Re: Odp: Balto-Slavic Bear

Piotr Writes:

BTW, I've never questioned a Germanic-Baltic-Slavic Sprachbund. I do question a branch with such members. In the techical jargon of historical linguists a Sprachbund (a.k.a. language league) is not a genetic unit but a convergence area within which even languages which are distantly related or exhibit no genetic relationship may influence each other as a result of long-standing bilingual contact. One famous example is the Balkan League grouping Bulgarian, Macedonian and southeastern Serbian dialects (all Slavic), but also Romanian and extinct Dalmatian (both Romance), Greek and Albanian (separate branches). I've always claimed that the IE languages of the North European Plain formed a Sprachbund in this sense. Shared vocabulary is symptomatic of that.

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Sprachbunds are fascinating things. If the very real evidence for their existence was not there for you to examine for yourself, or as in my case, reading about them in the matter-of-fact language of distinguished linguists, my instinct would be to disbelieve such things exist to the extent that they do. It's sort of like quantum mechanics: you trust what you've been told is fact even though such a thing is counter-intuitive.

I don't have David Crystal's Encyclopedia of Language in front of me, but he writes about the West European Sprachbund, basically Germany, France and the UK and Ireland. The phonology is basically the same, with a few variations; by this, as I understand it, the vast majority of our phonemes are in common (we don't do things the Scandinavians or Slavs do, and while there is a lot of overlap in the sound inventory with southern Romance languages, they are really quite different too).

Why do independent unrelated languages form sprachbunds? Even when you account for foreign trade and bilingualism at borders, it's quite counter-intuitive over such a large area.  Anyway: they are for real.

As for the ancient Germanic/Balto-Slavic sprachbund: from my reading, I have the impression that pre-Germanic 'experiemented'  with satemization, and a few traces of this exist. Perhaps I'm making an unwarranted assumption. Anyway. The idea seems to be that Balto-Slavic was the nearest IE language to pre-Germanic. Things changed when the Celts came into contact with the pre-Germans (all my books say we are not allowed to call it Germanic before 500 or 700 BCE, or thereabouts).

Mark.