> Many thanks for your message. You seem unhappy with the idea of Why unhappy? I couldn't care less.
> Lithuanian being described as "the oldest (i.e. the least changed > over the years) surviving Indo-European language", but you don't say > which modern Indo-European language you think might be older. Icelandic (an extremely close relative of old Norse) is older, and A LOT more intact. > > > Meilute Ramoniene and Ian Press, in their introduction to > _Colloquial Lithuanian_ (London: Routledge, 1996), confirm that > Latvian and Lithuanian are closely related to Old Prussian, a West > Baltic language, which became extinct towards the end of the 17th > century. This opinion is somewhat tendentious. It is a la mode in Lithuania to distance oneself from everything Slavic (for understandable reasons), but Prussian is more likely to have belonged to the Slavic rather than Baltic subgroup. > If I remember right (from library books - so not available at home) > Latvian and Lithuanian parted company with each other c. 800 AD, and > the two languages have hardly changed for the past 800 or 900 years. > "Lithuanian itself is traditionally described as 'archaic'; what is, > or ought to be, meant by this is that it retains a large number of > features, particularly in declension, one might assume to have been > present at an earlier stage in the history of the Indo-European > languages. Putting it simply, Lithuanian might be placed alongside > Latin, Greek and Sanskrit in its linguistic importance. With the > difference that it and its numerous dialects are still spoken." No doubt. The INTERESTING thing is that Lithuanians are GENETICALLY closer to Slavs than the Balts (do not tell them this: they are as sensitive on this subject as the Japanese on their origin in Korea), so they are not the same people that broke off the Letts 1300 years ago, but a people that adopted that language. A related issue has a HUGE bearing on one particular paleolutenistic theory: Bulgarians (a genetically Turkic people who adopted an Indo-European Slavic language) are responsible for the introduction of short necked lutes into Europe in the 6th century (may Ferengizade's progeny all have large feet....). More on the subject later. I am working on a webpage about linguistic evidence of Lute's Balkan entry into Europe. RT ______________ Roman M. Turovsky http://turovsky.org http://polyhymnion.org
