Old Latvian Comparative Constructions

What functioned as the primary comparative construction in seventeenth-century Latvian was a construction with the conjunction nekā ‘than’ (literally: ‘not like’), which typologically represents the so-called conjoined comparative in Stassen’s terminology (Stassen 1985). This is consistent with the state of affairs evidenced in sixteenth-century Lithuanian, where, as primary comparative constructions of inequality (COI), we find constructions with conjunctions comprising negation: neg(i), nei(gi), neng, nekaip, net, nent ‘than’ (Ostrowski 2018).