I once ran an inadvertent experiment by installing Austrumi Linux, but not realizing that the default language is Latgallian. I'm fluent in Latvian, but I wondered if something had gone wrong with my brain. I could understand most of the words I was looking at, but more than half of the sentences I read were baffling.
What was the reason for that? Were you less fluent than you initially thought? Or is there something odd about the translations in that distro?
Latgalian (<- correct spelling) is a dialect spoken by maybe tens of thousands of people in the province of Latgale. I assumed that since this was a distro from Latvia, that I was looking at Latvian when I booted it up. I did not take the hint that "Austrumi" was referring to the east of Latvia, which is the province of Latgale.
I might have had a better chance understanding spoken Latgalian. Written Latvian is all phonetic, having been designed by 15th c. German clergy to teach us barbarians a proper religion without burdening us with difficult spelling rules. Written Latgalian is a retrofit.