Balto-Slavic languages
The
Balto-Slavic language group is a hypothetical language group consisting of the
Baltic and
Slavic language subgroups of the
Indo-European family. It is spoken by perhaps 240 million people, mostly in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe.
Baltic and Slavic share more close similarities, both
lexical and
morphosyntactic, than any other language groups within the Indo-European language family. Many linguists, following the lead of such notable Indo-Europeanists as
August Schleicher and
Oswald Szemerényi, take these to indicate that the two groups separated from a common ancestor,
Proto-Balto-Slavic, only well after the breakup of Indo-European.
Other linguists " themselves following such notable Indo-Europeanists as
Antoine Meillet " regard these similarities as arising entirely from intensive contact between the two branches well after they had separately split directly from
proto-Indo-European (the
satem group).
The former view is traditionally the more widely held of the two: Beekes (1995: 22), for example, states: "The Baltic and Slavic languages were originally one language and so form one group". Collinge (1985) includes an appendix (pp. 271"77) on "Laws of accentuation in Balto-Slavic", apparently implying a belief in a single Balto-Slavic
proto-language, but does concede, "everything in this section is controversial, including this sentence."
[Gray and Atkinson's (2003) application of language-tree divergence analysis supports a genetic relationship between the Baltic and Slavic languages. That this was found using a very different methodology than other studies lends some credence to the links between the two.]More than 100 words are common in their form and meaning to Baltic and Slavic alone, among them:
*
Lithuanian bėgu "I run,"
Latvian b"gu,
Proto-Slavic běgǫ,
Russian:
begu;
* Lithuanian
liepa "linden tree," Latvian
liepa, Old Prussian
lipe, PS
lipa,
Russian:
lipa.
The amount of shared words may be explained either by existence of common Balto-Slavic language in the past or by the following circumstances:
* Baltic and Slavic speakers are in close geographical, political and cultural contact, which naturally leads to lexical similarities; that is, each has borrowed words and meanings from the other. Differentiating between borrowings and common inheritance requires a careful study of
sound shifts, and in some cases the information can be insufficient to resolve the question.
* Slavic and Baltic languages were not written down until
9th and
16th centuries A.D., respectively. Thus, the historical record tracing the development of the languages is limited.
* Baltic and Slavic languages both belong to the
Satem sub-group of the Indo-European languages.
Until Meillet's
Dialects indo-européens of
1908, Balto-Slavic unity was undisputed among linguists -- as he notes himself at the beginning of the
Le Balto-Slave chapter,
"L'unité linguistique balto-slave est l'une de celles que personne ne conteste" ("Balto-Slavic linguistic unity is one of those that no one contests"). Meillet's critique of Balto-Slavic confined itself to the seven characteristics listed by
Karl Brugmann in 1903, attempting to show that no single one of these is sufficient to prove genetic unity.
Szemerényi in his
1957 re-examination of Meillet's results concludes that the Balts and Slavs did, in fact, share a "period of common language and life", and were probably separated due to the incursion of
Germanic tribes along the
Vistula and the
Dnepr roughly at the beginning of the
Common Era. Szemerényi notes fourteen points that he judges cannot be ascribed to chance or parallel innovation, and thus considers proof of Balto-Slavic unity:
#phonological palatalization (described by Kurylowicz, 1956)#the development of
i and
u before
PIE resonants #
ruki#accentual innovations#the
definite adjective#participle inflection in
-yo-#the
genitive singular of thematic stems in
-ā(t)-#the
comparative formation#the
oblique 1st singular
men-, 1st plural
nōsom#
tos/tā for PIE
so/sā pronoun#the agreement of the irregular
athematic verb (Lithuanian
dúoti, Slavic
datь)#the
preterite in
"/ā#verbs in Baltic
-áuju, Slav.
-uj#the strong correspondence of vocabulary not observed between any other pair of branches of the Indo-European languages.
Another common innovation proposed for Balto-Slavic is
Winter's law (Werner Winter, 1978), the lengthening of a short vowel before a voiced
plosive. Conditions of the operation of the law are disputed; according to Matasović (1995) the change only takes place in closed syllables.
*
Proto-Slavic*
Slavic languages*
Baltic languages*
Corded Ware culture* Provides a review of the points of debate, and a listing of the scholars and their positions.
*Gray, Russell D., and Clayton Atkinson. 2003. "Language-tree divergence times support Anatolian theory of Indo-European Origins,"
Nature 426 (27 November): 435-439.
*Matasović, Ranko, "A Reexamination of Winter's Law in Baltic and Slavic", Lingua Posnaniensis 37/1995: 57-70
* Answers the question in the negative.
*
*Pashka, Joseph.
*Pashka, Joseph.
*
* The University of Texas at Austin
The Indo-European Language Family*
Balto-Slavic within the Indo-European language group*
Balto-Slavic language group*
Ethnologue " Baltic languages*
Ethnologue " Slavic languages*
The Balto-Slavic accentual mobility*
Balto-Slavic Accentuation, by Kortlandt; a very idiosyncratic approach to Balto-Slavic accentuation
*
We the Balts (by Algirdas Sabaliauskas)
*
Lexical comparison of Sanskrit and Latvian
