Talk:Balto-Slavic languages/Archive 2

Position of Common Slavic

what I've been reading mostly as the most probable is the Ivanov/Toporov theory presented in the 1960s, by which Balto-Slavic separated directly into Early Proto-Slavic, Eastern Baltic and Western Baltic. Before the geographical division (probably caused by Goths), there was some kind of dialect continuum, on whose periphery there was this innovative dialect that Common Slavic later emerged from.
Common Slavic (up to 7th century) was spoken on an immense territory on which it expanded so fast that there are basically no detectable dialect features in it - this was probably because it was koine of Avar state. A thin millitary aristocracy layer of Avars was eventually completely Slavicized (later sources such as De administrando imperio often confuse Slavs with Avars, but earlier make a difference such as when describing Slavic-Avar attack on Constantinople).
That vastly expanded CS probably erased most of BSl. idioms, that left little or no traces (Avar itself left almost no traces in Slavic), leaving only CS, Eastern and Western Baltic. That theory is supported not only by historical inditions, but also by the fact that one cannot reconstruct Proto-Baltic language; Eastern and Western Baltic diverge among themselves so much as every one of them individually from CS, and there are basically no non-trivial exclusive isoglosses among Baltic languages, that are not secondary and that can be faithfully arranged chronologically (i.e. represent common development). Proto-Baltic article is a joke (it's been a stub for..how long?). These new "theories" that Western and Eastern Baltic independently stem from PIE (each repesenting a separate PIE "branch"), and that exhibited parallel development and converged, are just pathetic attempts to evade undisputable correspondences with Slavic. OTOH, for many important exclusive Balto-Slavic isoglosses, relative chronology can be set very easily!
The current state of the article, which focuses primarily on approving/"disapproving" Balto-Slavic theory, is particularly misleading. These comparison lists like Sanskrit-Latvian (hey this was new, usually these these are Lithuanian-Sanskrit, or Lithuanian-Sumerian, Turkish-Sumerian and similar ^_^) have nothing to do with the article theme. And it was even conveniently lemmatized; Latvian with Balto-Slavic infinitive suffix -ti, Sanskrit in 3PS PAI ^_^
Lituanus articles with their original research theories are really no "arguments" (Slavic-Albanian-Messapian - oh lord, after that, what credibility does Harvey Mayer have left?), most notably because they present absolutely no reasonable alternative to account for common isoglosses.
One would think upon reading this article, and also on Baltic languages ("Most linguists believe that the Baltic languages diverged from Proto-Indo-European separately from other language groups." - what a dirty lie), that the current communis opinio upon BSl. unity is that it's very existence is quite conservative topic by itself, when on the other hand the truth is quite the opposite: BSl. forms are cited in notable books, papers and journals, BSL. reflexes of PIE roots are treated always together (e.g. by Derksen in IEED project), and correspondences are being drawn to relevant Slavic dialects (Chakavian/Slovincian).
But, there are still many imporant articles to be created first (there's not even one on Winter's law, geez) --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 14:01, 25 April 2008 (UTC) And also "SIL" as a reference - this is the geographical distribution, which doesn't necessarily correspond with cladistic tree reconstructed by comparative method. E.g., Slavic languages are traditionally divided into East/West/South - but there is no "Proto-South Slavic" or "Proto-West Slavic"; there are numerous isoglosses that connect e.g. Croatian dialects with Slovak, and one tries to reconstruct "Proto-South-Slavic" word (e.g. on the basis of reflex of yat) you end up with Late Proto-Slavic reconstruction. So SIL's division is really a matter of tradition, not an argument per se. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 14:10, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

your points are granted, and you appear to be the right person to address them -- so, any time you have some time to spare, feel welcome. --dab (𒁳) 15:46, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

I know both languages -Latvian(baltic) and Russian(slavic)very well and can assure you that these both languages are very relative.I am surprised to see that wikipedia allows blatant lies to proliferate within itself by letting such frazes as "Most linguists believe that the Baltic languages diverged from Proto-Indo-European separately from other language groups."

Frank Whoeffer (talk) 11:52, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

"blatant lies", Sir? Did you in fact verify the sources cited in this article? Which of them did you find was mis-cited? dab (𒁳) 15:44, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

Why do you consider the Latvian-Sanskrit comparison misleading and stupid? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.180.97.70 (talk) 13:22, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Because it's cherry-picking a handful of forms that look superficially similar rather than paying attention to the actual comparative method, which has shown for well over 100 years now that the Baltic languages are very closely related to the Slavic languages and only much more distantly related to Sanskrit. —Angr 13:37, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

How does putting an external link with a Latvian-Sanskrit vocabulary comparison disprove the fact that Baltic and Slavic languages are related? The comparison isn't as superficial as you claim and it surely can be used to deepen the insight into the Indo-European languages. Keep in mind that the average reader has little to no clue about these language groups and this source has a great potential of showing the average reader how closely related the Indo-European languages generally are. I'm sure that many people after seeing the word "Balto-Slavic" will mistakenly understand that Baltic and Slavic language groups are a lot closer than they actually are and this link is an appropriate way of showing the true colors. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.180.97.70 (talk) 17:49, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

The fact that the average reader has little to no clue about these language groups is exactly why we shouldn't include links to misleading websites suggesting some close relation between Latvian and Sanskrit where none exists. If people get the idea that Baltic and Slavic languages are closely related when they encounter the word "Balto-Slavic", then the idea they've gotten is the one that has consensus among historical linguists. Readers should get the idea that Baltic and Slavic are closely related, because they are; but they should not get the idea that Latvian and Sanskrit are closely related, because they aren't. —Angr 18:23, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

It is a case of WP:POV, and it could be cured by WP:RS and WP:V. Furthermore - removing of external links is on the verge WP:IDONTLIKE. And as a matter of fact Lithuanian is more close to sanskrit[1], [2], than Latvian, although, both of them ar not Slavic, and are rather Baltic, and rather close to the sanskrit [[3]. Best regards--Lokyz (talk) 20:02, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

The links you provided look fairly reliable, and indeed none of them claims that Baltic is particularly closely related to Sanskrit. However, some of them also do the cherry-picking, listing half-a-dozen words with superficial similarity, often due to coincidence (such as the fact that PIE *o became a independently in both Baltic and Indo-Iranian, as it did also in Germanic and, I believe, Hittite). —Angr 20:19, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

So you deleted the link, because: a) it is superficial b) it is misleading c) it is misleading and superficial?

You should support your opinion. In case of b) and c), I'd like to say that your quality standarts are far too high, I also couldn't find a sentence saying that Latvian or Lithuanian are very closely related to Sanskrit. A table of similar not just random words is accepted all over the Wikipedia and is included in several articles regarding various language groups and families therefore your statement, in my opinion, is not valid unless you can prove that the similarities in the provided link are inaccurate and false. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.180.97.70 (talk) 23:36, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Angr already showed you how misleading is to compare lexemes that have by pure chance acquired similar phonetic properties. PIE */o/ indeed completely by chance became /a/ in Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic (sometimes at the beginning of 9th century it turned back to /o/ in Slavic, so Slavic /o/ doesn't even inherit PIE */o/ !). Moreover, I showed you how it misleadingly lemmatizes Sanskrit verbs with 3rd person singular suffix -ti which has absolutely nothing to do with Balto-Slavic infinitive suffix -ti (even today unchanged in Lithuanian and my mother tongue - Croatian) which was taken from dative case ending of the verbal noun IIRC.

Those issues aside - the real reason why that naively compiled comparison table is misleading and irrelevant is because it doesn't actually "prove" and "disprove" anything. Even if you build a list of 10 000 etymons identical in Latvian and Sanskrit - Latvian would still share something like a dozen common innovations with Slavic languages which occurred during the Balto-Slavic era. It would be even more misleading to put that link to the article because the naive reader might assume that it actually invalidates the BSl. framework, which it doesn't, or that Latvian is more closely associated to Sanskrit than to Common Slavic.

We'll also have to discuss those lituanus.org links and Klimas' "arguments" at some point (half of which are the listings of Common Slavic innovations, which certainly do not invalidate BSl.). And also, the real argument why BSl. is necessary - no one has ever managed to reconstruct fantasy language "Proto-Baltic" that lituanus.org article writers like to invent to support their cause, because there is not single one non-trivial Common Baltic change that leaves Slavic aside (this was noticed by Christopher Stang something like half a century ago, and all relevant linguists nowadays agree on that fact - even the great Baltist Mažiulis, you might wanna look up his take on this). Baltic languages are just a "leftover" of the former Balto-Slavic dialect continuum which was largely erased by 6th century Late Proto-Slavic which for some reasons spread to vast territory, and do not represent a "node" in the genetic grouping of IE families, and BSl. is very necessary unless we want to posit that East Baltic and West Baltic constitute separate PIE branches. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 06:05, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

Slavic a branch of Baltic?

Two comments that I'd love an expert response on:

• I've read a statement that a reconstructed Proto-Baltic and a reconstructed Proto-Balto-Slavonic would be effectively the same thing.
• I've read a more startling statement along the lines that if you could construct a proto-language for Lithuanian and Slavonic, it could plausibly form a branch of the Eastern Baltic sub-family.

Actually, they might have been statements that these hypotheses have been put forward. One variation of the former could be the statement above that "Balto-Slavic separated directly into Early Proto-Slavic, Eastern Baltic and Western Baltic." Both hypotheses, in the form I've given them, would postulate Slavic as a divergent branch of Baltic. Comments?

Koro Neil (talk) 10:38, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

I've heard that too, that there are no uniquely Baltic sound changes that could be used to define a "Proto-Baltic" as distinct from Proto-Balto-Slavic; rather, there are sound changes that identify Slavic, sound changes that identify Eastern Baltic, and sound changes that identify Western Baltic. I don't know enough about it to evaluate those claims, though. —Angr 10:55, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

Most of the "branching over time" diagrams I've seen put the split of the Baltic languages from Slavic languages very early on. I'm not sure how terribly divergent/archaic "Proto-Baltic" would be as compared to today's Lithuanian, Latvian/Latgalian, ancient Prussian, et al, probably less than today's English versus Beowulf--but that's only my guess. Any such Proto-Baltic language would pretty much have to date back to the split of the Baltic and Slavic languages, effectively making Proto-Baltic and Proto-Baltic-Slavonic identical. That would mean Baltic doesn't come from Slavic, nor does Slavic come from Baltic--they are equal lineages that diverged a long time ago.

   I haven't looked much into the Slavic languages, but this scenario would likely place a Proto-Slavonic language (is there one?) sometime later in the evolutionary time scale. —PētersV (talk) 17:27, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

Article rewrite

Per kind Dbachmann's suggestion above, I took the liberty of rewriting the article. I now removed the references to Lituanus articles because they're amateurish and ridden with pro-Baltic nationalism, and also some refs to some personal web pages and some books that are no longer cited. I also think that this whole "dispute" that was current in neo-grammarian times should be confined to no more than 1 section, illustrating the main viewpoints. Listing all Szemerenyi's arguments looks like an overkill to me. Also, looking at other articles for language families, they mostly contain large listings of (standard) languages appearing in them, but these already appear at the articles for Baltic language and Slavic languages, so it might be the best just point to their respective articles. Also, I'm not sure whether the Proto-Balto-Slavic language stuff should be discussed here, or at the separate article (as most other proto-languages are). I'll adding start content to this article, and see how far it goes. I'll also add much more inline references when most of the article is finished. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 12:18, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

• I've finished with most of what I had in mind for this article. Comments? Feel free to correct any bad English constructs. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 15:31, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks Ivan, your work is excellent, and this article is well improved. Now, could you please do something about Alpha Centauri?  ;-P Kjaer 12:20, 15 October 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kjaer (talk • contribs)

History of Balto-Slavic problem

BTW, Thomas Olander's thesis, listed in ===External links== section, has a lot of important historical material [in French, German and Russian] dated to the problem of Balto-Slavic dispute. Enough to make even a separate article (e.g. History of Balto-Slavic problem). It's written in Danish that is to a large extent easily translatable via Google Translate, but unfortunately not completely. If some Danish-reading user wishes to collaborate on extracting the quotes in it to a separate article, feel free to drop me a note.. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 10:14, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

some questions

I'm trying to make sense of Balto-Slavic accent. The section in Beekes is extremely confusing, and this page is somewhat better, but still rather confusing. Most basic question: did Proto-Balto-Slavic have a tonal distinction on *all* syllables (i.e. all syllables had a three-way short/long acute/long circumflex distinction), or only on the syllable with accent? I'm guessing the former, based on statements like:

When accent was retracted from world-final, or any other syllable, to a syllable that carried Balto-Slavic acute, then the first syllable of a word in Latvian has so-called "broken" (lauztā) tone.

If so, this is a very important point that I've never seen mentioned anywhere: PBSl would then not be a pitch-accent language, like PIE, Greek, Sanskrit or (I think) any modern Balto-Slavic language, but a true tone language like Chinese.

Also, how many tone distinctions does Latvian have? Is it three (long/short/"broken") or four (acute/circumflex/short/broken)?

In general, the section "Reflexes in Balto-Slavic languages" could be seriously cleaned up; currently it's very confusing, with all these sound laws moving the accent from one syllable to another. One way that would really help is to expand the table to cover all the major cases, not just acute/circumflex on first syllable.

Also, the section "Matasović (2008)[20] lists the following scenario as the most probable origin of Balto-Slavic acute" is confusing (esp. the comment about Hirt's law) and duplicates what you previously said.

Also, I suggest shortening the section on Kortlandt. The second paragraph just restates why the glottalic theory as a whole is rejected. The first paragraph makes a bigger deal than it should. You do not need glottalic theory to suggest that BSl acute was phonologically a glottal stop; the entire argument of Kortlandt seems to boil down to "explain Winter's law with pre-glottal stop", and even then it's busted since this doesn't explain why Winter's law apparently only works in closed syllables, and it's very easy for glottalization to develop where it didn't used to be (cf. English glottalized stop consonants). (Finally, I see no reason why BSl acute couldn't just be /h/ rather than glottal stop -- this would make more sense anyway as a development from laryngeal /H/.)

Finally, "Relative chronology of sound changes" disagrees with Winter's law on the ordering of /o/-->/a/ and Winter's law.

Benwing (talk) 05:10, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

If you can find this reference and know Italian, Le Lingue Baltiche. My copy translated into Latvian is unfortunately packed away, perhaps someone else here has a copy and can lend a had on the Latvian tone distinctions. —PētersV (talk) 06:20, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the comment.

Definitely "pitch accent", but that's the formulation that my source uses (it's suppose to be called "Endzelin's law"); could it mean "that carried" means "that otherwise corresponds to", or that Latvian had polysyllabic tones in it's history? I don't know.. My knowledge of Latvian historical accentuation is very thin, because books mostly ignore it (Lith. being more archaic). You are probably aware that most of this stuff hasn't entered the standard handbooks yet and that reliable sources that are not research papers are very hard to find..

I'm not sure how that Matasović's sum-up is confusing..yes it repeats what has been said, but it in a more succinct way (abstracting away the origin of the lengths).

Second paragraph on Kortlandt deals with 2 very important problems of glottalic interpretation of BSl. accentuation. It mighty be worth mentioning it, because Kortlandt is a major researcher in the field, and even though glottalic theory has been long dead elsewhere, in Leiden school it's still flourishing. This book has glottal stops in PBSl. reconstructions all over the place ^_^ (including the cases where glottal stop would emerge in Winter's law). If we want a NPOV approach, we should at least keep the opinion (and the defects) of the other major alternative explanation in a few sentences..

You're right on relative chronology (that sequence defies with what has been said in Winter's law article), I think I miscopied it. I don't have the access to that Holzer's article right now, I'll check it later. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 09:19, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

OK, unquestionably "tone" existed on unstressed syllables. For example, here's a quote from Kortlandt [[4]]:

Secondly, Young proposes that a stressed broken tone loses its glottalic feature by dissimilation before a following broken tone. This is the converse of Hjelmslev's view (1932) that every stressed syllable adopted the tone of the following syllable. Unlike Hjelmslev, Young does not discuss the counter-evidence, which is in both cases prohibitive. In order to contain the damage, he assumes that all stressed broken tones subsequently lost their glottalic feature by analogy. This is in effect a phonetic development which renders the previous glottalic dissimilation immaterial, so nothing is gained by bis proposals. Young's article is an Illustration of the fact that priority must be given to an analysis of the data, not to speculation about mechanisms of change.

In Kortlandt's longer work [[5]], section 3.3 p. 25, he's clearer about this (unfortunately I can't cut out any text), in distinguishing "pitch" (any vowel feature other than quality and length) from "tone" (musical pitch). Unfortunately he uses these terms exactly backwards from e.g. the usage in the "Burmese" chapter of Comrie's "The World's Major Languages". The proper term used for Burmese is "register", and hence we might say that in Kortlandt's Proto-Baltic, all vowels have four "registers": short, long, broken (laryngeal/glottalized; no concomitant length distinction), and nasal (no concomitant length distinction). In addition, there is an "ictus" (accent/stress) on one of the vowels in a word, which may move around according to all sorts of complex laws depending on the register of the stressed vowel and the vowels around it. Long register tends to lead to long circumflex vowels, while broken register tends to lead to long acute vowels, but the broken feature remains as such in (ultimately) stressed vowels in Samogitian and Latvian (in the latter case, only on initial syllables that didn't bear stress prior to "Endzelin's law").

I think by explicitly describing the facts about "register" that I just described, the article would be a lot clearer.

BTW Latvian does have four "tones" -- short + three long tones (level, falling, broken).

My issue with the comments about the glottalic theory is that the criticisms duplicate those described in the article on Glottalic theory; maybe just point to that article for those criticisms.

What was confusing about Matasović's sum-up was the comment on Hirt's law, but it's a bit clearer after reading that page.

Benwing (talk) 06:18, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

OK, that looks interesting :) If I understand it correctly: Latvian broken tone on the fist syllable is a result of the retraction of the ictus to a syllabic that already belonged to broken register? K by Proto-Baltic means Proto-East-Baltic (as on the accentuation of Old Prussian nothing can be known for sure), or is just using the term in Mažiulis-Toporov-Ivanov sense equating with Proto-Balto-Slavic? If the latter, I think that everything should be done in the standard PIE framework, not mentioning the "glottalic feature" at all (i.e. making the difference between the BSl. acute originating from voiced stops, closing laryngeals, vrddhi formations..). As I said, I don't have enough knowledge on Baltic historical accentology to have confidence for any kind of interpretative edits. Can Latvian today have "tone" on more than one syllabic in a word (e.g. long falling + broken)?

I added the comment on the article on glottalic theory in the section which mentions Winter's law: somebody put Lachmann's and Winter's law as some crown argument in favour of glottalic theory, but forgot to mention the criticism. Later [6] some guy tried to ascribe it to "wave theory" (which has absolutely nothing to do with it, being a general model of isolgoss diffusion). This article advances the criticism even further: it is not certain to establish the direct correspondence between Balto-Slavic acute and glottal stops at all, as there is evidence of languages which developed falling tone in syllables closed with glottal stops (footnote [19]), and there are cases when rising tone developed before laryngeal and pharyngeal fricatives (some of which are assumed to be phonetic valuues of PIE "laryngeals", but I don't have ref for this type of development). So absolutely nothing can be said for sure between the correspondence of BSl. acute and the glottal stops, let alone to connect it to glottal theory of PIE. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 16:06, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

"Broken register" (my term) is just a cover term for a property that could apparently be realized on all long syllables in Proto-Balto-Slavic, and which eventually led to acute intonation on stressed syllables but disappeared on unstressed syllables (Latvian doesn't have broken tone on unstressed syllables, just long or short). The actual property might have been some sort of coarticulation (e.g. creaky voice aka "glottalized" or "laryngealized"), an extra segment after the vowel (glottal stop or /h/), a tonal difference, a length difference, etc. In fact, older theories assert that acute intonation simply came from long vowels and long diphthongs that were stressed (e.g. the big green "Slavonic Languages" book says this, with no reference to laryngeals anywhere). This is consistent with the fact that a number of accentual laws (Hirt's law, De Saussure's Law, Endzelin's Law, etc.) involve moving the stress onto "acute"/"broken register" syllables -- long vowels tend to attract the stress, cf. the stress systems of Latin or Arabic. However, it fails to account for the fact that original PIE long vowels (the ablauting kind) don't produce acute accent, while secondary long vowels (original short vowel + laryngeal) do. Hence the need for a "broken register" distinction. Perhaps there were simply three different vowel lengths (e.g. short, half-long, long), where the original long PIE vowels became half-long and newer lengthening processes (from laryngeals, from Winter's Law, etc.) produced true long vowels. The advantage to me of a term like "broken register" is it doesn't imply anything specific about the underlying phonetic representation and is clearly distinguished from "acute tone", which is usually a property only of the stressed syllable.

BTW I totally agree that the glottalic theory is garbage.

Benwing (talk) 04:25, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, I find Latvian lexemes like âbuõls 'apple', with both lauztā and stieptā, some with broken tone marker away from stressed vowels like ā̀rdît 'to destroy, scatter', and some even with multiple lauztās in the same word. Does this make Latvian Chinese-like tonal language, rather then pitch accent?

I'm still having trouble understanding the need for broken register on potentially all long syllables. In the Proto-Baltic system of K that you cite the broken register is a property of the same category as "short", "long", "nasal" [hence it can't be broken+long?]. Broken register that you introduce is then a feature needed to account for the reflex of secondary PIE long vowels, and vrddhi-style PBSl. formations which then came to be acuted?

BTW, similar to your proposal I've read [7] Jasanoff's reinterpretation of acute:circumflex opposition reflecting older hyperlong/trimoric:long/bimoric contrast, not directly related to maintaining the distinction between the original PIE long vowels and secondary, but to the distinction of *-VHV- sequences as opposed to both the original and secondary PIE long vowels. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 06:11, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

I dunno exactly what lauztā and stieptā mean. If Modern Latvian has more than two phonemic distinctions (i.e. more than just long vs. short; ignoring nasality) on unstressed as well as stressed syllables, then it would be a register language, somewhat akin to tonal languages like Chinese. But this is mostly just an issue of terminology.

The apparent need for broken register on all long syllables is that it can draw the accent towards it; hence at least it needs to be marked on the stressed syllable and the syllables on either side of it. And yes, it's needed to handle the distinction between original long vowels and secondary long vowels (due to laryngeals, Winter's Law, new PBSl. vrddhi formations, etc.). Perhaps also the distinction between long vowels developed from short diphthongs and those developed from long diphthongs, but I'm not whether such a distinction exists. As for nasal, Kortlandt said that at the PBSl stage, nasal vowels were unmarked for length (perhaps you could say they were always long). I have no idea whether a nasal vowel could also have a broken/non-broken distinction; his comment about a "nasal register" was rather off-handed. Benwing (talk) 02:07, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Lingua Franca

Their language [ie Slavic]] - at first possibly only one local speech, koinéized became a lingua franca of the Avar state. This would explain very well how Proto-Slavic could have spread so fast across all of Eastern Europe - from the Baltic to the Peloponnese, and from Russia and Ukraine to present-day Eastern Germany (Hamburg) and Austria[5]

This is a bit of leap ! Tha Avars had no political sway in the Baltic, or Russia .

A far more entertainable idea is presented by Curta and Barford, who propose that the fall of the 'old social order' (ie the Huns and Goths) in eastern European barbaricum enabled the growth of a new material culture- that characterized by the 'Prague-type' pottery and 'Slavic' fibulae, etc, which showed evidence of multi-regional trade netwroks encompassing Eastern Europe, the Baltic and Crimea. Out of some historical chance, Slavic became the lingua franca of this cultural affinity, perhaps hepled by the possibility that there were already pockets of Slavic speakers in several different regions of central and eastern Europe (who had dispersed from an ancestral land by their involvement in the earlier Hunnic and Gothic raids). They had initially lived side-by-side with communities of different cultural and linguistic affinities, but eventually displaced them

Hxseek (talk) 08:34, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Feel free to add the second interpretation, but please leave the Avar theory as it's very popular among some linguists (and it's abundantly described in Holzer's article which serves as a reference for that section). Interestingly, some of the Proto-Slavic phonological tendencies such as the so-called "law of open syllables" are commonly found in contact languages which would fit nicely in this prestigeous-trading-lingua-franca scheme. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 13:39, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Definitely won't change the Avar theory. I am just wondering how Holzer suggested that proto-Slavic's status in the Avar khanate resulted in such far-flung spread, exceeding that of the Avar empire Hxseek (talk) 01:52, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

The spread of Proto-Slavic within the Avar khaganate (Avars were completely assimilated very fast, and left very, very little borrowings in Proto-Slavic - it is not even certain to what linguistic family Eurasian Avars belonged, though the Turkic theory is generally the most widely held) was probably the impetus that caused it's spread to other areas not withing the direct Avar influence (Peloponnese, Adriatic, Austria, Baltic and Novgorod). Native cultures, being disoriented with crumbling Roman Empire and the newly-arrived dominant Slavic identity, and torn between the East and West must have felt the new idiom (and the accompanying cultural traits such as religion and trade) as much more prestigious so to abandon their own speech (Romance, Ancient Greek, "Illyrian" etc.). As for the term Baltic - it can only be conditionally used in the 5th and the 6th century, as Baltic languages (=archaic Balto-Slavic), as far as it is discernible from toponomastic evidence, were spoken on a much wider territory, as various 5th-9th century Proto-Slavic sound changes can be observed onto them (e.g. the very old first palatalization). --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 13:53, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

Well said. Hxseek (talk) 08:03, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

Meillet and Schleicher

What is the meaning of this sentence:

Antoine Meillet (1905, 1908, 1922, 1925, 1934), the distinguished French Indo-Europeanist, in reaction to a simplified Schleicher's theory, 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.

Is Meillet's theory a reaction to a simplified second theory of Schleicher? The implication of the relation between the two is unclear. Thanks. Kjaer (talk) 03:27, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes, according to Schleicher there was a simple branching to Baltic and Slavic branch, and according to Meillet there was continuous parallel development (see the picture on the right.). Please feel free to reword anything potentially confusing. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 11:52, 19 November 2008 (UTC)