# Why are Baltic languages not considered Slavic?



## CristAbe

Why are the Batic languages not considered Slave?


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## Glitz

CristAbe said:


> Why are the Batic languages not considered Slave?


 
Do you mean Slavic/Slavonic. It's simple they are not of Slavic origin, that is not belonging to the same language group as languages spoken in other surrounding countries that are Slavonic.
Take for example Romanian, it's a Romance language derived from Latin like Italian, Spanish and French so has no reason to be considered Slavic regardless of the geographical location of the country.


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## Binario

I'm no expert in any way, but I always had an idea that Latvian and Lithuanian belonged to the Slavic group. Whereas Estonian, without a doubt, belongs to the Finnish-Hungarian group. I never actually even heard the term "Baltic languages" as they belong to different lanquaqe groups anyway. Again-it's not my profession.


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## Athaulf

Binario said:


> I'm no expert in any way, but I always had an idea that Latvian and Lithuanian belonged to the Slavic group. Whereas Estonian, without a doubt, belongs to the Finnish-Hungarian group. I never actually even heard the term "Baltic languages" as they belong to different lanquaqe groups anyway. Again-it's not my profession.



Baltic languages definitely exists as a group separate from Slavic languages. They all developed from a single Proto-Baltic language, which was separate from Proto-Slavic, the common ancestor of all Slavic languages. Both of these groups are subgroups of the larger family of Indo-European languages, and therefore share some similarities, since they all ultimately developed from a common Proto-Into-European language that was spoken thousands of years ago, and which was also the ancestor of Germanic, Romance, Iranian, Celtic, and many other language groups. 

The similarities between Baltic and Slavic languages are indeed larger than between either of them and, say, Germanic languages, and this has led some linguists to hypothesize that both Proto-Baltic and Proto-Slavic developed from a common Proto-Balto-Slavic that existed a single language at some period. However, this hypothesis is controversial, and other linguists explain the Balto-Slavic similarities by intensive language contact at some point in prehistory, rather than a common Proto-Balto-Slavic language.

On a practical level, however, the difference between any given Baltic and Slavic language is immensely greater than between any two Slavic languages. Between even the most remote Slavic languages, there is always at least some fragmentary mutual intelligibility (and often much more than that), whereas the Baltic-Slavic mutual intelligibility is pretty much zero.


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## jester.

To get the idea, just look at the Lord's Prayer in Czech and Polish (both Slavic) and Lithuanian (Baltic):

Czech:



> Otče náš, jenž jsi na nebesích,posvěť se jméno tvé,přijď království tvé,buď vůle tvájako v nebi, tak i na zemi.Chléb náš vezdejší dej(ž) nám dnesa odpusť nám naše viny,jako(ž) i my odpouštíme naším viníkůma neuveď nás v pokušení,ale chraň nás od zlého.[Neboť tvé je království i moc i sláva navěky.]Amen.


Polish:





> _Ojcze nasz, któryś jest w niebie_
> (a) _święć się imię Twoje;_ (b) _przyjdź królestwo Twoje;_ (c) _bądź wola Twoja jako w niebie tak i na ziemi;_ (d) _chleba naszego powszedniego daj nam dzisiaj;_ (e) _i odpuść nam nasze winy, jako i my odpuszczamy naszym winowajcom;_ (f) _i nie wódź nas na pokuszenie;_ (g) _ale nas zbaw od złego._
> _Albowiem Twoje jest Królestwo, i moc, i chwała na wieki wieków. Amen._


And Lithuanian:



> 'Tėve mūsų, kuris esi danguje,
> teesie šventas tavo vardas,
> teateinie tavo karalystė,
> teesie tavo valia
> kaip danguje, taip ir žemėje.
> Kasdienės mūsų duonos duok mums šiandien
> ir atleisk mums mūsų kaltes,
> kaip ir mes atleidžiame savo kaltininkams.
> Ir neleisk mūsų gundyti,
> bet gelbėk mus nuo pikto'.Amen


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## Athaulf

jester. said:


> To get the idea, just look at the Lord's Prayer in Czech and Polish (both Slavic) and Lithuanian (Baltic):



That's a bit of cheating, since Czech and Polish aren't nearly the most remote pair of Slavic languages.  The greatest opposites, at least from the standardized national languages, would probably be Polish and Bulgarian. Of course, even those two are immensely more similar than either of them would be with any Baltic language. A nice overview of the Lord's Prayer across the Slavic world can be seen here (including a few fictional quasi-Slavic constructed languages):
http://www.sweb.cz/ls78/otcenas.htm


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## jester.

I thought that showing the similarities between Czech and Polish was good enough, especially since Poland is one of Lithuania's neighbouring countries. So one might think that those two countries' languages are related. Belarussian could also be used for a comparison, as Belarus is another neighbouring country of Lithuania.


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## Tolovaj_Mataj

Athaulf said:


> A nice overview of the Lord's Prayer across the Slavic world can be seen here (including a few fictional quasi-Slavic constructed languages):
> http://www.sweb.cz/ls78/otcenas.htm


Slovenian version is wrong! Somebody has copy-pasted Serbian text over there.


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## Rajki

The simplest answer to the original question is the discrepancy of the core vocabulary.
In Slavic, there is a clear core vocab of hundreds of basic words. For example, Slavic 'name': Polish imie, Bulgarian ime, etc. Baltic 'name': Latvian vards, Lithuanian vardas.
One could continue the long list of evident discrepancies ...


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## Maroseika

According to V. Toporov, Slavic languages originate from the Baltic group, first appearing at the South periphery of the latter, as one of the dialects.


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## Angelo di fuoco

jester. said:


> To get the idea, just look at the Lord's Prayer in Czech and Polish (both Slavic) and Lithuanian (Baltic):
> 
> Czech:
> 
> 
> Polish:[/I][/LIST]And Lithuanian:



As for Czech, that is, as for all I know, an archaic version of the language... and the Glagolitic Mass composed by Janacek uses a language that probably is more comprehensible to Southern or Eastern Slavs than to Czechs.

However, right are those who say that the mutual intelligibility between Slavic and Baltic languages is virtually nonexistent.


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## Christo Tamarin

CristAbe said:


> Why are the Batic languages not considered Slave?


There was a proto-Slavic language, very close to the first Slavonic texts attested, so that all Slavic languages do continue that proto-Slavic language. In other words, all descendents of that proto-Slavic language are called Slavic languages by definition. 

*Baltic languages are not descendents of that proto-Slavic language.* 

The reconstruction of that proto-Slavic language is reliable enough.

Some people believe that there was also a proto-Balto-Slavic language whose descendents are the proto-Slavic language and the Baltic languages. However, the reconstruction of the proto-Balto-Slavic language, if such existed, is very hard and unreliable.

Similarly, one may ask why Slavic languages are not considered Germanic or why Germanic languages are not considered Slavic. Actually, all these languages are considered indo-european (IE) along with many other languages.


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## Frank06

Hi,



Christo Tamarin said:


> Some people believe that there was also a proto-Balto-Slavic language whose descendents are the proto-Slavic language and the Baltic languages. However, the reconstruction of the proto-Balto-Slavic language, if such existed, is very hard and unreliable.


Contrary to what _seems_ to be the mainstream opinion, to be found here:


> Having experienced a period of common development, Baltic and Slavic languages share several linguistic traits not found in any other Indo-European branch, which points to their close genetic relationship.


Now, I am the first one to question the information found on Wikipedia, but given the fact that you sound so assured, could you please point out where exactly the mainstream reconstruction of (Proto-) Balto-Slavic fails.

Groetjes,

Frank


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## Maroseika

Frank06 said:


> Hi,
> 
> 
> Now, I am the first one to question the information found on Wikipedia, but given the fact that you sound so assured, could you please point out where exactly the mainstream reconstruction of (Proto-) Balto-Slavic fails.
> 
> Groetjes,
> 
> Frank


In particular, Toporov mentions the following problems, questioning the hypotetical Proto-Balto-Slavic language:
- absence No Proto-Slavic hydronimic areal isochronous to the Proto-Baltic one;
- absence or non-identifiability of the Proto-Slavic loans in the Proto-Valtic and v.v.;
- different attitude of the Finno-Ugric languages ot the loans from the Balcti and Proto-Slavic; 
- predominant closeness of the Slavic to the Prussian.


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## vianie

Difference between Austrian German and Icelandic (Germanic languages) is probably bigger than differenceness in any combination of two languages from "Balto - Slavic Group", but similarness neither geography are not the only relevant criterias for segmentation of particular languages.




Tolovaj_Mataj said:


> Slovenian version is wrong! Somebody has copy-pasted Serbian text over there.



There are couple of faults in Slovak version too.

Author of that site is post mortem already.


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## Söndag

jester. said:


> To get the idea, just look at the Lord's Prayer in Czech and Polish (both Slavic) and Lithuanian (Baltic):
> 
> Czech:
> 
> 
> Polish:[/I]
> [/LIST]And Lithuanian:


 

I see big diffrence between Baltic and Slavic languages. I think Baltic languages should be consideret as sepertated group.
And like some of you mentioned that Lithuania and Latvia had Slavic neighbours .Today's Belorussia is Slavic but in the far past (they were not Slavs they were Balts "Guds" (which was tottaly diffrent from today's Belorusians who are Slavs) Latvia (Lithuanian Neighbour which was under Germans control in past.(Livonia)...and other Lithuanian Neighbours today (Kaliningrad) which was (East Prussia) allmost 1000years it was German lands until 1945 when Russian occupated that territory.


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## Maroseika

Söndag said:


> I see big diffrence between Baltic and Slavic languages. I think Baltic languages should be consideret as sepertated group.


The question is not how to consider them in our epoch, but their origin: are the both groups independant descendants of some proto-language (or group), or Slavic languages have precipitated from the Baltic languages group.


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## DenisBiH

If I'm not mistaken, in his relatively recent (2008) book titled "Povijesno-poredbena gramatika hrvatskoga jezika" (Historical-comparative grammar of the Croatian Language), Ranko Matasović, a rather well-known (at least in these parts) Croat linguist, as his official stance in the book also adopts the view of Proto-Slavic being one of three nodes (in comparative sense), the other two being Eastern Baltic and Western Baltic.

This idea of proto-Slavic emerging as a sort of a koine from some fringe "Baltic" dialect may go well with the idea of the Slavs emerging historically as an ethnic/political entity on the Roman limes.


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## Orion7

Christo Tamarin said:


> There was a proto-Slavic language, very close to the first Slavonic texts attested, so that all Slavic languages do continue that proto-Slavic language. In other words, all descendents of that proto-Slavic language are called Slavic languages by definition.
> 
> *Baltic languages are not descendents of that proto-Slavic language.*
> 
> The reconstruction of that proto-Slavic language is reliable enough.



OK, the Proto-Slavic is reconstructed till some degree as we see here (I'd not call this reconstruction Proto-Slavic rather than Old-Slavic), but there's no any reconstructions further in past. E.g. let's take word _rydati_ 'to cry', from which older form it descends? Or we can take _lipa_ 'lime-tree', _rǫka_ 'hand', _ablonь_ 'apple-tree' etc, - from which older forms they directly have arisen?
So the main question is: what language is ancestor of Proto-Slavic?
Which language joins Proto-Slavic with Proto-Indo-European? As you can not derive directly _rydati_ from _*raudātavai_, even not speaking how to derive _lisa_ 'fox' from _*laupāsā_ '[animal] who steals [hens]'.


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## DenisBiH

Orion7 said:


> OK, the Proto-Slavic is reconstructed till some degree as we see here (I'd not call this reconstruction Proto-Slavic rather than Old-Slavic), but there's no any reconstructions further in past. E.g. let's take word _rydati_ 'to cry', from which older form it descends? Or we can take _lipa_ 'lime-tree', _rǫka_ 'hand', _ablonь_ 'apple-tree' etc, - from which older forms they directly have arisen?
> So the main question is: what language is ancestor of Proto-Slavic?
> Which language joins Proto-Slavic with Proto-Indo-European? As you can not derive directly _rydati_ from _*raudātavai_, even not speaking how to derive _lisa_ 'fox' from _*laupāsā_ '[animal] who steals [hens]'.



That's a very good question. 

But this is not always the case. While I've seen etymological dictionaries and books on Proto-Slavic stopping at what I guess is the form that can be deduced by only going from daughter languages (without looking at reconstructed parent languages), such as listing *_rǫka, _Matasović in his book cited above for example gives _*rankā_, which is obviously an earlier form. Although he calls this _praslavenski_ (basically, Proto-Slavic), rather than what he calls _predslavenski_ (basically, pre-Proto-Slavic, the state between Balto-Slavic and Proto-Slavic), it's obviously an early rather than late Proto-Slavic form. It's similar with other words, he lists *_lējpā_ instead of *_lipa_ etc.

This is certainly useful, and I think he does it on purpose as he stresses listing of cognate Baltic forms. I'm certainly glad, but I wonder what other linguists would have to say about that. I'd certainly like to know which other books or etymological dictionaries do this.


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## Orion7

The question about Pre-Proto-Slavic is very important directly in aspect of existing or no existing of Proto-Balto-Slavic language (which is denied by some linguists), because whenever you go from Proto-Slavic to Proto-Indo-Europen you get into Proto-Baltic (PB). From _*rǫka_ you get into _*rankā_, which is Proto-Baltic, from _lipa_ you get into _*leipā_, which again is Proto-Baltic, from _golova/glava_ you get into PB _*galvā_, and so on. So finally you have to state that Pre-Proto-Slavic = Proto-Baltic which yields in existence of Proto-Balto-Slavic (PBS) language.
The main cause which made splitting of Slavic from PBS was the enormous Iranian influence on PBS south-east tribes, which made the biggest impact on verb inflexion system, therefore it's so different from Baltic one. Some pronouns (_nas, vas_) are also loaned from Iranian (Scythian).


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## er targyn

May ruka be a baltic loan?


Orion7 said:


> Some pronouns (_nas, vas_) are also loaned from Iranian (Scythian).


Proof?


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## Söndag

Baltic languages are only considered slavic because of Soviet occupation.If you want to know Baltic languages are not slavic and end of the topic.I don't see no point that it should be considered as slavic.


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## Orion7

er targyn said:


> May ruka be a baltic loan?


_Ruka_ can not be a loan, as it observes all Slavic sound changes from [an] to  (BS _*ranka>*ronka>*rouka>*ruka_).
_Nas, vas_ are definitely loans from Iranian (cf. Sanskrit _nas, vas_ 'us, you'), as Balto-Slavic forms are _*mans, *vans_ (Latvian _mūs, jūs_, Old Latvian _muns, vuns_), which according Slavic sound changes would give Slavic _*mus, *vus_ or even _*muh, *vuh_ (cf. _teh_ 'them') and not _nas, vas_.


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## er targyn

Ruka may be a loan, but it can't be proven for sure. Nas, vas are not loans. Where did you get it?


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## Gita-Etymology

Re: vas, nas

We are talking about the accusative plural, right? 

How about Slavic 1st person acc. plural _nas_ = Latin  _ nōs_? (PIE long _ō, _ā > a, granted, just like in Indo-Iranian).

Phonetically, the only problem would be keeping the final -s from disappearing due to the law of open syllables?

Is that why it has to be Iranian influence? Why can't the Baltic form be considered an innovation?


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## Söndag

Scholars cannot agree when the forebears of Lithuanians and Latvians came into contact with the Baltic Finns, the ancestors of the present-day Finns and Estonians. Linguistic facts seem to suggest that their friendly relations back to very ancient times.

The Finnish linguist Lauri Hakulinen has estimated that Baltic loan words in Modern Standard Finnish account for 1.1 per cents, i.e. eleven words out of a thousand are of the Baltic origin. Some linguists, archaeologists in particular, maintain that the Balts and Finns became neighbours as early as the 2nd millennium BC. Others push that date forward to the very last centuries BC.

Judging from the level of civilisation reflected in the Finnish words of the Baltic origin, the Lithuanian linguist Kazimieras Buga (1879 - 1924) placed the first Finnish - Lithuanian contacts between the year 1000 and 500 BC.

Here are a few typical examples of Finnish words of Baltic origin:
Fin. ahingas harpoon, Est. ahinga cf. Lith. akstinas thorn, prick.
Fin. ansa loop, snare, Est. aas cf. Lith. asa.
Fin. hammas tooth, Est. hammas, cf. Lith. zambis wooden plough, Latv. zobs tooth.
Fin. heimo relative, relatives, Est. hoim, cf. Lith. seima, Latv. saime family.
Fin. keli road, cf. Lith. kelias.
Fin. kirves axe, Est. kirves, cf. Lith. kirvis.
Fin. morsian bride, Est. mors, cf. Lith. marti daughter-in-law.
Fin. paimen shepherd, cf. Lith. piemuo.
Fin. talkoot (collective) assistance, help, Est. talgug, cf. Lith. talka.

The semantics of Baltic loan words - the presence of terms of relationship, agriculture, animal husbandry, the absence of loan words denoting weaponry or discord - testifies to the friendly character of Baltic - Finnish relations.


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## Miacek

Christo Tamarin said:


> There was a proto-Slavic language, very close to the first Slavonic texts attested, so that all Slavic languages do continue that proto-Slavic language. In other words, all descendents of that proto-Slavic language are called Slavic languages by definition.
> 
> *Baltic languages are not descendents of that proto-Slavic language.*
> 
> The reconstruction of that proto-Slavic language is reliable enough.
> 
> Some people believe that there was also a proto-Balto-Slavic language whose descendents are the proto-Slavic language and the Baltic languages. However, the reconstruction of the proto-Balto-Slavic language, if such existed, is very hard and unreliable.
> 
> Similarly, one may ask why Slavic languages are not considered Germanic or why Germanic languages are not considered Slavic. Actually, all these languages are considered indo-european (IE) along with many other languages.



It is also interesting that Latvian seems more similar to Russian and Slavic languages than Lithuanian language does. It might be just my impression, but if there's some support for such a distinction, it would support the line of thought of Jānis Endzelīns, that the similarities between the Baltic and Slavic languages are there due to intensive language contacts. Lithuanian is after all the more archaic of the two living languages of the Baltic group and has generally received less foreign influences than Latvian.


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## Wikislav

DenisBiH said:


> If I'm not mistaken, in his relatively recent (2008) book titled "Povijesno-poredbena gramatika hrvatskoga jezika" (Historical-comparative grammar of the Croatian Language), Ranko Matasović, a rather well-known (at least in these parts) Croat linguist, as his official stance in the book also adopts the view of Proto-Slavic being one of three nodes (in comparative sense), the other two being Eastern Baltic and Western Baltic.


Some hypothetic reconstitutions of Proto-(Pre-)Slavic words offered by Matasović above are not dead, being also now in live use within *Baegnjunski* archidiom of northernmost Croatia e.g. _lejpa_ (linden), _rauka_ (arm) etc. This same mini-language includes also some hundreds of words identical or very similar to West-Baltic ones, and partly also a similar grammar especially in pronouns. One cannot list them all in this post, but I add down their main examples widely used also in Kaykavian and Chakavian. Their decreasing similarity to Baltic group is: mostly *Prusiskan*, then _Yatvingian__ (__Sudovian__), Lithuanian_, and Latvian as much different. Among Slavs, the decreasing similarity to West-Baltic is: mostly _*Baegnjunski*, Kaykavian, Chakavian, Slovenian_, Ikavian, BCS-standards, and less in others. 

The most striking West-Baltic/Kaykavian links are their same pronouns *kai,* *ikai, nikai, nekai* (what & derivates), _menei, tebei, sebei_ (me, you, him), and other identic (*also Chakavian) are: _*iz**_ (from), *na** (on), _pare*_ (vapours), _priki*_ (contrary), _sestra*_ (sister), _struja*_ (current), _winjaga_ (vine); also many similar ones: _berza/breza_ (birch), _brate/brat*_ (brother), _gara/gar*_ (heat), _galva/glava*_ (head), _kadan/kada*_ (when), _kmets/kmet_ (serf), _lazina/blazina*_ (coverlet), _leds/led*_ (ice), _lezja/lezjat*_ (recline), _medu/med*_ (honey), _mestan/mesto*_ (site), _milon/milni_ (dear), _nadele/nedela_ (Sunday), _nage/noge*_ (legs), _ponedele/ponedelek_ (Monday), _pazina/pažnja_ (watch), _pekare/pekar*_ (baker), _pimpa/pimpek_ (pizzle), _raks/rak*_ (cancer), _škadan/škodan*_ (nuisible), _twaja/tvoja*_ (yours), _warta/vrata*_ (door), _wesels/vesel*_ (merry), _wetra/vetar*_ (wind), _zeljan/zelje_ (cabbage), _zwerins/zveri_* (beasts) ...etc.


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## koniecswiata

Wikislav,
Some of the examples of similarity between Baegnjunski and Baltic are focusing on pronunciation, correct?  Because, pretty much all the other words exist in other Slavic languages also, proving that they are just as related.  Sometimes, similar pronunciation of a common root are nothing more than parallel, coincidental development (an example is the pronunciation of English "house" and German "Haus"--their similar pronunciation is a kind of coincidence only).  
Also, isn't it believed that the Slavic and Baltic languages began to diverge around 3,000 years ago?  The days of the week, for example, are largely cultural terms of the Middle Ages.  Nedela and Ponedelek are results of Christianity--they would have replaced previous terms.  Cabbage is also suspect, since it probably was not eaten by early proto-Baltic or proto-Slavic speakers since it is a vegetable of Mediterranean origin unknown in non-Mediterranean Europe over 2,000 years ago--the standard Slavic "kapusta" comes from Latin "caput" (head).


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## Wikislav

koniecswiata, 
You have probably not well understand my above post: It do not pretend at all that actual _Baegnjunski_ descended directly from Proto-Baltic even before 3 millenia, but these similarities may be much younger, because the ancestors of these _Baednjoki_ were undoubtely original Slavs and they immigrated in their actual Croatian area from north in 7th/9th century AD. Formerly, they were probably the near neighbors of Western Balts and so they inherited a considerable number of their loanwords, e.g. the most indicative pronouns _*kai*, ikai, nikai, nekai_ (what etc.) mostly lacking in other Slavs except Slovenians. The cabbage terms as _zelje, zeli_ etc. are usual and distinctive of southwestern Slavs i.e. Slovenians and Croats (including Kaykavian, Chakavian etc.), but absent eastwards in Bosnians, Serbs and most other Slavs where the modern derivatives of Slavic 'kapusta' widely prevail. E.g. in Croats _'kupus'_ occur also in parallel with a changed pejorative signification as a bad mixture or a ripped old book etc.


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## sokol

I would like to emphasise, in support of koniecswiata's post above, that many of those words are also common in other Slavic languages.

Links between Slovenian and Kajkavian on the one hand and Western Slavic languages on the other one are well-proven (in fact, the prevailing theory about migration of Slovenes to the region where they live now include an earlier wave of possibly Western Slavs which overlapped with a younger one of Southern Slavs - a hypothesis, but a well-founded one).

On the other hand, examples like "galva/glava" = head (the first one Baltic, the second one Slavic) do not really reveal a great deal about "similarity" or "non-similarity", as applied liquida metathesis (glava) is typical for all Slavic languages, while the lack of liquida metathesis (galva) is a marker of Baltic languages.

So of that list above most examples only are of interest comparing Baltic and Slavic languages in the context of their relationship in the broader Indo-European spectrum: "galva/glava" could be seen as an indicator that Slavic and Baltic languages were closer to each other than to any of the other IE languages, which is the prevailing theory, but still not an uncontested one, as the discussion in this thread (and some others here in EHl, refering to similar topics) already has shown.


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## LilianaB

Frank06 said:


> Hi,
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Now, I am the first one to question the information found on Wikipedia, but given the fact that you sound so assured, could you please point out where exactly the mainstream reconstruction of (Proto-) Balto-Slavic fails.
> 
> Groetjes,
> 
> Frank



I believe that the (Proto)-Balto-Slavic is a myth, a total absurdity, created by people who wanted to prove something against any commonsense.

What is so close between the Slavic and the Prussian? Have they seen Prussian, or at least heard it?



vianie said:


> Difference between Austrian German and Icelandic (Germanic languages) is probably bigger than differenceness in any combination of two languages from "Balto - Slavic Group", but similarness neither geography are not the only relevant criterias for segmentation of particular languages.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> .


 I doubt it. I believe that Austrian German is somehow related to Icelandic, whereas Slavic languages and Baltic languages are not genetically related at all.


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## DenisBiH

LilianaB said:


> What is so close between the Slavic and the Prussian? Have they seen Prussian, or at least heard it?



I don't think anyone has heard (Old) Prussian in quite a while, due to its unfortunate predicament of having become extinct several centuries ago.


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## LilianaB

I believe that the words similar in Slavic and Baltic languages are either loans, a result of contact of those peoples, or words derived directly from the Proto Indo-European.

This may be true, but Finno-Ugric  languages and Baltic languages are genetically not related at all.



LilianaB said:


> I believe that the (Proto)-Balto-Slavic is a  myth, a total absurdity, created by people who wanted to prove something  against any commonsense.


It is not extinct: it has partially been reconstructed. It could be heard just a few centuries ago.


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## DenisBiH

LilianaB said:


> It is not extinct: it has partially been reconstructed. It could be heard just a few centuries ago.



And the fact that it can't be heard *today *makes it rather convincingly extinct.


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## LilianaB

It depends from what point of view you look at it. It may not be extinct if you really like it and there are people who speak it, at least to some extent.


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## berndf

LilianaB said:


> It depends from what point of view you look at it.


No, it does not. The absence of native speakers makes it extinct.



LilianaB said:


> ...Slavic languages and Baltic languages are not genetically related at all.


Both are groups IE languages which makes them genetically related.



LilianaB said:


> I believe that the words similar in Slavic and  Baltic languages are either loans, a result of contact of those peoples,  or words derived directly from the Proto Indo-European.


When contradicting what is largely consensus view in historical linguistics (the existence of a Balto-Slavic group with a common proto-language) I would have expected slightly more tangible arguments than "I believe".


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## itreius

LilianaB said:


> I believe



What are your credentials?


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## LilianaB

It is not really a consensus view among linguists that there has ever been a Proto Baltic-Slavic language. There are linguists who highly deny it. You are right as to the second point, that these languages are related as members of the Indo-European group. What I had in mind was really that these languages are not more related than, for example, German and Polish. One might claim that there had been a Proto Germanic-Slavic group. Examples could be found, if one really focussed on it and studied the phonetics to prove the point.


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## DenisBiH

LilianaB said:


> It depends from what point of view you look at it. It may not be extinct if you really like it and there are people who speak it, at least to some extent.



What berndf said about it being extinct of course stands, but I feel I have to retract my earlier statements. Ok, one can probably hear Old Prussian today, from linguists and language enthusiasts. However, everything one can hear is based on extant literary evidence and later reconstructions. Hearing it offers no special additional insight that can't be had by seeing it, and while I don't know much about Old Prussian, I wonder how close such modern "reenactment" is to the original language. One can probably hear Proto-Indo-European the same way.


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## LilianaB

What I said about the extinction was just something a little bit funny, a light way to put things. I hoped it would be understood. In a way nothing is extinct if it exists. From the purely linguistic point of view, Prussian is considered extinct.

Prussian could still be heard in the XVIII c.


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## Ben Jamin

Athaulf said:


> That's a bit of cheating, since Czech and Polish aren't nearly the most remote pair of Slavic languages.


Remot from what?


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## LilianaB

Ben Jamin said:


> Remot from what?


Remote as not closely related.


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## Ben Jamin

To each other or to another language? If to another, then to which one?
Are you sure what Athaulf meant?
As far as I know Polish and Czech are closely related, as they both belong to the West Slavic Group. Languages in one group are closer related to each other than to other groups.


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## LilianaB

Ben Jamin said:


> To each other or to another language? If to another, then to which one?
> Are you sure what Athaulf meant?
> As far as I know Polish and Czech are closely related, as they both belong to the West Slavic Group. Languages in one group are closer related to each other than to other groups.


To each other. I think what he really meant was that Polish and Czech are closer related to each other than other Slavic languages. Polish and Czech are not the most remote Slavic language in relation to each other. There are some other languages which would better show the similarities or differences among Slavic languages: the contrast might be sharper.


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## Ben Jamin

LilianaB said:


> To each other. I think what he really meant was that Polish and Czech are closer related to each other than other Slavic languages. Polish and Czech are not the most remote Slavic language in relation to each other. There are some other languages which would better show the similarities or differences among Slavic languages: the contrast might be sharper.


I was actually most interested to get know what Athaulf meant from himself.


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## berndf

Ben Jamin said:


> I was actually most interested to get know what Athaulf meant from himself.


Unfortunately, Athaulf is no longer active in this forum, as a brief glance at his user profile reveals.


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## neonrider

'Tėve mūsų, kuris esi danguje,
teesie šventas tavo vardas,
teateinie tavo karalystė,
teesie tavo valia
kaip danguje, taip ir žemėje.
Kasdienės mūsų duonos duok mums šiandien
ir atleisk mums mūsų kaltes,
kaip ir mes atleidžiame savo kaltininkams.
Ir neleisk mūsų gundyti,
bet gelbėk mus nuo pikto'.Amen

Lithuanian words (above) that I suspect were loaned from Slavic and the rest are original and natural Lithuanian words:

Sventas (Rus. sviatoj, Pol. swiety), although Lat. Saint, santo
Karalyste (Rus. korolj)
Valia (Rus. volja)
Zeme (Rus. Zemlja, Pol. ziemia) - not so sure on this one


Words cognitive with English (not loan words):

Kalte (Eng. guilt; Lat. culpa)

Other Lith. words cogn. with Eng.:

AR (or)
JUS (you)
BET (but)
TILTAS (bridge), yet English "TILT" means  "slope, slant" while old bridges are usually sloped or tilted.
GRINDINYS  (pavement) reminds of English GRIND (ground) which looks like ground  stones.
GRIEBT (to grip; to grab)
GRIEZT (to grit)
GROTOS  (grid)
PERKA, PIRKT (buys; to buy) = perk = to become more interested (to  buy?)
BITE (a bee)
APSEST(AS) (obsessed)
MENUO - (moon)
AUGINT (augment, to grow, to increase) or should I say: augmenti, grauti, increasti 

Not to mention there are tons of words in Greek, Latin. French etc. similar or identical to Liuthuanian. And you call it Balto-Slavic group. They should be separate languages.

Portuguese - Lithuanian

Cadeira - kede
Madeira - mediena
Colina - kalva, kalnas

==========================

Lithuanian - Russian  

Zinoti - znati - to know
Eiti - idti - to walk,  to go
Rukyti - kuriti - to smoke
Ash - ya(sh) - I (me)
Tu - ty -  you
Mes - my - we
Stiklas - steklo - glass
Grybas - grib =  mushroom
Stoveti - stoyati - to stand
Gelezhis - zhelezo - iron
Peilis  (a knife) - pila (a saw)
Plaukti - plavati - to swim
Begti - bezhati,  begati - to run
Duoti - dati - to give
Persekioti - presledovati - to  persecute
Shokineti - skakati - to jump
Zhveris - zveri - wild ferocious  animal
Vilkas - volk - wolf
Meshka - mishka (medvedi) - a bear
Shienas  - sieno - hay
Diena - deni - a day
Naktis - nochi - a night
Vakaras -  vecher - evening
Vanduo - voda - water
Gerkle - gorlo - a throat
Stalas  - stol - a table
Ezheras - ozero - a lake
Gyventi - zhiti - to  live
Ranka - ruka - a hand
Akis - oko (glaz) - an eye
Tamsa - temnota -  darkness
Esi - jesti - is, are
Esti (like an animal) - jesti - to  eat
Bezdeti - bezdeti - to fart
Debesys - nebesa - skies, clouds
Akmuo  - kameni - a stone
Teketi - techi - to flow, run (river)
Shirdis - serdtse  - a heart
Inkaras - yakori - anchor
Zhiema - zima - winter
Sniegas -  snieg - snow
Ledas - liod = ice
and many more?

Remark: Some or all of these words could be borrowings  from either language.

=====================================================

Lithuanian - Italian, French, Latin etc.

Saule - soleil, sole, sol - sun
Tu - tu, vous - you 
Mano - mon - mine

Lit. - German

Naktis - nacht

Thus Lithuanian, imho, is a Centum-Satem language, neither one, and both, a pan-European language.


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## neonrider

CristAbe said:


> Why are the Batic languages not considered Slave?



Please indulge in this article (not mine) for answer, although I have posted more proof in my posts on WR: http://www.lituanus.org/1967/67_2_01Klimas.htm

and also:

http://www.lituanus.org/1981_1/81_1_05.htm


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## إسكندراني

I am assuming the 'baltic' group excludes Albanian, which is apparently unique?


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## berndf

إسكندراني said:


> I am assuming the 'baltic' group excludes Albanian, which is apparently unique?


I don't understand your question. Why would you think of connecting Albanian with Baltic languages in the first place? I can't think of anything.


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## berndf

neonrider said:


> Words cognitive with English (not loan words):
> 
> *Kalte (Eng. guilt; Lat. culpa)
> *
> Other Lith. words cogn. with Eng.:
> 
> AR (or)
> JUS (you)
> BET (but)
> TILTAS (bridge), yet English "TILT" means  "slope, slant" while old bridges are usually sloped or tilted.
> *GRINDINYS  (pavement) reminds of English GRIND (ground) which looks like ground  stones.*
> GRIEBT (to grip; to grab)
> GRIEZT (to grit)
> GROTOS  (grid)
> PERKA, PIRKT (buys; to buy) = perk = to become more interested (to  buy?)
> BITE (a bee)
> APSEST(AS) (obsessed)
> MENUO - (moon)
> AUGINT (augment, to grow, to increase) or should I say: augmenti, grauti, increasti


Please, don't just pile up vague similarities irrespective of whether or not they make etymological sense. English _guilt_ and Latin _culpa_ are certainly not cognate. One word "reminding" you of another doesn't make them cognate.


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## إسكندراني

berndf said:


> I don't understand your question. Why would you think of connecting Albanian with Baltic languages in the first place? I can't think of anything.


It was very late, I was very tired, and I got very confused because I thought the title was Balkan languages. Which doesn't exist as a grouping as far as I know. But now I must contribute something to make up for that.

May I ask, as someone who knows little more than that the baltic states have a language from a different group i.e. Estonian, why this grouping even exists? It seems rather peculiar.


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## berndf

إسكندراني said:


> May I ask, as someone who knows little more than that the baltic states have a language from a different group i.e. Estonian, why this grouping even exists? It seems rather peculiar.


The Baltic languages are clearly Indo-European and it is totally obvious that they don't belong to either of the other two IE language groups that are relevant in the broader area, viz. Slavic and Germanic.

These things are obvious and undisputed. What we are discussing in this thread is whether Baltic and Slavic are independent sub-groups of IE like, say, Italic and Germanic or whether, as some researchers have proposed, the commonalities between between Slavic and Baltic are significant enough to assume a common ancestral proto-language within the IE group.


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## killerbee256

I mean no offense when I say this, but I think the Lithuanian posters belief that their language is not and can not be related to Slavic languages has more to do with the cold war and their countries treatment by the soviets during that time then it does with linguistics.


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## neonrider

CristAbe said:


> Why are the Batic languages not considered Slave?



He probably meant: Are Balts slaves? Because there's a lot of this talk in the so-called West where Slav and Slave are considered the same word by some semi-literate people; almost insulting. Some people would intentionally misspell Slave instead of Slav, just to pinch.

Why would Baltic languages (Lithuwanian, Latvian) should be Slavic? They're not. Just like Hungarian, Estonian, Romanian, Suomi, Sami, Karelian languages in the region, they're not Slavic at all. They may have influence on Slavic languages or have Slavic influence on them, but not in the same group. While they have several hundred borrowed words and similarities with Slavic languages (one way or another, either they borrowed or the words were borrowed by Slavs), they also have a lot in common with Latin, Greek, Anglo-Saxon languages and languages of northern India and Iran. I just found an old English word HERK (hear me). In Lithuwanian (should be the correct spelling) that is GIRDEK, where the roots are HEAR/HER vs. GIR. Pretty close. Same situation with DRINK vs. GERK. "To drink" comes from "gert(i)" (ger+to = gert). "Slavic" -ti is also Lithuanian "t" and English "to".

In  the past and in my other posts I posted many examples like those. I believe it is incorrect to bundle Baltic languages with Slavic languages into one group. While there's nothing wrong with Slavic, and they're well respected (by me at least), but now I see all these people at StormFront etc. coming up with comments such as "Oh you Balts are slaves" etc. because they see Balto-Slavic language group. Speaking both Baltic and Slavic languages as well as many others I can see that there's equal amount of similarity between Lithuanian and other Indo-European languges, very little indeed, but equal similarity, and especially with English, Greek and Latin and with Russian etc. as well. None overwhelms the other. There is no more similarity of Lithuanian to Russian than to English or Latin if we are talking about original words and not borrowings. Anyone who could prove in one post that Baltic belongs to a Slavic group, please post your proof or your references and links here.


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## neonrider

Error post, remove pls.


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## neonrider

berndf said:


> Please, don't just pile up vague similarities irrespective of whether or not they make etymological sense. English _guilt_ and Latin _culpa_ are certainly not cognate. One word "reminding" you of another doesn't make them cognate.



I wasn't comparing Lithuanian KALTE, with Latin CULPA as much as I  was comparing Lithuanian KALTE with English GUILT, which are clearly  cognate.​


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## neonrider

These two branches of the Indo-European languages — Baltic and Slavic — initially developed separately and independently of each other, directly from Proto-Indo-European. Onomastic evidence shows that Baltic languages were once spoken in much wider territory than the one they cover today, from Berlin all the way to Moscow, and were later replaced by Germans and Slavs. Polabian language example clearly has Lithuanian/Baltic influence (see the first line of the prayer) and so does Ukrainian and Russian - Baltic influence:

http://ls78.sweb.cz/otcenas.htm


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## neonrider

CristAbe said:


> Why are the Batic languages not considered Slave?



Another example is Lord's Prayer in two Baltic languages (now extinct) Prusian and Curonian. If you find anything similar to any Slavic language, call me:

*Lord's Prayer in Old Prussian* (from the so-called "1st Catechism")
 Thawe nuson kas tu asse Andangon,Swintits wirst twais Emmens;Pergeis twais Laeims;Twais Quaits audasseisin na Semmey, key Andangon;Nusan deininan Geittin deis numons schindeinan;Bha atwerpeis numans nuson Auschautins, kay mas atwerpimay nuson Auschautenikamans;Bha ny wedais mans Enperbandan;Sclait is rankeis mans assa Wargan. Amen

*Lord's Prayer after Simon Grunau (Curonian-Latvian)*
 Nossen Thewes, cur tu es Delbes,Schwiz gesger thowes Wardes;Penag mynys thowe Mystalstibe;Toppes Pratres giriad Delbszisne, tade tymnes sennes Worsinny;Dodi momines an nosse igdenas Magse;Unde geitkas pamas numas musse Nozegun, cademas pametam nusson Pyrtainekans;No wede numus panam Padomum;Swalbadi mumes newusse Layne. Jesus. Amen.

Lithuanian: 'Tėve mūsų, kuris esi danguje,
teesie šventas tavo vardas,
teateinie tavo karalystė,
teesie tavo valia
kaip danguje, taip ir žemėje.
Kasdienės mūsų duonos duok mums šiandien
ir atleisk mums mūsų kaltes,
kaip ir mes atleidžiame savo kaltininkams.
Ir neleisk mūsų gundyti,
bet gelbėk mus nuo pikto'.Amen

ENGLISH:

Our Father, Who art in heaven,
Hallowed be Thy Name.
Thy Kingdom come.
Thy Will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven. 
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil. Amen.


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## ahvalj

neonrider said:


> In  the past and in my other posts I posted many examples like those. I believe it is incorrect to bundle Baltic languages with Slavic languages into one group. While there's nothing wrong with Slavic, and they're well respected (by me at least), but now I see all these people at StormFront etc. coming up with comments such as "Oh you Balts are slaves" etc. because they see Balto-Slavic language group. Speaking both Baltic and Slavic languages as well as many others I can see that there's equal amount of similarity between Lithuanian and other Indo-European languges, very little indeed, but equal similarity, and especially with English, Greek and Latin and with Russian etc. as well. None overwhelms the other. There is no more similarity of Lithuanian to Russian than to English or Latin if we are talking about original words and not borrowings. Anyone who could prove in one post that Baltic belongs to a Slavic group, please post your proof or your references and links here.


That is not quite true. First of all, this depends on the level of discussion. The Internet wisdom is different from that one found in the linguistic literature and is targeted at a different audience. Linguistic palaeontology distinguishes between similarities of different origin and values. Modern English has more words of Romance than of Germanic origin, but that does not make it a less Germanic language from the evolutionary viewpoint. Likewise, in the order of branching on the evolutionary tree, English and northern German dialects are noticeably closer to each other than the northern and southern German dialects, yet the latter now constitute one language clearly different from English.

The English Wikipedia has a decent article about Balto-Slavic, may be even too serious for this resource. In particular, investigations of the last decades have shown that both Baltic and Slavic had an almost identical starting point as to their accentuation system, very complicated and pretty different from those in all the other attested IE branches. A complex accentuation is the thing that is extremely difficult to learn when adult, and this is the aspect extremely unlikely to be borrowed from one language to the other. We may hypothesize, if we want, that the Genitive after negative verbs, or Instrumental after "to be", or compound definite adjectives are borrowings, or that declension similarities are shared archaisms, but the ir/ur reflexes, the Winter law, and the accentuation put Baltic and Slavic apart from any other IE branch. This simply cannot be independent. 

One thing may save the pride of Baltic patriots not wishing to have special relations to the Slavs. The history decided so that all the IE languages of the ancient Central Europe went extinct. We know about Baltic Venetians, Pannonians, Dacians, Thracians, Illyrians, but we know almost nothing about their languages. Many tribes undoubtedly disappeared with no traces in the written history. For linguistic palaeogeography it means that the links found between Baltic, Slavic, Gemanic, Albanian, Italic or Celtic may have been results of indirect contacts of, say, Balts–Venetians–Germanics or Balts–?–Slavs.


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## Dhira Simha

I would like to point out that the theory of a common `Balto-Slavonic', which was initially proposed by Schleicher, is only ONE theory out of many. The distinguished Russian linguist Trubachev http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Trubachyov listed at least 5 theories:

 1) Common Balto-Slavonic proto-language (Schleicher),
 2) Independent parallel development (Meillet),
 3) Independent development and secondary later convergence (Endselin),
 4) Ancient common stage then separation then convergence (Rozwadowski),
 5) Formation of Slavonic from peripheral dialects of Baltic (Ivanov - Toporov).

 Trubachev's  view was between 2 and 3 and I am also of the same opinion. Over several pages Trubachev meticulously demonstrated the cardinal differences between Slavonic and Baltic on all levels: lexico-semantic, phonetic (particularly, different character and course of palatalisation) but, most importantly, in morphology and particularly in the verbal system. Trubachev noted that the Baltic verbal system with one Present and one Preterite is reminiscent of Finnish rather than IE and that Slavonic verbal system could not derive from Baltic. He wrote [my translation]: 
"Those linguists who endeavoured to resolve or at least to put the question of the origin of proto-Slavonic were mostly inclined to connect this with its emergence from a Balto-Slavoinic unity dating this event at the beginning of AD or a few centuries before [...] it. Presently, there is an objective tendency to push back the dating of the history of ancient Indo-European dialects. This also applies to Slavonic as one of the Indo-European dialects. However, the question now is not that the history of Slavonic may be measured by the scale of the II to III millenniums B.C. but that we can hardly date the ‘emergence’ or ‘separation’ of pra-Slavonic or pra-Slavonic dialects from Indo-European dialects because of the proper uninterrupted Indo-European origin of Slavonic. This is in concordance with Meillet's assertion that Slavonic [and Baltic*] is an IE language of the archaic type which has not experienced any radical shake-over like, for example the Greek language [...]". (Etnogenez i kultura drevneyshikh Slavian: lingvistichesskiye issledovaniya, 1991 [Ethnogenesis and culture of the oldest Slavs: linguistic studies], pp. 19-25).

note (*) The quote of the passage to which Trubachev referred:

“[..] Baltic and Slavic show the common trait of never having undergone in the course of their development any sudden systemic upheaval. [...] there is no indication of a serious dislocation of any part of the linguistic system at any time. The sound structure has in general remained intact to the present.  [...] Baltic and Slavic are consequently  the only languages in which certain modern word-forms resemble those reconstructed for Common Indo-European.” (_The Indo-European Dialects_ [Eng. translation of  _Les dialectes indo-européens(1908)], University of Alabama Press, *1967, **pp. 59-60).*_


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## ahvalj

Trubachev belonged to that numerous kind of scientists, especially philologists, who pretend to know more than the data could allow. They waste their lives for building castles in the sky and only a minor part of their scientific heritage survives a critical review.

In particular, the "different character and course of palatalization" you have mentioned was based, if memory serves, on the single word "sьrna/stirna", which was considered by Trubachev an evidence that the Slavic palatalized IE palatovelars to ts>s and dz>z, while Baltic did so through tš>š(>s) and dž>ž(>z). No comments. 

The verbal system can change pretty seriously for a period of several centuries: e. g., most Northern Slavic languages show little evidence of the Imperfect and scarce remnants of the Aorist, which allowed people like Khaburgayev to suggest that the development of the past tenses was profoundly different in Polish/East Slavic in the one hand and South Slavic/Sorbian in the other. I don't think it is justified, but we are dealing here with pretty dramatic changes that took only several centuries. 

The situation with Baltic/Slavic is such that we cannot doubt the number of their unique shared innovations in the early period of history (due to direct contacts, or as I had mentioned, through some now extinct Central European IE branch) and somewhat parallel development in the subsequent periods. The question is when did the split happen. The latest dating is the middle of the 1st millennium BC (based, I guess, on the substantial differences of Prussian vs. East Baltic), the earliest — a couple of millennia before (i. e. the latest stages of the IE). I personally don't think there is any practical value of regarding Balto-Slavic as a group like Germanic, since these are taxa of different levels, but that Baltic and Slavic originally belonged to a single dialect continuum is reflected in their useful grouping as an informal Balto-Slavic branch. 

I suspect, if we had now living descendants of the Osco-Umbrian dialects, and those would have been able to escape the Latin influence, the divergence between Romance and modern Osco-Umbrian would have been pretty dramatic. Likewise, modern Indo-Iranian languages hardly show any signs of particular affinities. It is the archaic character of Lithuanian that makes comparisons with Slavic still possible.


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## Ben Jamin

Dhira Simha said:


> note (*) The quote of the passage to which Trubachev referred:
> 
> “[..] Baltic and Slavic show the common trait of never having undergone in the course of their development any sudden systemic upheaval. [...] there is no indication of a serious dislocation of any part of the linguistic system at any time. The sound structure has in general remained intact to the present.  [...] Baltic and Slavic are consequently  the only languages in which certain modern word-forms resemble those reconstructed for Common Indo-European.” (_The Indo-European Dialects_ [Eng. translation of  _Les dialectes indo-européens(1908)], University of Alabama Press, *1967, **pp. 59-60).*_



I saw recently some texts that claim that Baltic and Slavic languages are the only ones of IE languages that have avoided being influenced in a considerable degree by any non IE language, thus being the most direct descendants, and continuators of PIE. I don't know how plausible this claim is, but it is, at least, interesting.


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## ahvalj

Ben Jamin said:


> I saw recently some texts that claim that Baltic and Slavic languages are the only ones of IE languages that have avoided being influenced in a considerable degree by any non IE language, thus being the most direct descendants, and continuators of PIE. I don't know how plausible this claim is, but it is, at least, interesting.


That's not true, since there are clear areal features common for languages distributed to the south and east of the Baltic sea, namely Baltic, Slavic and Baltic-Finnic — such as a non-Accusative after negative verbs (Genitive in B and Sl and Partitive in BF) or a non-Nominative after "to be" (Instrumental in B and Sl and Essive and Translative in BFi), not to mention the secondary locative cases in Old Lithuanian.

Also, there is a popular mistake that the most conservative dialect is the most direct descendant of the proto-language. However, in cases when the historical development can be traced, we find various situations, including those that contradict this assumption. Say, in Italian the dialect of Rome is just an average dialect among others, with nothing especially conservative. In contrast, the Tuscan dialect, spoken by descendants of the non-IE Etruscans *is* the most conservative. In Slavic languages, dialects of the Slavic homeland — in Slovakia, southern Poland and western Ukraine have no striking signs of conservatism or more "Slavicness" comparing to any other. Almost every Slavic language preserves some features better than the others, and without direct knowledge of the OCS we would have had a hard time to decipher what exactly is archaic and what is not. It is safe to assume that the same is true for the PIE.


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## Dhira Simha

ahvalj said:


> Trubachev belonged to that numerous kind of scientists, especially philologists, who pretend to know more than the data could allow. They waste their lives for building castles in the sky and only a minor part of their scientific heritage survives a critical review.



For those who do not know whom we are talking about:

Oleg Trubachyov (October 23, 1930, Stalingrad - March 9, 2002, Moscow) - Soviet and Russian linguist, one of the leading Russian scholars in the field of the etymology of Slavonic languages ​​and Slavonic onomastics. Specialist in comparative-historical linguistics, Slavonic, lexicography, etymology, PhD. He was an academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences and served as the editor-in-chief of _Etimologiya_ yearbook.  He was engaged in the translation and editing of "Etymological dictionary of Russian language" by Max Vasmer. Editor of the multi-volume "Etymological dictionary of Slavonic languages. Proto-Slavonic lexical fund".


I am glad that I have set the discussion into a more academic course.


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## Dhira Simha

ahvalj said:


> In particular, the "different character and course of palatalization" you have mentioned was based, if memory serves, on the single word "sьrna/stirna", which was considered by Trubachev an evidence that the Slavic palatalized IE palatovelars to ts>s and dz>z, while Baltic did so through tš>š(>s) and dž>ž(>z). No comments.



You obviously over-simplify his theory.

Those who are lucky enough to read German may want to get an idea of Trubachev's approach from this article: Trubačev,     O. N.
"Die Sprachwissenschaft und die Ethnogenese der Slawen." _ZfS, _*1987*_,     32_, 911–919.

Russian texts are widely available on the web.


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## ahvalj

Dhira Simha said:


> You obviously over-simplify his theory.
> 
> Those who are lucky enough to read German may want to get an idea of Trubachev's approach from this article: Trubačev,     O. N.
> "Die Sprachwissenschaft und die Ethnogenese der Slawen." _ZfS, _*1987*_,     32_, 911–919.
> 
> Russian texts are widely available on the web.


Trubachev's opus magnum on the topic: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_7IkEzr9hyJeXkyWi1aQlNtVVk/edit?usp=sharing see pp. 21 & 31.

Looking at the working method of people like Trubachev or Vyacheslav Ivanov it is easy to notice that it is not a careful analysis of all the data according to some transparent procedures: authors of this type see no fun in the boring aspects of scientific research. What they do is closer to writing essays: "what if I am right and the things are so and so", then, the original assumption is taken as proven and new essays are being written on that basis. As a result, the final conclusions are not necessarily wrong, but they represent some chain of probabilities randomly chosen among an ocean of other, not less probable, interpretations. It strongly resembles the approach by the ancient Greek philosophers: when thousands of people generate random ideas ("Universe is fire" — "no, Universe is water"), some of these ideas casually turn out right with time, and we praise e. g. Democritus for first discovering the atomic structure. This is in striking contrast to people like Meillet and Zaliznyak who leave proven facts and widely accepted interpretations.


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## ahvalj

Just to conclude with Trubachev. The greatest problem of minor sciences is that there is very little feedback. When one is involved in some physical research, the correctness is verified by the practice: if the plane eventually flies and lands, everything is OK, otherwise... There is usually no such possibility in philology, and the only feedback here is the existence of an audience of competent and reasonable colleagues. Unfortunately, this was definitely not so with the palaeoetymological Slavic studies in Russia — there simply were not enough people to evaluate Trubachev's research. 

I spoke once with Otkupschikov about the reaction on his book about the pre-Greek substrate: he said that there was virtually no reaction, since nobody read it carefully — some people looked at the complexity of the book and decided that it must have been a serious research, the others looked at the conclusions that contradicted their own ideas and rejected the book entirely (well, if recent Carian achievements by Adiego are not another vaporware, like many others before, Otkupschikov eventually was wrong with the palaeo-Balkanic nature of the Carian language, though the book itself is just fine). 

There is a classical phrase from Solovyov's «Возмутитель спокойствия» that describes how things work in such kind of sciences: 

_«[х]отя он очень сильно подозревал Ходжу Насреддина в мошенничестве и невежестве, но подозрение не есть уверенность, можно и ошибиться; зато о своем крайнем невежестве мудрец знал точно и не осмелился спорить»._


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## Dhira Simha

ahvalj said:


> Just to conclude with Trubachev. The greatest problem of minor sciences is that there is very little feedback. When one is involved in some physical research, the correctness is verified by the practice: if the plane eventually flies and lands, everything is OK, otherwise... There is usually no such possibility in philology, and the only feedback here is the existence of an audience of competent and reasonable colleagues. Unfortunately, this was definitely not so with the palaeoetymological Slavic studies in Russia — there simply were not enough people to evaluate Trubachev's research.



Very wise words indeed, but is not it the essence of this, as you rightly said, `minor science'? “Historical linguistics often resorts to generalizations based on limited evidence, making statements that are far from obvious and often subject to discussion and various interpretations.” (Maciej Wencel. “Making Archaeology Speak - Archaeology and Linguistics”). The fundamental problem has been formulated by Pulgram as: “Now when we reconstruct, through the methods of comparative historical linguistics, an array of asterisked Proto-Indo-European forms, the procedure itself implies that the result of our endeavors is a uniform construct. We are, in fact, creating an idiolect -- not of a speaker, to be sure, but of the scholar, of the method, as it were. This procedural circumstance spares us a priori all scruples and worries over uniformity. But note that the result emanates from the method, that different procedures would deliver different results.” (Pulgram, E. “Proto-Indo-European Reality and Reconstruction”. Language, Linguistic Society of America, 1959, 35, pp. 421--426). 

Returning to the topic, many years ago I started from the concept of Balto-Slavonic but in the course of lexicographic an comparative research my views on this have changed. I can now clearly see the gap separating the two groups and quite agree with Trubachev that despite the apparent similarity there is an even larger disparity at the very fundamental lexical stratum. I can now better understand why Meillet  wrote that `The general resemblance of Baltic and Slavic is so apparent that no one challenges the notion of a period of common development. Nevertheless, upon close examination the innovations and the individual features, common  to the two groups are less probative than they appear at first" (See the ref. in my earlier post p.58).  In my opinion, Baltic and Slavonic come from separate but closely related IE dialects and I came to accept Meillet's conclusion: "  [...] Baltic and Slavic had identical points of departure and [...] they developed under the same conditions and influences. There may even been some period of common development, but, if so, neither Baltic nor Slavic, the most conservative of the Indo-European languages, produced any notable innovations in the course of it. It is sufficient to examine the verb system to see that the two developments were independent at an early date." (p. 67).


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## ahvalj

Look, that's all true, but Baltic and Slavic share at least three unique and very specific kinds of phonetic innovations I had mentioned some posts before:
(1) i/u reflexes of syllabic sonants — there are other groups with u-coloring (Germanic and some Palaeobalkanic — reflexed in Greek borrowings with yr/yl/yn/ym), with i (some cases in Celtic, though i there goes after the sonant, not before it) — but no other branch has both at the same time (and often with parallel development: when it is i in Baltic, it usually corresponds to i in Slavic);
(2) Winter law (acute lengthening of old short vowels before IE voiced/glottalized stops) — again, no group has anything comparable, plus it must have been quite old since the IE o in Baltic lengthens to o:, while a — to a:, suggesting this law operated before the merger of short o and a;
(3) the extreme similarity if not identity of the accentuation system (see Dybo) — a thing that cannot be borrowed in principle.
Points (2) and (3) were not known at the time of major Balto-Slavic discussions since they became clear only in the eighties.

This all implies that the split must have happened after the rest of the documented IE branches had diverged from the common stock, so in any case there must have been a serious period of time necessary to create the new accentuation system, with an acute/non-acute opposition, identical rules of accent placement (different at the same time from those in Indo-Iranic, Greek, pre-Werner's Germanic and pre-Dybo's Italic and Celtic) etc. I can only repeat my arguments that languages change and diverge with time and that e. g. the modern Indo-Aryan and Iranian languages have diverged for 3,5–4 millennia to such an extent that it is hard to imagine they have any special connections, yet it is often claimed that the language of older parts of Avesta can be converted into a decent Vedic by standard phonetic replacements (and vice versa).

I think the following can be considered proven:
(1) We don't know how close the ancestors of both branches were at various IE periods.
(2) After the split of IE, both branches experienced a period of common unique innovations (outlined above + many less unique).
(3) After that, they developed separately but influencing each other from time to time so they exhibit many similar (but not always identical) innovations, even at pretty late periods (e. g. yotations occurred in parallel in the 1st millenium in Slavic and in the 1st or early 2nd millennia in Baltic, the compound adjectives formed on the local material but in a fully parallel manner (including avoidance of trisyllabic endings), the aspectual opposition in verbs developed separately but in parallel (though in Slavic it went further), finally the modern Lithuanian consonantism is so astonishingly close to the modern Russian one, to the extent that the academic grammar by Ambrazas et al. (1985) wrote «Согласные фонемы ... литовского языка реализуются по существу такими же звуками, как и соответствующие фонемы русского языка, и потому они не нуждаются в подробных артикуляционных характеристиках» (p. 34)).

Practically, for the title question of this topic, it means that Baltic and Slavic do not belong to the same group of the level of Germanic, but they do belong to an informal supergroup. Since all this taxonomy exists first of all for didactic and mnemonic purposes, there are numerous contexts when it is more convenient to operate with Baltic and Slavic as independent groups with their particular peculiarities, but there are numerous contexts when it is more convenient to treat them together, like e. g. the ancient Indo-Iranic.


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## ahvalj

Just for fun, here is the beginning of "Pater noster" in the 11th century Old Church Slavonic (http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Отче_наш) (Wikipedia text has Russifying mistakes):
«Otĭče našĭ jĭže jesi na nebesĭxŭ,
da svętitŭ sę jĭmę tvoje,
da prijĭdetŭ carĭstvĭje tvoje,
da bǫdetŭ voļa tvoja
jako na nebese i na zemļi».

Now, hocus-pocus, leaving all the grammar and lexis as is, I change the phonetics as it must have sounded one thousand years before, at Christ's time (I voluntarily distinguish between ō and ā, and write an older ṣ instead of x, and ž/š instead of z/s from IE palatovelars, though honestly nobody knows if these changes had already occurred to that time):
«Atike nōsjas jas ge esei nō nebesiṣu,
dō šwenteiti sen inmen twaja,
dō prei ideti [waldūkistwa] twaja,
dō būndeti waljā twajā
jāka nō nebese ei nō žemjai».

Now, hocus-pocus again, I take this text, pretend it to be a proto-Baltic text of the same period, and change the phonetics as it developed to the modern Lithuanian, sound after sound:
«Atike nuosias, jas ge esi nuo nebesisu,
duo šventietis įmę tvaja,
duo priideti [karalystė] tvaja,
duo bundeti valia tvaja
joka nuo nebese ie nuo žemei».

Enjoy ,-)


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## Dhira Simha

ahvalj said:


> Look, that's all true, but Baltic and Slavic share at least three unique and very specific kinds of phonetic innovations I had mentioned some posts before:
> (1) i/u reflexes of syllabic sonants — there are other groups with u-coloring (Germanic and some Palaeobalkanic — reflexed in Greek borrowings with yr/yl/yn/ym), with i (some cases in Celtic, though i there goes after the sonant, not before it) — but no other branch has both at the same time (and often with parallel development: when it is i in Baltic, it usually corresponds to i in Slavic);



The question of sonorants is still one of the disputed areas. For example in the Watkin's Dictionary of IE Roots you can still find different reflexes for OCS (*rъ/*lъ) and Lithuanian (*ir/*il).



ahvalj said:


> (2) Winter law (acute lengthening of old short vowels before IE voiced/glottalized stops) — again, no group has anything comparable, plus it must have been quite old since the IE o in Baltic lengthens to o:, while a — to a:, suggesting this law operated before the merger of short o and a;



As you know, Winter's Law is one of the most disputed and controversial 'sound laws' which Sylvain Patri clearly called a `fiction` based on `coïncidences aléatoires': “Il s’ensuit que les principes nécessaires à l’élaboration d’une règle cohérente que sont la régularité et l’économie descriptive sont l’un et l’autre contredits par les données. Toutes les conditions sont donc réunies pour conduire à la conclusion que l’hypothèse d’une relation entre la durée des syllabe et la position de leur noyau par rapport aux consonnes de la série *b, *dy *g, *g, *gw est réfutée; en d’autres termes, que la loi de Winter est une fiction. Les quelques exemples qui ont été invoqués à l’appui de sa formulation relèvent de ce que les ouvrages de probabilité et de statistiques désignent sous le nom de « coïncidences aléatoires »: dès lors que n’existe nulle contrainte sur la répartition des voyelles allongées dans le mot (Varbot 1984), il est naturel que celles-ci puissent se rencontrer, devant toutes consonnes, y compris devant *b, *d, *g, même si cette constatation ne permet évidemment pas d’inférer l’existence d’une régularité prégnante.”



ahvalj said:


> (3) the extreme similarity if not identity of the accentuation system (see Dybo) — a thing that cannot be borrowed in principle.
> Points (2) and (3) were not known at the time of major Balto-Slavic discussions since they became clear only in the eighties.



I admit that I am not an expert in accentuation, which appears to be the corner-stone of the `Leiden School' (which I believe you embrace), but I know that it is not without controversies and problems. There are considerable dialectal variations in Lithuanian, which is practically the only source of information about Baltic accentuation. We have no direct information about Pra-Slavonic accent. Also there is no consensus in IE accentuation as it is directly linked to the problem of laryngeals which is an issue in itself. 



ahvalj said:


> Practically, for the title question of this topic, it means that Baltic and Slavic do not belong to the same group of the level of Germanic, but they do belong to an informal supergroup. Since all this taxonomy exists first of all for didactic and mnemonic purposes, there are numerous contexts when it is more convenient to operate with Baltic and Slavic as independent groups with their particular peculiarities, but there are numerous contexts when it is more convenient to treat them together, like e. g. the ancient Indo-Iranic.



In my opinion, the 1-3 arguments are hardly sufficient to support `Balto-Slavonic' unity in the `classic' form as envisaged by Schelicher. I would agree with your definition `informal supergroup'. This goes well with the results of my etymological research. Thank you for the excellent post!


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## Dhira Simha

"Now, hocus-pocus, leaving all the grammar and lexis as is, I change the phonetics as it must have sounded one thousand years before, at Christ's time"

Bravo! Could have been signed "Frederik Kortlandt" 

Lithuanian:

_Tėve mūsų, kuris esi danguje,
teesie šventas Tavo vardas,
teateinie Tavo karalystė,
teesie Tavo valia
kaip danguje, taip ir žemėje.
_Count the number of cognates but, for God's sake, without [karalystė]!!!.
_Atike nuosias, jas ge esi nuo nebesisu,
duo šventietis įmę tvaja,
duo priideti [karalystė] tvaja,
duo bundeti valia tvaja
joka nuo nebese ie nuo žemei._


----------



## ahvalj

Dhira Simha said:


> The question of sonorants is still one of the disputed areas. For example in the Watkin's Dictionary of IE Roots you can still find different reflexes for OCS (*rъ/*lъ) and Lithuanian (*ir/*il).



This is actually the area with the least amount of problems. There is a number of mismatching reflexes (ginti/гънати), but these can occur in the same language as well (жерло/горло from *gwrtlo). Anyway, double reflexes are a very striking and strong shared innovation.



Dhira Simha said:


> As you know, Winter's Law is one of the most disputed and controversial 'sound laws' which Sylvain Patri clearly called a `fiction` based on `coïncidences aléatoires': “Il s’ensuit que les principes nécessaires à l’élaboration d’une règle cohérente que sont la régularité et l’économie descriptive sont l’un et l’autre contredits par les données. Toutes les conditions sont donc réunies pour conduire à la conclusion que l’hypothèse d’une relation entre la durée des syllabe et la position de leur noyau par rapport aux consonnes de la série *b, *dy *g, *g, *gw est réfutée; en d’autres termes, que la loi de Winter est une fiction. Les quelques exemples qui ont été invoqués à l’appui de sa formulation relèvent de ce que les ouvrages de probabilité et de statistiques désignent sous le nom de « coïncidences aléatoires »: dès lors que n’existe nulle contrainte sur la répartition des voyelles allongées dans le mot (Varbot 1984), il est naturel que celles-ci puissent se rencontrer, devant toutes consonnes, y compris devant *b, *d, *g, même si cette constatation ne permet évidemment pas d’inférer l’existence d’une régularité prégnante.”



These problems have been largely resolved in the last decades. The dictionary by Derksen (Leiden school you'd mentioned) is built entirely around the Winter law: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_7IkEzr9hyJb0J4a1VKMVlPRXM/edit?usp=sharing And here are a couple of recent papers: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_7IkEzr9hyJeFNRTEE0OGxZRzA/edit?usp=sharing (Dybo) and https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_7IkEzr9hyJWWE4MFFQdzlnaDA/edit?usp=sharing (Young). I think, Winter law has matured enough to be used safely.





Dhira Simha said:


> I admit that I am not an expert in accentuation, which appears to be the corner-stone of the `Leiden School' (which I believe you embrace), but I know that it is not without controversies and problems. There are considerable dialectal variations in Lithuanian, which is practically the only source of information about Baltic accentuation. We have no direct information about Pra-Slavonic accent. Also there is no consensus in IE accentuation as it is directly linked to the problem of laryngeals which is an issue in itself.


I don't adhere to the Leiden school and I find Kortland to be a scientist of the same calibre as Trubachov and Ivanov. This list by him (still largely accepted by Leiden scientists — see Derksen's preface in the dictionary from the first link) https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_7IkEzr9hyJVTZkaEkxMUl2elk/edit?usp=sharing is a classical example of «краткое введение в сравнительное слоноведение» from the old joke — I don't imagine in principle how the existing data can lead anyone to such a detailed construction (and highly doubtful in so many details). 

As to the Balto-Slavic accentology — in the last thirty years the things have become increasingly clearer. Here is the huge research by Dybo (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_7IkEzr9hyJVUhZYi1pbFR3ODA/edit?usp=sharing), the main person behind the revolution. Please, note that, in contrast to Trubachov and Ivanov, Dybo goes from material to conclusions, and analyses the bulk of the data, instead of flittering from assumption to assumption. 

The Latvian and Samogitian data have turned out to be not less important than the Aukstaitian ones, since each branch has preserved different aspects of the original system.

In brief, what has changed since the situation found in the old manuals.
(1) The original IE had an opposition of high- and low-toned syllables, like e. g. the Japanese. The place and quality of the accent depended on the interplay of such syllables in the word form. In B and Sl the stress originally fell on the first high-toned syllable of the word form. If all syllables were low-toned, the stress of a special kind fell on the first syllable (hence e. g. modern за'нял but заняла' or рука' but ру'ку and на' руку).
(2) The high-toned stems are reflected as Lithuanian stress patterns (1) and (2) and the Slavic (a), (b) and (d). The low-toned stems are reflected as Lithuanian patterns (3) and (4) and Slavic (c).
(3) There were thus four original kinds of stems: high-toned acute (Lithuanian 1), high-toned non-acute (Lithuanian 2), low-toned acute (Lithuanian 3), low-toned non-acute (Lithuanian 4). 
(4) In high-toned stems, the Lithuanian acute corresponds to the Slavic acute, the Lithuanian circumflex corresponds to the Slavic new acute (when the latter is not secondary before ь and ъ). In low-toned stems, the Lithuanian merged its acute with the high-toned acute and its circumflex with the high-toned circumflex (not so in Latvian), while Slavic has merged both low-toned intonations into the Slavic circumflex — thus, what is called circumflex in BSl and L is not the same as the circumflex in the attested Slavic (the major wrong assumption in the entire old literature).


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## ahvalj

Also, a fine work on the history of the Russian accentuation (again, compare this level with Trubachov's "masterpieces"): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_7IkEzr9hyJRnotRmZfWk9QOXM/edit?usp=sharing (see especially pp. 118–128 and 158).


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## ahvalj

Dhira Simha said:


> "Now, hocus-pocus, leaving all the grammar and lexis as is, I change the phonetics as it must have sounded one thousand years before, at Christ's time"
> 
> Bravo! Could have been signed "Frederik Kortlandt"
> 
> Lithuanian:
> 
> _Tėve mūsų, kuris esi danguje,
> teesie šventas Tavo vardas,
> teateinie Tavo karalystė,
> teesie Tavo valia
> kaip danguje, taip ir žemėje.
> _Count the number of cognates but, for God's sake, without [karalystė]!!!.
> _Atike nuosias, jas ge esi nuo nebesisu,
> duo šventietis įmę tvaja,
> duo priideti [karalystė] tvaja,
> duo bundeti valia tvaja
> joka nuo nebese ie nuo žemei._


Well, let's also compare this:
"Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth, as it is in heaven"

with this: 
"Atta unsar þu in himinam, 
weihnai namo þein,
qimai þiudinassus þeins, 
wairþai wilja þeins
swe in himina jah ana airþai".

Or this: 
«Notre Père, qui es aux Cieux,
Que ton nom soit sanctifié,
Que ton règne vienne,
Que ta volonté soit faite
Sur la terre comme au ciel».

with this:
«Tatăl nostru Care ești în ceruri,
sfințească-se numele Tău,
vie împărăția Ta,
fie voia Ta, 
precum în cer așa și pe Pământ».

Languages have a habit to change.


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## ahvalj

The Lithuanian nominal accentuation is pretty transparent. For a historical explanation check here https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_7IkEzr9hyJTXdsbjA1a2dHVGc/edit?usp=sharing on pp. 34–36 and e. g. 42–43, for a synchronous one — here https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_7IkEzr9hyJMWs2ODBpRG0tMzQ/edit?usp=sharing on pp. 77–81.


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## Dhira Simha

ahvalj said:


> The Lithuanian nominal accentuation is pretty transparent. For a historical explanation check here https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_7IkEzr9hyJTXdsbjA1a2dHVGc/edit?usp=sharing on pp. 34–36 and e. g. 42–43, for a synchronous one — here https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_7IkEzr9hyJMWs2ODBpRG0tMzQ/edit?usp=sharing on pp. 77–81.



Thank you very much, I know most of the sources you quoted and daily use Derksen, however, accentuation  has not been relevant to my current work but I definitely need  an update here.


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## Dhira Simha

Sorry, we are discussing specifically the relations between Baltic and Slavonic.


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## ahvalj

Dhira Simha said:


> Sorry, we are discussing specifically the relations between Baltic and Slavonic.


? 

If this is a reply to "Pater noster", I just wanted to emphasize how far two obviously related languages (English vs. Gothic and French vs. Romanian) can diverge lexically for a period of 20+ (in the case of the first pair) or 20- (in the case of the second one) centuries. I am rather skeptical to the studies of lexical affinities and I regard them as the least conclusive. Both Russian and English are examples of languages strongly diverging in their vocabularies from their closest relatives (resp. Frisian/Dutch/Low German and Belarusian/Ukrainian). On the other hand, Icelandic vs. modern Norwegian are an example of abrupt phonetical and especially grammatical differences between sister languages.

In biology, shared innovations guarantee the affinity since organisms are unable to exchange characters. Not so in languages: mutual influence is a norm here. It will be therefore impossible to make the study of relationships between languages as precise as the evolutionary biology is becoming in the recent two decades. In the absence of direct evidence, what remains is the old method of accumulating all the data available and trying to evaluate which of them outweigh the other. 

Back to the Balto-Slavic relationships, there is no doubt that both branches were influencing each other during much of their history. The question is at what level did they split: within IE or some time later? I think, in the absence of written documents and without inventing the time machine, we have no tools to decide between both variants. I mentioned some posts before that the Low German, originally a separate dialect, in the course of history has become part of the German (originally High German) language. The same is documented for the north-western Russian dialects, which were quite peculiar in the 11th century but lost virtually all of their specific characters to the early 20th century. So, languages split and merge, and Baltic and Slavic may have passed through something like this several times until the phonetic changes in the latter made this impossible at some point. Let's not forget the West Baltic that was perceptibly closer to Slavic, and the extinct languages of Central Europe that may have been intermediate dialects in what is known now as Balto-Slavic.


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## arvistro

Dhira Simha said:


> "Now, hocus-pocus, leaving all the grammar and lexis as is, I change the phonetics as it must have sounded one thousand years before, at Christ's time"
> 
> Bravo! Could have been signed "Frederik Kortlandt"
> 
> Lithuanian:
> 
> _Tėve mūsų, kuris esi danguje,
> teesie šventas Tavo vardas,
> teateinie Tavo karalystė,
> teesie Tavo valia
> kaip danguje, taip ir žemėje.
> _Count the number of cognates but, for God's sake, without [karalystė]!!!.
> _Atike nuosias, jas ge esi nuo nebesisu,
> duo šventietis įmę tvaja,
> duo priideti [karalystė] tvaja,
> duo bundeti valia tvaja
> joka nuo nebese ie nuo žemei._


This interesting post brought me here  

Actually on cognates, they are all in Old Prussian. More of those in Old Prussian and Latvian than Lithuanian. I would guess this thing was in Old Prussian if presented randomly  and I would be able to read and understand this text.
nuosias - Old Prussian cognate. Dodi momines an _nosse_ igdenas Magse
nuo - Latvian is No, spelled as nuo.
Nebesisu - ok, Latvian is Debesis
duo - hm, duod is to give
Šventietis - Šventas is cognate
ime - Emmens, Old Prussian
priideti -pradėti (lith) start, begin, initiate, launch, open, come
tvaja - tava
bundeti - is actually būti 
valia - vaļa freedom, laid vaļā - let me go, savvaļa - wilderness Latvian
joka - should be kaip, or Latvian kā
žemei - zemei


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## arvistro

ahvalj said:


> This is actually the area with the least amount of problems. There is a number of mismatching reflexes (ginti/гънати), but these can occur in the same language as well (жерло/горло from *gwrtlo). Anyway, double reflexes are a very striking and strong shared innovation.


Ginti/гънати - hmm.
Ginti in Latvian is attested as dzīti (to chase), but then we have another word in Latvian ganīt(i)/Lithuanian ganyti (to shepherd). I guess ganyti and gnati is close enough for reflexes


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## ahvalj

arvistro said:


> Ginti/гънати - hmm.
> Ginti in Latvian is attested as dzīti (to chase), but then we have another word in Latvian ganīt(i)/Lithuanian ganyti (to shepherd). I guess ganyti and gnati is close enough for reflexes


_Gъnati_ has the same root vowel as the Prussian _guntwei_. _Ganyti/ganīt_ correspond to the Old Church Slavonic _goniti _"to drive". This root is attested in most IE languages: the Balto-Slavic peculiarity is the _i/u_-reflexation of the former zero grade (Sanskrit has_ ī/ū_ in laryngeal roots before sonorants, otherwise no branch shows this development).


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## ahvalj

arvistro said:


> nuosias - Old Prussian cognate. Dodi momines an _nosse_ igdenas Magse


Not quite: Prussian preserves the plain root (_nousesmu, nousons, nousā_), while Slavic adds a -_ı̯_- suffix (_našь, naša, naše_ from earlier _*nōsı̯as, *nōsı̯ā, *nōsı̯a_).


arvistro said:


> nuo - Latvian is No, spelled as nuo.


True. Lithuanian usually has it shortened (_nu), _but the original form is preserved as nominal prefix (_nutraukti_ — _nuotrauka_).


arvistro said:


> Nebesisu - ok, Latvian is Debesis


True.


arvistro said:


> duo - hm, duod is to give


No, this is casual: this Slavic particle has no cognates in Baltic.


arvistro said:


> Šventietis - Šventas is cognate


True.


arvistro said:


> ime - Emmens, Old Prussian


True.


arvistro said:


> priideti -pradėti (lith) start, begin, initiate, launch, open, come


No, the Slavic _pri _(<*_preı̯_) corresponds to the Lithuanian _prie _(_prievadas=привод, _both from *_preı̯ u̯adas_), but *_ideti _is a specifically Slavic form with no Baltic cognate: Baltic has an athematic, simple thematic or _n_-Present from this root:_ eimi, einu; ēisei, ēit; eju, iet _(http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/iet#Etymology), whereas Slavic has used the ancient Imperative Sg. 2 form (IE *_i-dʰi_) as the base for the Present stem. *_Priideti_ corresponds to _prieina_.

By the way, I now find it probable that the Old Church Slavonic _da priidetъ_ directly continues the Optative *_dō prei idetu:_ the meaning is the same, and the mysterious -_ъ_ nicely corresponds to the Present Optative -_u_. The Old East Slavic _da priidetь_, on the other hand, continues the Present Indicative *_dō_ _prei ideti_. The Optative _-*tu/-*ntu_ thus must have been generalized in Old Church Slavonic and north-eastern East Slavic whereas the primary Indicative _-*ti/-*nti _— in southern East Slavic. Other Slavic dialects may also continue the secondary -*_t/-*nt_.


arvistro said:


> tvaja - tava


Latvian preserves the older thematic form, whereas Slavic and Prussian add the _ı̯_-suffix: _tvojь_/_twais _(<*_tu̯aı̯as_) (likewise _mojь_/_mais_ (<*_maı̯as_) and _svojь_/_swais_ (<*_su̯aı̯as_)). 


arvistro said:


> bundeti - is actually būti


Again, this is the same root as in Latvian but in a specifically Slavic formation: _bū_- (reflected in _byti, būti, būt_) had received a _d_-extension (probably in the same manner as *_eı̯_-, i. e. from the Imperative Sg. 2. *_bʰuH-dʰi_) and then a nasal infix (cp. the same formation in Lithuanian with a different root: _busti—bundu—budau, the root *bʰeu̯dʰ-_, reflected in the Slavic Praes. Pl. 2 _bļudete_ [from *_bʰeu̯dʰete_], _budite_ [from *_bʰou̯dʰeı̯te_] and -_bъnete_ [from *_bʰudʰnete_, here, unlike in Lithuanian, -_n_- is added after the root]; Slavic has a couple of other verbs with a nasal infix, e. g. Pl. 2. _sędete_ [<*_sendete_], _lęžete_ [<*_lengʰete_]).


arvistro said:


> valia - vaļa freedom, laid vaļā - let me go, savvaļa - wilderness Latvian


True.


arvistro said:


> joka - should be kaip, or Latvian kā


There is a set of correspondences: _kakъ—koks, takъ—toks, śakъ—šioks, viśakъ—visoks, jakъ—joks._ Otherwise, _jako_ indeed means _kaip/kā._


arvistro said:


> žemei - zemei


No, this is the Locative, which in East Baltic has been augmented by a postposition (_žemėje_ is a new creation from the old Locative *_źemēı̯_ and the postposition -_e; _Latvian_ zemē _has lost _-ı̯e _but has preserved the long vowel inside the word). Slavic has the same Locative in the consonant stems (Loc. Sg. _na_ _nebese_ "in heaven" instead of the expected etymological **_nebesь_ from IE *_nebʰesi_).


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## arvistro

Thanks for deeper analysis, in my post I just replied that in your experiment almost all words do have cognates in Baltic (except Da - Duo, which I suggest comes deeply from duod, also used in let us go = duod mums iet; Latvian lai seems to derive from laid (let) in similar but bit different, laid mūs/mums iet = let us go OR maybe not, please comment).
I did not say those cognates were exact matches  which would be a bit far stretched for sound replacement experiment ocs-> proto-Slavic -> = proto-Baltic -> Lithuanian.


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## arvistro

ahvalj said:


> _Gъnati_ has the same root vowel as the Prussian _guntwei_. _Ganyti/ganīt_ correspond to the Old Church Slavonic _goniti _"to drive". This root is attested in most IE languages: the Balto-Slavic peculiarity is the _i/u_-reflexation of the former zero grade (Sanskrit has_ ī/ū_ in laryngeal roots before sonorants, otherwise no branch shows this development).


Could be, I still believe dzīt (ginti), ganīt is not a big thing. For example we have
Locīt/loks, liekt, līks with basically same meaning.


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## ahvalj

arvistro said:


> except Da - Duo, which I suggest comes deeply from duod, also used in let us go = duod mums iet; Latvian lai seems to derive from laid (let) in similar but bit different, laid mūs/mums iet = let us go OR maybe not, please comment).


This is not absolutely impossible, but pay attention at the construction: _da_ and _lai_ require a personal form (_lai dzivo_), whereas _dod_ and _laid_ require an Infinitive. Traditionally, the Baltic _lai_ is compared with the Slavic particles _li_ and _lě_.

P. S. On the other hand, if -_tъ_/-_ntъ_ forms after _da_ in Old Church Slavonic do continue the old Optative, the connection with "to give" becomes syntactically possible: _da stanetъ_ < _*dō stānetu_, literally something like "give (=let) it for it to stand", cp. Spanish _déjale hacer_ and _déjale que haga_ "let him do" with the Infinitive (_hacer_) and the Subjunctive (_que haga_).


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## Dhira Simha

I am surprised that this thread still goes on! Just to remind you, I support the opinion that Baltic and Slavonic are two separate lineages of the so called "Indo-European" dialects. I believe that they have existed side by side and intermingled at various periods but neither the Baltic system can be derived from Slavonic nor the other way round. The disparity is particularly evident in their verbal systems.

As for the affinity in their vocabularies, indeed, we find a lot of common words but there is a rational explanation for this. Citing Meillet (The Indo-European Dialects. _University of Alabama Press, _*1967, pp.59-60)*:

"[...] Baltic and Slavic are the descendants of almost indentical Indo-European dialects. [they] show the common trait of never having undergone in the course of their development any sudden systemic upheaval. [...] There is no indication of a serious dislocation of any part of the linguistic system at any time. [...] The sound structure has in general remained intact to the present. [...] Baltic and Slavic are, consequently the only languages in which certain modern word-forms resemble those reconstructed for Common-Indo-European."

Consequently, it is only natural that these two groups would show striking resemblances in many aspects. As for their vocabulary, I made a little exercise of comparing the texts of the first part of the prayer adding Sanskrit (I do not use the hypothetical "reconstructed" Proto-Slavonic, kindly proposed by ahvalj, simply because there is no proof that it ever existed*). For simplicity I do not use the sandhi and also reproduce the final visarga as a "historical s" (e.g. _pitas _instead of _pitaḥ `father'_). The construction _da svjatitjsja_ I transpose as Optative _śveteta _`let be bright!' As you can see from the table, all three idioms are definitely similar but they are also approx. equally different from each other. Therefore, the similarity in the vocabularies of Baltic and Slavonic only confirms that they preserve a good deal of the ancient common word-stock (+Millets arguments as above) and not necessarily testifies that they come from an imaginary "proto-Balto-Slavic".




LithuanianSlavonicSanskrittėveotčepitasmūsųnašnaskurisižeyasesijesiāsidangujena nebesěxъnabhaḥsuteesie šventasda svjatitjsjaśvetetatãеvotvojetvavardasimjanamasteateinieda pridetjpari yāyāt (or Imp. pari yātu)tavotvojetvakaralystėcarstvijerājyamteesieda bǫdetjbhavettavotvojatvavaliavoljavaraskaipjakautadangujena nebesinabhasitaip iriutažemėjena zemlikṣamāyām



*note
I side here with Pulgram, E. (“Proto-Indo-European Reality and Reconstruction Language”, Linguistic Society of America, 1959, 35, pp. 421-426). This is a quote from his article:
“Now when we reconstruct, through the methods of comparative historical linguistics, an array of asterisked Proto-Indo-European forms, the procedure itself implies that the result of our endeavors is a uniform construct. We are, in fact, creating an idiolect-not of a speaker, to be sure, but of the scholar, of the method, as it were. This procedural circumstance spares us a priori all scruples and worries over uniformity. But note that the result emanates from the method, that different procedures would deliver different results. I am not, of course, attempting to refute the validity of comparative linguistics; it is, as scholars have repeatedly said, our only choice, for any other modus operandi ‘removes the basis for scientific [historical] linguistics’. But it must be conceded that such a reconstruction is something of a fiction, since ‘the terms Proto-, Ur-, Primitive are firmly attached to formulae which are timeless, non-dialectal, and non-phonetic.’ Anything in linguistics that is timeless, nondialectal, and nonphonetic, by definition does not represent a real language. That is to say, the uniformity which reconstructed Proto-Indo-European exhibits is not representative of a reality“


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## ahvalj

I don't think I can add anything to what has been already said in this thread, but what is the purpose of this comparative table? For a half of isolated Slavic words I can find Lithuanian cognates, and where it is impossible, Prussian or Latvian ones. Actually, only _otьcь_ and _carьstvьje_ have no roots (or prefixes+roots+suffixes) attested somewhere in Baltic, the former casually (*_atta_ was an IE word) and the latter for obvious reasons (if we don't count _caras_). Religious texts are normally calqued between closely related languages, but let's take something less sacral, e. g. _The Internationale_ in English and German (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internationale and https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Internationale): how many related (not to mention identical) words do you find?


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## ahvalj

Dhira Simha said:


> “Now when we reconstruct, through the methods of comparative historical linguistics, an array of asterisked Proto-Indo-European forms, the procedure itself implies that the result of our endeavors is a uniform construct. We are, in fact, creating an idiolect-not of a speaker, to be sure, but of the scholar, of the method, as it were. This procedural circumstance spares us a priori all scruples and worries over uniformity. But note that the result emanates from the method, that different procedures would deliver different results. I am not, of course, attempting to refute the validity of comparative linguistics; it is, as scholars have repeatedly said, our only choice, for any other modus operandi ‘removes the basis for scientific [historical] linguistics’. But it must be conceded that such a reconstruction is something of a fiction, since ‘the terms Proto-, Ur-, Primitive are firmly attached to formulae which are timeless, non-dialectal, and non-phonetic.’ Anything in linguistics that is timeless, nondialectal, and nonphonetic, by definition does not represent a real language. That is to say, the uniformity which reconstructed Proto-Indo-European exhibits is not representative of a reality“


That is true in the ultimate sense, since we will of course never be able to *reconstruct* an extinct language, but the history of research of many groups of languages proves that some aspects of the extinct stages can be rather successfully estimated. E. g., Romance languages, especially taken in their development, shed a lot of light on their common ancestor, and, comparing these reconstructions with the actual Latin, we can tell that the look of many basic words and grammatical forms can be reconstructed with sufficient precision. The same can be said e. g. about later Slavic languages in comparison with the attested Old Church Slavonic. Lithuanian and Latvian in their turn can be largely derived from a common prototype, etc. As any model, the reconstruction is a work in progress, it is constantly being compared to the actual data and is being updated when necessary, but as long as it doesn't face totally inexplicable blocks of data, it can be considered satisfactory. This is how the brain works, in everyday life and in any science.


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## Dhira Simha

ahvalj said:


> I don't think I can add anything to what has been already said in this thread, but what is the purpose of this comparative table? For a half of isolated Slavic words I can find Lithuanian cognates, and where it is impossible, Prussian or Latvian ones. Actually, only _otьcь_ and _carьstvьje_ have no roots (or prefixes+roots+suffixes) attested somewhere in Baltic, the former casually (*_atta_ was an IE word) and the latter for obvious reasons (if we don't count _caras_). Religious texts are normally calqued between closely related languages, but let's take something less sacral, e. g. _The Internationale_ in English and German (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internationale and https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Internationale): how many related (not to mention identical) words do you find?


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## Dhira Simha

Sorry, I have just used this  piece because it has already been  discussed earlier in the thread. We could take any other piece of text, it does not matter. What I tried to  illustrate with it was that "all three idioms are definitely similar but they are also approx. equally different from each other. Therefore, the similarity in the vocabularies of Baltic and Slavonic only confirms that they preserve a good deal of the ancient common word-stock (+Millets arguments as above) and not necessarily testifies that they come from an imaginary "proto-Balto-Slavic". I think it is exactly what this thread is about.


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## ahvalj

OK, Meillet was one of the rare IE linguists with a disciplined mind, he made much less mistakes than average in this science, so it is hard not to agree with his position on the Baltic-Slavic relationships (though, I should add, he was at the same time a proponent of the Italo-Celtic unity, which was and remains endlessly less substantiated). There is, however, one aspect that he was unable to consider: the prosody. In the first half of the 20th century, the studies of the Baltic and Slavic prosodies were at their infancy, were based on cherrypicked examples, and the results, as it turned out later, were often wrong or placed in the wrong context (e.g. the Slavic circumflex). In the last decades, the situation has become much more clear, and we can safely tell that (a) the Baltic and Slavic prosodies are the most complicated ones attested in the entire IE family, and (b) until pretty late in history the changes and their results were almost identical. This has been discussed already some 100 posts ago, but I'd like to repeat: the prosody is among the most complicated things to master when studying a language, it is very difficult to share, and the strongly divergent prosodic systems even between modern Baltic and Slavic dialects testify that at the first opportunity the prosody tends to evolve separately. If, despite all this, we are able to reduce the in-Baltic and in-Slavic systems to some common Baltic and common Slavic unities, and then to impose one on another (the Baltic one, as usual, turning out more archaic), it may only suggest that the shaping and evolution of these systems were anything but not independent.


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## Dhira Simha

We have, on the one hand, the vast amount of tangible evidence (grammar, vocabulary)  and, on the other hand, an even greater amount of a less palpable and more fluid and elusive prosody. Obviously, prosody is your area of research so your view on the Balto-Slavonic unity is bound to be biased.  Removing the axiom of "Balto-Slavonic" from Dybo's "балто-славянской акцентуационной системы, которая оказалась организованной как парадигматическая акцентная система" would render the whole theory void.


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## ahvalj

Between the IE prototype (in Dybo's and anybody else's reconstructions) and the actual Baltic and Slavic prosodic systems lies a chain of non-trivial shared innovations not attested anywhere else. I don't imagine how it was technically possible without a permanent language contact in a limited territory. Even Winter's law, regardless of whether somebody accepts it as a law or a collection of words with a similar development, leads to the same results in both branches in the same lexemes. I'd also remind you Meillet's words that Baltic and Slavic aren't separated by any ancient isogloss... Modern Baltic and Slavic are, surely, not reducible to a common post-IE proto-language (as aren't modern Indo-Iranic languages despite we know that they have developed from a common post-IE prototype) but to say that they aren't any more related that any of them to Indic is obviously an overstatement.


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## ahvalj

By the way, about the dissimilar verbal systems. Let's take the Russian verb as it is, with the Infinitive, full set of participles, and the single _л_-Past, and the Bulgarian verb without the bookish and Russian-influenced present participles and imagine that the _л_-tenses have been lost or, better, replaced with _имам_ constructions: the only shared verbal forms between Russian and this imaginary Bulgarian will be the Present tense and the Past Passive Participle — and all this for just a millennium of divergent development.


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## Dhira Simha

ahvalj said:


> I'd also remind you Meillet's words that Baltic and Slavic aren't separated by any ancient isogloss... Modern Baltic and Slavic are, surely, not reducible to a common post-IE proto-language (as aren't modern Indo-Iranic languages despite we know that they have developed from a common post-IE prototype) but to say that they aren't any more related that any of them to Indic is obviously an overstatement.



I agree.  My remark was made solely in the context of my little comparative exercise. Surely,  we compare  two systems which co-existed for millenniums side by side with a system  separated from them by at least three thousand years. However, if  both Slavonic and Baltic had started from the same system and given the long-time co-existence and interference, one would expect an even greater similarity.


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## arvistro

Dhira Simha said:


> However, if  both Slavonic and Baltic had started from the same system and given the long-time co-existence and interference, one would expect an even greater similarity.



As if they started from some different system. They surely both started from proto-IE and co-existed after, so "given the long-time co-existence and interference one would expect and even greater similarity" 
Which they had until Slavic expanded and assimilated crazy number of other dialects and people.


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## Dhira Simha

arvistro said:


> As if they started from some different system. They surely both started from proto-IE and co-existed after, so "given the long-time co-existence and interference one would expect and even greater similarity"
> Which they had until Slavic expanded and assimilated crazy number of other dialects and people.



You, probably know for sure what is behind the label  "proto-IE", where and when it originated and existed, how it sounded, what was its grammar, what was its dialectal division etc., also what was the origin of the Slavs,  and from where they "expanded" and what "crazy number of other dialects and people" they assimilated. Pls. enlighten us ....


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## ahvalj

For example, consider these two standard maps of archeological cultures of Eastern Europe in the 3–6th centuries:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/East_europe_3-4cc.png
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/East_europe_5-6cc.png
(from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balts)

Presumably Finnic archeological cultures are shown as green, presumably Baltic — violet, presumably Slavic — brown and yellow.


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## arvistro

Dhira Simha said:


> You, probably know for sure what is behind the label  "proto-IE", where and when it originated and existed, how it sounded, what was its grammar, what was its dialectal division etc., also what was the origin of the Slavs,  and from where they "expanded" and what "crazy number of other dialects and people" they assimilated. Pls. enlighten us ....


I don't think this even needs an answer  We apparently live in different worlds.


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## DarkChild

ahvalj said:


> By the way, about the dissimilar verbal systems. Let's take the Russian verb as it is, with the Infinitive, full set of participles, and the single _л_-Past, and the Bulgarian verb without *the bookish and Russian-influenced present participles* and imagine that the _л_-tenses have been lost or, better, replaced with _имам_ constructions: the only shared verbal forms between Russian and this imaginary Bulgarian will be the Present tense and the Past Passive Participle — and all this for just a millennium of divergent development.


What exactly are you referring to? If it's what I think it is, it's not bookish at all and used all the time. Also, not sure why you think it's Russian-influenced. I've actually never heard of Russian influences on grammar.


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## ahvalj

DarkChild said:


> What exactly are you referring to? If it's what I think it is, it's not bookish at all and used all the time. Also, not sure why you think it's Russian-influenced. I've actually never heard of Russian influences on grammar.


Sorry if it is wrong, but this is what I have read in virtually any description of the Bulgarian grammar. For example, _E. A. Scatton, "Bulgarian"_ in _B. C. Comrie & G. G. Corbett (eds.), 1993, "The Slavonic languages":_ 215 (https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_7IkEzr9hyJWWV3OWtRZzl6cFU&authuser=0) — "A present active participle is formed from imperfective present stems with the suffixes /-ašt- ~ -ešt-/: m SG п'ишещ/píšešt 'writing'. A strictly literary form devised in the late nineteenth century on Russian and Church Slavonic models, it is only used attributively".

By the way, I had forgotten the Imperative, so we would have had three shared forms.

Update. Ю. С. Маслов, 1981, "Грамматика болгарского языка": 228, writes:
"Причастие настоящего времени распространилось в литературном языке в XIX–XX в. под русским (первоначально и церковнославянским) влиянием и в первое время с русской огласовкой суффикса (орфогр. -_ущ_ и -_ющ_), лишь позже получившего своё современное болгаризованное оформление".

Update 2. http://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Руско_....80.D0.B8.D1.87.D0.B0.D1.81.D1.82.D0.B8.D0.B5
Сегашното деятелно причастие (_знаещ_, _виждащ_) е нововъведение в новобългарския книжовен език, което възстановява изчезналата в народните говори старобългарска форма. За възраждането му първоначално оказва влияние църковнославянският, а по-късно и руският език, като отначало се възприемат частично русизираните форми (например _ведущ_, но не _ведуч_, понеже както в църковнославянски, така и в руски тези форми са останали със старобългарско _щ_, вместо източнославянско _ч_, за справка вижте тук). По-късно, към края на 19 век заеманите от руски по книжовен път форми на деятелни причастия се приспособяват към морфологичните основи на българските глаголи и по този начин стават част от българското спрежение. В съвременната разговорна реч тези форми обикновено се заместват с конструкция от относително местоимение + глагол (например: вм. _намиращ се_ - _който се намира_ и т.н.).
За справка:


Любомир Андрейчин Из историята на нашето езиково строителство, С. 1977, стр. 89


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## Christo Tamarin

DarkChild said:


> ahvalj said:
> 
> 
> 
> By the way, about the dissimilar verbal systems. Let's take the Russian verb as it is, with the Infinitive, full set of participles, and the single _л_-Past, and the Bulgarian verb without the bookish and Russian-influenced present participles and imagine that the _л_-tenses have been lost or, better, replaced with _имам_ constructions: the only shared verbal forms between Russian and this imaginary Bulgarian will be the Present tense and the Past Passive Participle — and all this for just a millennium of divergent development.
> 
> 
> 
> What exactly are you referring to? If it's what I think it is, it's not bookish at all and used all the time. Also, not sure why you think it's Russian-influenced. I've actually never heard of Russian influences on grammar.
Click to expand...


*ahvalj* was right. The active present participle in Bulgarian is not inherited, it is restored from Literary Russian and Church Slavonic. Such forms are missing in vernacular tongues, Bulgarian-Russian-Greek.

Also, East Bulgarian lacks the adverbial active present participle. Тhose forms (имайки, бидейки, знаейки) are the contribution of the South-West dialects to the Standard Bulgarian. Unlike East Bulgarian, vernacular Russian and Greek have such forms.

If the forms of the active present participle in Bulgarian were inherited, there should not be endings -ящ-/-ащ-, there should not be mutations -ящ- > -ещ- (apllied by some people), there should only be -ещ-/-ъщ- as in вещ/горещ/могъщ/същ.


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## rur1920

Christo Tamarin said:


> Such forms are missing in vernacular tongues, Bulgarian-Russian-Greek.


DarkChild is also right: "missing" is too strong a word. As it feels, the tendency to use the present participle for specific purposes is the same in spoken and in written, though of course the inherent difference of purposes of these kinds of speech may result in differing frequencies of utilisation of such participles. I would not say that participles are rarer in spoken speech, I would instead say that some non-formalised constructions are introduced in spoken and are more frequent there than in written speech ("этот человек, он в гости пошёл…"). Attributively (and even predicatively, as opposed to the use as a conjunction), these forms are most certainly completely common: one cannot imagine spoken speech without phrases like "это человек знающий". I am speaking about Russian of course, maybe in Bulgarian there are specifics, though DarkChild says you quite do use the present participle in spoken.


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## ahvalj

Since we have touched on the participles, here are examples of etymologically identical participial forms in Lithuanian and Old Church Slavonic. The Accusative Singular feminine of the compound declension is taken as examples.

_vesti_ ≈ _vesti_ (= Russian _вести_) "to lead, to carry"
_vyti_ ≈ _viti_ (= Russian _вить_) "to wind, to weave, to twist"

Present Active participle: _vedančiąją_ = _vedǫštǫjǫ_ (= Russian _ведущую_)
Past Active participle: _vedusiąją_ = _vedъšǫjǫ_ (= Russian _ведшую_)
Present Passive participle: _vedamąją_ = _vedomǫjǫ_ (= Russian _ведомую_)
Past Passive participle: _vytąją_ = _vitǫjǫ_ (= Russian _витую_)


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## klemen

CristAbe said:


> Why are the Batic languages not considered Slave?


Baltic languages are so different from slavic that they belong to different group of languages. But they have got in common with slavic languages some features, thus they are grouped together with slavic languages.


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## neonrider

Lithuanian (Baltic) vs. English (Germanic, influenced by Latin)

An(t) = on
Apsėstas = obsessed
Apverst = upside down, obverse
Ar = are, is, do
Augmuo, augmenys, augalas = growth, augmentation, plant
Augt, augint = augment, to grow, to raise
Auksas = gold (Lat. Aurum)
Avis = sheep (Lat. ovis)
Balkis, rastas = balk, log
Banda - band, flock
Bet = but
Bintas, bintuot = bandage
Braukt = brush away
Brūžint - to bruise
Būti = to be
Dantis = tooth (Lat. dentes)
Darbas = work (german: arbeit)
Duktė = daughter
Džiaugsmas (pron.: jowgsmas) = joy
Esi = is, are (It. sei)
Ëst (vulg. animal) = to eat (Germ. essen)
Gaut = to get, gain
Gelbėt (pagelbėt) = help, save (the root is GELB-)
Gentis = tribe, nation (Lat. gente)
Giminė = genus, gender
Girdët = to hear
Girnos = grindstones
Grandyt = to grain
Griebt = to grab (grieb+ti vs. to+grab)
Grindinys = pavement (to grind)
Guoda (paguoda) = consolation, comfort, relief (related to "god"? guost vs. ghost?)
į (old “in”) = in, into
Jaunas = young
Jie = they
Jungtis = junction
Jūs (pron.: yoos) = you
Kambarys = room (chamber)
Kask, kast = cascade (to dig)
Kirst = to cut
Kirstis = to cross
Laižyt = to lick
Lapas = leaf
Leist = to let (let do something)
Link = towards, link
Lygmuo, lygiuot, lygint = league
Mano = mine, my
Myžt, myžo (vulg.) = mijar (Port.) Example: mijar na cadeira = myžti ant këdës - to pee on a chair)
Moteris = woman (comp. mother, madre)
Naujas = new
Oras = air
Per = Per
Persekiot = to persecute
Perst (vulg.) = to fart
Pirkt (perka = buys) = to buy (perks, to perk)
(už)Pist (vulg.) (to piss off, to make one upset)
Plūgas = plough (agricult.)
Purtyt = purge
Raibul(iavimas)= ripple
Raitytis, riestis = to writhe
Ratas = wheel (Germ. rad)
Rident = to roll over, to ride
Salė = hall
Saulė = sun (Lat. sol, Fr. soleil, It. Sole)
Senas = old (senile)
Sėst = to sit (sėdimas = sedentary)
Siek, siekt = to seek
Siela = soul
Sirgt = sick
Siūt, siuvimas = to sew, sewing
Skambint = chime
Skelt = to split
Skrebot = scrape, scrub
Skubėt = scurry
Spiaut = to spit
Stiebelis, stiebas = stubble
Stot, stok = to stop, stop
Sūnus = son
Šaukt (pron. shaúkt) = to shout
Šaut (pron. sháwt) = shoot
Šikt (pron. shikt) = to shit
Tapšnot = tap
Tempt = to drag (~attempt?)
Traukt = to pull (related to truck?)
Tu = You (Lat. tu)
Tūtavimas = tootle
Vėjas = wind
Vemt (vulg.) = to vomit
Vyras = man (Latin: vir)

Just to name a few…

(ENG) Prefix To vs. (LIT) Suffix -ti

IMHO the Lithuanian verb ending -t (-ti) seems to “match” or be related to the English “to”, for example: EN to shoot vs. LT shaut(ti). Let’s take the Lithuanian verb TRAUK(ti) (Eng: to pull, to truck) where the root is TRAUK- and the ending -TI is like the English TO in front of any English verb. Thus: Trauk-ti or To trauk, to truck. This is my theory (how English originates from the proto Indo-European language).

LITH vs. LATIN

dantis = tooth (Lat. dente(s))
auksas = gold (Lat. Aurum)
avis = sheep (Lat. ovis)
saule = sun (Lat. sol, Fr. soleil, It. Sole)
tu = you (Lat. tu)
esi = is, are (It. sei)
mirtis = mortem (death)
naktis = noctis (night)
and others…

Now Lithuanian vs. Russian:


Péreiti vs. Перейти (pereití) (to cross, a street)
Prapuolë vs. Пропал (propál) (disappeared)
Be vs. Без (bez) (without)
Bëgioti vs. Бегать (begat’) (to keep on running)
Prasyti vs. Просить (prosit’) (to ask)
Büti vs. Быть (byt’) (to be)
Ezys vs. Ёжик (jözhyk) (hedgehog)
Ezeras vs. Озеро (özero) (lake)
Duoti vs. Дать (dat’) (to give)
Eiti vs. Идти (idtí) (to go)
Plaukti vs. Плавать (plávat’) (to swim)
Nesti vs. Нести (nestí) (to carry)
Karve vs. Корова (karöva) (cow)
Ranká vs. Рука (ruká) (hand)
Büsim vs. Будем (büdem) (we will be)
Kreivas vs. Кривой (krivöy) (curved, crooked)
Ugnis vs. Огонь (agwoñ) (fire)
Paprasyk vs. Попроси (poprosÿ) (ask)
Pesciomis vs. Пешком (peshköm) (by walk)
Gyvas vs. Живой (zhyvój) (alive)
Nagai vs. Ногти (nogti) (toe/nails)
Vezti vs. Везти (veztí) (to carry by driving)
Ieskoti vs. Искать (iskát’) (to seek, look for)
Sodinti vs. Садить (sadít’) (to plant)
Prasaú vs. Прошу (prashü) (please, to ask)
Prasom vs. Просим (prösim) (please, we ask)
Sesti vs. Сесть (sëst’) (to sit down)
Stoti vs. Стать (stät’) (to stand up)
Lipdyti vs. Лепить (lepít’) (to mould, to glue)
Parduoti vs. Продать (prodát’) (to sell)
Laizyti vs. Лизать (lizát’) (to lick)
Sedeti vs. Сидеть (sidét’) (to sit)
Stoveti vs. Стоять (stoyát’) (to stand)
Prapulti vs. Пропадать (propadát’) (to disappear)
Tamsus vs. Тёмный (tyomnyj) (dark)
Sapnas vs. Сон (sön) (a dream)
Kaupti vs. Копить (kapit’) (to save, accumulate)
Varna vs. Ворона (varona) (crow)
Erelis vs. Орёл (aryol) (eagle)
Blogas vs. Плохой (plakhoy) (bad, evil)
Sidabras vs. Серебро (serebró) (silver)
Zvaigzde vs. Звезда (zvezdá) (star)
Sienas vs. Сено (siéno) (hay)
Praeiti vs. Пройти (proytí) (to be over, to pass)
Tada vs. Тогда (tagdá) (then)
Kada vs. Когда (kagdá) (when)
Kam vs. Кому (kamú) (whom)
Kur vs. Куда (kudá) (where)
Teka vs. Течёт (techyot) (river runs)
Zmoná vs. Жена (zhená) (wife)
Grazi vs. Красивая (krasívaya) (beautiful fem.)
Muilas vs. Мыло (mylo) (soap)
Jiems vs. Им (jim) (to/for them)
Pereja vs. Переход (perekhöd) (ped. crossing)
Virve vs. Верёвка (veryovka) (rope)
Pradzia vs. Перед, начало (pered) (the beginning)
Siena vs. Стена (stená) (wall)
Sniegas vs. Снег (snieg) (snow)
Ledas vs. Лёд (lyod) (ice)
Usai vs. Усы (usý) (moustache)
Sakalas vs. Сокол (swókal) (falcon)

Slavic languages were somehow related to Baltic thousands of years ago way before Russians mixed up with Mongols, Tatars, Iranians, Finns and Turkic peoples. Yet humans live on Earth for millions of years and the last 2000 years are insignificant in development of languages. Humans may as well exist in the Universe for trillions of years.


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## AndrasBP

killerbee256 said:


> I mean no offense when I say this, but I think the Lithuanian posters belief that their language is not and can not be related to Slavic languages has more to do with the cold war and their countries treatment by the soviets during that time then it does with linguistics.


I totally agree. 
As a Russian speaker who has learned Lithuanian, I also learned early on not to tell Lithuanians that my knowledge of Russian actually helped me learn their language. Many of them got quite annoyed by this and tried to deny the obvious fact that there really are lots of similarities, both in grammar and vocabulary. One of them even claimed that English was closer to Lithuanian than Russian!


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