The hypothetical 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 dialect continuum or just common language traits acquired by close contact of speakers of ancestral languages.

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

General argument

Baltic and Slavic share more close similarities, phonological, lexical, and morphosyntactic, than any other language groups within the Indo-European language family save the close affinities between Indic and Iranian languages. Some linguists, following the lead of such notable Indo-Europeanists as August Schleicher (1861), and Oswald Szemerényi (1957), 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 (1905, 1908, 1922, 1925, 1934) ? 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". Gray and Atkinson's (2003) application of language-tree divergence analysis supports a genetic relationship between the Baltic and Slavic languages and dating the split of the family to about 1400 BCE. That this was found using a very different methodology than other studies lends some credence to the links between the two.^[1].

Evidence and interpretation

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

• Lithuanian b?gu ("I run"), Latvian b?gu ("I flee"), Old Prussian b?gtwei ("to run"), Proto-Slavic b?g?, Ukrainian bizhu, Russian begu, Polish biegn?;
• Lithuanian liepa ("tilia"), Latvian liepa, Old Prussian l?pa, Proto-Slavic lipa, Ukrainian lypa, Russian lipa, Polish lipa.

The number 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 and political 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 have the Satem sound change.

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:

1. phonological palatalization (described by Kurylowicz, 1956)
2. the development of i and u before Proto Indo-European resonants
3. ruki
4. accentual innovations
5. the definite adjective
6. participle inflection in -yo-
7. the genitive singular of thematic stems in -?(t)-
8. the comparative formation
9. the oblique 1st singular men-, 1st plural n?som
10. tos/t? for Proto Indo-European so/s? pronoun
11. the agreement of the irregular athematic verb (Lithuanian dúoti, Slavic dat?)
12. the preterite in ?/?
13. verbs in Baltic -áuju, Slav. -uj
14. 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 Matasovi? (1995) the change only takes place in closed syllables.

Objections to Balto-Slavic Unity

Klimas' Baltic and Slavic Revisited lists some points adduced by linguists skeptical of a Balto-Slavic proto-language.

1. PIE *? and *? remain in Baltic but they merged in Slavic.
2. PIE *sr remains in Baltic but changes to "str" in Slavic, though several identical changes in Baltic tend to confuse the issue.
3. Baltic uses the suffix -mo in ordinal numbers where Slavic uses -wo.
4. Baltic has indications of the 1st person singular present verb suffix -mai whereas Slavic doesn't, though this point is debated.
5. Baltic makes frequent use of the infix -sto- whereas Slavic doesn't.
6. Proto-Baltic didn't distinguish the 3rd person singular and plural verb forms whereas Proto-Slavic did.
7. The Baltic adjectival suffix -inga isn't used in Slavic.
8. The Baltic diminutive -l- isn't used in Slavic.
9. The Slavic agentive suffix -tel? isn't used in Baltic.
10. Proto-Slavic uses -es in words denoting body parts but Baltic doesn't.
11. Proto-Slavic uses the participle suffix -lo but Baltic doesn't.
12. Proto-Slavic incorporates the so-called "Law of Open Syllables" but Baltic doesn't.
13. The sigmatic aorist exists in Slavic but not in Baltic.
14. Proto-Slavic forms abstract numerals with -t? whereas Baltic doesn't.

See also

• Proto-Baltic
• Baltic languages
• Proto-Slavic
• Slavic languages
• Corded Ware culture

Notes

References

• 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.

• Matasovi?, 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.

External links

• The University of Texas at Austin The Indo-European Language Family
• Balto-Slavic within the Indo-European 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)

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