A popular way of naming people and places again is by combining two German words to make one. Some examples in my ancestry are Akerfelds/Ackerfeld, Grinbergs/Gruenberg, Vinakmens/Weinstein and Veisbergs/Weissberg. They are usually a combination of an adjective and a noun.
Some German colours that are used in surnames:
Rot (Red)
Gruen (Green)
Blau (Blue)
Braun (Brown) Bruns
Grau (Gray) Peleks
Weiss (White) Balts
Some German nouns that are typically found in Latvian surnames:
Berg (Hill or Mountain) Kalns
Stein (Stone) Akmens
Blume (Flower) Ziedu
Baum (Tree) Koks
Feld (Field) Lauka
Wald (Forest) Mez
Mann (Man) Virs
Some German adjectives used in Latvian surnames:
Neu (New) Jaun
Alt (Old) Vec
Gross (Big) Liel
Klein (Small) Maz
Ober (Over) Vairak
Mitten (Middle) Vidu
Rein (Straight/Right) Tiri
Frei (Free)
In the interwar period, changing to a more “Latvianized” surname was encouraged. In some cases, the German compound name was simply made to sound more Latvian, for example Grinbergs from Gruenbergs and Veisbergs for Weissberg. They literally mean green and white mountains translated from German, but do not literally translate as such from Latvian.
But sometimes, the named was “Latvianized” by literally translating the two compounded words, for example Vinakmens from Weinstein (both are Wine Stone, in Latvian and German respectively).
Family story: in Minneapolis in the 1950s was an old Latvian professor named Fedders, who lived with his daughter who spelled her name Feders. When they had immigrated together to the U.S., the immigration inspector noticed the spelling difference and suspected some chicanery. Prof Fedders did not think the inspector would understand the long-winded Germanized/Latvianized explanation (or maybe he was just having a bad day). So he said to the inspector: “male and female.” The inspector thought a moment and said “I see,” in a ponderous way. And let them pass. When he later told this story (often), Prof Fedders would always add “so I wonder: what did he see?”