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. Baltic and Slavic share many close similarities, both lexical and morphosyntactic, not found in the rest of Indo-European; many linguists, following the lead of such notable Indo-Europeanists as Oswald Szemerenyi, 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 (satem branch.) The former view is traditionally the more widely held of the two.

The question is complicated by the facts that:

• 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.
• Baltic and Slavic languages were not written down until 15th and 9th centuries A.D.; 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). 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:

1. phonological palatalization (described by Kurylowicz, 1956)
2. the development of i and u before PIE resonants
3. ruki
4. accentual innovations
5. the definite adjective
6. participle inflection in -yo-
7. the Genitive singular of thematic stems in -ā(t)-
8. the comparative formation
9. the oblique 1st singular men-, 1st plural nōsom
10. tos/tā for PIE so/sā pronoun
11. the agreement of the irregular athematic verb lith. dúomi, slav. damь
12. the preterite in ē/ā
13. verbs in balt. -áuju. slav. -ujǫ
14. the strong correspondence of vocabulary not observed between any other pair of branches of the Indo-European languages.

See also

• Proto-Slavic
• Slavic languages
• Baltic languages

References

• Antanas Klimas Baltic and Slavic Revisited (http://www.lituanus.org/1973/73_1_02.htm) Lituanus, (1973) provides a review of the points of debate, and a listing of the scholars and their positions.
• Harvey E. Mayer Aorist or Future? (http://www.lituanus.org/1999/99_1_02.htm) (Lituanus, Volume 45, Spring 1999)
• Harvey E. Mayer Was Slavic a Prussian Dialect? (http://www.lituanus.org/1987/87_2_01.htm) Lituanus, (1987) answers the question in the negative.
• Harvey E. Mayer Tokharian and Baltic versus Slavic and Albanian (http://www.lituanus.org/1991_1/91_1_03.htm) Lituanus, (1991)
• Joseph Pashka, Proto-Baltic (http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Ithaca/6623/proto.htm) (1994) and Proto-Indo-European (http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Ithaca/6623/pie.htm) (1994)
• Lituanus Linguistics Index (http://www.lituanus.org/IndexLanguage.htm) (1954-2004)
• Oswald Szemerényi, The problem of Balto-Slav unity, Kratylos 2, 1957, 97–123.

External Links

• The University of Texas at Austin The Indo-European Language Family (http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/lrc/iedocctr/ie-lg/ie-lg.html)
• Balto-Slavic within the Indo-European language group (http://jilaniwarsi.tripod.com/geno.pdf#search='BaltoSlavic%2Cgroup%2Clanguages')
• Balto-Slavic language group (http://www.worldhistory.com/wiki/B/Balto-Slavic-languages.htm)
• Ethnologue – Baltic languages (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90207)
• Ethnologue – Slavic languages (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90673)
• The Balto-Slavic accentual mobility (http://www.staff.hum.ku.dk/olander/project/)
• Balto-Slavic Accentuation (http://www.kortlandt.nl/publications/art218e.pdf), by Kortlandt
• We the Balts (http://postilla.mch.mii.lt/Kalba/baltai.en.htm) (by Algirdas Sabaliauskas)
• Lexical comparison of Sanskrit and Latvian (http://www.lexiline.com/lexiline/lexi51.htm)

af:Balto-Slawies fr:Balto-slave pl:Języki bałtosłowiańskie