10-01-04 23:19, Alexander Stolbov wrote:
> Does not this mean that Proto-Baltic had to separate at once in 3
> parts - West Baltic, Slavic and East Baltic? And what about the
> Golyad' subgroup?
My view is that the Proto-Baltic dialectal network gradually broke up
into distinct languages, which then either died out or expanded and
broke up into more descendant languages, which then... etc. The only
groups of which we have any concrete information are those that happen
to have survived till now (Slavic and East Baltic) and the one that went
extinct late enough to be documented (Old Prussian). Toponymic and other
indirect evidence allows us to identify (more or less tentatively) the
areas where groups generally classifiable as Baltic lived in prehistoric
times, but it would be extremely naive to classify such "basal Baltic"
languages into _modern_ subdivisions. Languages ancestral to Slavic, Old
Prussian and East Baltic were somewhere among them, but there may have
been any number of now extinct linguistic lineages more loosely related
to the modern ones.
Piotr