# Lithuanian language - one of the oldest in Europe



## Fingerprint69

I have seen a discusions about my native language and many myths was mentioned. [inappropriate link removed]

Example, lithuanians can easly understand the oldlest text of Lithuanian language wich was published 500 years ago. And, I would like to know, what about other languages? Example, can french people understand them language as it was in 10-15th. centuries? What about English? Spanish?


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## origumi

What's "old language"?

500 years are not impressing. Arabs can fluently read 1500 years old texts. Hebrews can read 2500 years old texts.


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## Kartof

I know Spanish is readily understandable to modern speakers from at least the time of the conquistadors to the present. Comparatively, English speakers need to get slightly used to the early modern English of Shakespeare, for example, though it's still understandable.


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## fdb

The  word "old" is meaningless in historical linguistics.


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## Radioh

What is the right word then, fdb ? Ancient ? I'm no linguistic, just curious.
Vietnamese language before the 20th century is a completely different language from the current one. At the present, few people can read and understand it(I can't).


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## AndrasBP

Apparently Icelanders can read and understand their 800-year-old sagas, which are texts written in Old Norse (_senovės skandinav__ų kalba_ in Lithuanian).


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## ger4

fdb said:


> The  word "old" is meaningless in historical linguistics.


In this context, I guess, 'old' simply means 'conservative'. Some languages are definitely more conservative than others (I'm not a linguist, though). Compare Old (or Middle?) English 'Thou hast' (=you have, singular meaning only) to modern English 'You have' and then to Modern Standard German 'Du hast' (same meaning as 'thou hast'). Standard German has kept some forms and words (and distinctions) that English has lost, so you might call German an 'older' language than English. Likewise, Icelandic seems to have kept many old Germanic forms that German has lost... As for written languages, I've heard that Chinese has kept some very old characters (those that have survived the spelling reforms), but the pronunciation of modern Mandarin has changed completely. If that's true, I guess, written Chinese is 'old' while modern Mandarin Chinese is, well, 'not old'...


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## fdb

origumi said:


> Arabs can fluently read 1500 years old texts.



Yes, but that is because they learn Classical Arabic in school.



origumi said:


> Hebrews can read 2500 years old texts.



Yes, but for 2000 of those years Hebrew was not a spoken language, but only a written one. It was revived as a spoken language within the last 100 years or so.


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## ger4

Fingerprint69 said:


> I have seen a discusions about my native language and many myths was mentioned. If you would like to know more about one of the oldest language in Europe, check this article > bit.ly/1pmJPpO
> 
> Example, lithuanians can easly understand the oldlest text of Lithuanian language wich was published 500 years ago. And, I would like to know, what about other languages? Example, can french people understand them language as it was in 10-15th. centuries? What about English? Spanish?



I have heard Lithuanian being described as a very 'old' language as well - 'old' of course meaning conservative, i.e. the language hasn't moved away as much from old Sanskrit as many other Indo-European languages have - check out the so-called Swadesh Lists on wiktionary.org. Those are lists of roughly 200 very basic words in hundreds of different languages. Compare the Lithuanian list to the Sanskrit list and you'll see there are still much more similarities between modern Lithuanian and Sanskrit than, say, between English and Sanskrit.

I guess, linguists would point out that Lithuanian is old/conservative not just in terms of vocabulary, but also when you compare grammar structures, for instance.

You might be right, then.


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## ahvalj

The most infantile in this discourse is the permanent comparison of Lithuanian with Sanskrit. 150 years ago some quasi-educated Lithuanian national revivalists saw a comparative IE grammar, understood nothing there but the fact that some Lithuanian words resemble some Sanskrit words in the Latin transcription, and laid this to the base of the Lithuanian national pride. Lithuanian is the most conservative IE language, that's true. But Lithuanian does resemble Sanskrit as it does resemble any other IE language — besides the _o_>_a_ and the Lithuanian _š_ vs. the Sanskrit _ś_ in the place of the IE *_k'_, as well as some grammatical forms, there is very little that links Lithuanian specifically to Sanskrit. Lithuanian is a language of its own, with its own features, conservative and derived, as are Sanskrit, Latin, English or Afrikaans (well, with less conservatism in the latter two), and it doesn't need this infantile (I repeat) substantiation by comparisons with Sanskrit.


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## ger4

Apparently you do agree, though, that Lithuanian is much more conservative than other IE languages. That's precisely what Fingerprint69 meant, I take it.


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## fdb

Icelandic is arguably just as conservative as Lithuanian.

Modern Greek still has three genders, four cases, inflected forms for active and passive voice, distinction of imperfect, aorist and perfect tenses. That is what I would call conservative.


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## bazq

Holger2014 said:


> Apparently you do agree, though, that Lithuanian is much more conservative than other IE languages. That's precisely what Fingerprint69 meant, I take it.



The fact is true, though it seems that Fingerprint69 (great nick btw ) refered to ortographic comprehension. Ortographics is vastly more conservative than the actual spoken language, so obviously reading older texts is far easier than "conversing with/understanding" a speaker of an older stage of the language. Sadly my knowledge of Lithuanian is almost non-existant, just wanted to point this out.


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## ahvalj

fdb said:


> Icelandic is arguably just as conservative as Lithuanian.
> 
> Modern Greek still has three genders, four cases, inflected forms for active and passive voice, distinction of imperfect, aorist and perfect tenses. That is what I would call conservative.


Icelandic is considerably more advanced. Lithuanian is even more conservative than the language of the earliest Runic inscriptions (acute/circumflex opposition in stressed syllables and dialectally in all long syllables, free and mobile accent, no systematic vowel reduction, seven cases with mostly ancient endings; the verb is restructured but the participles are old; free word order, ancient syntactic patterns etc.).

The Perfect in modern Greek is new. Lithuanian preserves 7 cases of IE 8/9. In non-final syllables it distinguishes between all post-IE vowels but _a/o_. The stress is more archaic (see above). The consonantism is generally more archaic than in modern Greek (no spirantization etc.). All in all, I would compare the advancement level of modern Lithuanian to Koine Greek: some moments were better preserved in Koine, some are in modern Lithuanian.


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## ger4

I would like to add this example often referred to in order to point out that Lithuanian is a very conservative language (of course, it doesn't prove anything linguistically):

Sanskrit: Devas adadat datas; Devas dat dhanas.
Latin: Deus dedit dentes; Deus dabit panem.
Lithuanian: Dievas dave dantis; Dievas dos duonos.
English: God gave (us) teeth; God will give (us) bread.

(I'll edit this later as I am not sure about the spelling)


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## ahvalj

An exercise from a linguistic competition for schoolchildren from the 80's (http://www.nordic-land.com/topic/91).

The contestants are given a list of words in Sanskrit and modern Russian. They task is to analyze the phonetic and grammatical correspondences and to translate into Russian the following (modified) Sanskrit text: 

_Dame vidhavā jīvati. Damas navas asti. Dame agnis asti: vidhavā damam tāpayati. Catvāras sūnavas na santi dame, avikās pāsanti prastāre. Navā snuşā na budhyate: supyate. Vidhavā etām snuşām bodhayati: “Paca mānsam!” iti. Snuşā havate: “Devaras, bharata avikām!” iti. “Katarām?” iti. “Tām tanukām, devaras” iti. Trayas devaras jīvām avikām bharanti. Avikā ravati. Devaras etām avikām mārayanti. Snuşā meşam darati, mānsam pacati, dhūme vartayati. Vidhavā sūnum havate: “Vaha madhu!” iti nodayati. Sūnus ravati: “Nūnam, mātar!” iti. Sūnus madhu vahati. Vidhavā sūnum sādayati, snuşā devaram pāyayati. Nūnam catvāras adakās sīdanti, mānsam adanti, madhu giranti. “Madhu-pītis jīvayati, mātar!” iti ravanti.

_The resulting Russian text, consisting of word-by-word correspondences with Sanskrit (except _iti_ for the indirect speech):_

В доме вдова живёт. Дом новый есть. В доме огонь есть: вдова дом топит. Четверо сыновей не суть в доме, овец пасут на просторе. Новая сноха не бдит: спит. Вдова эту сноху будит: «пеки мясо!». Сноха зовёт: «девери, берите овцу». «Которую?». «Ту, тонкую, девери». Трое деверей живую овцу берут. Овца ревёт. Девери эту овцу морят. Сноха мех дерёт, мясо печёт, в дыме вертит. Вдова сына зовёт: «вези мёд!» нудит. Сын ревёт: «ныне, мать!». Сын мёд везёт. Вдова сына садит, сноха деверя поит. Ныне четверо едоков сидят, мясо едят, мёд жрут. «Медо-питие живит, мать!» ревут._


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## ger4

It would be interesting to list some of the Sanskrit words here with their equivalents in both Russian and Lithuanian. I speak neither of the two languages properly so someone else might help..

One thing that striked me here were some similarities between Sanskrit and Russian where Lithuanian seems to have gone its own way:
- t in 3rd person singular verbs
- Sanskrit santi / Russian sut' (not used in everyday language very often, I think) / Lithuanian yra
- Sanskrit dame / Russian (v) dome / Lithuanian name (has there been a consonant shift here from d to n?)

On the other hand, Lithuanian masculine nouns still end in -s in the nominative singular.

I would like to add a question: What is your opinion about Swadesh Lists? Are they helpful or do you think they are too superficial to compare languages? They might have the disadvantage of not showing declensions and conjugations, for instance.


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## fdb

ahvalj said:


> They task is to analyze the phonetic and grammatical correspondences and to translate into Russian the following (modified) Sanskrit text:



I like “modified”. This “text” is not real Sanskrit. It has been cobbled together from Sanskrit words that have been selected because they have fairly obvious Russian cognates. If you took a real Old Indian text you would not be able to recognise the Russian equivalents of most of the words. 

Secondly, real Sanskrit has something called saṁdhi: you cannot simply string words together, you have to obey certain phonological rules. So, for example, masculine thematic nouns in the nominative singular do not actually end in –s, but in –a, -o, -aḥ etc., depending on what (if anything) comes after it. The nominative singular in –as is a hypothetical reconstruction, not real Sanskrit. 

Thirdly, Sanskrit is a very old Indo-European language, but it is not necessarily the “oldest” or “most conservative” one. The vowel system in Greek is more archaic than that in Sanskrit. Hittite is considered to be more archaic than Sanskrit in many regards. If you want to argue for the greater “conservatism” of Russian or Lithuanian you cannot compare these just with Sanskrit; you have to compare with all the IE languages.

Fourthly, Balto-Slavic shares some innovations with Indo-Iranian, and there are a fair number of Old Iranian loanwords in Balto-Slavic (famously the word for “god”, Iranian bāga-). These cannot be adduced to prove the “conservatism” of Lithuanian or Russian.

Try this with Russian or Lithuanian school children:

aghnimīḷe purohitaṃ yajñasya devaṃ ṛtvījam | 
hotāraṃ ratnadhātamam || 
aghniḥ pūrvebhirṛṣibhirīḍyo nūtanairuta | 
sa devāneha vakṣati || 
aghninā rayimaśnavat poṣameva dive-dive | 
yaśasaṃ vīravattamam || 
aghne yaṃ yajñamadhvaraṃ viśvataḥ paribhūrasi | 
sa iddeveṣu ghachati ||


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## ahvalj

I didn't mean to emphasize a peculiar similarity of a certain language (Russian in the case of this example) to Sanskrit: the idea was that it is in principle possible to compile more or less plausible texts from related words for many given pairs of related languages and, if the morphology is relatively similar, the texts may be made even somewhat more complicated as we see in the above example.


Holger2014 said:


> One thing that striked me here were some similarities between Sanskrit and Russian where Lithuanian seems to have gone its own way:
> - t in 3rd person singular verbs
> - Sanskrit santi / Russian sut' (not used in everyday language very often, I think) / Lithuanian yra
> - Sanskrit dame / Russian (v) dome / Lithuanian name (has there been a consonant shift here from d to n?)
> 
> On the other hand, Lithuanian masculine nouns still end in -s in the nominative singular.


The Baltic languages lack the Pl. 3 altogether, and this remains so far unexplained. This may represent an archaism (not shared by any other attested IE branch) so that the -_nt_- forms still haven't been used in this role and remained purely participial (-_r_- in the Perfect was lost together with the Perfect itself), or a generalization of thematic forms (if -_nt_- originally characterized the athematic conjugation), or a merger of -_o_ and -_ont_ in the thematic type subsequently expanded to the athematic one (less probable because modern Lithuanian has adverbial participles on -_nt_), or something else. Nobody knows.

-_ti_ was present in Lithuanian athematic verbs but is absent from the thematic type. One of the explanations is that Baltic and Greek preserve the original state of affairs when -_t_- characterized only what became later the athematic conjugation, whereas the future thematic type was somehow related to the future Perfect and had a zero ending, -_e_ in Greek (>-_e+i_ in the attested Greek; the same ending as in the Perfect) and -_o_ in Baltic (>-_a_; the same ending as in the _t_-less secondary Mediopassive). In Slavic, as well, not everything is so clear: -_t_- is absent in the Sg. 3 since the first records in a half of dialects, and e. g. in the ancient North-Western East Slavic the -_etь_ and -_e_ forms of the same verb appear to be functionally separated: -_etь_ in the main clauses and -_e_ in some kinds of dependent ones, resembling the usage of the Vedic Injunctive; in modern dialects the distribution may be different (e. g. literary Ukrainian and Belarusian have -_e_ but -_it'_ and -_et's'a_). The Slavic situation is explainable from the opposition of primary/secondary endings (-_eti_/-_et_), but the latter ending may go back to the original _t_-less form as well.

The Baltic _namas/nams_ is usually explained as a result of sonorant assimilation.


Holger2014 said:


> I would like to add a question: What is your opinion about Swadesh Lists? Are they helpful or do you think they are too superficial to compare languages? They might have the disadvantage of not showing declensions and conjugations, for instance.


I have no considered opinion on this. Russians have a saying _"the average temperature across the hospital"_ and this is applicable to all such extrapolations that presume a stable rate of changes regardless of any circumstances, but on the other hand they are the only tools we possess. So…


fdb said:


> I like “modified”. This “text” is not real Sanskrit.[...]


I agree with all this, I just wanted to provide a counterexample to the old good _Devas adadat datas; Devas dat dhanas_ (without sandhi as well)_. _These kinds of texts are just funny baubles to illustrate the lexical (first of all) similarity. There exists even a reconstructed text in the highly hypothetical Nostratic language of about 10–12 millennia ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostratic_languages#Sample_text


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## ger4

bazq said:


> The fact is true, though it seems that Fingerprint69 (great nick btw ) refered to ortographic comprehension. Ortographics is vastly more conservative than the actual spoken language, so obviously reading older texts is far easier than "conversing with/understanding" a speaker of an older stage of the language. Sadly my knowledge of Lithuanian is almost non-existant, just wanted to point this out.



For anyone interested in the Lithuanian language, the University of Texas (www.utexas.edu) has a website describing several old and modern Indo-European languages, amongst others Lithuanian and Latvian. The lessons 1 - 5 cover some of the basics of modern Lithuanian, while in lesson 7 there is an excerpt of a Lithuanian text written by an author and translator called Jonas Bretkunas (1536-1602). Comparing the vocabulary and orthography in lesson 7  to the lessons covering modern Lithuanian can provide some answers to the issues discussed here.

Another website providing information in English about the development of the Lithuanian language is this one: www.postilla.mch.mii.lt/kalba/baltai.en . For audio lessons not teaching the grammar but some basic expressions, I found www.50languages.org very helpful.

Despite all of that, I admit I still don't speak Lithuanian...


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