> I mean no disrespect to the other languages of Eastern Europe.
> It's just that Lithuanian is the most archaic of the IE
> languages.
>
>It's just a stereotype, Mark.
I agree that it's a bit of stereotype too. I believe the history of a
language starts when it splits off of its ancestor language. I don't know
when the Slavic ancestor language split into Western, Eastern and Southern
Slavic groups but I've read Russian, Byelorrusian and Ukranian emerged from
the Eastern group in the 14th-15th centuries. So the history of Russian
must've started about 500 years ago. Sergei?
As to the Baltic ancestor language, it split into Prussian and
Lithuanian-Latvian groups in the 4th-3rd centuries BC. Lithuanian and
Latvian began to live their own life in the 5th-7th centuries AD. Why
Latvian is less archaic than Lithuanian then? And what about Albanian? Sorry
for any mistakes and possible off-topic.
Juozas Rimas