#balto-slavic

[yvanspijk]

English is part of a large language family that includes French, Welsh, Polish, Persian, Greek, and Albanian. They stem from a common ancestor reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European.  The cardinal numerals from 1 to 10 illustrate their relationship well. Click the image for a selection.

[unhonestlymirror]

I didn't know that Lithuanians and Latvians love potatoes too, I thought it was a specific Belarus feature

[prussianmemes]

"In May 1982, Yu. V. Andropov sent a note to L. I. Brezhnev about the need to "strengthen the fight against drunkenness." A commission was set up headed by A. Ya. Pelshe, chairman of the Party Control Commission of the Central Committee of the CPSU, which prepared proposals by the autumn of that year: a) to increase the production of beer and wine, b) to expand the network of cafes and pubs."

how did the politburo ever hope to stop a quirked up latvian boozechamp like this:

sure- *sound of fumbling with a bottle opener*

yeah yuri, we'll get them- *slapping the bottom of the bottle*

you have the full support of the latvian ssr in the fight against dunkin donuts or whatever.

slav- *cough cough* s-slava KPSS.

[pactw]

i love seeing foolish's process of learning spanish. it's like he's trying to rebuild the language itself from the ground up as he goes. like, he doesn't want to know that X means Y and be done with it, he needs the history of the latin alphabet, a phonetics lesson on all possible pronunciations of X, and an explanation for why people decided that it comes after W. his approach to spanish seems to carry an underlying hope that he'll be able to logic a thousand-year old romance language into becoming, like, a balto-slavic toki pona. this guy is trying to min-max the tower of babel, i want to study him in a lab.

[tissitpoispaita]

Which language family does your native language belong to?

I like the idea of this poll by @akozuheiwa, but Indo-European skews the results way too much with its massive online prevalence and number of speakers. So, I'm wondering if the poll could be improved by breaking IE into its extant branches. Probably not much, since English speakers will just make this a Germanic sweep, but it could be a step in the right direction.

Out of all the non-IE families, I added Uralic as a separate option because it was by far the most often listed family in the previous poll's tags*, and "other, list in tags" so far has more answers than all the biggest non-IE families combined. Plus, the majority of its speakers are Europeans and thus more likely to be on English-speaking Tumblr.

*(Many people also listed Finno-Ugric, which is a Uralic group)

IE branches containing a single extant language (Albanian, Armenian, and Hellenic/Greek) were combined to make room for two more poll options out of the four biggest families besides IE: Afro-Asiatic & Niger-Congo and Austronesian & Sino-Tibetan. Please tell me if these groupings don't make sense.

People with more than one native language, please choose "other" if multiple categories apply.

As always, please reblog for a bigger sample size.

[aro-langblr]

Insight into Polish (/ˈpəʊlɪʃ/)

[Image description: A photo of Kraków's Main Square at night in Poland. Source: Mark Willemse.]

What is the language called in English and the language itself? - It is called Polish in English and polski [ˈpɔlskʲi] in the language itself. It has 4 generally recognized dialects: Greater Polish, Lesser Polish, Masovian, Silesian. The basis for Standard Polish is the Greater Polish dialect.

Where is the language spoken? - It is spoken in Poland as a national language, and it is a recognized minority language in Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Belarus, Slovakia, Ukraine, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Romania. It's also a common diaspora language around the world.

How many people speak the language? - There are roughly 40 million speakers of Polish, and about 10% of speakers use it as a second language.

Which language family does it belong to? What are some of its relative languages? - Polish is classified as Indo-European > Balto-Slavic > Slavic > West Slavic > Lechitic > Polish. It’s closest relative language is Kashubian, which is the only other living langauge in the Lechitic branch. It's also decently close to Czech, Slovak, and Sorbian.

What writing system does the language use? - Polish is written in a modified Latin script with the added letters ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, and ż. - Sample text, courtesy of omniglot: "Wszyscy ludzie rodzą się wolni i równi w swojej godności i prawach. Są obdarzeni rozumem i sumieniem i powinni postępować wobec siebie w duchu braterstwa."

What kind of grammatical features does the language have? - It is a fusional language with relatively free word order, though sentence structure tends towards SVO. It is a pro-drop language with no articles and adjectives preceeding nouns. Polish has 2 numbers, 3 persons, 3** genders, and 7 cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, and vocative). It also has 2 voices (active and passive), 2 aspects (perfect and imperfect) and 3 moods (indicative, subjunctive, and imperative), and 3 tenses (present, past, future). However, the future tense of perfective verbs is conjugated the same as the present tense of imperfective verbs. Polish also has conjunctions and a formal second person. ** Masculine nouns are subdivided into 3 categories: personal, animate, and inanimate. (Which is so interesting! I don't think I've seen animacy manifest like this before.) ** Unrelated interesting note: Polish used to have a dual number, but it has fallen out of use and is now only found in archaisms.

How to identify the language? - The letter "ż" is almost exclusive to Polish. This language also frequents letters towards the end of the alphabet (namely u, w, y, and z). Standalone "w" and "z" as prepositions, means you're likely reading Polish. It's pretty easily identifiable once you get used to it.

What does the language sound like?

What do you personally find interesting about the language? - If you've followed me for long time, you know that I call Polish "the language I'd speak fluently in another timeline." Years back, I was super close to moving in with a Polish couple that were family friends, but I decided to go to community college in my current state instead. Had I chosen to go to a different college, I could very well have become fluent haha. But yeah, because of my mother's friend, who I spent a lot of time near in my childhood, I have an especially strong appreciation for Polish, and I hope you do, too!

[ishparpuaqib]

I've long, long assumed the Serbo-Croatian word for rainbow, duga, must be related to duga, the feminine nominative singular form of dug “long”. this is despite a) duga (as in “rainbow”) having a rising accent and duga (as in “long”) having a falling one, and b) the Slovenian cognate to duga (as in “long”) being dolga. indeed the two are completely unrelated—duga as in “rainbow” comes from Proto-Slavic *dǫga, from Proto-Balto-Slavic *dangāˀ, which apparently meant something like “covering” or “curtain”. it's directly cognate to Lithuanian danga “clothes”, and related to dangus “sky”. (duga as in “long” comes from Proto-Slavic *dĭlga, from a completely different root). always remember to check ur biases...

[possessivesuffix]

Crossposting from Twxttxr: some interesting news about ongoing research by colleagues, from a workshop "Diversification of Uralic" just this Thursday and Friday

Do the Permic languages have loanwords from Old Norse? e.g. ONo. ár ~ Komi & Udmurt ar 'year'. This would've been sensible during the brief time when Norsemen originally from Sweden were in charge of trade along the Volga and settling in inner Russia, forming the Rus' (later Slavicized, but as we know from Byzantine sources they remained Norse for centuries) — and also the Norwegians too were known to conduct exploration + trade along the Barents Sea at the time, our oldest written reports of "Bjarmia" come from them after all.

Do the Finnic languages have loanwords already from Pre-Proto-Germanic into Pre-Proto-Finnic? My first reply would've been "yes surely", this has been discussed for half a century and there's dozens of etymologies out by now. Turns out though that there's still a lot of room for skepticism if we try to assemble a big picture. Most of these could be (and have been proposed by other analyses) to be proper Germanic after all, or from some non-Germanic kind of Indo-European, or even incorrect. There is unambiguous evidence I think at least of loans lacking *ā > *ō, but that's already though to be one of the latest common Germanic innovations, perhaps barely post-PG. [Follow-up question: do we even know where Pre-Proto-Germanic was spoken? might not have been anywhere convenient for contacts with Pre-Proto-Finnic.] — A few similar problems also in the less discussed supposed layer of Proto-Balto-Slavic or pre-BSl. loans, but by areal considerations it seems obvious to me there must've been Uralic/IE contact somewhere in the Russian forest belt for ages already, even if it might not have left enough evidence to clearly distinguish from things like pre-Indo-Iranian loans.

Do the Samic languages have loanwords that are not from any historically attested branch of Scandinavian, but some sort of a lost variety entirely? This could be an explanation for an unexpected sound correspondence *j → *ć in many loans; it might also explain some loans that look surprizingly archaic, e.g. lacking any reflection of Siever's Law. One example showing both is indeed *Tāńćə 'Norse', from some sort of a *Danji- variant of Proto-Germanic *Daniz.

Several new hypotheses on the history of of sibilants in Ugric, adding to the growing tally of evidence that traditionally reconstructed *s > *θ and *ś > *s "in Proto-Ugric" are actually later developments. A paper supposed to be coming out soon!

No linguistic evidence so far, but a 1670 travelogue by de La Martinière appears to still report seemingly pre-Uralic populations along the Barents Sea coast — and even on Novaya Zemlya, traditionally thought to have been uninhabited (as reported by other early modern explorers) before some Tundra Nenets briefly settled there in mid 19th century. Apparently there's been no real archeological investigation, but also at least two stone labyrinths are known as signs that humans still must've at least visited there sometime in the past. [By current knowledge, labyrinths from Sweden and Finland have mostly been built in late medieval and early modern times though, so they don't suggest especial antiquity either. Could the ones on NZ in fact have been left behind by some of these historical Northwest European expeditions?]

Various discussion also on the development of Samoyedic. Nothing particularly all-new (maybe on Nganasan, more on that in a PhD thesis to appear later this year though), but a few main results include 1. clear recognition that there is no "North Samoyedic" group (as has been suspected for several years now), 2. confirmation that there is regardless a narrower Nenets–Enets group, and 3. some development of a model where all three of Nenets, Enets and Nganasan may have moved to the tundra zone independently from further down south (as is certainly the case for Northern Selkup, the most recent northern expansion of Samoyedic speakers).

[gwendolynlerman]

Most commonly spoken language in each country

I had to separate the legend from the map because it would not have been legible otherwise. I am aware that the color distinctions are not always very clear, but there are only so many colors in the palette.

The legend is arranged in alphabetical order and languages are grouped by family (bullet points), with branches represented by numbers and followed by the color palette languages within them are colored in, as follows:

Afroasiatic

Chadic (Hausa) — ocher

Cushitic (Oromo and Somali) — light yellow-green

Semitic (from Arabic to Tigrinya) — yellow

Albanian — olive green

Armenian — mauve

Atlantic-Congo

Benue-Congo (from Chewa to Zulu) — blue-green

Senegambian (Fula and Wolof) — faded blue-green

Volta-Congo (Ewe and Mooré) — bright blue-green

Austroasiatic (Khmer and Vietnamese) — dark blue-purple

Austronesian

Eastern Malayo-Polynesian (from Fijian to Wallisian) — dark brown

Malayo-Polynesian (Palauan) — bright brown

Western Malayo-Polynesian (from Malagasy to Tagalog) — light brown

Eastern Sudanic (Dinka) — foral white

Hellenic (Greek) — black

Indo-European

Germanic (from Danish to Swedish) — light blue (creoles in medium/dark blue)

English-based creoles (from Antiguan and Barbudan to Vincentian Creole)

Indo-Aryan (from Bengali to Sinhala) — purple

Iranian (Persian) — gray

Romance (from Catalan to Spanish) — red (creoles in dark red)

French-based creoles (from Haitian Creole to Seychellois Creole)

Portuguese-based creoles (from Cape Verdean Creole to Papiamento)

Slavic — light green (from Bulgarian to Ukrainian)

Inuit (Greenlandic) — white

Japonic (Japanese) — blanched almond

Kartvelian (Georgian) — faded blue

Koreanic (Korean) — yellow-orange

Kra-Dai (Lao and Thai) — dark orange

Mande (from Bambara to Mandinka) — magenta/violet

Mongolic (Mongolian) — red-brown

Sino-Tibetan (Burmese, Chinese*, and Dzongkha) — pink

Turkic (from Azerbaijani to Uzbek) — dark green

Uralic

Balto-Finnic (Estonian and Finnish) — light orange

Ugric (Hungarian) — salmon

* Chinese refers to Cantonese and Mandarin. Hindi and Urdu are grouped under Hindustani, and Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian are grouped under Serbo-Croatian.

[paganimagevault]

Mummified heads from Xiaohe cemetery 2000 BCE

"Readers of Language Log will certainly be aware of Tocharian, but when I began my international research project on the Tarim Basin mummies in 1991, very few people — only a tiny handful of esoteric researchers — had ever heard of the Tocharians and their language since they went extinct more than a millennium ago, until fragmentary manuscripts were discovered in the early part of the 20th century and were deciphered by Sieg und Siegling (I always love the sound of their surnames linked together by "und"), two German Indologists / philologists — Emil Sieg (1866-1951) and Wilhelm Siegling (1880-1946), in the first decade of the last century.

It wasn't long after the decipherment of Tocharian by Sieg und Siegling that historical linguists began to realize the monumental importance of this hitherto completely unknown language. First of all, it is the second oldest — after Hittite — Indo-European language to branch off from PIE. Second, even though its historical seat was on the back doorstep of Sinitic and it loaned many significant words (e.g., "honey", "lion") to the latter, it is a centum (Hellenic, Celtic, Italic and Germanic) language lying to the east of the satem (Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic) IE languages. (PROVISO: some sophists will undoubtedly argue that the centum-satem split in Indo-European is meaningless; it has happened before on Language Log and elsewhere, but I think it does matter for the history of IE languages and the people who spoke them.) Third, Tocharian has grammatical features that resemble Italic, Celtic, and Germanic (i.e., northwest European languages) more than they do the other branches of IE. (STIPULATION: certain casuists will surely argue that such differences are meaningless, but I believe they are crucial for comprehending the nature of the spread of IE in time and space.) Etc.

Because their physical, textual, and cultural remains were indisputably found in the Tarim Basin, the Tocharians naturally became a primary focus of my investigations in Eastern Central Asia during the more than two decades from the nineties through 2012."

-Victor Mair, Language Log: The sound and sense of Tocharian. University of Pennsylvania.

[yvanspijk]

The words yard, garden and garth all stem from one and the same Germanic word. Yard is the native English form, garden took a detour via Old French, and garth was borrowed from Old Norse. These words are also distantly related to Latin hortus (garden), Russian górod (city) and Irish gort (field). Here's more.

[unhonestlymirror]

Me when people call themselves Balto-Slavic but they are not Belaruthians: ???????bro who are you

[frogpaste]

How do people make syllabaries?? I'm trying to construct a logosyllabary for my balto-slavic conlang, and my mind is melting.

Mine would have separate vowels for ь, ъ, and ѣ alongside hard and soft versions of all the normal vowels... even if I group some together, there are very few single-syllable words in any of the swadesh lists I've been looking at which allow for a convenient pictograph to start with.

My brain is a little wyrm in a metal cage, and every time I learn something new, I bash my head against the bars.. the cage gets bigger, but I get a headache.

[talonabraxas]

Demonic spaces and offshore formations – Alexandra Waliszewska and Balto-Slavic landscapes https://www.ashadecolder.com/demonic-spaces-and-offshore-formations-alexandra-waliszewska-and-balto-slavic-landscapes?fbclid=IwAR1xzEKON-qyTFSZDUOlqwcrwkwlgiL_EpW4kDt_jOKQrh98T8W_gQdGM2c

[deathlessathanasia]

Is there any evidence that Semele was an earth goddess?

I haven't read much about this, but from what I can gather the main argument for the theory seems to be based on etymology.

Personally I know nothing about etymology and can't comment on that, so here is an overview from Wikipedia (X): According to some linguists the name Semele is Thraco-Phrygian,[5] derived from a PIE root meaning 'earth'. A Phrygian inscription refers to diōs zemelō (διως ζεμελω). The first word corresponds to Greek Zeus (genit. Dios) and the second to earth in some Indo-European languages.[6] Julius Pokorny reconstructs her name from the PIE root *dgem- meaning 'earth' and relates it with Thracian Zemele, 'mother earth'.[7] Compare Žemyna (derived from žemė – earth), the goddess of the earth (mother goddess) in Lithuanian mythology, and Zeme, also referred to as Zemes-mãte, a Slavic and Latvian goddess of the earth.[8][9] Mallory and Adams suggest that, although Semele is "etymologically related" to other mother Earth/Earth goddess cognates, her name might be a borrowing "from another IE source", not inherited as part of the Ancient Greek lexicon.[10] Burkert says that while Semele is "manifestly non-Greek", "it is no more possible to confirm that Semele is a Thraco-Phrygian word for earth than it is to prove the priority of the Lydian baki- over Bacchus as a name for Dionysos".[11]M.L.West derives the Phrygian zemelo, Old Slavonic zemlya,Lithuanian zēmē from the Indo-European name *dʰéǵʰōm (earth). Semele seems to be a Thracian name of the earth goddess from gʰem-elā. The pronunciation was probably Zemelā.[12] Etymological connections of Thraco-Phrygian Semele with Balto-Slavic earth deities have been noted, since an alternate name for Baltic Zemyna is Žemelė,[13][14] and in Slavic languages, the word seme (Semele) means 'seed', and zemlja (Zemele) means 'earth'.[15]

And from Jennifer Larson's Greek Heroine Cults: „Semele seems to have originated as an Anatolian earth goddess. As early as 1890 Kretschmer derived her name from the same root that gives us Greek chamai and Latin humus.”