The Baltic languages are a subbranch of the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family.

They show the closest relationship with the Slavic languages, and have, by most scholars, been reconstructed to a common Proto-Balto-Slavic stage, during which Common Balto-Slavic lexical, phonological, morphological and accentological isoglosses are thought to have developed.

* Balto-Slavic languages

The dative was common among early Indo-European languages and has survived to the present in the Balto-Slavic branch and the Germanic branch, among others.

Among modern languages, cases still feature prominently in most of the Balto-Slavic languages, with most having six to eight cases, as well as Icelandic, German and Modern Greek, which have four.

* modern Balto-Slavic languages ( see however prepositional case )

Some theories, such as Jānis Endzelīns ' considered that the Baltic languages form their own distinct branch of the family of Indo-European languages, but the most widely accepted opinion is the one that suggests the union of Baltic and Slavic languages into a distinct sub-family of Balto-Slavic languages amongst the Indo-European family of languages.

* the Standard Average European area, comprising Romance, Germanic and Balto-Slavic languages, the languages of the Balkans, and western Uralic languages

Of the Balto-Slavic languages, Serbian ( Latin alphabet ), Croatian, Bosnian, Slovenian, Latvian and Lithuanian use č, š and ž.

Dubious connections have also been suggested with words in Balto-Slavic languages, including Old Church Slavonic and Lithuanian.

Balto-Slavic retained Proto-Indo-European pitch accent, reworking it into the opposition of " acute " ( rising ) and " circumflex " ( falling ) tone, and which, following a period of extensive accentual innovations, yielded pitch-accent based system that has been retained in modern-day Lithuanian and West South Slavic languages ( in some dialects ).

The comparative method involves the search for etymological sources not only in Russian, but also in other Indo-European languages: Anatolian, Balto-Slavic, Germanic, Italic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, Celtic, Armenian, and others.

Category: Balto-Slavic languages

Category: Balto-Slavic languages

The Slavic languages are part of the Balto-Slavic group, which belongs to the Indo-European language family.

The Balto-Slavic language group traditionally comprises Baltic and Slavic languages, belonging to the Indo-European family of languages.

One particularly innovative dialect separated from the Balto-Slavic dialect continuum and became ancestral to Proto-Slavic language, out of which all other Slavic languages descended.

There is a minority of scholars who argue that Baltic forms a separate branch of Indo-European, or that it is not a genetic node in either Indo-European family or Balto-Slavic, but that Eastern and Western Baltic are separate branches of Balto-Slavic.

From these few references, which are the only surviving evidence apart from place name analysis, it would seem that the Balts Pytheas would have encountered were past the Common Balto-Slavic stage, but still spoke one language, which would have been Proto-Baltic.

Notable among these are Grimm's law and Verner's law in Proto-Germanic, loss of prevocalic * p-in Proto-Celtic, reduction to h of prevocalic * s-in Proto-Greek, Brugmann's law and Bartholomae's law in Proto-Indo-Iranian, Grassmann's law independently in both Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian, and Winter's law and Hirt's law in Balto-Slavic.

An association between Balto-Slavic and Germanic has been proposed on the basis of lexical similarities that are unique to these languages.

Recent subgrouping calculations of Indo-European branches using a method that accounts for the distribution of PIE verbs ( SLR-D ) reject an early separation of Anatolian languages altogether and yield results that place a genealogical split of Anatolian ( and Tocharian ) within a more recent grouping together with Greek, Albanian and Armenian, in a single branch together with Indo-Iranian, though at distance from the genealogical splits of Balto-Slavic, Italo-Celtic and Germanic that are harboured within another branch, thus supporting proponents of an IE expansion that roughly parallels the adoption of the bronze metallurgy.

( On the other hand, Germanic, among others, has a class of present-tense verbs derived from PIE perfect / stative verbs, and both Germanic and Balto-Slavic have a class of secondary n-verbs with a clear meaning, derived originally from nu-and / or neH-verbs, so it is possible that many of the Anatolian differences are innovations.

There are a number of words in Balto-Slavic which show Centum reflex of PIE patalalized dorsals.

RUKI rule also operated if there was a laryngeal after */ u / or */ i /, i. e. */ s / changes to */ š / after * uH and * iH, but it remains open to debate whether the laryngeal was already lost in that environment, i. e. are we dealing with the change of */ s / to */ š / after Balto-Slavic */ ū / and */ ī /.

In Lithuanian, Balto-Slavic */ š / and */ ś / are merged to / š /, which remains distinct from / s / so the effect of RUKI rule is still evident in Lithuanian.

These features sometimes cut across sub-families: for instance, the instrumental, dative and ablative plurals in Germanic and Balto-Slavic feature endings beginning with-m -, rather than the usual -* bh -, e. g. Old Church Slavonic instrumental plural synъ-mi ' with sons ', despite the fact that the Germanic languages are centum, while Balto-Slavic languages are satem.

According to Renfrew's most recent revision of the theory however Old Europe was a " secondary urheimat " where the Greek, Armenian and Balto-Slavic language families diverged around 5000 BC.

That sudden expansion of Proto-Slavic erased most of the idioms of the Balto-Slavic dialect continuum, which left us today with only two branches: Baltic and Slavic ( or East Baltic, West Baltic, and Slavic in the minority view ).

These null subject languages include most Romance languages, with French being the most notable exception, as well as all the Balto-Slavic languages and to a limited extent Icelandic.

PIE */ s / has been preserved in Balto-Slavic and Proto-Slavic in most of the positions ; it changed to Balto-Slavic */ š / according to the RUKI law, and in Proto-Slavic it was probably lost word-finally.

The most common claim is that Balto-Slavic */ s / turned to */ š / in Baltic unconditionally only after */ r /, while after */ u /, */ k / and */ i / we have both */ s / and */ š /.

Supporters of both theories have suggested this region as IE's secondary urheimat, in which the differentiation of proto-IE into the various European language-groups ( e. g. Italic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Celtic ) began.

Some linguists, however, have recently suggested that Balto-Slavic should be split into three equidistant nodes: Eastern Baltic, Western Baltic and Slavic.

However, another division was proposed in the 1960s by Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov: that the Balto-Slavic proto-language split from the start into West Baltic, East Baltic and Proto-Slavic.

Ruki ( or iurk ) refers to a sound change in Balto-Slavic, Albanian, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian, wherein an original phoneme changed into after the consonants,, and the semi-vowels,, or:

* the three PIE laryngeals merged into one (* H ), which may have disappeared even during the Balto-Slavic period

Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov believed in the unity of Balto-Slavic, but not in the unity of Baltic.

The Balto-Slavic homeland largely corresponds to the historical distribution of Baltic and Slavic, Proto-Baltic likely emerging in the eastern parts of the Corded Ware horizon.

Thus Ivanov and Toporov questioned not only Balto-Slavic unity, but also Baltic unity.

Proto-Balto-Slavic is reconstructed proto-language descending from Proto-Indo-European ( PIE ) and out of which all later Balto-Slavic languages ( represented by Baltic and Slavic branches ) and dialects descended, such as modern Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish and Russian.

In Baltic languages the evidence of RUKI rule is recognizable only in Lithuanian, because in Latvian and Old Prussian a merger occurs of Balto-Slavic */ š / (< PIE */ s / by RUKI rule ), */ ś / (< PIE */ ḱ /) and */ s / (< PIE */ s /).

There is no simple solution to such double reflexes of PIE */ s / after */ r /, */ u /, */ k /, */ i / in Baltic, and thus no simple answer to the question of whether RUKI law is a common Balto-Slavic isogloss or not.

Generally it can be ascertained that Baltic shows the effect of RUKI law only in old words inherited from Balto-Slavic period, meaning that Lithuanian / š / will come after / r /, / u /, / k /, / i / in words that have complete formational and morphological correspondence in Slavic ( ruling out the possibility of accidental, parallel formations ).