Balto-Slavic languages

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The Balto-Slavic language group consists of the Baltic and Slavic language subgroups of the Indo-European family. The grouping is due to a reconstructed Proto-Balto-Slavic language or dialect continuum.

There is some debate as to the nature of the reconstruction among linguists. Opinons range from an actual genetic unity to a more incidential "period of common language and life" with the strong similarities due to prolongued language contact.

Balto-Slavic
Geographic distribution:	Eastern and Northern Europe
Genetic classification:	Indo-European Balto-Slavic
Subdivisions:	Baltic Slavic

1 General argument
2 Evidence and interpretation
3 Meillet vs. Szemerényi
4 Objections to Balto-Slavic Unity
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

[edit] General argument

Hypothetical Indo-European phylogenetic units
Balto-Slavic Daco-Thracian Graeco-Aryan Graeco-Armenian Italo-Celtic Thraco-Illyrian ✻ Indo-Hittite

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, the Proto-Balto-Slavic language, 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 expressly that "[t]he Baltic and Slavic languages were originally one language and so form one group". Collinge (1985) includes an appendix (p 271–77) on "Laws of accentuation in Balto-Slavic", apparently implying a belief in a single Balto-Slavic proto-language, but concedes that "everything in this section is controversial, including this sentence"^[1].

[edit] Evidence and interpretation

More than 100 words are common in their form and meaning to Baltic and Slavic alone, among them:

Lithuanian bėgu ("I run"), Old Prussian bīgtwei ("to run"), Proto-Slavic běgǫ, Russian begu, Polish biegnę;
Lithuanian liepa ("tilia"), Latvian liepa, Old Prussian līpa, Proto-Slavic lipa, Russian lipa, Polish 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.

[edit] Meillet vs. Szemerényi

Until Meillet's Dialectes 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 ē/ā
verbs in Baltic -áuju, Slav. -ujǫ
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.

[edit] Objections to Balto-Slavic Unity

Klimas' Baltic and Slavic Revisited listed some points where some linguists disagree with the idea of a Balto-Slavic proto language:

PIE *ā and *ō remain in Baltic but they merged in Slavic.
PIE *sr remains in Baltic but changes to "str" in Slavic, though several identical changes in Baltic tend to confuse the issue.
Baltic uses the suffix -mo in ordinal numbers where Slavic uses -wo.
Baltic has indications of the 1st person singular present verb suffix -mai whereas Slavic doesn't, though this point is debated.
Baltic makes frequent use of the infix -sto- whereas Slavic doesn't, though the Old Church Slavonic word "bastǫ" may be an exception.
Proto-Baltic didn't distinguish the 3rd person singular and plural verb forms whereas Proto-Slavic did.
The Baltic adjectival suffix -inga isn't used in Slavic.
The Baltic diminutive -l- isn't used in Slavic.
The Slavic agentive suffix -telь isn't used in Baltic.
Proto-Slavic uses -es in words denoting body parts but Baltic doesn't.
Proto-Slavic uses the participle suffix -lo but Baltic doesn't.
Proto-Slavic incorporates the so-called "Law of Open Syllables" but Baltic doesn't.
The sigmatic aorist exists in Slavic but not in Baltic.
Proto-Slavic forms abstract numerals with -tь whereas Baltic doesn't.

Of course, all these objections are open to interpretation and debate.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

^ 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.

Barschel; Kozianka; Weber (eds.) (1992). Indogermanisch, Baltisch und Slawisch, Kolloquium in Zusammenarbeit mit der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft in Jena, September 1989. Munich: Otto Sagner. ISBN 3-87690-515-X.
Beekes, Robert S. P. (1995). Comparative Indo-European Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ISBN 90-272-2151-0 (Europe), ISBN 1-55619-505-2 (U.S.).
Collinge, N. E. (1985). The Laws of Indo-European. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ISBN 0-915027-75-5 (U.S.), ISBN 90-272-2102-2 (Europe).
Klimas, Antanas. Baltic and Slavic revisited. Lituanus vol. 19, no. 1, Spring 1973 . Retrieved on July 13, 2005. 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
Mayer, Harvey E.. Was Slavic a Prussian Dialect?. Lituanus vol. 33, no. 2, Summer 1987 . Retrieved on July 13, 2005. Answers the question in the negative.
Mayer, Harvey E.. Tokharian and Baltic versus Slavic and Albanian. Lituanus vol. 37, no. 1, Spring 1991 . Retrieved on July 13, 2005.
Mayer, Harvey E.. Aorist or Future?. Lituanus vol. 45, no. 1, Spring 1999 . Retrieved on July 13, 2005.
Pashka, Joseph. Baltic languages & Proto-Baltic. Retrieved on July 13, 2005.
Pashka, Joseph. Proto-Indo-European. Retrieved on July 13, 2005.
Szemerényi, Oswald (1957). "The problem of Balto-Slav unity". Kratylos 2: 97–123.