| Balto-Slavic | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution: |
Eastern, Southern and Northern Europe |
| Linguistic classification: | Indo-European
|
| Proto-language: | Proto-Balto-Slavic |
| Subdivisions: | |
Countries where the national language is:
Eastern Slavic
Western Slavic
Southern Slavic
Baltic
|
|
The Balto-Slavic language group traditionally comprises Baltic and Slavic languages, belonging to the Indo-European family of languages. Baltic and Slavic languages share several linguistic traits not found in any other Indo-European branch, which points to the period of common development. Most Indo-Europeanists classify Baltic and Slavic languages into a single branch, even though some details of the nature of their relationship remain in dispute in some circles, usually due to political controversies.[1] Some linguists, however, have recently suggested that Balto-Slavic should be split into three equidistant nodes: Eastern Baltic, Western Baltic and Slavic.[2][3]
A Proto-Balto-Slavic language is reconstructable by comparative method, descending from Proto-Indo-European by means of well-defined sound laws, and out of which modern Slavic and Baltic languages descended. One particularly innovative dialect separated from the Balto-Slavic dialect continuum and became ancestral to Proto-Slavic language, out of which all other Slavic languages descended.[4]
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The nature of the relationship of the Balto-Slavic languages has been the subject of much discussion from the very beginning of historical Indo-European linguistics as a scientific discipline. A few are more intent on explaining the similarities between the two groups not in terms of a genetic relationship, but by language contact and dialectal closeness in the Proto-Indo-European period.
Baltic and Slavic share more close phonological, lexical, morphosyntactic and accentological similarities than do any other language groups within the Indo-European language family. The notable early Indo-Europeanist August Schleicher (1861) proposed a simple solution: From Proto-Indo-European descended Proto-Balto-Slavic, out of which Proto-Baltic and Proto-Slavic emerged. The Latvian linguist Jānis Endzelīns thought, however, that any similarities among Baltic and Slavic languages were a result of an intensive language contact, i.e., that they were not genetically related and that there was no common Proto-Balto-Slavic language. Antoine Meillet (1905, 1908, 1922, 1925, 1934), the distinguished French Indo-Europeanist, in reaction to a second simplified theory of Schleicher's, propounded a view according to which all similarities of Baltic and Slavic occurred accidentally, by independent parallel development, and that there was no Proto-Balto-Slavic language. In turn, the Polish linguist Rozwadowski suggests that the similarities among Baltic and Slavic languages are a result of not only genetic relationship, but also of later language contact. Thomas Olander corroborates the claim of genetic relationship in his research in the field of comparative Balto-Slavic accentology.[5]
Even though some linguists still reject a genetic relationship, most scholars accept that Baltic and Slavic languages experienced a period of common development. Beekes (1995:22), for example, states expressly that "[t]he Baltic and Slavic languages were originally one language and so form one group".[6] 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.[7]
The Balto-Slavic languages are most often divided into Baltic and Slavic branches.[8][9] However, another division was proposed in the 1960s by Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov: that the Balto-Slavic proto-language split from the start into West Baltic, East Baltic and Proto-Slavic.[10] Thus Ivanov and Toporov questioned not only Balto-Slavic unity, but also Baltic unity. In their framework, Proto-Slavic is a peripheral and innovative Balto-Slavic dialect which suddenly expanded, due to a conjunction of historical circumstances, and effectively erased all the other Balto-Slavic dialects, except in the marginal areas where Lithuanian, Latvian and Old Prussian developed. This model is supported by glottochronologic studies by V.V.Kromer[11] although both of the most recent computer-generated family trees have a Baltic node parallel to the Slavic node.[12] Onomastic evidence shows that Baltic languages were once spoken in much wider territory than the one they cover today, all the way to Moscow, and were later replaced by Slavic.
The sudden expansion of Proto-Slavic in the sixth and the seventh century (around AD 600, uniform Proto-Slavic with no detectable dialectal differentiation was spoken from Thessaloniki in Greece to Novgorod in Russia) is according to some connected to the hypothesis that Proto-Slavic was in fact a koiné of the Avar state, i.e. the language of the administration and military rule of the Avar khaganate in Eastern Europe.[13] It is well-known from historical sources that Slavs and Avars jointly attacked the Byzantine Empire and laid siege to Constantinople.[14] According to that interpretation, Avars were a thin layer of military aristocracy in that state/alliance, while the Slavs were a military caste – warriors (i.e. not a nation or ethnicity in the proper sense of that word). Their language – at first possibly only one local speech – once koinéized, became a lingua franca of the Avar state. This might explain how Proto-Slavic spread to the Balkans and the areas of the Danubian basin,[15] and would also explain why the Avars were assimilated so fast, leaving practically no linguistic traces, and that Proto-Slavic was so unusually uniform. However, such a theory fails to explain how Slavic spread to Eastern Europe, an area which had no historical links with the Avar Khanate.[16]
That sudden expansion of Proto-Slavic erased most of the idioms of the Balto-Slavic dialect continuum, which left us today with only two branches: Baltic and Slavic (or East Baltic, West Baltic, and Slavic in the minority view). This secession of the Balto-Slavic dialect ancestral to Proto-Slavic is estimated on archaeological and glottochronological criteria to have occurred sometime in the period 1500–1000 BCE.[17]
The close relationship of the Baltic and Slavic languages is indicated by a series of exclusive isoglosses representing innovations not shared with any other IE branch (especially in their phonology)[4] and by the fact that one can establish the relative chronology of those innovations, which is the most important criterion for establishing genetic relationship in historical linguistics. The most important of these isoglosses are:
Common Balto-Slavic innovations include several other prominent, but non-exclusive isoglosses, such as the Satemization, Ruki, change of PIE */o/ to PBSl. */a/ (shared with Germanic, Indo-Iranian and Anatolian branch) and the loss of labialization in PIE labiovelars (shared with Indo-Iranian, Armenian and Tocharian). A number of these, however, fit only in the relative chronology of other otherwise exclusive Balto-Slavic isoglosses, which makes them specific Balto-Slavic innovation.
Baltic and Slavic languages also show some correspondence in vocabulary; about 100 words are shared by Baltic and Slavic languages, either being a common innovation (i.e. not of PIE origin) or sharing the same semantic development from PIE root.[19] For example:
Among Balto-Slavic archaisms notable is the retention of free PIE accent (with many innovations).
Proto-Balto-Slavic is a reconstructed proto-language descending from Proto-Indo-European and out of which all later Baltic and Slavic languages and dialects descended.