Latvian is the only Baltic language that presents a suppletive variation between a positive and a comparative: adverb daũdz ‘much’ / vaĩrs or vaĩrâk ‘more’. The question arises whether this composite paradigm is an innovative feature of the Latvian language or could be traced back to Proto-Baltic, and any answer to this question is strongly dependent on how we explain the origin of the Latvian comparative vaĩrs, vaĩrâk. The aim of this paper is to propose a new etymology for vaĩrs and to shed some light on the prehistory of this suppletive variation that appears to be unique in the Baltic languages.

Latvian is the only Baltic language that presents a suppletive variation between a positive and a comparative: adverb daũdz ‘much’ / vaĩrs or vaĩrâk ‘more’. The question arises whether this composite paradigm is an innovative feature of the Latvian language or could be traced back to Proto-Baltic, and any answer to this question is strongly dependent on how we explain the origin of the Latvian comparative vaĩrs, vaĩrâk. The aim of this paper is to propose a new etymology for vaĩrs and to shed some light on the prehistory of this suppletive variation that appears to be unique in the Baltic languages.