The Baltic languages are a subbranch of the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. Baltic languages are spoken mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. The group is usually divided into two sub-groups: Western Baltic, containing only extinct languages, and Eastern Baltic, containing both extinct and the two living languages in the group: Lithuanian (including both Standard Lithuanian and Samogitian) and Latvian (including both literary Latvian and Latgalian). The range of Eastern Balts reached to the Ural mountains.^[1][2][3] While related, the Lithuanian, the Latvian, and particularly the Old Prussian vocabularies differ substantially from one another and are not mutually intelligible. The now-extinct Old Prussian language has been considered the most archaic of the Baltic languages.^[4]

Branches[link]

The Baltic languages are generally thought to form a single family with two branches, Eastern and Western.

Western Baltic languages †[link]

• (Western) Galindian †
• Old Prussian †
• Sudovian (Yotvingian) †
• Skalvian (see Skalvians) †

Eastern Baltic languages[link]

• Latvian (~2–2.5 million speakers, whereof ~1.39 million native speakers, 0.5–1 million ethnic Russian speakers, 0.15 million others)
  • Latgalian (150 thousand speakers; usually considered a dialect of Latvian)
  • New Curonian (nearly extinct; often considered a separate language, but mutually intelligible to Latvian)
• Lithuanian (~3.9 million speakers)
  • Samogitian (~0.5 million speakers; usually considered a dialect of Lithuanian)
• Selonian †
• Semigallian †
• Old Curonian (sometimes considered Western Baltic)
• (Eastern) Galindian (the language of the Eastern Galindians, also known as Russian: Голядь Golyad') †

(†—Extinct language)

Geographic distribution[link]

Distribution of the Baltic languages in the Baltic (simplified).

Speakers of modern Baltic languages ^[5] are generally concentrated within the borders of Lithuania and Latvia, and in emigrant communities in the United States, Canada, Australia and states of the former Soviet Union. Historically the languages were spoken over a larger area: West to the mouth of the Vistula river in present-day Poland, at least as far East as the Dniepr river in present-day Belarus, perhaps even to Moscow, perhaps as far south as Kiev. Key evidence of Baltic language presence in these regions is found in hydronyms (names of bodies of water) in the regions that are characteristically Baltic. Use of hydronyms is generally accepted to determine the extent of these cultures' influence, but not the date of such influence. Historical expansion of the usage of Slavic languages in the South and East, and Germanic languages in the West reduced the geographic distribution of Baltic languages to a fraction of the area which they had formerly covered.

Prehistory and history[link]

Although the various Baltic tribes were mentioned by ancient historians as early as 98 B.C., the first attestation of a Baltic language was in about 1350, with the creation of the Elbing Prussian Vocabulary, a German to Prussian translation dictionary. It is also believed that Baltic languages are among the most archaic of the remaining Indo-European languages, despite their late attestation. Lithuanian was first attested in a hymnal translation in 1545; the first printed book in Lithuanian, a Catechism by Martynas Mažvydas was published in 1547 in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). Latvian appeared in a hymnal in 1530 and in a printed Catechism in 1585. One reason for the late attestation is that the Baltic peoples resisted Christianization longer than any other Europeans, which delayed the introduction of writing and isolated their languages from outside influence.

With the establishment of a German state in Prussia, and the eradication or flight of much of the Baltic Prussian population in the 13th century, the remaining Prussians began to be assimilated, and by the end of the 17th century, the Prussian language had become extinct.

During the years of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795), official documents were written in Polish, Ruthenian and Latin, with Lithuanian being mostly an oral language, with small quantities of written documents.

After the Partitions of Poland, most of the Baltic lands were under the rule of the Russian Empire, where the native languages were sometimes prohibited from being written down, or used publicly.

Relationship with other Indo-European languages[link]

The Baltic languages are of particular interest to linguists because they retain many archaic features, which are believed to have been present in the early stages of the Proto-Indo-European language.^[6]

Linguists have had a hard time establishing the precise relationship of the Baltic languages to other languages in the Indo-European family.^[7] Several of the extinct Baltic languages have a limited or nonexistent written record, their existence being known only from the records of ancient historians and personal or place names. All of the languages in the Baltic group (including the living ones) were first written down relatively late in their probable existence as distinct languages. These two factors combined with others have obscured the history of the Baltic languages, leading to a number of theories regarding their position in the Indo-European family. They show the closest relationship with the Slavic languages, and have, by most scholars, been reconstructed to a common Proto-Balto-Slavic stage, during which Common Balto-Slavic lexical, phonological, morphological and accentological isoglosses are thought to have developed.^[8][9] There is a minority of scholars who argue that Baltic forms a separate branch of Indo-European,^[10] or that it is not a genetic node in either Indo-European family or Balto-Slavic, but that Eastern and Western Baltic are separate branches of Balto-Slavic.^[11][12]

See also[link]

• Historical linguistics
• Language families and languages
• Baltic peoples
• Balto-Slavic languages
• Dacian-Baltic connection

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Ernst Fraenkel (1950) Die baltischen Sprachen, Carl Winter, Heidelberg, 1950
• Joseph Pashka (1950) Proto Baltic and Baltic languages
• Lituanus Linguistics Index (1955–2004) provides a number of articles on modern and archaic Baltic languages
• Mallory, J. P. (1991) In Search of the Indo-Europeans: language, archaeology and myth. New York: Thames and Hudson ISBN 0-500-27616-1
• Algirdas Girininkas (1994) "The monuments of the Stone Age in the historical Baltic region", in: Baltų archeologija, N.1, 1994 (English summary, p. 22). ISSN 1392-0189
• Algirdas Girininkas (1994) "Origin of the Baltic culture. Summary", in: Baltų kultūros ištakos, Vilnius: "Savastis" ISBN 9986-420-00-8"; p. 259
• Edmund Remys (2007) "General distinguishing features of various Indo-European languages and their relationship to Lithuanian", in: Indogermanische Forschungen; Vol. 112. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter

External links[link]

• Ethnologue Report on Baltic languages
• Baltic Online from the University of Texas at Austin

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. Tagged since August 2011. It has been nominated to be checked for its neutrality. Tagged since February 2009.

Lauris Reiniks
Background information
Birth name	Lauris Reiniks
Born	(1979-07-11) July 11, 1979 (age 32) Dobele, Latvia
Origin	Riga, Latvia
Genres	Pop, pop-rock
Occupations	Singer, songwriter, actor, TV Host
Years active	1998–present
Labels	MicRec (2008–present) MicRec PM(2005–2008) Platforma Records (2002–2005)
Website	laurisreiniks.com

Lauris Reiniks (born on July 11, 1979 in Dobele, Latvia) is a Latvian pop music singer, songwriter, television host and actor. Lauris was educated at the Jelgava Music college in Latvia and the University of Latvia, but acting skills have been honed in Los Angeles, California. He has released 7 solo albums. As a composer and recording artist Lauris Reiniks has received more than 20 National awards and has gained international recognition. The remarkable number of views of his music videos on YouTube has unofficially made him a "King of YouTube" in Latvia.^{[citation needed]} Lately Lauris Reiniks is considered as the Baltic artist.^{[citation needed]}

Early years[link]

Lauris was born in the Latvian town of Dobele, grew up in a musical family in Tērvete. Lauris' first appearance on television was at the age of five, singing in a show called Neighbors Meet. As a kid and teenager, Lauris was a soloist in a pop-rock group called “AURI” formed by his father. Together with this band Lauris gained his first stage experience; participating in different children music festivals, contests and other musical activities.

The Reiniks family (mother Dace, father Arturs, sister Ruta) used to be one of the most active singing families in the country. They regularly appeared on a broadcast called "Spiets" (The Swarm) and toured around Latvia with concerts.

In 1998 Latvian Television noticed the young and attractive Lauris and offered him to host a new musical TV show called "Nošu Spēles" (Games of Music Notes).

The show brought Lauris together with the popular Latvian composer Raimonds Pauls who invited Lauris to participate in several his music projects and record songs. This collaboration lasted for one year when Lauris realized he can write his own music and be an independent artist.

The management company Aktiv Music approached Lauris Reiniks in 2000 and offered him a record deal with Platforma Records company. That was a moment when Lauris stepped into the big scene of Latvian pop music and started his way to success and fame.

Music career highlights[link]

This section is in a list format that may be better presented using prose. You can help by converting this section to prose, if appropriate. Editing help is available. (August 2011)

Lauris Reiniks' most popular and renowned songs are "Sirds Sadeg Neparasti", "Es Neesmu Neprātīgs", "Tik Balti", "Es Tev Apmulsis", "Tev Šodien Vienalga", "Es Esmu Tev Dzīslās" in a duet with his sister Rūta, "Pasakā" in a duet with Aisha and his 2010 Baltic smash hit "Es skrienu" (I'm running). Most of his Latvian songs are written in collaboration with Mārtiņš Freimanis who wrote lyrics to Lauris's music.

• Twice Lauris Reiniks has been a winner of the annual Universality Prize, which is offered by AKKA/LAA the Latvian copyright agency for those songs that have been played most often on the radio and television in Latvia. "Tell Me" (2004) in a duet with Marija Naumova and "Sirds Sadeg Neparasti" (2007) song that had received all major music awards in Latvia already in 2003.
• He has been a voice of Coca-Cola commercial in Latvia.
• The 2003 album Lidot savādāk (To Fly Differently) certified Gold.
• In 2005 the Latvian edition of BBC popmusic magazine Top Of The Pops awarded Lauris with a title of "Latvian National Megastar 2004".
• In 2005 Lauris Reiniks releases a song "And You Came" in a duet with Estonian singer Maarja which becomes a hit both in Latvia and Estonia.
• In 2009 marketing and public relations specialists from 7guru.lv who presented a list of Latvia’s seven most successful pop musicians ranked Lauris second, right after the band Brainstorm.
• His latest 2010 studio album Es skrienu was awarded the "Best Pop Album" at Latvian Music Awards 2010. The title song "Es skrienu" from the same album was officially the best selling song of 2010 on doremi.lv – the biggest mp3 shop in Latvia.
• In 2010 Lauris Reiniks's song, video "Es skrienu" very fast becomes a national blockbuster. "Es skrienu" song has been recorded and released also in 6 more languages – Estonian ("Ma jooksen"), Lithuanian ("Aš bėgu"), Russian ("Я бегу"), Italian ("Correrò da te"), German ("Ich Renne") and English ("I Will Run"), hitting the radio charts and dance clubs in all three Baltic States – Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. The German version "Ich renne" has been included in several compilations in Germany, released by EMI Germany.
• With a music video for "Es skrienu" song Lauris has set the Baltic record as the first Baltic artist who has reached over 1 million views on YouTube in a very short period of time. That happened with a Lithuanian version called "Aš bėgu".
• In 2011 Lauris Reiniks' song "Aš bėgu" wins "Song Of The Year" award in Lithuania on TV3 Lithuania show "Vaikų Balsas 2011".
• On June 1, 2011 Lauris Reiniks releases his first album in Lithuania called "Aš bėgu". The album is Lithuanian adaptation of Lauris's award winning Latvian album "Es skrienu", featuring tracks in Lithuanian from the original Latvian album as well as previously unpublished English versions of Lauris's most popular Latvian songs.
• In July, 2011 Lauris Reiniks releases his first album in Estonia called "Ma jooksen". The album is Estonian adaptation of Lauris's award winning Latvian album "Es skrienu", featuring tracks in Estonian from the original Latvian album as well as previously unpublished English versions of Lauris's most popular Latvian songs.
• September 2011, Lauris Reiniks "Es skrienu" album certifies Gold in Latvia.
• February 2012, Lauris Reiniks wins " Radio Hit Of The Year" award with a song "Es skrienu" at Latvian Music Awards 2011.

Television[link]

Ever since 1998 Lauris Reiniks has been hosting several TV shows for Latvian Television LTV, TV3 Latvia (Viasat) and LNT Television. Lauris has done several National TV commercials and print ads. In 2010 Lauris gets his first National TV award "Zelta Vilnis 2009" (Golden Wave) in a nomination "TV Personality Of The Year".

Lauris Reiniks has be a host of following TV shows and projects:

• 1998–2003: "Nošu spēles" LTV
• 1998–2001: Internation children music festival "Saules zaķis" LTV
• 2000 : Eurovision Song Contest 2000 host and spokesperson from Latvia. LTV
• 2000: VIII Latvian school and youth song and dance festival LTV
• 2000: "Rīga 800"; LTV
• 2001–2005: "Kam gaišāka galva?" LTV
• 2002–2003: "Troksnis" LTV
• 2003: "SeMS" LTV 7
• 2004: "Junior Eurovision Latvia 2004" LTV; co-hosted by Rūta Reinika.
• 2005: IX Latvian school and youth song and dance festival LTV
• 2005: "SeMS " LTV 7
• 2007: "Dziedi ar zvaigzni" (Sing With a Star) TV3 Latvia, co-hosted by Iveta Feldmane.
• 2008: "Koru kari" " (Clash of the Choirs). TV3 Latvia
• 2009: "Muzikālā banka 2008" (Latvian Radio 2 Music Awards) LTV
• 2009: "Latvijas zelta talanti 2009" (Latvia’s Golden Talents) LNT
• 2009–2010: "Latvijas ģimeņu dziedāšanas svētki" (Latvia’s Singing Families) LNT
• 2012: "Pelnrušķīte" (Cinderella) LNT

Dancing With The Stars[link]

On April 8, 2007 live on TV3 Latvia Lauris Reiniks becomes the first season winner of Latvian "Dancing with the Stars" (Dejo ar Zvaigzni). He was partnered by a professional ballroom dancer and many time Latin dance champion – Aleksandra Kurusova. In the spring of 2008, an ABC Television affiliate in California, USA presented a story about Lauris as a successful pop musician and winner of the Latvian version of "Dancing with the Stars".

4 years later (2011) Lauris Reiniks is invited to participate in the same kind of show in Lithuania -"Šok su manimi" (Dance with me) on TV3 Lithuania. After 3 episodes, Lauris and his partner Aleksandra gave their place to the eliminated couple and withdrew from the show.

Acting[link]

Lauris Reiniks's acting credits include a role of Rolf in a musical The Sound Of Music in 2004/2005 and Olympus in a musical "Autoplanet" in 2005. In May, 2007 Lauris Reiniks starts working on a motion picture "Dancis pa trim" (Three to Dance) produced by "Kaupo" film studio. He is playing Edvards, a Latvian soldier during the latter stages of World War II. The movie comes out on big screens in 2011. In 2010 Lauris Reiniks is playing one of the leading roles in the world famous play "Ladies Night" (Kailie Brieži) produced by Domino Teatras and staged at National Theater in Riga. The show is still on-going.

Eurovision Song Contest / Eirodziesma[link]

• 2001 – Lauris Reiniks in a duet with Linda Leen finishes 2nd at Latvian National selection with a song "I Wish I Knew".
• 2002 – Lauris Reiniks finishes 5th at Latvian National selection Eirodziesma 2002 with a song "My Memory Tape".
• 2003 – along with Mārtiņš Freimanis and Yana Kay a trio F.L.Y. has been created specially for Eurovision Song Contest Latvian selection. With a song "Hello From Mars" they won the National preliminaries and represented Latvia at Eurovision Song Contest 2003 taking place in Riga. The song finished 24th.^[1]
• 2009 – Lauris Reiniks's song "I wish I could pretend" performed by Kristina Zaharova finishes 2nd in Irish Eurovision Finals "Eurosong 2009".
• 2010 – Lauris Reiniks' song "Your Morning Lullaby" gets into the finals of Latvian Eurovision National preliminaries "Eirodziesma 2010" finishing 4th.
• 2011 – Lauris Reiniks finishes 2nd at Latvian Eurovision National preliminaries "Eirodziesma 2011" with his song "Banjo Laura". The Spanish version "La chica del Banjo" of the song is being released a month later.

Discography[link]

• Planet 42 (2002)
• Lidot savādāk (2003)
• Tik balti (2003)
• Never Look Back (with F.L.Y.) (2003)
• Debesskrāpju spīts (2005)
• Nakts veikalā (2007)
• Es skrienu (2010)
• Aš bėgu (2011)
• Ma jooksen (2011)

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Lauris Reiniks

• Official website
• Lauris Reiniks on Facebook
• Lauris Reiniks on Twitter
• Lauris Reiniks's channel on YouTube
• Lauris Reiniks on Myspace
• Lauris Reiniks at the Internet Movie Database

Hans Uszkoreit is a German computational linguist.

Hans Uszkoreit studied Linguistics and Computer Science at the Technical University of Berlin and the University of Texas at Austin. While he was studying in Austin, he also worked as a research associate in a large machine translation project at the Linguistics Research Center. Furthermore, after he received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Texas, he worked as a computer scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Center and, what is more, he was affiliated with the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University.

Nowadays, he is teaching as a professor of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University. Moreover, he serves as a Scientific Director at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) where he heads the DFKI Language Technology Lab.

Life[link]

Hans Uszkoreit was born in Rostock, East Germany on January 23, 1950. At present, he has his residence in Saarbrücken and Berlin. He studied Linguistics and Computer Science at Technical University of Berlin and in the University of Texas, Austin. Uszkoreit covered the field in Computational Linguistics, Informatics, Information Science. He has worked for the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and Saarland University.

Work[link]

Hans Uszkoreit, by the year 1988, was given a position at the University of Saarland, to work in the field of Computational Linguistics. He created the Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics. In 1989 he was elected head of the Language Technology Lab at DFKI. Uszkoreit has also co-found and has work as main enquirer of the Special Collaborative Research Division (SFB 378) “Resource-Adaptive Cognitive Processes” and as the Euopean Postgraduate Program Language Technology and Cognitive Systems’s co-founder and professor too. He is a member of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics and of the European Academy of Sciences and the Past President of the European Association for Logic, Language and Information, and a fellow of the Board of Directors of the European Network of Language and Speech, but also of the European Language Resources Association.^[1]

Uszkoreit regularly acts as external scholar and these are four lectures he has given in 2007:

• Panel moderation: "The Prospects of MT Today" MT Summit, 14 September Copenhagen, 2007
• "Emerging Mechanisms for Personal and Collective Decision Making", International Conference "Digitalized Globe 2017" of the Allianz AG, Munich, 11 September 2007.
• Keynote lecture: "Methods and Applications for Relation Detection" Third IEEE International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Engineering, Beijing, 31 September 2007.
• "Events, Opinions, Connections - Identifying Complex Relations in Large Volumes of Text", empolis exchange conference, Berlin, 23 November 2007.^[2]

Selected major publications[link]

Books and special issues of journals[link]

• Uszkoreit, H. (1987): Word Order and Constituent Structure in German, CSLI Lecture Notes 8, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University, 1987, Stanford, California.
• Uszkoreit, H. (1995) (Ed.) Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Cambridge/Mass., Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco.
• Cole R.A., J. Mariani, H. Uszkoreit, A. Zaenen, V. Zue (Eds.) (1997) Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology, Cambridge University Press and Giardini.
• Uszkoreit, H., Th. Brants & B. Krenn (1999) (Eds.) Linguistically Interpreted Corpora, Proceedings of the Workshop LINC 99 at the Ninth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics, Bergen, 1999.
• Oepen, S., D. Flickinger, J. Tsujii, and H. Uszkoreit. (2002). Collaborative Language Engineering. A Case Study in Efficient Grammar-based Processing. CSLI Publications, Stanford.

Journal articles and chapters in books[link]

• Kirkpatrick, C. and H. Uszkoreit (1982), "On the Category of English Predicative Constructions" In: TEXAS LINGUISTICS FORUM 21, 1982
• Uszkoreit, H. (1986): "Linear Precedence in Discontinous Constituents." In: Syntax and Semantics 20, Academic Press, 1986
• Bouma, G., E. König and H. Uszkoreit (1988). A flexible graph-unification formalism and its application to naturallanguage processing, IBM Journal of Research and Development, 32, 170-184
• Uszkoreit, H. (1990): La grammaire d'unification catégorielle. In P. Miller und T. Torris (Hrsg.), Formalismes syntaxiques pour le traitement automatique du langage naturel, (S. 183-205). Paris: Hermes. (revised translation of.:Uszkoreit, Hans "Categorial Unification Grammars" In: Proceedings of COLING 1986, August 1986, Bonn.)
• Uszkoreit, H. and Annie Zaenen (1997): Grammar Formalisms. In: R. A. Cole et al. (Eds..), Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology, Cambridge University Press and Giardini

Contributions in proceedings of refereed conferences[link]

• Karttunen, L., R. Root, R. and H. Uszkoreit, (1981) Morphological Analysis of Finnish by Computer. Proceedings of the 71st Annual Meeting of the SASS. Albuquerque, New Mexico
• Uszkoreit, H. (1986): "Categorial Unification Grammars" In: Proceedings of COLING 1986, August 1986, Bonn
• Uszkoreit, H. (1991): “Strategies for Adding Control Information to Declarative Grammars.” In: Proceedings of the 1991 Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics, June 1991, Berkeley, California
• Uszkoreit, H. (2002) New Chances for Deep Linguistic Processing, In: Proceedings of COLING 2002, Taipei
• Xu, F., H. Uszkoreit and H. Li (2006) Automatic Event and Relation Detection with Seeds of Varying Complexity, In: Proceedings of the AAAI 2006 Workshop Event Extraction and Synthesis, Boston, July, 2006
• Xu, F., H. Uszkoreit and H. Li (2007) A Seed-Driven Bottom-up Machine Learning Framework for Extracting Relations of Various Complexity, In: Proceedings of Annual Meeting-Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2007), Prague, 2007

Articles in encyclopedic works[link]

• Uszkoreit, H. (1990): 16 Einträge für den Bereich der Unifikationsgrammatiken, In: H. Bußmann (Hrsg.) Lexikon der Sprachwissenschaft. Stuttgart: Kröner. [in der englischen Übersetzung als H. Bußmann, Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics, Routledge, London and New York, 1996]
• Uszkoreit, H. (1996): Hauptartikel Grammatikmodelle, sowie mehrere Lang-und Kurzartikel zum Themenbereich Grammatiktheorie. In G. Strube (Ed.) Wörterbuch der Kognitionswissenschaft. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 1996

Awards[link]

• 1977-78 Fulbright Grant for studies at the University of Texas
• 1978-79 Fulbright Grant for studies at the University of Texas
• 1986 IBM Research Fellowship at IBM Germany in Stuttgart
• 2002 Elected Member of the European Academy of Sciences

See also[link]

• Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Technical University of Berlin
• University of Texas at Austin
• Saarland University
• DFKI

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• German research Center for Artificial Intelligence. Language Technology Lab.Retrieved: 18 May 2009. From: http://dfki.de/lt/lt-general.php
• Saarland University. Computer science. Retrieved 18, May 2009 from: http://frweb.cs.uni-sb.de/
• Hans Uszkoreit. Personal page. Retrieved 18, May 2009 from: http://hans.uszkoreit.net/
• Hans Uszkoreit. Retrieved 18, May 2009 from: http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~hansu/

External links[link]

• Videolectures.net. Getting at the semantics of texts by Hans Uszkoreit. Retrieved 18, May 2009 from: http://videolectures.net/estc08_uszkoreit_gst/
• Videolectures.net. Potential and limitations of minimally supervised botstrapping by Hans Uszkoreit. Retrieved 18, May 2009 from: http://videolectures.net/solomon_uszkoreit_pal/