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Lithuanian and Latvian are Baltic languages. Nothing to do with Slavic...
by jim180 11mo ago
Lithuanian and Latvian are Baltic languages. Nothing to do with Slavic...
- Telaneo 11mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balto-Slavic_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balto-Slavic_languages
- asveikau 11mo agoSee the section "historical dispute". I think some people get touchy about them being lumped together if their last period of commonality (per the article) was 1400 BCE. For comparison, I believe all the Slavic languages were mutually intelligible around 1200 AD. But much more recently than this, in the last few centuries, there have been notable attempts by east slavs to absorb the Baltic language cultures and deny them.
- krzyk 11mo agoI doubt that South Slavic and West/East Slavic were mutually intelligible at 1200 AD. I doubt West and East Slavic were. But inside those geographic groups they probably were (Czech and Polish AFAIR were around that time).
- asveikau 11mo agoI may be off by 100-200 years, but this is what I read. There were accents and regionalisms but they were all mutually intelligible. It is an example I think of often, about how quickly languages can change. In the scale of 1000 years, a lot changes. Most of the diversity in Romance languages is from around that timescale too, it really started to diverge substantially around 900ad-1100ad.
- actionfromafar 11mo agoDepends on your standards, too. Even today, any pair of slavic speakers should have a head start in understanding each other. Put them next to each other for a month and they should be talking, at least about basic everyday things.
- krzyk 11mo agoNot quite. My anecdotal examples. I'm Polish. I was in Crimea for about 2 weeks (in 2012) they split me Russian there. I couldn't understand a word they said. And I didn't learn to understand than for 2 weeks of travel there. I could understand some words from Ukrainian (I traveled by train from Lviv). Another example is Croatian, I've been there on vacation and renting a room. I couldn't understand a word they said and didn't learn any. TlI can understand some Czech (because this is the closest language together with Slovakian to Polish) but that's it. I wouldn't mix Slavs from different groups together. They evolved separately and are as close as English and German.
- kaato137 11mo agoBalto-Slavic branch divides into Baltic and Slavic language groups so nothing wrong here
- kreetx 11mo agoYup, most of Eastern Europe are Balto-Slavic. While the division from the Eastern Slavic languages (Russian, Belarussian, Ukranian, etc) is distant, they are still Slavic. From Eastern Europe, only Estonian is not a Slavic language.
- d1sxeyes 11mo agoHungarian too, although there’s a question about whether Hungary is Eastern or Central Europe.
- kreetx 11mo agoAh, yes, how could I forget! As a side note, though also Finno-Ugric then similarity in sound and appearance from Finnish or Estonian at least appears very far.
- d1sxeyes 11mo agoYeah Hungarian is just a thing on its own.
- dragonwriter 11mo ago“There’s a question” implies that there is a ground truth that might be discovered to resolve this rather than simply a clash of different purely arbitrary definitions of the same terms.
- d1sxeyes 11mo agoNot my intention. In fact my intention was the opposite: just to highlight it’s a bit of a contentious topic.
- adzm 11mo agoI was thinking about separating the two groups when I was writing this but was afraid of getting too verbose, though in retrospect that probably would have made more sense regardless of the historical lineage. My apologies if this came off as inconsiderate. I updated my original comment, and learned a good amount about that dispute as a result, so thanks for calling it out.