Lithuanian is the most archaic Indo-European language

me   Sat Jul 07, 2007 12:41 pm GMT
furrykef   Sat Jul 07, 2007 4:27 pm GMT
I think this belongs in the Language forum.

Anyway, as I've said before, I don't believe in the concept of an "archaic language" except for a language that is dead. Perhaps the word "conservative" might be better. The word "archaic" typically has a negative connotation, as if the language were founded on outmoded principles or something. "Your language has seven cases? Oh, that's the old way of doing things. Modern languages use word order and prepositions, except for pronouns. You should get with the times." ;)

- Kef
Adam   Sat Jul 07, 2007 8:12 pm GMT
Like many of the Indo-European languages, Lithuanian employs a modified Roman script. It is composed of 32 letters. The collation order presents one surprise: "Y" is moved to occur between "Į" (I ogonek) and "J" because "Y" actually represents a prolonged /iː/.

A Ą B C Č D E Ę Ė F G H I Į Y J K L M N O P R S Š T U Ų Ū V Z Ž
a ą b c č d e ę ė f g h i į y j k l m n o p r s š t u ų ū v z ž



Lithuanian is one of two living Baltic languages, along with Latvian. An earlier Old Prussian Baltic language was extinct by the 19th century; the other Western Baltic languages, Curonian and Sudovian, went extinct earlier. The Baltic languages form their own distinct branch of the Indo-European languages.

Lithuanian still retains many of the original features of the nominal morphology found in the common ancestors of the Indo-European languages, and has therefore been the focus of much study in the area of Indo-European linguistics. There is evidence to suggest the existence of a Balto-Slavic language group after the splitting of the Proto-Indo-European language, with the Slavic and Baltic branches then dividing after a prolonged "period of common language and life" (Szemerényi). While the possession of many archaic features is undeniable, the exact manner by which the Baltic languages have developed from the Proto-Indo-European language is not clear.

The Eastern Baltic languages split from the Western Baltic ones between 400 AD and 600 AD. The differentiation between Lithuanian and Latvian started after 800 AD; for a long period they could be considered dialects of a single language. At a minimum, transitional dialects existed until the 14th or 15th century, and perhaps as late as the 17th century. Also, the 13th- and 14th-century occupation of the western part of the Daugava basin (closely coinciding with the territory of modern Latvia) by the German Sword Brethren had a significant influence on the languages' independent development.

The earliest surviving written Lithuanian text is a hymnal translation dating from about 1503-1525.

The Lithuanian language is a highly inflected language in which the relationships between parts of speech and their roles in a sentence are expressed by numerous flexions.

There are two grammatical genders in Lithuanian - feminine and masculine. There is no neuter gender per se, but there are some forms which are derived from the historical neuter gender, notably attributive adjectives. Lithuanian has a free, mobile stress, and is also characterized by pitch accent.

It has five noun and three adjective declensions and three verbal conjugations. All verbs have present, past, past iterative and future tenses of the indicative mood, subjunctive (or conditional) and imperative moods (both without distinction of tenses) and infinitive. These forms, except the infinitive, are conjugative, having two singular, two plural persons and the third person form common both for plural and singular. Lithuanian has the richest participle system of all Indo-European languages, having participles derived from all tenses with distinct active and passive forms, and several gerund forms. Nouns and other declinable words are declined in seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, and vocative. In older Lithuanian texts three additional varieties of the locative case are found: illative, adessive and allative. The most common are the illative, which still is used, mostly in spoken language, and the allative, which survives in the standard language in some idiomatic usages. The adessive is nearly extinct.

In practical terms, these declensions render word order less important than in more isolating languages such as English. A Lithuanian speaker may word the English phrase "a car is coming" as either "atvažiuoja automobilis" or "automobilis atvažiuoja".

The basic vocabulary of Lithuanian does not possess many loan words. Some words known as senieji skoliniai (old loan words) were borrowed from its close neighbors (Slavs and Germans) a very long time ago. Usually, when Slavs or Germans introduced a new concept or item, Lithuanians used the same word for that concept or item with minor changes to conform to the phonological system of the language. Words like stiklas for "glass" (from the Slavic "steklo"), muilas for "soap" (from the Slavic "mylo"), gatvė for "street" (from the Germanic "gatwo"), spinta (a generic term for storage furniture, such as cupboards, wardrobes, bookcases, and so forth; from the German "Spind"), are all examples of old loan words.

Like most other languages, Lithuanian has quite a few international words which came into the language along with 20th-century inventions. Some of them are direct, for example, ekonomija, schema, kosmosas, while others are hybrids, i. e. one stem is international and the other is Lithuanian. An example of the latter usage is šviesoforas, "traffic light" (lit. light-bearing).

The policy of borrowing new foreign words is a compromise between simply accepting new words and coining new Lithuanian words. For scientific usage, it is much easier to simply accept the word in question, making minor changes to conform to the phonological system of the language. Therefore, the percentage of foreign words in technical contexts might readily reach 70% or more. In everyday usage, creating new Lithuanian words is preferred.

An interesting feature of the language, in common with its sister language Latvian, is that proper names from other countries and languages, no matter how obscure, are altered phonetically to fit the phonological system of Lithuanian. Even if the original language also uses the Latin alphabet, this process takes place. Moreover the names are modified to ensure they have noun declension endings, declining like all other nouns. For example a place such as Lecropt (a Scottish parish) is likely to become Lekroptas; the Scottish village of Tillicoultry becomes Tilikutris. This is a good example of linguistic purism in this ancient language.


Indo-European vocabulary

Lithuanian is considered one of the more conservative modern Indo-European languages, and certain Lithuanian words are very similar to their Sanskrit counterparts. The Lithuanian and Sanskrit words sūnus (son) and avis (sheep) are exactly the same, and many other word pairs differ only slightly, such as dūmas for smoke (dhumas in Sanskrit), antras for second (antaras in Sanskrit), and vilkas for wolf (vrkas in Sanskrit). However, Lithuanian verbal morphology shows many innovations.

Lithuanian has some vocabulary items descended from the proto-language which are also found in Latin. Examples include the following words (the first word is Latin, the second is the Lithuanian cognate): rota — ratas (wheel), senex — senis (an old man), vir — vyras (a man), anguis — angis (a snake in Latin, a species of snakes in Lithuanian), linum — linas (flax, compare with English 'linen'), aro — ariu (I plow), iungo — jungiu (I join), duo — du (two), tres — trys (three), septem — septyni (seven), gentes — gentys (tribes), mensis — mėnesis (month), dentes — dantys (teeth), noctes — naktys (nights), sedemus — sėdime (we sit) and so on. This even extends to grammar, where for example Latin noun declensions ending in -um often correspond to Lithuanian -ų. Many of the words from this list share similarities with other Indo-European languages, including English. But, despite frequent similarities in vocabulary, Lithuanian has many differences from Latin, and consequently from the Romance languages as well. Notably, structural differences almost exclude the possibility of any hypothesis that one of the languages is a descendant of the other.

On the other hand, the numerous lexical and grammatical similarities between Baltic and Slavic languages suggest an affinity between these two language groups. However, there exist a number of Baltic (particularly Lithuanian) words, notably those that are similar to Sanskrit or Latin, which lack counterparts in Slavic languages. This fact was puzzling to many linguists prior to the middle of the 19th century, but was later influential in the re-creation of the Proto Indo-European language. In any event, the history of the earlier relations between Baltic and Slavic languages and a more exact genesis of the affinity between the two groups remains in dispute.


wikipedia.org
furrykef   Sun Jul 08, 2007 3:51 am GMT
I'd prefer that you provide a link instead of quoting a long excerpt.