Posted on 07/26/2007 12:19:22 PM PDT by Dievas
Lithuanian and Latvian languages are not Slavic and not Balto-Slavic. I made a deep esearch and I can say that both Baltic languages are definitely not Slavic, not even close, and neither Balto-Slavic. They should be separated into a very early separation branch similar to Armenian. There are very few Slavic-sounding words in both Baltic languages and those words were borrowed in near modern times. All other words (99,999999%) in both Baltic languages don't even remind of any Slavic language. There are words that sound Arabic, Franco, Latin, Greek, even English and Italiamn and even Pacific, but very few Slavic words and those "slavic" words could have been original Baltic words borrowed by Slavs from the Balts. Please CHALLENGE me and prove that Baltic languages belong in the Balto-Slavic group and not in Baltic group from the very beginning of Sanskrit and even before that.
Welcome to FR. I think.
Are you an expert in the field. Most reliable sources consider Latvian and Lithuanian to be Slavic (includes Balto-Slavic--the most encompassing definition of the term).
Como?
Wat?
Was?
Ce qui ?
Sounds like something a Slav might say.
Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians are NOT Slavs, nor is their language, although their remains a large Slavic population (in the form of Russians and Poles) in Vilnius.
It's got a gazillion conjugations and declensions ~ and tracking each one of them back to the closest source language(s) would probably pin it down as a creole with no purely Slavic roots.
Still, some of those roots can probably also be found in the ancient background of one or more of the modern Slavic languages. This is something that would lead to the confusion that Lett is Slavic, or even derived, in part from Slavic linguistic input (beyond modern words of course).
Sometimes the development of a creole takes a different track, and like English, the conjugations and declensions are dropped. Sometimes the replacement (for purposes of grammar) may be word order or just a lot of mind-numbing agglutination.
My understanding is that Lett has neither ~ and that leaves it out of the Uralic/Altaic or Fenno/Scandian orbits. (BTW, this question of Lett being as old as Sanskrit has been around for ages. Even the Nazi ethnologists used to debate it. That's before they lost WWII and we killed them off).
It's possible that ancient slave routes passed through this part of the Baltic, and that's what led to the creation of a regional trade language made up of so many pieces from so many other Indo-European langauges. Unfortunately they appear not to have written any histories until the coming of the Swedes and Greeks.
Vilnius used to be a Swedish speaking city. Some things happened. The Swedes left. Other folks moved in. At one time it was the third largest Swedish city.
Near as I can tell, that is correct. Lithuanian has a dozen or so words you could call IE roots, almost certainly borrowed, and 99.999% of the language looks like it came straight from Mars. Calling it an IE language is wishful thinking.
G'Dansk was until quite recently the Prussian city of Danzig, with a majority-German speaking population. There were once more German and Slovenian speakers in Trieste than Italian speakers.
Back before the rise of nationalism, it was very common for most large cities in Europe (especially in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean) the be multi-ethnic and multi-lingual. Even in the Polish countryside, until the late 19th century, you had German villages, Czech villages, and ethnic Polish villages.
Contrary to current mythology (believed by many Freepers), the idea of nationalism is barely two centuries old, and many if not most European polities were multiethnic and multilingual, with no requirements to "assimilate."
Of course, this didn't stop the German petty-monarchies from encouraging the colonialization of eastern Europe through emigration in the middle ages. Same goes for the scandanavians.
Appreciated.
G'Dansk was until quite recently the Prussian city of Danzig, with a majority-German speaking population. There were once more German and Slovenian speakers in Trieste than Italian speakers.
Back before the rise of nationalism, it was very common for most large cities in Europe (especially in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean) the be multi-ethnic and multi-lingual. Even in the Polish countryside, until the late 19th century, you had German villages, Czech villages, and ethnic Polish villages.
Contrary to current mythology (believed by many Freepers), the idea of nationalism is barely two centuries old, and many if not most European polities were multiethnic and multilingual, with no requirements to "assimilate."
Of course, this didn't stop the German petty-monarchies from encouraging the colonialization of eastern Europe through emigration in the middle ages. Same goes for the scandanavians.
You are right about the cities. They were almost always mixed. One of the reasons for the "mix" was frequently the ineligibility of some ethnic group or the other to own land ~ e.g. Jews.
At the same time city populations were a small fraction of the total population in any given area. They also had a "reproductive" problem. City people had a very low birth rate. Rural people had a high birth rate. Kids did not do well in towns.
More children = another hand to pick the crops/milk the cow/slaughter the swine.
Lets also forget that in urban areas, there are typically more diversions, which leads to a lower birth rate. The key reason given for the rapidly falling birthrate in Latin America since the end of WWII has been urbanization. In a rural area, your main form of activity has traditionally been farming and procreating. In an urban environment, there are more diversions, and additional children are usually a burden more than an additional source of labor/income.*
You are correct that in medieval times to early modern times, cities and towns were disease ridden and not healthy places.
*A major exception being our own cities when we had AFDC from the 1960s-1990s, where poor urban women were paid additional benefits on the amount of children they had.)
Thailand ?
see also estonian finno-ugricThe Latvian languageThe Latvian language belongs to the Baltic group of the Indo-European family of languages. Its closest and only living relative is Lithuanian (the Latvian is non-Slavic and a non-Germanic language). Latvian has inherited a lot from the Indo-European proto-dialects, and as well as Lithuanian, it has preserved a lot of archaic features in its sound system and grammar. The Baltic tribes arrived in their present territory in the third millennium BC. The split between Latvian and Lithuanian proto-dialects took place in the sixth and seven centuries AD. The formation of the common Latvian language began during the 10-12th centuries. Today traces of tribal dialects can be found in three main dialects and more than 500 vernaculars of the Latvian language, which exist along with the highly standardised form of Latvian. Typologically Latvian is a fissional, inflectional language. Latvian nouns have 7 cases, verbs may inflect for tense, mood, voice and person. There is also a rich system of derivational affixes. The order of clause constituents is relatively free. The majority of speakers distinguish between two tones or intonations in long syllables. Latvian stresses the first syllable of each word and vowel length may occur in an unstressed syllable.
The Latvian Institute
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