Re: Latvian Language Older Than Lithuanian?

In article <1149064383.605562.33930@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
lorad474@xxxxxx wrote:

<deletions>

The older population of this vast
area, Finno-Ugric speakers, had lived by foraging, so the
agriculture-based alternative introduced by the Balts meant a cultural
revolution in the area.

False on the first point. Nothing identifiable as 'Finnic' is possible
until the arrival of Baltic occurred. Finnic is a term derived from
indigenous interaction with Baltic. You are again attempting an
anachronism.

I wrote "Finno-Ugric", not Finnic. Finno-Ugric is the name of a language
family, Finnic is the designation of a subgroup within that family.
Professor Lauri Posti's famous article "From Pre-Finnic to Late
Proto-Finnic", *Finnish-ugrische Forchungen*31: 1 - 91, 1953-54, calls the
language of the Finno-Ugric-speaking population that inhabited the Baltic
area before the arrival of Indo-European-speaking agriculturalists
"Pre-Finnic".

The Balts intermarried with the Finno-Ugric
speakers, and the degree to which they were assimilated is reflected in
today's realities:

False assertion. Provide evidence of such a thing. You cannot.
Since you cannot, it would be best for you to remain silent rather than
externalizing your personal issues in public.

Scholars in the field have long regarded the existence of Baltic loans
within Finnic for female relatives (e.g. Finnish sisar 'sister', tytär
'daughter', morsian 'bride'), body parts (e.g. Finnish hammas 'tooth',
reisi 'thigh', karva 'body hair'), and social relations (e.g. Finnish
kaima 'namesake', heimo 'extended family') as evidence of intemarriage and
bilingualism on families.

=80 Lithuania - full language shift and cultural assimilation of the
indigenous inhabitants to the Indo-European speakers, with no sign of the
earlier Finno-Ugric speaking population except a few loanwords and
hydronyms.

Conflicted assertion. You previously stated that 'finno-ugrian'
influence was more pronounced in Lithuania than in Latvia. What has
caused you to change your story?

No I didn't. I said that Lithuania was completely Indo-Europeanized,
Balticized, if you will:

<quote>
Lithuania - full language shift and cultural assimilation of the
indigenous inhabitants to the Indo-European speakers, with no sign of the
earlier Finno-Ugric speaking population except a few loanwords and
hydronyms.
</quote>


Explain, please.

=80 Latvia - full languge shift and cultural assimilation of the indigeno=
us
inhabitants to the Indo-European speakers, with traces of the earlier
Finno-Ugric population evident in the dominant physical anthropology as
well as in a clear Finno-Ugric substratum in Latvian that increases the
further northward one goes, particularly to the north of what was once a
significant linguistic and cultural boundary, the River Daugava.

False on two counts. There is no evidence of full cultural assimilation
between Latvian and Ugrian cultures in the archeological record.

The older livestyle based on foraging was replaced by one based on
agriculture. The archeological record indicates a rapid increase in both
population as well as permanent dwellings concsequent to the agricultural
revolution.

Rather
discrete cultures persist in adjacent (apparently peaceful) settlements
for centuries. The trend continues (extended) to the present day
nations of Estonia and Latvia - millenia later.

Secondly, discrete anthropomorphological traits identified as 'Baltic'
persist for centuries and are found as far north as the Aaland Islands
in the Gulf of Bothnia - identifying the limits of Baltic Culture
expansion to the north.

People got around. On the other hand, the spread of culture and the spread
of people follow different dynamics. Baltic culture represented a
revolution in this part of the world, and its spread does not necessarily
mean the spread of Balts. Estonia was completely Balticized culturally,
but not linguistically or anthropologically. The same holds for Finland,
which was largely colonized from, Estonia.

These discrete physical anthropological traits
persist for centuries until the collapse of farming culture in the
north - due to climatic cooling.

The most
obvious Finno-Ugric substratum feature of Latvian is fixed word-initial
dynamic stress, something totally alien to Lihuanian, which retains the
typical Indo-European type of mobile pitch accent.

False assertion which is unproven.
Here is a different opinion from a professional:

"FOURTH - Latvian is the ONLY language in Indo-European
in which ALL words are stressed on the FIRST SYLLABLE,
and where later more modern "sing-song" effects are not present
and where stress or accent has not been transferred to
interceding or closing syllables carrying less than
the initial important meaning of the word."

Your professional is wrong. Icelandic, Czech and (standard) Slovak also
stress all words on the first syllable. In these languages, as well as
in Latvian, this is an innovation. Indo-European stress was originally
mobile.


=80 Estonia - significant linguistic influence in the form of Baltic
loanwords, but no language shift. Full cultural shift to an
agricultuyre-based lifestyle. The physical anthropological type that
dominated within the Finno-Ugric-speaking group predominates.

Baltic influence in loans and agriculture, yes. Also anthropological
remnants of previous Baltic colonization.

In southern Estonia. The linguistic and political boundaries between
Estonia have never coincided exactly.

=80 Belarus -[snip]

To paraphrase the Finnish linguist Kalevi Wiik: From a Finnish standpoint,
the Baltic countries confront Finns with many mysteries. The Estonians
look like us and we can understand much of their speech. Latvians also
look like us and their speech initially sounds somewhat familiar, but we
can't understand it except for an occcasional word. Lithuanians don't look
like us, their speech sounds unfamiliar, nor can we understand it.

This is entirely to be expected if the original Baltic colonizers of
Finland were close kin to Latvians. This is, of course, invisible to
you due to your biases.

I would word it somewhat differently. The colonizers of Finland were
culturally, but neither linguistically or anthropologically Balts. They
are anthropologically related to the Latvians because many Latvians,
particularly those from north of the old linguistic and cultural boundary,
the Daugava, are the descendants of Balticized Finno-Ugrians.

(And again, you have dropped your previous 'Finno-Ugric' - Lithuanian
close affilities.)

Latvian is the imperfectly learned colonial Baltic simplified and
modified by speakers of Finno-Ugric. Or to put it even more bluntly,
Latvian is bad Lithuanian spoken with a heavy Estonian accent.

Total clap-trap promulgated by your racist self, holeman.
I suggest you discover that Latvian is a Baltic language first.

Who ever denied that? Languages arise under various conditions and are
inluenced by their surroundings. Latvian morphology is a highly simplified
version of the older system still so well preserved in Lithuanian. The
same holds true for its morphology. These types of restructurings
typically take place as a consequence of language shifts: a population
abandons its traditional language and learns an imported one rapidly and
imperfectly. Every authority on the history of Latvian recognizes that it
has a strong Finnic substratum.

> Below is a recent cladistics lingusitic tree that is based upon an
enormous number of word language group comparisons. It appears to show
Latvian as being more conservative than Lithuanian.

Words are the *least* reliable indices of linguistic relationship and
history.

The word 'least' is yours, you racist twit.

What is "racist" about insisting on sound linguistic methodology?

All but the most basic words circulate from language to language
within a cultural sphere, and are typically the result of cultural
innovation and dissemination. Latvian words such as komponists 'composer',
firma 'firm', kase 'cashdesk', meistars 'master', zellis 'apprentice',
and even seemingly 'pure' Latvian words such as neatkar=EEba 'independenc=
e'
=3D ne- + at- + kar + =EEba =3D un- + ab - h=E4ng - igkeit =3D in- + de- =
+ penden +
tia, etc. etc. The most reliable index of language relationship is regular
sound

Yes, crappy magister. They are called 'loan words'. Look them up.

The Latvian word *neatkarîba* is not a loanword; it is a calque. Look it up.

correspondences in inherited vocabulary. Latvian z- regularly corresponds
to English k- in inherited words, e.g. zobs 'tooth' =3D English comb [kou=
m];
zirnis 'pea' =3D English corn [korn]; zin- 'to know' =3D English
ken/acknowledge [-kn-], etc.

Though interesting, your above Latvian-English correspondence is a
secondary artifact. It is not a direct language correspondence.
English is way out there on the western fringes of 'germanic' - as far
as Baltic is concerned.

Fifteen hundred years ago things were diffrent. The Angles, Saxons, and
Jutes who migrated to England starting in the fifth century spoke dialects
of what is today known as Low German, a very important language in the
Baltic area. As to your "secondary artefact", the following equation is
valid in the light of the empirical evidence:

PIE *g- = English k- and Latvian z- in inherited cognates,

Secondly - as I have long argued with the usual bunch of *pie morons -
the Baltic group (Latvian and Lithuanian) - sits supreme as the
mainline language group of the entire 'indo-european' language tree in
this cladistic analysis.

The Baltic group, specifically Lithuanian,

No, the argument is that Latvian is 'older' than Lithuanian.
Pay attention.

is arguably the most archaic
branch of Indo-European. Nevertheless, it has undergone some radical
changes, the most significant being the reduction of the three-gender
system to two,

Prove that Baltic had three genders.

The inherited masculine and neuter have fallen together.

and the use of the historical third person singular verb
forms for singular as well as plural. Latvian has diverged radically from
Indo-European in its phonology and morphology, while Lithuanian has not,
something evident to anyone from the following table:
ROOT THEMATIC VOWEL CASE MARKER
PIE *wlq o s *wlqos 'wolf'
Sanskrit vrk a h vrkah 'wolf'
Greek lyk o s lykos 'wolf'
Latin lup u s lupus 'wolf'
Lithuanian vilk a s vilkas 'wolf'
Gothic wulf - s wulfs 'wolf'
Old Norse ulf - r ulfr 'wolf'
Latvian vilk - s vilks 'wolf'
Old English wolf - - wolf 'wolf'

Very strange...!!
Where is your supposed Latvian 'radical divergement' above?

The thematic vowel is missing. This is a very important part of nominal
morphology in Lithuanian, Greek, and Sanskrit. Dropping this precipitates
a total reconstruction of the organization of nominal paradigms.

Latvian 'Vilks' is phonologically and morphologically identical to
Lithuanian 'Vilkas'.
What the devil are you mumbling about, now?

No it isn't. Lithuanian *vilkas* has a tripartite structure: root vilk-,
inflectional stem- vilka-, nominative singular vilkas; in Latvian the
difference between root and inflectional stem has been lost.


Not only that - but Gothic (east germanic) is obviously genetically
related to both Latvian and Lithuanian.

Nobody has ever denied that. They belong to different but neighboring
branches of Indo-European.


And as can be seen, the *pie example has, again, been incompletely
copied from the Baltic (as is often the case)

Baltic, specifically Lithuanian, is the most archaic branch of
Indo-European, so that is hardly surprising.

This is a significant observation about the difference between
conservative Lithuanian and more innovating Latvian nominal morphology,
and it means that the paradigms in the two languages are formed according
to radically different organizing principles, one a retention from
Indo-European, the other a break with it.

Total lunacy on your part again. Your opinion as a racist linguist
sucks totally.

There is nothing "racist" about these claims. Within every language family
there are innovators and retainers. Within Germanic English, Afrikaans,
and Danish are the innovators, German and Icelandic are the retainers.
Within Romance French is the most innovative, while Italian and Sardinian
are the most archaic. Within Slavic Bulgarian and Macedonian are the
innovators, Slovene the most conservative. Innovation usually has to do
with language mixture and shift, while linguistic conservatisim is often
linked with difficult geography and isolation.

Although both Latvian and
Lithuanian both go back to the same source and are, strictly speaking,
localized versions of Proto-Indo-European

False. No such thing as 'proto-indo-european' ever existed. It never
was.

That is your opinion, but no professional linguist would agree with you.

The sure thing is that Baltic existed.
And rather than using imperfect copies of Baltic roots as examples of
*pie - they really just need to use Baltic instead. Latvian is most
cases.

Latvian represents a break with
many of the most alient features of Indo-European and is, in this sense, a
radical restructuring. Lithuania, altough not without some restructuring
of its own, has far more in common with the other archaic Indo-European
languages, Sanskrit, Greek (Kather=EAvousa), Icelandic, and Slovene than
Latvian does.

False. Count the points listed below to see the errors of your
malingering ways.

" The relatively greater age of Lithuanian over Latvian was first
alleged
by August Schleicher (1821-1868), who published the first
comprehensive grammatical study of the Lithuanian language.
See the Latvian Language Insitute and the Institute of Lithuanian
Language.

I am quite familiar with Schleicher's work and an extensive unit on him
has long been a part of my teaching of historical linguistics.

However, Schleicher conducted most of his work in East Prussia and
NEVER actually came into contact with the actual primary Lithuanian
dialect, so that his conclusions must be regarded with great
scepticism.

Nevertheless, the Lithuanian dialescts that Schleicher studied were
varieties of Lithuanian, not of Old Prussian or Latvian.

Moreover, Schleicher made his conclusions at a time when there was
a near vacuum of information and research on Latvian. The Latvian
Grammar ( Lettische Grammatik ) of Endzelins first appeared in Riga in
1922. Essentially, Schleicher's conclusions have just not been
questioned
since that time, except for a few researchers who HAVE dealt with the
subject intensively.
Those who have dealt with the issue intensively, such as the German
Rainer Eckert or the Scandinavian Ekblom, come to other conclusions.

Professor Rainer Eckert, University of Greifswald, provides several
examples, which, according to him, point to the relatively greater
age of Latvian than Lithuanian, evidenced by:

FIRST - the retention of older Indo-European
irregular inflections (heteroclites); and,

SECOND - retention of the older i-stem in the roots
of nominative forms of words, which are not retained
in Lithuanian or in Old Prussian.

"Older" is used here in following sense: if we presume a
proto-language,
then a language which most nearly retains the original forms of this
language is "older" and languages which show greater innovation in
these
forms is "newer", although all languages are of course equally "old" in
tracing their roots back to the proto-language.

Innovating languages often retain a few archaic traits. English and
Icelandic are the only two Germanic languages to have retained dental
fricatives (the initial sounds in *this* and *thing*). This retention does
not override the fact that English diverges radically from Proto-Germanic
with respect to much of its phonology and morphology, while Icelandic
shows little innovation.

To the above two points we can add more:

THIRD - Latvian is the ONLY language in Indo-European
WITHOUT aspirates. It is impossible to argue that Latvian is an
archaic form of Indo-European and somehow allege it has LOST all
aspirates without a trace. The only possible explanation is that
Latvian NEVER had aspirates - neither did Nostratic ! -
and that this is the original state for Indo-European.

Aspirates is an imprecise term. In Indo-European linguistics it refers to
the sounds reconstructed as *bh, *dh, and *gh, these sounds being extant
in Sanskrit and other Indic languages, as well as to their voiceless
counterparts ph, th, kh, found in classical Greek. Could you give an
example of what you mean by your claim that Latvian is the only IE
language without aspirates?


<deletions; these points have nothing to do witht he age of a language>


"NO NEED TO TELL US: LATVIANS -- THE MOST BALTIC OF BALTS

19. AN INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH GROUP LED BY SCIENTISTS FROM THE LATVIAN
HISTORY INSTITUTE'S ANTHROPOLOGY LAB RECENTLY ANNOUNCED THAT THEY HAVE
FOUND A "BALTIC GENE", A SLIGHT MUTATION IN A GENE DETERMINING BLOOD
GROUPS. THE GENE, OFFICIALLY CALLED "LANGSTEINER WIENER B" (LWB), IS
MOST PREVALENT IN LATVIANS (5.9% OF THE POPULATION), FOLLOWED BY
LITHUANIANS (5.7%), AND ESTONIANS (4%). IN ADDITION, RELATIVELY HIGH
PRESENCE OF LWB WAS ESTABLISHED IN FINLAND, NORTHWEST REGIONS OF
RUSSIA, POLAND, AND IN SWEDISH POPULATION OF GOTLAND. ONLY AN
INSIGNIFICANT CONCENTRATION OF LWB WAS FOUND IN WESTERN EUROPE AND
THERE WAS NO TRACE OF THE GENE IN ASIA AND AFRICA."

There is little evidence for Lithuanian being older than Latvian
except for outdated, unfounded and ill-supported theories
of linguists relying on a scholar who was never even in Lithuania."

She tav holmaning:
http://www.lexiline.com/lexiline/lexi201.htm

(It really should be called the 'Baltic-European' language tree.)

No it shouldn't. Language families are named after their geographic
limits.

Sure. And the limit of Baltic (and its daughter languages) previously
extended east to beyond the Urals, south to the Indian sub-continent,
and west to England.

And you can prove this? East to the Volga is no problem, but anywhere west
of Denmark is, at least as I see things.

Indo-European (formerly called Indo-Germanic in English, still
referred to as *Indo-germanisch* in German), because it encompasses an
area traditionally delimited by India and Europe (or the Germanic
languages, Iceland being the westernmost one before the Age of Discovery).
Baltic is actually right there in the center of things, being the
westernmost of the eastern (satem) Indo-European languages.

Out of the mouths of dunces.. "Baltic is actually right there in the
center of things".
Yes. Exactly.

You still have a lot to learn about the historical study of language.

On the contrary, holeman, it is *you* that needs instruction.

I am glad that you raised your snout again.
Besides the above lessons given you, I have the correction to your
previous ignorance in rejecting my years long contention that
'germanic' was also Baltic language or a derivative. Here is your
second lesson for today:

Drum roll please... :
Don Ringe, Tandy Warnow, Ann Taylor ringe02IECladistics.pdf - pp. 52
"This split distribution of character states leads naturally to the
hypothesis that Germanic was a near sister of Balto-Slavic.."

They said "hypothesis". According to the Wave Theory model of the Indo
European language relationships Baltic stands between Germanic and Slavic.
That accords with my practical experience as well, although Baltic
lexicon, grammar, and particularly phonology currently have more in common
with West and particularly East Slavic than they have with Germanic.

.=2Ebearing in mind that Slavic didn't exist until St. Cyril, of course.

Slavic is far older than St. Cyril. He and St. Methodious could not have
translated the Bible into Slavic if it had not already been a developed
group of languages. Noether would there have been anybody who could make
use of his efforts if the language did not have a considerable body of
speakers. Your position amounts to a claim that St. Cyril and St.
Methodious devised the Slavic language out of nowhere and then went out
and started teaching it to people.

\EH
.