Lithuanian = the most archaic ?

[0stsee]

Hello!

I keep on hearing and reading that Lithuanian is the most archaic living spoken IE language.
I'm learning Latvian and it has only two genders and the 3rd person has universally the same form no matter whether it's singular or plural.
I was surprised to know that Lithuanian also has the same characteristics. In that case, I would think many Slavic languages are closer to ancient IE, don't you think?

[JackFrost]

By comparasion, Baltic languages preserved some features from PIE that are lost in many other IE languages.

Arachic is a word I wouldn't use. Just closer to the mother source than many other IE languages.

two genders

PIE only had two genders too. The feminine gender split off from the neuter if I remember right.

In that case, I would think many Slavic languages are closer to ancient IE, don't you think?

Maybe, but we have to remember that the arrivals of the Slavs were the last linguistic group of the IE family to split off from PIE. They were also the last group to arrive Europe. The rest came before them. The Baltic languages were the last ones to split off from PIE as well (well, they split off from Proto-Baltic-Slavic).

While the Balto-Slavic (and especially the Baltic) languages of eastern Europe are attested only late, even by Indo-European standards, there are characteristics that strongly suggest they are highly conservative (most especially Baltic) and retain features akin to Proto-Indo-European. No Slavic language is attested until the mid-9th century A.D. (Old Church Slavonic), and no Baltic language until the 14th century (some Old Prussian words & phrases). Old Church Slavonic and Old Prussian became extinct, but Slavic and Baltic sibling languages survived.

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/general/IE.html

[0stsee]

Thanks JackFrost!

I didn't know that IE had two genders.
Although I don't really understand why a language would develop an extra gender, I don't think it's impossible that neuter branched off from feminine. In some Slavic languages the masculine also has some subgenders, which don't exist in neuter and feminine. It's possible that neuter was at one time a subgender of feminine in the linguistic evolution.

[nighean-neonach]

the 3rd person has universally the same form no matter whether it's singular or plural.

That's obviously a late development and not so very important. Among the reasons why Lithuanian is often seen as very "archaic" are for example the complex word stress patterns, some phonetic aspects, some rather conservative vocabulary, conservative noun inflections, the complexity of participles, verbal aspects, etc.
I've always found that a lot of things in Lithuanian remind me of Ancient Greek (for example word stress, and the participles).

In my opinion no modern language as a whole is more "archaic" than others. They all have a long history of development and change behind them, and all have adapted some new features. Lithuanian does have some aspects which comparative linguists find very interesting, but it's not as if it had not changed throughout the last 2,000 years or so.

About the genders: If I remember it correctly, PIE (or maybe even some stage before that) is supposed to have had two genders, one for living beings, and one for things. The masculine/feminine/neuter concepts is thought to have developed from that.

[JackFrost]

About the genders: If I remember it correctly, PIE (or maybe even some stage before that) is supposed to have had two genders, one for living beings, and one for things. The masculine/feminine/neuter concepts is thought to have developed from that.

Yes, that's it. Now I remember: animate and inanimate. The former became masculine whereas the neuter and feminine split off from the latter.

Thanks for reminding me. ^^

Even though it makes me wonder why Slavic languages have animate and inaminate masculine forms, yet the neuter and feminine don't behave in that way.

[nighean-neonach]

I don't know anything about Slavic languages really, but the masculine gender has always been the strongest and most productive in all the IE languages. In all the languages which have to some degree kept the inherited inflection classes (like Ancient Greek, Latin, Icelandic, Old Irish, Lithuanian - well, those are the ones that I know best...) the masculine ones are more complex, the feminine and neuter ones tend to be more simplified.

[Nukalurk]

Even though it makes me wonder why Slavic languages have animate and inaminate masculine forms, yet the neuter and feminine don't behave in that way.

In Russian, female nouns in plural are also differentiated according to animate and inanimate.

That "neuter" doesn't behave that way is surely because most people think that living beings are either male or female.

[dunkelwald]

While I don't know a lot about Lithuanian, even though I want to study it in the far future, I want to have a word or two about the IE things. It's true that Proto-Indo-European most likely originally had two genders (animate and inanimate which correspond to later masculine and neuter), however that doesn't mean that a non-existence of a feminine gender means any preservation of something archaic. The feminine gender developed in Indo-European after the split of the Anatolian languages, which was the very first language group to split from PIE, but before the split of other language groups. None of the Anatolian languages survives until today, so all IE languages nowadays are derived from a common language that had three genders. If you study classical IE languages such as Latin, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit, it's rather obvious that masculine and neuter differ somewhat from the feminine gender. When analysing this, you must keep in mind though that there were two different types of declension in these languages. There were declensions that are nowadays believed to be the older declensions, corresponding to the Ancient Greek 3rd declensions, and to all declensions except the o-/a-declensions in Latin, and the "younger" o-/a-declensions in Latin and Greek (only a-declension in Sanskrit, cause short 'o' merged with 'a', if I recall correctly). In these "older" declensions there isn't any difference between the masculine and feminine gender, and the neuter only differs in nominative and accusative singular and nominative and accusative plural.
Compare these Latin examples:

limen (threshold, entrance) - neuter
-----Sg.----- Pl.
Nom. limen limin-a
Gen. limin-is limin-um
Dat. limin-i limin-ibus
Acc. limen limin-a
Abl. limin-e limin-ibus

victor (victor, conqueror) - masculine
-----Sg.----- Pl.
Nom. victor victor-es
Gen. victor-is victor-um
Dat. victor-i victor-ibus
Acc. victor-em victor-es
Abl. victor-e victor-ibus

victrix (female conqueror) - feminine
-----Sg.----- Pl.
Nom. victrix victric-es
Gen. victric-is victric-um
Dat. victric-i victric-ibus
Acc. victric-em victric-es
Abl. victric-e victric-ibus

So it seems to me that there hadn't been any clear distinction between the masculine and the feminine gender at the time that this kind of declension was "invented". Only the later declensions really have a gender assigned to them. The vast majority of words declined according to the o-declension is masculine or neuter, and the vast majority of words declined according to the a-declension is feminine. Yet again the nom./acc. sg./pl. forms are the only ones that differ in masculine and neuter words in the o-declension, showing that these belong together, being nearly the same originally:
servus (slave) - masculine
-----Sg.----- Pl.
Nom. serv-us serv-i
Gen. serv-i serv-orum
Dat. serv-o serv-is
Acc. serv-um serv-os
Abl. serv-o serv-is

frumentum (grain, crops) - neuter
-----Sg.----- Pl.
Nom. frument-um frument-a
Gen. frument-i frument-orum
Dat. frument-o frument-is
Acc. frument-um frument-a
Abl. frument-o frument-is

Compare a word of the a-declension:
serva (female slave) - feminine
-----Sg.----- Pl.
Nom. serv-a serv-ae
Gen. serv-ae serv-arum
Dat. serv-ae serv-is
Acc. serv-am serv-as
Abl. serv-a serv-is

There are several similarities between the feminine a- and the masculine o-declension as well which aren't obvious at once. As I once read that the o- and a-declensions were constructed for derivatives originally, I tend to think that o- and a-declension originally were the same with only a different thematic vowel (a instead of o). If you take into account that long "i" which occurs twice in the masculine o-declension is derived from an "oi"-diphthong and "ae" resembles an "ai"-diphthong (further support for this in Ancient Greek), you get a lot of similarities, but I don't think I should elaborate further on this, as this is a forum for Lithuanian

I don't know anything about different declension classes in Lithuanian, it would be cool to compare it to this. However, Lithuanian having three genders is more archaic in that respect than Latvian having only two genders, because PIE had two genders in the very beginning only, long before something called "Baltic" nowadays began to arise. (You might say, Latvian having two genders like earliest PIE is a 'secondary' development)

Oh and by the way, the third person singular and plural differed in PIE verbs, but there were two different ways of conjugation, and I couldn't elaborate on that as much anyway.

[Lazar Taxon]

Yeah, I've read that PIE originally had two genders - animate (which became masculine) and inanimate (which became neuter) - and that the feminine developed from the neuter plural. That's why in Latin, for example, the 1st declension (feminine) nominative singular is the same as the 2nd declension neuter nominative/accusative plural. I heard that there were cases like archaic Latin "aquom", which meant "water", and came to be referred poetically as "aqua" or "waters", with this form eventually being reanalyzed as a feminine singular. (And I imagine that they constructed the new feminine forms by analogy with the masculine ones - feminine accusative singular "am" like masculine "om", and nominative plural "ai" like masculine "oi".)

One thing that I think is universal in IE languages is that for the neuter gender, the nominative and accusative forms are always indistinguishable. (I heard that this was because, originally, only animate things were considered agents.) So among the languages that I'm familiar with, you can see that in Latin and Classical Greek and German.

[Bubis]

Na, yra ir kitokia nuomonė:
kad visi tie PIE ir IE yra tik gudrūs teoriniai išvedžiojimai.
Ir aš tam pritariu.

[nighean-neonach]

Na, yra ir kitokia nuomonė:
kad visi tie PIE ir IE yra tik gudrūs teoriniai išvedžiojimai.
Ir aš tam pritariu.

Žinoma, teoriniai. Of course they are theories, they can't be anything else, because we can't turn back time and listen to people from 4.000 years ago I did IE studies at university for a while, as a side-line to my major subjects, and I have pretty much skipped it because I had the feeling that much of it is built on rather fragile foundations. There are a few main theses which almost everyone accepts nowadays, but everything beyond that is often not much more than guesswork, especially all the reconstructing and theorising about single sounds during the very early phases of IE developments, for which we have no sources at all.

[Bubis]

Nors, dažnai tomis IE teorijomis remiamasi, kaip moksliniu faktu. Aš gi iš savo patirties, kiek teko su tuo susidurti, pastebėjau, kad IE kūrėjai dažnai labai paviršutiniškai arba visai neišmano kalbų kurias analizuoja, kas liečia lietuvių kalbą – rasdavau tokių klaidų... ko gero ir su kitomis kalbomis panašiai. Manau, kad tyrinėti tokią sritį reikėtų bent kelioliką kalbų puikiai mokėti, arba bent reikėtų artimai bendrauti su žmonėmis tas kalbas išmanančiais.
Šiaip jau, laikausi kitokios kalbų ryšių teorijos:

............................prokalbė
........................./................. \
..............sanskritas........prabaltų
....................... \.................. /
...........................praslavų

Kitas neva IE kalbas reikėtų dėstyti, ko gero, aplink, jungiant ir kitų šeimų kalbas.

[nighean-neonach]

Bubis, I'd like to reply to some of the things you have said, but I have a feeling that it would be a bit impolite to continue this discussion in Lithuanian, as the original question and most of the discussion so far was in English. I think most of the people here who are interested in this topic don't speak Lithuanian.

Jeigu tu nemėgsti rašyti angliškai, aš galėčiau išversti tavo raštą ir po to atsakyti angliškai.

[Bubis]

Ne tai, kad nemėgstu rašyti angliškai, o nemoku, na pakankamai greitai ir aiškiai...
Na, kaip padarysit taip nepagadysit, manau.
Verskit,.. aš anglų pasimokysiu

[nighean-neonach]

Bet tu juk labai gerai supranti angliškai. Na, aš pabandysiu išversti, tai gera praktika man. Tikiuosi kad bus pakankamai aišku ir be bjaurų klaidų. Prašom, pažiūrėti ar teisinga.

So, I am just going to try and translate what Bubis said, so everyone can follow the discussion:

Often though those IE theories are presented as scholarly facts. I know from own experience,
kiek teko su tuo susidurti (čia nežinojau... gal būt: how conflicting they are?)
I have noticed that the creators of IE are often quite superficial or completely clueless when analyzing certain languages, when it comes to the Lithuanian language, I used to find lots of mistakes... it is probably the same with other languages. In my opinion it would be necessary to kown several languages very well to do research in this area, or at least to work in close contact with people who know the languages well.

So, I have a different theory of language connections:

...........................proto-language
........................./................. \
....................sanskrit........proto-baltic
....................... \.................. /
............................proto-slavic

Paskutinis tavo sakinys buvo sunkus: Aš nežinau ar gerai supratau. Nepažodinis, manau kad tu sakei:
It would also be necessary to look at non IE languages, to compare IE to non IE language families.
Ar teisus? Gal būt paaiškinti lengvesniais žodžiais?


Now, what I wanted to reply to this:
I agree, I've often noticed that comparative linguists like to talk about all the languages they know, but when you look at it more closely, they only have a very superficial understanding of most of them. Old Irish is a good example for that. All the historical linguists comment on it and seem to find it very important and interesting, but hardly anyone takes the effort to really study it. So there are a lot of funny opinions around, and no one notices the many mistakes, because everyone just thinks: "Wow, cool, something about Old Irish". As a Gaelic speaker I had a very intuitional access to Old Irish - some of its concepts must appear awfully weird to most scholars, but if you can speak and think in Gaelic, it looks just logical. So, yes, people should know the languages they are researching. And it becomes more difficult to trust academic arguments and theories which involve languages you don't know, when you have seen so many mistakes in arguments and theories with languages you do know.

Turiu sakyti kad netikrai suprantu tavo teorijos apie sanskritą ir baltų kalbą
I have to admit I don't really understand your own theory about Sanskrit and Baltic...

[Bubis]

Pagaliukai „/“ ir „\“ žymi giminystės ryšius tarp kalbų grupių. Dėl kitko, daugmaž pataikėte (deja, anglų kalbos plonybių nepagaunu, kaip Jūs lietuvių...).

[Lietuvis]

Talking about archaic. Interesting coincidental "similarity" between unrelated languages almost "proves" that all languages are somehow "related" because we breathe the same air, we share the same water and we can communicate by way of telepathy:

In English this tree is SYCAMORE, in Japanese プラタナス PURATANASU (Lithuanian equivalent would be PLATANAS), and in Lithuanian language: JOVARAS (Japanese equivalent - YOWARASU/YOBARASU).

Another funny coincidence: The word "kalakuta" is a swahili word meaning "rascally" (nenaudėliškai). In Lithuanian "kalakutas" is a "turkey" (bird). Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalakuta_Republic