people contributed also to the translation.

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