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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 85.206.193.252 (talk) at 08:00, 17 May 2005 (→Baltic languages group and Slavic languages group are separate languages groups). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Question

This page is really helpful, but I just have a small question. According to the image shown in the page, why isn't Indo-European languages predominant in European nations like Hungary and Finland. What language do they use? Thanks.

Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian are Finno-Ugric languages. Does anyone know how to edit the map for Iraq (assuming it's not intended to symbolize the Anglo-American occupation)?
Thanks
I was wondering about Iraq being in the group. I guess it could go either way, because Kurdish is also an official language of Iraq. Maybe somebody could alter the map, maybe having some countries being striped, when one or more of the languages is Indo-European, but one or more isn't .

Image

The map shows Iraq as being predominantly indoeuropean, when most of the population speaks Arabic, a Semetic language. Or is there something I'm missing? ( Maybe this isn't an error, or but instead reflects the US presence in Iraq? ;) Probably not I guess )

I was wondering that too, but then one has to remember that Arabic isn't the only official language of Iraq, but Kurdish, an Indo-European language, is too.

origin of the term 'Indo-European'

Quote: "Indo-Germanic languages" or sometimes "Aryan". However when it became apparent that the connection is relevant to most of Europe's languages, the name was expanded to Indo-European.

I contest this. "Indo-European" is not an 'expansion' of "Indo-Germanic". I believe it was simply an alternative used by the french, because they didn't like having 'germanic' in the name. The problem is (was) that 'indo-' may be both a linguistic and a geographical term. "germanic" is a linguistic, "european" a geographical term. "Indo-European" tries to describe the area where the languages are spoken, "Indo-Germanic" tries to encompass the familiy branches by naming two (again, geographical, NW-SE) extremes. I will try to dig up some details on this and amend the article. "Aryan", on the other hand, was an attempt at reconstructing what the Proto-Indo-Europeans called themselves; other names were suggested, e.g. "Japhetite" (building on the semitic/hamitic nomenclature). Note that this controversy predates the third Reich by many decades, so "Indo-Germanic" is not a german nationalistic/chauvinist term at all, and carries no such overtones in german literature -- Dbachmann 08:07, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Satem/Kentum

Could somebody describe Satem-Centum division and basic reconstructed grammar of PIE ? Taw

See Satem, Centum
Piotr Gasiorowski
[deleted statement of my intention to add this] - fair enough, I have nothing to add to that Dbachmann 10:44, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Kentum-Satem has to do with the word for hundred. In some languages the original Kemtum was replaced by Satem. Satem languages include Slavic, Baltic, Indo-Iranian, and Indic. An example would be the Russian word for hundred, "sto".

English "hundred" comes from a different word. In Germanic, Indo-European "k" is sometimes replaced with "h". So, Germanic is a Kentum language. The Latin word for hundred is Centum, so it is a Kentum language too.

An excellent resource for Indo-European is ENCYCLOPEDIA OF INDO-EUROPEAN CULTURE, edited by Mallory.


Satem-Centum, Again

I'm a little puzzled about this being an absolute, since when I took a class in Hittite a few decades ago, one of the facts that stayed with me was that the Anatolian languages split off from PIE either before or during the Satem-Centum split -- which makes this family of interest. (As well as being one of the earliest attested IE languages.) -- llywrch 19:55, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)


Grammar

I am not happy with the paragraph

The entire body of Indo-European, Aryan or Indo-Germanic languages is derived originally from monosyllabic elements. There are two classes, verbal and pronominal. These two grammatical forms combined, gradually formed the rudiments of vocabulary and grammar.

which I feel is not consistent with the previous one. I don't know what to make of it nor what to do with it. Expert linguists please help. -- Calypso

The paragraph is not consistent with facts either. There are numerous IE nouns, for example, which are not derived from verb roots. Also, "monosyllabic" is not a felicitous description, since roots in a language like PIE are bound morphemes that cannot be pronounced in isolation. Some "roots" may well have disyllabic phonetic realisations. I think the paragraph is simply superfluous, so I'll take the liberty of removing it. If time permits, I'll provide some more concrete info about PIE word structure instead. -- User:Piotr Gasiorowski

Article organization, wording

The "languages" articles are inconsistently titled. We have "Romance language" but "Indo-European languages". This is a poor show for a group of skilled linguists. It seems clear to me that, going by the article naming guidelines, we should use the singular for everything. Before I go around re-naming all the articles, does anyone have an alternative view? Deb 09:42, 10 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I prefer the usage of the plural; generally, we are talking about all the languages in a group, not just one of them. The heading Indo-European languages, for instance, might be better titled Indo-European language family; it shows a collective - a group of languages - not a singular language. thefamouseccles 01:14 27 Oct 2003 (UTC)
Differentiation between 'languages' and 'dialects' is mostly conventional, but such conventions exist; it is not customary, for example, to speak of 'greek languages', but rather of 'greek dialects'. also, for armenian and albanian, arguably only a single language is known in these groups (including various dialects). Dbachmann 11:56, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I think we need to split off the Proto-Indo-European section into its own article. I mean, Latin isn't a section on the Romance languages page. -Branddobbe 08:44, Mar 9, 2004 (UTC)

I contracted baltic and slavic to a single list-entry 'balto-slavic', to reflect 'indo-iranian'. (and since, as indo-iranian, they really do form a single branch of IE, being closer to each other than to any other IE language) Dbachmann 11:56, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Quote: Popular languages in this superfamily include English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Italian, Russian, Persian, Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu.

what's a 'popular' language? shouldn't this be 'modern' or 'spoken today'. NPOV would ask for for sorting by number of living native speakers. wouldn't four or five 'most spoken' be enough (probably English, Spanish, Urdu/Hindi, Russian, but I didn't check) Dbachmann 12:06, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Non-IE languages

What pockets of non-Indo-European languages are left in Europe? Is the basque language the only one? --AxelBoldt

The Finno-Ugric languages such as Hungarian, Finnish, and Saami (Lapp) languages are also non-Indo-European
There's actually nummerically a whole heap, just most of them have very few speakers.

Estonian is also Finno-Ugric and related to Finnish user:H.J.

Turkish language is not Indoeuropean iirc. --Taw

You're right. However, it barely counts as European either. But it should probably be included for completeness. Also Maltese. --Zundark, 2001 Dec 6
Basque is the only "Pocket". All others are later incursions (turkish, hungarian migrations). Non IE-languages in Europe boil down to Basque, Finno-Ugric and Turkic, the latter two having homelands in the east. Dbachmann 13:33, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I'm not sure Basque is the only pocket of speakers of the original languages of Europe - what about welsh? --81.134.180.92 10:33, 28 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Welsh is a Celtic language and the Celtic languages are Indo-European. As an aside, I know that Basque is older than Finnish and Hungarian but I'm not sure how the Celtic languages compare age-wise. — Hippietrail 00:52, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Nostratic

I changed the reference to Nostratic from its previous form, which was along the lines of "Indo-European languages may belong to a superfamily called Nostratic". The consensus is that the Nostratic hypothesis is disproven, but then I was also loathe to removed the link to one of the articles I wrote :) So I just changed it to a "See also". I rationalize that on the basis that there's some discussion of how PIE was reconstructed there. -- Paul Drye

There is no consensus that the Nostratic hypothesis is wrong. Drye seems to be very fanatical about this. I suggest that anyone should simply look up Nostratic in any other encyclopedia and get a more balanced view.

Well, I don't debate with anonymous editors, but for the benefit of anyone else who's been wondering what I've been up to, the Nostratic hypothesis inhabits the borderlines of linguistics. Essentially it has the life that it does thanks to the troubled scientific history of the Soviet Union. Afer the Russian Revolution, and particularly after Stalin came to power, politics cut off the Russians in a number of fields -- genetics and its troubles with Lysenkoism are the most famous example. In the case of linguistics, Russian scientists went off on a wild hare about Nostratic and were too isolated to benefit from the better work happening in the west. After the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, they became quite voluble about how right they were, and attracted the attention of the popular press.
There are very few serious linguists who give Nostratic much time. As with our anonymous proponent up there, I also suggest that the interested reader take a look around. You'll notice that those who speak of Nostratic seriously in 2002 boil down to:
    • Russians that no-one takes seriously
    • A half-dozen western names that pop up repeatedly
    • Popular press articles
    • J. Greenberg
The first three can be dismissed out of hand. Greenberg deserves better if only on the strength of his stellar work on sub-Saharan African languages in his earlier days. Unfortunately, he is generally perceived as another Isaac Newton; brilliant as a young man, off the deep end once he got older. Greenberg's "Eurasiatic"-renaming of Nostratic is seen as the equivalent of Sir Isaac's obsession with alchemy and numerology.
I would point out that the best documentary evidence our anonymous author is providing is a link to some web discussion forums, and a pro-Nostratic e-mail Listserv. Whee. A quick boo at the professional literature in the field turns up only refutations of the concept, if they even talk about it at all. Close reading of the recent stuff about linguistic diffusion shows that they've moved beyond the possibility of a reconstructable macrofamily "above" the ones we've got.
Not that you need my permission, but I specifically invite any reader here who looks at what I'm claiming here and disagrees to reverse my reversions. I'm confident enough in this that I believe there won't be any takers. -- Paul Drye, who explains what he does instead of resorting to ad hominem.
I'd like to endorse Paul Drye's scepticism. It is the more welcome because a lot of macrofamily stuff is being propagated on the Internet and published in the popular press. Most of it makes little sense, but the popular imagination delights in this kind of romantic speculation. I regard this state of affairs as unfortunate. "Nostraticism" (including Greenberg & Ruhlen's "Eurasiatic" variety) remains an insufficiently justified fringe hypothesis, by the accepted standards of historical linguistics. As for Greenberg's mass (a.k.a. lateral) comparison, it is a method that simply cannot produce reliable results, since it has no built-in controls for distinguishing genuine cognates (historically or "genetically" related words) from spurious matches resulting from purely coincidental similarity or from lexical borrowing. As opposed to comparative method, it yields no protolanguage reconstruction, nor does it reconstruct sequences of sound change transforming the protolanguage into its historically documented "offspring" -- which means, in practice, that no-one can verify its results by checking the consistency of the reconstruction. The flaws that make mass comparison scientifically useless have been discussed so many times by so many linguists that one wonders how the method can be taken seriously by anyone. Piotr Gasiorowski

Re: Nostratic redundancy

I've twice deleted an anon's addition of a paragrpah saying Indo-European is "possibly" related to (insert every other language family). This paragraph gets placed after, mind you, the paragraph which discusses the Nostratic theory. I just want a quick check to make sure I'm not being unduly repressive here. -- कुक्कुरोवाच|Talk‽ 05:20, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC)

No, you're quite right to remove that part. It seems wholly unreasonable to first mention the Nostratic hypothesis and *then* say that PIE may be related to every other language. Vice 20:49, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC)
such hypotheses may have a place in the nostratic article, or in an article on the world's language families. in this article, a simple link to the nostratic one should be enough. Dbachmann 11:04, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Diagram?

We've got the tree model kinda explained in text, but would it be possible to get an image of the (more accurate) wave model of the various major sound laws of IE linguistics?

Georgian?

Someone just added the claim "The Basque language is unusual in that it shares a 25% vocabulary overlap with only one other language known at this point, Georgian." Is this true? It seems highly suspect to me—by which I mean only that it contradicts the thing I keep hearing about Basque—which inclines me to delete it unless someone comes up with documentation for this odd claim. AJD 06:28, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)

"members include"

Unless we present the 'largest' languages, by number of speakers, the listing becomes completely arbitrary. Clearly, we do not want to list 400 languages in the intro. We used to list languages with > 100 million speakers. We can lower that threshold, to e.g. 70 million, but if we go too low (<50 million), the list will become unwieldy. dab (ᛏ) 13:05, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

IE speakers map

Kind of nitpicky, but... I notice several inaccuracies with :

  1. . English is an official language in Israel, so Israel should be colored yellow.
  2. . Orange has spilled over into Thrace, even though it is part of Turkey.
  3. . Cyprus is totally absent. Its official language is Greek which is IE.
  4. . I am fairly certain French is an official language in Lebanon, though I may be mistaken.
  5. . Kenya has English as an official language; it should be yellow.

--Briangotts 20:23, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

When you say "Thrace", you mean "Turkish Thrace". Much of Bulgaria was once Thrace and part of northeastern Greece was once Thrace as well. Nothing personal, I just don't want people confusing all of Thrace with Turkish Thrace, which is a mere part of the ancient land. Decius 05:01, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I'll fix it. Well, not Cyprus, that's just not on the map, but I'll fix the others, thanks for pointing them out. dab (ᛏ) 10:09, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Wrong maps

Provided maps aren't correct. 3d map wrong indicates territory of Balts - it should be more to the West and North. 4th map wrong indicates territory of Balts as well - it should be more to the West. 5th map somehow shows the Balts and Slavs together. As we know, the Slavs emerged in territory of Lower Dniepr after the mutation of Southern Baltic tribes (mixing with Asiatic tribes). After this emerged completely different ethnos - Slavs. The same with 6th map. Zivinbudas 14:04, 14 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Baltic

Read the article (below) and Germania (book) by Tacitus. Zivinbudas 14:27, 14 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, I see you got here first after all. Anyway:
  • I don't think citation of a few words in Tacitus is included in what linguists would call "the earliest attestation" of the language. After all, if that counted we would likewise have to move back the earliest attestation date for Germanic, since there are Germanic words mentioned by Roman historians as well. Can you provide a citation demonstrating that linguists would regard Tacitus as the earliest attestation of Baltic, rather than the earliest document or inscription actually written in a Baltic language?
  • "Most archaic" doesn't mean "most similar to Sanskrit". That's just confused.
AJD 14:37, 14 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
You write "Read Talk and this article - its indicated very clearly here." What is? (1) The article has no mention of any purported attestation of Baltic in Tacitus, let alone an argument that that would count as the earliest attestation of Baltic. (2) Even if the first century were the correct date for earliest attestation of Baltic, it would go between Italic and Germanic on that list, not before Anatolian!—that list is in order of earliest attestation. (3) "The strong similarity discovered between Sanskrit and older spoken dialects of Lithuanian and Latvian" does not mean Baltic is "most similar to Sanskrit"! It only means that Baltic is much more similar to Sanskrit than one would have expected, especially without knowing that it was related. "Most archaic" doesn't mean "most similar to Sanskrit" either; it means most similar to PIE. AJD 14:49, 14 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Tacitus wrote approx.: "Their (Aestiorum Gentes - Balts (Aisčiai)) language is closer to Britanians than to Germanians" and "They call amber "Glesum"".
  • Lithuanian and Latvian languages are closest to Sanskrit of all living Indo-European languages (axactly closest not similar). They are most archaic of living Indo-European languages as well. These are unquestioned facts.
  • It is known to every student in Lithuania, but it is almost unknown in Western Europe for many reasons, mostly because of soviet occupation of Baltics. Zivinbudas 15:16, 14 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • I repeat: I don't dispute that Tacitus quoted a Baltic word, but I don't believe that a single word of one language quoted in a text written in another language is sufficient to be what linguists would describe as the "earliest attestation" of the language in question. Do you have evidence that that counts as an earliest attestation? If it does, the earliest attestation of Germanic is similarly earlier than this list would have it.
  • Furthermore, in no way does this justify placing Baltic first in the list, as though it were attested earlier than Hittite, Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin: this list is sorted by earliest attestation, and the earliest attestation of Baltic is certainly not earlier than the first century.
  • I don't know what you mean by "closest to Sanskrit" if not "most similar to Sanskrit". If you mean "most closely related to Sanskrit", that's simply false: there are living Indic languages which are actually descendants of Sanskrit. It is an unquestioned fact that Baltic is the most archaic of the living Indo-European families; but your claim that it is somehow "closest to Sanskrit" is either false or meaningless.
  • You've also kept reverting my correction of your grammar.
  • You are now in violation of the three-revert rule.
AJD 15:56, 14 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • I take it you mean Baltic should be between Celtic and Germanic. At any rate, you haven't put it there.
  • Is there convincing linguistic evidence that Tacitus's glesum is actually a Baltic word (rather than just a word from a language spoken near the Baltic sea)? I don't know much about the phonology of Baltic languages, but a Google search gives no mention of a Baltic etymology for this word, and one suggestion that it actually looks Germanic. If you have evidence that this is a Baltic word, please cite it.
  • It is meaningless to say that "the Slavs are a late formation"; no language family can possibly be "later" than its sister language family. If you believe that Slavic "emerged from Baltic", then you should list them together as a single Balto-Slavic family.
  • If by "closest" you now mean 'most similar', then yes, I agree that Baltic is closest to PIE—although, since PIE is a reconstructed language, I would prefer to say "most similar to the usual reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European" or "retains the greatest number of features reconstructed in Proto-Indo-European".
  • No, the first revert in this particular revert war was this one.
AJD 17:49, 14 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Glesum bears no resemblance to gintaras. Again, if you have evidence that glesum is a Baltic word, please cite it.
  • Repeating your claim that Slavic is a "late formation" doesn't make it any truer, or meaningful at all. If Slavic is a late formation, then Baltic must be exactly as late: that's the way related languages work. The mainstream view among linguists is not in favor of a "Balto-Germanic" family, but rather in favor of a Balto-Slavic family which, earlier, had occupied the middle of a dialect continuum extending from Germanic on the west to Indo-Iranian on the east. If you believe that Slavic separated from Baltic, what you believe in is a Balto-Slavic family.
  • I have no opinion on the similarity of Baltic to Sanskrit, but the degree of similarity of unrelated subfamiliesto each other is not relevant to this list of subfamilies.
AJD 19:52, 14 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • If you have evidence that glesum is a Baltic word, please provide it. For instance, if it is "deformed Prussian", what is the original Prussian word that it is deformed from? How can it be derived from Indo-European by means of the sound changes known to be proper to Baltic? We have no reason other than your assertion to believe that this is a Baltic word at all.
  • What you have described two times is a Balto-Slavic family. If you believe that the Slavs "formed themselves" from the Balts, you should list them as such.
AJD 22:20, 14 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The list is not organized by how "archaic" the languages are, that's too subjective. It is organized by the date of their first attestation, which is objective. dab (ᛏ) 10:07, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think this article has more pressing issues than arguing about the ordering of this list. I can assure you that the sequence as I put it is certainly the most widely accepted one. Anything else is typically people trying to draw attention to their own (always their own, how boring) languages. No, a couple of names in Tacitus doesn't count, unless they unambiguously exhibit sound-changes peculiar to Baltic, not Slavic. "It is known to every student in Lithuania" you bet. Lithuanian is very archaic in some respects (e.g. accent), and it isn't in others. Outside (strangely) the Baltic, it isn't considered overwhelmingly archaic. Some people want to believe it's incredibly archaic, and they'll find evidence of course, but that's just boring old selection bias. Oh, and I looked into it, and I don't think there have been any convincing arguments against Balto-Slavic unity since Semerenyi (1957). dab (ᛏ) 11:03, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

In my experience, Lithuanian actually is pretty frequently described as unusually archaic. So I've added back a comment on that point into the article, since it is of interest. AJD 14:30, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Your "comment" is nothing more than bla-bla-bla. Sorry. Read latest books on Baltic. 85.206.193.46 11:30, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

blabla to you too. sadly, you are just another lingo-chauvinist-nationalist pov-pusher, mister anon. we have them a dime a dozen on Wikipedia. If there has indeed been a recent breakthrough in Balto-Slavic research, kindly direct us to the pertinent reviews. dab (ᛏ) 13:14, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Dear Dbachmann, please don't make personal attacks. It only shows that your arguments are very weak. Something like "Balto-Slavic family" never existed, like "Celtic-Germanic family" or "Celtic-Romanic-Germanic family" (who are French?). It is stupid soviet propaganda which in stupid West still is in force (book of 1957 (!) - why not "Full set of Stalin's scripts"? 85.206.194.120 14:05, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

1957 is not so bad, considering that the proposition "Balto-Slavic never existed" dates to 1908. Don't call my edits vandalism, and stop edit warring. "my" arguments are linguistic mainstream. If you dispute that, quote authorities, don't throw around Stalin. Really. hello basic common sense and decency? dab (ᛏ) 14:29, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I became involved with this precisely because of such claims of "Balto-Slavic is Soviet propaganda". So the 14 points by Szemerenyi listed on Balto-Slavic are Soviet propaganda? That's interesting, since they were completely accepted by linguists in Western Europe and the USA, in spite of the cold war and all. Are you saying that western linguistics was and is hopelessly infested by communists, conspiring to make the Baltic languages look similar to Russian? That would make a great article on conwiki, I suggest you discuss that idea over there. dab (ᛏ) 16:27, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I suggest you: Zigmas Zinkevičius. Lietuvių tautos kilmė. Vilnius, 2005 (The Origin of Lithuanian Nation). Of course if you read Lithuanian (I have very big doubts). Do you know Zigmas Zinkevičius? He is the most famous Baltist in the world at this time. 85.206.194.120 14:38, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

not a word. Do you read Wikipedia policy, sometimes, Zivinbudas? You are making a fool of yourself, and you'll just be blocked for 3RRvio again and again. Funny it should be impossible to find evidence of the blatant impossibility of Balto-Slavic outside Lithuanian literature, though. dab (ᛏ) 15:06, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
hey, but your talents might be employed more rewardingly in writing the sadly inexistent Zigmas Zinkevičius article, letting us know more about this man. dab (ᛏ) 15:09, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I don't approve of the vandal-like method, but I sympathize with the anonymous user's cause (in fact, the history of the article shows that on March 19 2005 I also separated Baltic from Slavic on the list as he is doing now, but I stopped & gave precedence to the majority view which Wikipedia should follow). The article is in line with the traditional view, but it doesn't mention the dispute. Maybe a compromise can be reached, with a note in the article that the grouping of Baltic & Slavic together is very much disputed. Decius 12:37, 16 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Alexander M. Schenker in his 1995 book (published by Yale University Language Series) gives a conservative overview of the situation and the linguists involved, and he ends up with an inconclusive view---he doesn't reject or accept Balto-Slavic. I'll quote his book in a minute. Decius 13:04, 16 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Schenker, Page 70:

"The existence of Balto-Slavic as an intermediate node in the development of Baltic & Slavic from Proto-Indo-European was first proposed by the German neogrammarian August Schleicher in 1861. His theory was elaborated on by Karl Brugmann and supported by Jan Rozwadowski, Aleksander Brückner, Reinhold Trautmann, Jerzy Kurylowicz, Nicolaas van Wijk, André Vaillant, & many other Indo-Europeanists. All of them attributed the Balto-Slavic linguistic similarities to a period of shared history & postulated the existence of Balto-Slavic as an autonomous, post-Proto-Indo-European linguistic entity.
"Others, like Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, Antoine Meillet, Alfred Senn, Christian Stang, and Ernst Fraenkel, though representing a wide range of views, expressed reservations about a wholesale acceptance of the Balto-Slavic theory. They argued that the features common to Baltic & Slavic are, insofar as they are not inherited from Proto-Indo-European, a product of separate, though parallel, development, enhanced by territorial contiguity of the two speech communities and by their social and linguistic interaction.


of course, I am open to compromise on this. We can discuss this as soon as mr. 206.85 calms down, or during his 3RR blocks. Balto-Slavic should be mentioned as a branch according to mainstream IE linguistics. afaik, there were no serious objections either before 1908, or after 1957, but I may be wrong. I don't know how much detail of the dispute it is appropriate to give on this page, but I'm not opposed in principle. It would be over the top, for example, to say here that Balto-Slavic is unpopular, politically, in the Baltic states, because of their history with the Soviet Union. That is true, but it simply doesn't belong here. Take it to Balto-Slavic. The more recent and notable oppositon we find, of course, the better the case will be to label Balto-Slavic as disputed, even on this page. My view is, so far, that unfortunately, that this case is almost entirely political, not unlike the Finno-Ugric and Macedonian case. These political issues may be notable, but they have no place on this linguistic article. Based on your quote, which is very relevant to the Balto-Slavic article, I'd say scholars are divided into supporters and agnostics? So how about we say "Balto-Slavic (considered uncertain by some experts)", and leave the details to the B-Sl article? You will find serious linguists (the more cautious ones) saying the group is "uncertain". Anyone calling it "impossible" or "obviously wrong" is almost certainly a Baltic patriot. dab (ᛏ) 13:25, 16 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

That sounds like a good compromise. The article should list Baltic & Slavic together in the traditional manner, yet with a cautionary note (or a qualifier) after it. For further reading, readers can turn to Balto-Slavic. Schenker, a professor of Slavic languages at Yale University, ends his brief overview by inconclusively accepting (or almost accepting, he is very cautious) Balto-Slavic basically, though he seems to give leeway for the separatists. Decius 13:34, 16 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Schenker adds his personal view:

"This disagreement appears to be largely terminological in nature, & the two points of view need not be seen as contradictory. Since Baltic & Slavic were at the tail end of the process of the disintegration of the Indo-European speech community, what is termed Balto-Slavic is in fact the very latest stage of one of the Late Proto-Indo-European dialects. Once separated from each other, Baltic & Slavic (or at least some of their dialects) continued to exist side by side & underwent a period of parallel development & of outright linguistic borrowing."

He seems to basically accept Balto-Slavic (the line "once separated from each other" shows that he accepts Balto-Slavic in some manner), but he underlines the uncertainty. Decius 13:51, 16 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]


I disagree wholeheartedly with this phrasing (there is no "tail end" or "remnant PIE", the breakup is symmetrical, that is to say no single group carries the torch of original or most undiluted PIE, they all evolve), but you are very welcome to add Schenker, notably his list of scholars, to the BSl article, thanks for your research, Decius! dab (ᛏ) 13:56, 16 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

You're welcome. We should note that Schenker is not quite an authority on the matter, but he does give 'a feel' of the debate among scholars. Decius 13:58, 16 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Werether it started off as a same branch once is hard to say; after all every indoeuropean language started from same indoeuropean prolanguage. And now Baltic and Slavic branches are usually separated; so I think they should be kept separated, maybe there could be a note that "some linguists considers this to be the same branch", but in general they should be separate IMO. Then again, there are theories that e.g. Indoeuropean, Finougric and some other language families belong to one larger family an dsuch; this is one thing where it is hard to make a real classification I guess. DeirYassin 18:05, 16 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

please, it is complicated, and it is easy to postulate anything in linguistics. That doesn't mean there are real experts, and real progress accepted by a real mainstream. Balto-Slavic is not some oddball hypothesis on par with Ugro-Sumerian. It is the standard hypothesis, accepted as matter of fact by the majority of experts, and questioned (but not refuted) by others. Meillet didn't say "Balto-Slavic is incorrect", he said "wait a minute, everybody is so certain, but how sure are we really?", i.e. he was being sceptical, as he should be. Nothing is "dead certain" in IE linguistics. Even PIE is "uncertain", but nobody goes around trying to delete the PIE article, because there is no nationalism involved. My position is not to let nationalists interfere with linguistic articles for nationalistic reasons. There are very good reasons for both the PIE and the Balto-Slavic article. Informed criticism is of course welcome, but Soviet propaganda and Baltic patriotism should not be allowed. Unfortunately, the glowingly patriotic editors almost infallibly are not very informed at all, linguistically. dab (ᛏ) 07:14, 17 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Baltic languages group and Slavic languages group are separate languages groups

Dear Talkers, your level of knowledge on this topic is like on the flat.

  • All what you provided above is only discussion of sholars on Proto Baltic-Slavic language which may be existed, like may be existed Proto Baltic-Germanic language. It isn't discussion on present "Balto-Slavic languages group". Such group doesn't exist. There are absolutely separate Baltic languages group (or Baltic languages) and Slavic languages group (or Slavic languages). Why do you defend false using of hypothetic "Proto Baltic-Slavic language" as "Baltic-Slavic languages" in this text?
  • There was mentioned political reason of this in discussion. It realy exists but not in mentioned context. In soviet occupation time (until 1990) russians tried to show that Balts are close to Slavs (which is complet lie). The same tried to show polish nationalists in XIXth - XXth centuries.
  • Only your "arguments" are deletions and blockings. It shows that your position is very weak. 85.206.194.13 18:21, 16 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

When arranging the language-branches of Indo-European, the common practice is to group Baltic & Slavic together as Balto-Slavic, refelecting the hypothesis that they both descended from Proto-Balto-Slavic. It is very common practice, and from what we can gather, it is much more common than those who separate them. The simple mathematics of the situation is: regardless if it is correct or not (it has not been determined conclusively yet), the more common practice is to group them together. Wikipedia being the way it is, the more common practice is the one that is presented. Nobody should be saying that Balto-Slavic has been proven, because it is still only a hypothesis (though with much evidence). This hypothesis though is the prevalent hypothesis. Decius 00:42, 17 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

So in other words, your edits will be reverted by others (though not by me, I'm staying clear of this one, since I'm not convinced either way, and it doesn't bother me either way, since neither grouping nor separating them seems to be more correct to me: it's unclear). I don't know which is more correct, but I do know which has more support from general linguists.Decius 00:42, 17 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

dear 85.206, by your argument

Proto Baltic-Slavic language which may be existed, like may be existed Proto Baltic-Germanic language. It isn't discussion on present "Balto-Slavic languages group". Such group doesn't exist.

would you dispute that Indo-European group exists, by the same argument? Yes, Balto-Germanic, or Western-PIE has been suggested, but is rejected by a vast majority of scholars. Balto-Slavic, otoh, is widely accepted. That doesn't mean, of course, that Baltic and Slavic is the same group. It's really analogous to Indo-Iranian. It existed, but Iranian and Indo-Aryan are two separate groups. Szemerenyi suggested Balto-Slavic split into Proto-Baltic and Proto-Slavic in the 1st century (either AD or BC), so that they were well separated, by almost a millennium, when the first Slavic texts appear. Some people assume an even earlier split, around 1000 BC, so that Baltic and Slavic are separated by 2000 years at the time of our earliest texts. you are being blocked because your complete disregard of WP:3RR. Behave according to Wikipedia policy, and you won't be blocked. dab (ᛏ) 05:55, 17 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Dear Dbachmann, now you are absolutely right! Hypothetical "Proto Balto-Slavic" isn't the same like "Balto-Slavic languages" (group) like wrong is in this article (I will change it again of course). Look at the top of this article -> mark Indo-European - Baltic and Slavic (groups) are indicated separately (absolutely right). Slavs is late formation (apx. 500 BC - 500 AD) when Balts are from the 3000 BC. 85.206.192.240 06:37, 17 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

sheesh. Balto-Slavic languages by defniniton are the desendents of Proto-Balto-Slavic. Why is this so difficult to understand? "Balts are from 3000 BC"? Sure, with the same justification you can say, Balts are from 150,000 BC. Because, obviously, the ancestors of the Balts were around somewhere in 150,000 BC, and they spoke some language that eventually morphed into Baltic. Look, it is obvious you do not know much about historical linguistics, and you should probably leave this article to people who do. No offense, but why don't you edit articles on Baltic subjects like Zigmas Zinkevičius? That way, you could actually contribute something, while your effort is just wasted here. dab (ᛏ) 07:05, 17 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

How good it is that not all Germans (Swiss) are such stupid like you are. But I think that you are simply another Austrian Slav. Compare both your latest comments - they opposite to each other. I will not waste a time to "discussions" with you. 85.206.193.252 07:58, 17 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

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