Re: The Language Closest to PIE

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 119
Date: 1999-10-28

 
----- Original Message -----
From: markodegard@...
To: cybalist@eGroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 1999 5:50 PM
Subject: [cybalist] The Language Closest to PIE

I voted for Lithuanian, but don't really know enough to say if this is the right choice (but among the choices, it seems best).

Lithuanian is said to be the most grammatically archaic of all the IE languages, and you often see examples of how transparantly cognate Latin and Sanskrit are to the modern language.

At the same time, I gather that Lithuanian has some *extraordinary* innovations, mostly from its encounter with Uralic. For a while, it seems to have borrowed a whole suite of Finnic cases. And what is it, the inessive? the one that replaces the locative, is still with them. This might be cited as evidence for making Lithuanian the most unlike PIE.< html>

 
Well, no living language is perfectly archaic in all its aspects. For example, Lithuanian (which I also voted for, like everybody else) is respectably conservative and impressionistically "closest" to PIE, true enough, but it has no neuter gender -- a loss which surely disqualifies it as a living fossil. It also has a highly innovative system of adjectival declension (like the Slavic and Germanic languages).
 
As case systems go, Polish is almost as archaic as Sanskrit. Except for the ablative (and the Anatolian directive, inasmuch as it reflects a separate PIE case) it still has all the remaining seven cases (Nom, Acc, Gen, Dat, Instr, Loc, Voc) against Latin's six or Classical Greek's pitiful four. It scores better than Hittite and beats some of its Slavic cousins (including Russian) in preserving the vocative as a productive category. It must be admitted that Modern Polish has no dual (quite a recent loss, as dual inflections were rather common until the16th century); Slovene wins in this respect.
 
Well, considering how long the Balts and the Slavs lay hidden in some remote woodlands of Eastern Europe, away from external influences, no wonder they have retained so many primitive linguistic traits. But English, too, can boast some extremely archaic features. For example, it is the only extant IE language (or at any rate the only one to my knowledge) to preserve the original pronunciation of PIE *w (as in water)!
 
Piotr