East Baltic languages
47-611: The East Baltic languages are a group of languages that along with the extinct West Baltic languages belong to the Baltic branch of the Indo-European language family. The East Baltic branch primarily consists of two extant languages— Latvian and Lithuanian . Occasionally, Latgalian and Samogitian are viewed as distinct languages, though they are traditionally regarded as dialects . It also includes now-extinct Selonian , Semigallian , and possibly Old Curonian . Lithuanian
94-949: A (e.g. d ai lyti ‘distribute’), shortening of nominal singular endings (e.g. arkluks ‘little horse’, dieus , dies ‘god’, niks ‘nothing’, vaiks ‘child’), use of consonant z instead of ž (e.g. ząsis , ząsė ‘goose’, zvėris , zvėrys ‘beast’, zvaiždė ‘star’). The said subdialect is believed to have retained an archaic feature from the Sudovian language — the usage of compound consonants šč , št , žd and st without inserting consonants k , g (e.g. auštas ‘high, tall’, pauštė ‘bird’, spiūsna ‘feather’, žvirždo s ‘sand, pebble’) — which also corresponds to examples found in Old Prussian (e.g. aūss ‘gold’, rīsti ‘whip’). Personal pronoun forms have also been noted for possessing features found in West Baltic languages, such as
141-441: A group of extinct Baltic languages that were spoken by West Baltic peoples. West Baltic is one of the two primary branches of Baltic languages, along with East Baltic . It includes Old Prussian , Sudovian , West Galindian , possibly Skalvian and Old Curonian . The only properly attested West Baltic language of which texts are known is Old Prussian , although there are a few short remnants of Old Curonian and Sudovian in
188-733: A n / m e n ) and others the complete disappearance of a vowel (reduction to zero: could n o t → couldn't ). For the study of European languages, one of the most important instances of vowel gradation is the Indo-European ablaut, remnants of which can be seen in the English verbs r i de , r o de , r i dden , or fl y , fl ew , fl ow n . For simply learning English grammar, it is enough to note that these verbs are irregular , but understanding why they have unusual forms that seem irregular (and indeed why they are actually perfectly regular within their own terms) requires an understanding of
235-410: A n and m e n ). The difference does not need to be indicated in the spelling. There are many kinds of vowel gradation in English and other languages, which are discussed generally in the article apophony . Some involve a variation in vowel length (quantitative gradation: ph o tograph / ph o tography shows reduction of the first vowel to a schwa ), others in vowel coloring (qualitative gradation: m
282-402: A n , ph o tograph / ph o tography ). Confusingly, in some contexts, the terms 'ablaut', 'vowel gradation', 'apophony' and 'vowel alternation' are used synonymously, especially in synchronic comparisons, but historical linguists prefer to keep 'ablaut' for the specific Indo-European phenomenon, which is the meaning intended by the linguists who first coined the word. In Proto-Indo-European,
329-553: A single vowel in the parent language. In particular, the zero grade was often subject to modification from changes in the pronunciation of syllabic sonorants. For example, in Germanic, syllabic sonorants acquired an epenthetic -u- , thus converting the original zero grade to a new "u-grade" in many words. Thus, while ablaut survives in some form in all Indo-European languages, it became progressively less systematic over time. Ablaut explains vowel differences between related words of
376-401: A verb is *bʰeydʰ- "to wait" (cf. "bide"). In the daughter languages, these came to be important markers of grammatical distinctions. The vowel change in the Germanic strong verb, for example, is the direct descendant of that seen in the Indo-European verb paradigm. Examples in modern English are the following: It was in this context of Germanic verbs that ablaut was first described, and this
423-448: Is a transitional language between West and East Baltic. Sudovian is either classified as an Old Prussian dialect, a West Baltic language or a transitional language between West and East Baltic. The former two options would leave Sudovian in the West Baltic phylum. Old Curonian is the least securely classified language. It is argued to be either West Baltic with significant East Baltic influence, or East Baltic. West Baltic
470-542: Is believed that East Balts would burn the remains of the dead and scatter the ashes on the ground or in nearby rivers and lakes. It is also known that East Balts were much more susceptible to the cultural influences coming from their Baltic Finnic neighbours in the northeast. The East Baltic languages are less archaic than their Western counterparts, with Latvian being the most innovative Baltic language. Certain linguistic features of East Baltic languages are usually explained by contacts with their Baltic Finnic neighbours. It
517-565: Is believed that stress retraction in Latvian is a consequence of their influence. Linguistic traits observed in the grammar of the Lithuanian language, such as the alteration of consonants p and b in Lithuanian dialects, the use of various syntactic borrowings like genitive of negation (cf. nematau vilko ( GEN ) 'I don’t see a wolf'; matau vilką ( ACC ) 'I see a wolf') or indirect mood (e.g. nešęs velnias akmenį 'a devil who
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#1732765860100564-565: Is easily explained: the PIE root is *h 1 es- . In the singular, the stem is stressed, so it remains in the e-grade, and it takes the inflection -ti . In the plural, however, the inflection -énti was stressed, causing the stem to reduce to the zero grade: *h 1 es-énti → *h 1 s-énti . See main article: Indo-European copula . Some of the morphological functions of the various grades are as follows: e-grade: o-grade: zero-grade: lengthened grade: Many examples of lengthened-grade roots in
611-466: Is not difficult to imagine it as a contraction of an older *ph 2 terés, pronounced perhaps [pɐterés] , as this combination of consonants and vowels would be possible in English as well. In other cases, however, the absence of a vowel strikes the speaker of a modern western European language as unpronounceable. To understand, one must be aware that there were a number of sounds that were consonants in principle but could operate in ways analogous to vowels:
658-408: Is said to be from pre-Proto-Indo-European syncope in unaccented syllables, but in some cases the lack of accent does not cause zero grade: *deywó- , nominative plural *-es "god". There does not seem to be a rule governing the unaccented syllables that take zero grade and the ones that take stronger grades. It is still a matter of debate whether PIE had an original a-vowel at all. In later PIE,
705-400: Is said to be in the "zero grade". Syllables with long vowels are said to be in "lengthened grade". (When the e -grade or the o -grade is referred to, the short vowel forms are meant.) A classic example of the five grades of ablaut in a single root is provided by the different case forms of two closely related Greek words. In the following table, an acute accent (´) marks the syllable carrying
752-471: Is still what most people primarily associate with the phenomenon. A fuller description of ablaut operating in English, German and Dutch verbs and of the historical factors governing these can be found at the article Germanic strong verb . The same phenomenon is displayed in the verb tables of Latin , Ancient Greek and Sanskrit . Examples of ablaut as a grammatical marker in Latin are the vowel changes in
799-449: Is the most-spoken East Baltic language, with more than 3 million speakers worldwide, followed by Latvian, with 1.75 million native speakers, then Samogitan with 500,000 native speakers, and lastly Latgalian with 150,000 native speakers. Originally, East Baltic was presumably native to the north of Eastern Europe , which included modern Latvia , Lithuania , northern parts of current European Russia and Belarus . Dnieper Balts lived in
846-556: The Indo-European ablaut ( / ˈ æ b l aʊ t / AB -lowt , from German Ablaut pronounced [ˈaplaʊt] ) is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb s i ng, s a ng, s u ng and its related noun s o ng , a paradigm inherited directly from the Proto-Indo-European stage of
893-497: The anthroponymy of the East Balts. West Baltic languages are traditionally characterised by having at least few of the following six key linguistic features: 1 – primordial diphthong *ei , 2 – equivalents to IE velars *k and *g , 3 – *AN type compounds, 4 – equivalents to palatals *k‘ and *g‘ , 5 – equivalents to Baltic consonant compounds *tj and *td , 6 – equivalents to Baltic vowels *ā and *ō . Based on
940-404: The basic, inherent vowel of most syllables was a short e . Ablaut is the name of the process whereby this short e changed, becoming short o , long ē , long ō or sometimes disappearing entirely to leave no vowel at all. Thus, ablaut results in the alternation of the following sounds: If a syllable had a short e , it is said to be in the "e-grade" or "full grade". When it had no vowel, it
987-683: The current territory of Moscow , which was the furthest undisputed eastern territory inhabited by the Baltic people. Traditionally, it is believed that West and East Baltic people had already possessed certain unique traits that separated them in the middle of the last millennium BC and began to permanently split from a common Proto-Baltic ancestor between the 5th and 3rd centuries BC. During this time, West and East Balts adopted different traditions and customs. They had separate ceramics and housebuilding traditions. In addition, both groups had their own burial customs : unlike their Western counterparts, it
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#17327658601001034-427: The degree of consensus existing in the academic community, the first two points are sometimes regarded as strong features whereas the remaining four are identified as weak features . There are differences in vocalic variations in the root ( aR / eR and a / e ) between East and West Baltic languages that possibly emerged due to development of Baltic phonology, categories of word-formation, categorical semantics of
1081-406: The development in the daughter languages is frequently far more complicated, and few reflect the original system as neatly as Greek. Various factors, such as vowel harmony , assimilation with nasals, or the effect of the presence of laryngeals in the Indo-European (IE) roots as well as their subsequent loss in most daughter languages, mean that a language may have several different vowels representing
1128-724: The diphthong *ei into a monophthong, pronounced like the contemporary Latvian jē and Lithuanian ė. This would further develop in Lithuanian and Latvian to become the present diphthong *ie (e.g. Lat. dievs , Lith. dievas 'god'). This innovation becomes obvious when comparing ablauted words of the same root, where o-grade words do not reflect this change (e.g. Lat. ciems , Lith. kaimas 'village') . Unlike their Western counterparts, East Baltic languages usually tend to keep their short vowels *o and *a separately (e.g. Lat. duot , Lith. duoti 'give' as opposed to Lat. māte , Lith. motina 'mother'). West Baltic languages West Baltic languages The West Baltic languages are
1175-410: The disappearance of the laryngeal h 2 could leave an a-colouring and this may explain all occurrences of a in later PIE. However, some argue controversially that the e-grade could sometimes be replaced by an a-grade without the influence of a laryngeal, which might help to explain the vowels in class 6 Germanic verbs , for example. Although PIE had only this one, basically regular, ablaut sequence,
1222-483: The examples above, Szemerényi's law affected the older sequences *ph 2 -tér-s and *n̥-péh 2 -tor-s, changing them to *ph 2 -tḗr and *n̥-péh 2 -tōr. Thus, these forms were originally in the regular, unlengthened e-grade and o-grade. Such lengthened vowels were, however, later grammaticalised and spread to other words in which the change did not occur. Nevertheless, there are examples of true lengthened grades, in which short e alternates with long ē . Examples are
1269-691: The following features: the diphthong *ei (e.g. deiws 'god', ( ACC ) deinan 'day'), palatalized consonants /kʲ/ , /gʲ/ (they are preserved also in the Lithuanian language), and the consonant clusters /tl/ and /dl/ . They also preserved three genders: masculine , feminine and neuter . Sudovian and Old Curonian shared the suffix -ng- , which can be observed in various hydronyms and oeconyms (e.g. Apsingė , Nedzingė , Pilvingis , Suvingis , Palanga , Alsunga ) found in southern Lithuania, western Lithuania and Latvia. West Balts possessed double-stemmed personal names with distinct compounds (e.g. Net(i)- , Sebei- ), which are unusual to
1316-433: The form of isolated words and short phrases. Many West Baltic languages went extinct in the 16th century while Old Prussian ceased to be spoken in the early 18th century . The only languages securely classified as West Baltic are Old Prussian and West Galindian , which could also be a dialect of Old Prussian. Most scholars consider Skalvian to be a West Baltic language or dialect. Another possible classification
1363-405: The four syllabic sonorants, the three laryngeals and the two semi-vowels: When u and i came in postvocalic positions, the result was a diphthong. Ablaut is nevertheless regular and looks like this: Thus, any of these could replace the ablaut vowel when it was reduced to the zero-grade: the pattern CVrC (for example, *bʰergʰ- ) could become CrC ( *bʰr̥gʰ- ). However, not every PIE syllable
1410-406: The grammar of the reconstructed proto-language . Ablaut is the oldest and most extensive single source of vowel gradation in the Indo-European languages and must be distinguished clearly from other forms of gradation, which developed later, such as Germanic umlaut ( m a n / m e n , g oo se / g ee se , l o ng / l e ngth ) or the results of modern English word-stress patterns ( m a n / wom
1457-402: The language started to develop a more complex vowel system. Thus, it has often been speculated that an original e-grade underwent two changes in some phonetic environments: under certain circumstances, it changed to o (the o-grade) and in others, it disappeared entirely (the zero-grade). However, that is not certain: the phonetic conditions that controlled ablaut have never been determined, and
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1504-403: The language. Traces of ablaut are found in all modern Indo-European languages , though its prevalence varies greatly. The phenomenon of Indo-European ablaut was first recorded by Sanskrit grammarians in the later Vedic period (roughly 8th century BCE), and was codified by Pāṇini in his Aṣṭādhyāyī (4th century BCE), where the terms guṇa and vṛddhi were used to describe
1551-490: The noun Laut "sound", and the prefix ab- , which indicates movement downwards or away, or deviation from a norm; thus the literal meaning is "sound reduction". It was coined in this sense in 1819 by the German linguist Jacob Grimm in his Deutsche Grammatik , though the word had been used before him. In particular, the 17th-century grammarian Schottelius had used the word negatively to suggest that German verbs lacked
1598-403: The paradigms of verbs and nouns. These were not the main markers of grammatical form, since the inflection system served this purpose, but they must have been significant secondary markers. An example of ablaut in the paradigm of the noun in PIE can be found in *pértus , from which the English words ford and (via Latin) port are derived (both via the zero-grade stem *pr̥t- ). An example in
1645-485: The perfect stem of verbs. Ablaut can often explain apparently random irregularities. For example, the verb "to be" in Latin has the forms est (he is) and sunt (they are). The equivalent forms in German are very similar: ist and sind . The same forms were present in Proto-Slavic : *estь and *sǫtь , and developed into e.g. Polish jest and są . The difference between singular and plural in these languages
1692-535: The phenomena now known respectively as the full grade and lengthened grade . In the context of European languages, the phenomenon was first described in the early 18th century by the Dutch linguist Lambert ten Kate , in his book Gemeenschap tussen de Gottische spraeke en de Nederduytsche ("Common aspects of the Gothic and Dutch languages", 1710). The term ablaut is borrowed from German, and derives from
1739-533: The position of the word stress may not have been a key factor at all. There are many counterexamples to the proposed rules: *deywós and its nominative plural *deywóes show pretonic and posttonic e-grade, respectively, and *wĺ̥kʷos has an accented zero grade. Many examples of lengthened grades, including those listed above, are not directly conditioned by ablaut. Instead, they are a result of sound changes like Szemerényi's law and Stang's law , which caused compensatory lengthening of originally short vowels. In
1786-541: The same language. For example: Ablaut also explains vowel differences between cognates in different languages. For the English-speaking non-specialist, a good reference work for quick information on IE roots, including the difference of ablaut grade behind related lexemes, is Watkins (2000). (Note that in discussions of lexis, Indo-European roots are normally cited in the e-grade, without any inflections.) In PIE, there were already ablaut differences within
1833-455: The sophistication of the classics, but there is no hint of this disdain in Grimm or in modern scholarly usage. In English, the term became established through the 1845 translation of Bopp's Comparative Grammar . Vowel gradation is any vowel difference between two related words (such as ph o tograph [ˈf əʊ təgrɑːf] and ph o tography [f ə ˈtɒgrəfi]) or two forms of the same word (such as m
1880-427: The sounds *š , *ž into *s, *z respectively. This is observed in hydronyms and oeconyms (e.g. Zirnajai , Zalvas , Zarasai ) as well as loanwords preserved in Lithuanian and Latvian dialects. It is believed that Semigallian possessed an uninflected pronoun, which was the equivalent to the Lithuanian savo (e.g. Sem. Savazirgi , Lith. savo žirgai , meaning 'one's horses'). East Baltic would in many cases turn
1927-523: The turn of consonant v into j when applying instrumental or adessive singular cases (e.g. sajim ( INS ), sajip , savip ( ADE ) ‘with oneself’, tajim ( INS ), tajip ( ADE ) ‘with you’). Old literary Lithuanian texts from Lithuania Minor attest the use of the third person singular past tense form bit(i) ‘was’ as well as prefix–preposition sa(-) , which are most likely linguistic features inherited from West Baltic languages. Indo-European ablaut In linguistics ,
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1974-590: The verb or traces of IE perfect. Findings on the Lithuanian Zatiela subdialect in present-day Dyatlovo suggest that it had preserved certain linguistic traits associated with West Baltic languages, primarily Sudovian, such as the incomplete transition of diphthong ei to ie (e.g. sv ie kas ‘hello’, sv ie kata ‘health’, pasv ie k ‘get well’), turn of vowel u into i before consonant v (e.g. br i vai ‘eyebrows’, liž i vis ‘tongue’, ž i vis , ž i vė ‘fish’), use of diphthong ai instead of
2021-482: The verbs with "Narten" inflection , and nouns like *mḗh₁-n̥s "moon", genitive *méh₁-n̥s-os . Alternations of this type were rare, however, and the e ~ o ~ ∅ alternation was the most common by far. The long ō grade was rarer still and may not have actually been a part of the ablaut system at all. The zero grade of ablaut may appear difficult for speakers of English. In the case of *ph 2 trés, which may already have been pronounced something like [pɐtrés] , it
2068-458: The word stress; a macron (¯) marks long vowels and the syllable in bold is the one illustrating the different vowel gradations. In this unusually neat example, the following can be seen: As with most reconstructions, however, scholars differ about the details of this example. One way to think of this system is to suppose that Proto-Indo-European originally had only one vowel, short e , and over time, it changed according to phonetic context, so
2115-583: Was bringing the stone') are also attributed to the influence of Baltic Finnic languages. Other extinct languages of the Eastern family group are poorly understood as they are practically unattested. However, from the analysis of hydronyms and retained loanwords, it is known that Selonian and Old Curonian languages possessed the retention of nasal vowels *an , *en , *in , *un . It is noted that Selonian, Semigallian and Old Latgalian palatalised soft velars *k , *g into *c , *dz while also depalatalising
2162-403: Was capable of forming a zero grade; some consonant structures inhibited it in particular cases, or completely. Thus, for example, although the preterite plural of a Germanic strong verb (see below) is derived from the zero grade, classes 4 and 5 have instead vowels representing the lengthened e-grade, as the stems of these verbs could not have sustained a zero grade in this position. Zero grade
2209-490: Was presumably native to the north of Central Europe , especially modern Poland , and the western Baltic region , which includes parts of modern Latvia and Lithuania . The West Baltic branch probably fully separated from East Baltic around the 4th–3rd century BCE, although their differences go as far as the middle of the last millennium BC. Unlike the East Baltic languages , West Baltic languages generally conserved
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