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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: roots of lithuanian language
In-Reply-To: RIMELLBD@IBM3090.BHAM.AC.UK's message of 16 Jun 95 17:24:35 BST
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Date: Fri, 16 Jun 1995 18:33:02 GMT
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In article <952416172435@ibm3090.bham.ac.uk> RIMELLBD@IBM3090.BHAM.AC.UK
writes:

>Apparently the speech of a Lithuanian Country Peasant (ie: sopeech without
>all the city terms, eg computer) is the closest modern day equivalent to
>Proto-Indo_european.

No.

This is a legend, like the claim that there are communities in the Appalachian
Mountains (eastern U. S.) which still speak "Elizabethan English," that is, in
which the language has remained unchanged since the 17th century.  (Or, if you
prefer, that there is a canton in Switzerland in which classical Latin is
spoken, unchanged since the time of the Caesars.)

I have studied Lithuanian, both the modern language and the early texts known
as Old Lithuanian (16th century).  There are major differences in phonology and
notable changes in morphology; the syntax may be similar, but then, we have no
good measures for similarity of syntax.

>As for other conservative languages, there's Latvian (next door), and
>Sanskrit, a language of India which shares many similar words with Lithuanian.

Latvian shows a great number of changes with respect to Lithuanian, so that
even if we were to consider the latter conservative, the former is not.

Sanskrit has been artificially preserved, like Latin in the Roman Catholic
church, for over 2000 years.  The claims made for mutual comprehension of
Lithuanian and Sanskrit in the 19th century were an excess of enthusiasm in
circles in which there were racial and political agendas as much as linguistic
ones.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
