These statements influenced the study of the Latvian language in the first written texts until the early 1980s. Another prominent linguist, Artūrs Ozols, stated that early written Latvian "is a distortion of the people's language, a grouping of the words of this language according to the model of the German language" (Ozols, 1965: 8). The delayed development of this branch of the Baltic philology might be explained by the view expressed by Jānis Endzelīns, one of the most influential and well-known Latvian linguists, that the earliest texts were "written incorrectly (by Germans!)" and that the language in the texts is "full of mistakes" (Endzelīns, 1951: 22, 20). Research on the history of written Latvian has been carried out rather fragmentary. Martin Luther's ideas on preaching in the native language became very popular here and there is written evidence of the first book in Latvian published in 1525, but it has not survived. Although the first physically available book in Latvian - Catechismvs Catholicorum - was published not in Latvia, but in Vilnius, the capital of neighbouring Catholic Lithuanian, in 1585, texts in Latvian and copies thereof were distributed in Riga much earlier. The history of written Latvian dates back to the late 16th century, when both Protestantism and Catholicism reigned.
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