--- tgpedersen <
tgpedersen@...> wrote:
> Given that the western Baltic languages (ie Old
> Prussian) are
> affiliated somehow with the Germanic languages and
> (if you believe
> this
>
> http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~histling/nytarticle.html
*****GK: This is 6 years ago. I wonder if there have
been follow ups.******
>
> article) that Germanic was first influenced by
> Balto-Slavic,
*****GK: My understanding of "Balto-Slavic" is that it
is an ancestor language of all Baltic and Slavic
languages. So the affiliation mentioned here should
affect not only Western Baltic tongues but everything
else. As a matter of fact some of the linguistic
authorities who dealt with this problem had
hypothesized that there once existed a
"Germano-Balto-Slavic" group, which then broke up into
"Germanic" and "Balto-Slavic".******
then by
> Celtic, is it possible that there was once a dialect
> continuum on the
> South shore of the Baltic between the Baltic (Old
> Prussian) languages
> in (East) Prussia and the (Old) Germanic languages
> of Denmark and
> Sweden, a continuum that was breached by a Celtic
> colonization of the
> South shore (cf. Tacitus' remark that the Aestii
> spoke a language
> similar to that of the Britons)?
*****GK: I think we should be careful in not reading
too much into Tacitus' remark that the "Aestii" spoke
a language like that of the Britons. This is a
statement of the same category, it seems to me as
Strabo's (if I remember correctly) comment that the
Romans called the Germans "Germani" because the latter
were "genuine Celts". The only thing I could think off
to explain Tacitus was the possibility that some form
of Celtic could have played the role of lingua franca
along the Amber road as late as the 1rst c. AD.*****
>
> Torsten
>
>
> Torsten
>
>
>
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