Classify Latvian conductor Normunds Šnē

[Roy]

His surname strikes me as just as unusual as his facial features.

I imagine pure ANE people looking a lot of like him. I have seen more Latvians with this phenotype but usually not as extreme.

[Arūnas]

of that stock:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksey_Pushkov

born in Beijing so basically both Chinese, eot

[hurtuv]

Yeah one reason why Latvian sounds like Finnic is that it has fixed word stress on the initial syllable, which is fairly rare in IE languages. Most of the Uralic languages of the VUR have no fixed stress, but Udmurt has fixed location on the final syllable, which makes it sound like French, and which makes it sound exotic to Finns.


https://wals.info/feature/14A

What does VUR mean? I've seen it being used a ton of times on this forum but couldn't find the meaning.

[Insuperable]

If he dyes his hair black he would look straight up Mongoloid with light eyes.

[Komintasavalta]

What does VUR mean? I've seen it being used a ton of times on this forum but couldn't find the meaning.

Volga-Ural region:

[Sandis]

His surname strikes me as just as unusual as his facial features.

I imagine pure ANE people looking a lot of like him. I have seen more Latvians with this phenotype but usually not as extreme.

This surname was found among Latvians already 150 years ago in Northern Latvia (in Straupe or Roop from Livonian), so this almost certainly is of local origin. In original writing Snee could be Scandinavian form of snow.

[Art23]

In original writing Snee could be Scandinavian form of snow.

It sounds exactly as German snow Schnee. In Scandinavian languages the word is pronounced differently, more like snjo.

[Sandis]

It sounds exactly as German snow Schnee. In Scandinavian languages the word is pronounced differently, more like snjo.

Right, many Latvians got German surnames, and in some areas those were very common, in some areas less frequent.