--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, mkapovic@... wrote:
> But 3. sg. = 3. pl. is hardly a Proto-Baltic innovation... Even in
Old
> Lith. you have e~sti and es±~.
I suppose ±~ is nasal a with circumflex although I can't see that on
my screen. Where is that attested, not as the plural of the
participle, but as a third plural finite verb form? I know, and am
inclined to accept, Cowgill's identification of the Nom.pl. of the nt-
participle vedaN~ as being in reality the 3pl *wedhont(i), transferred
from narrative usage, but if there is no other place for the 3pl in
Lith. or any of the other Baltic languages this can have been its
place in Proto-Baltic already. That means there are no finite non-
singular third person forms in Baltic - unless your " es±~ " is just
that. I can't find anything about any such thing, but there may well
be new information I do not have. Could you be more specific, please?
If there is no such finite form, it ought to be recognized as a major
common innovation of Baltic that the third sg verb forms are used of
all numbers. Since that innovation is not shared by Slavic, the latter
does not appear to be a branch of Baltic. I do not see what else one
could possibly mean by these terms.
> Anyway, one could imagine Slavic being a
> "Baltic" dialects which preserved the distinction.
> By saying Slavic is just a Baltic dialect, I do not mean to propose
that
> we can derive Slavic from Lithuanian or something like that,
ofcourse. I'm
> just putting down the projected importance of Slavic in the past.
Are you doing anything other than replacing the term Balto-Slavic by
Baltic? And what's the benefit of that if there are Pan-Baltic
exclusive innovations? What are we then to call the subbranch of
Baltic that does not comprise Slavic?
I guess your real point is to stress the closeness of Baltic and
Slavic and the reality of a Balto-Slavic unity. I would agree
completely with that, but that can be said without changing the terms
we use which would only cause confusion. I have always found it
strange that so much effort could be wasted on a crusade of
dramatizing the little differences between Baltic and Slavic when the
much greater difference between Irish and Welsh is never used to
assign Goidelic and British Celtic to different IE branches.
Jens