--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Michael Smith"
<mytoyneighborhood@...> wrote:
>
> Can Bronze Age settlements from the northern Baltic regions be
> speculatively identified at all through a possible substratum
behind
> Baltic in this region? Or are Baltic-speaking tribal groups
believed
> to have been present in this region during the Bronze Age?
>
> Thoughts?
>
If by 'Baltic' you mean 'close to the Baltic Sea' your question is
difficult to understand. Baltic is spoken today in the southern, not
nothern end of the Baltic Sea.
PIE has free accent. Lithuanian has free accent. Latvian has initial
accent. Estonian and Finnish have initial accent. Polish once had
initial accent. Germanic has initial accent. One gets the impression
that Lithuanian is an old IE incursion (from the sea?) into an area
which spoke a language with initial accent.
Kuhn posited an ar-/ur- language in approximate the area where now
these initial-accent languages are spoken. I believe it must have
included the apa/upe "water, river" and apple/ubol words, which are
not necessarily IE. One difference from Krahe's 'Old European' is
that suffixes consist of a single consonant -C (example: Ource, Urk)
instead of Old European's -VC, which could be a sign of a strong
initial accent.
Torsten