Baltica & Balto-Slavica

Bibliographic Data

ID23199883
AuthorsFrederik Kortlandt (corresponding author)
Year2009
Publication date2009-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueBaltica and Balto-Slavica (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherBrill (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1163/9789042026537
OpenAlexW612909267
ISBN9789042026537
LanguageEN
Citations received9

This volume offers a discussion of the phonological, accentological and morphological development of the Baltic languages and their Indo-European origins. The first half of this book is about Baltic historical phonology and morphology and the second half is about Prussian. The emphasis is on the relative chronology of sound changes and on the development of the flexional and derivational categories of nouns, pronouns and verbs. It is argued that the Balto-Slavic acute tone was a glottal stop which developed from the Indo-European laryngeals and from Winter's law and that the original circumflex continues other vocalic sequences. Special points of attention are the gen.pl. endings, ē and ī/jā stems, and thematic and athematic present endings. The second half of the book contains a comparative analysis of the three Prussian catechisms, resulting in the conclusion that they represent three consecutive stages of a real linguistic system. It includes a discussion of the Prussian accent shift, initial vowels, diphthongs, infinitives, verb classes, participles and traces of ablauting paradigms. The final part of the book offers a full linguistic interpretation of the three Prussian catechisms on the basis of the preceding chapters, followed by a list of references and a word index. The book is of interest to Balticists, Slavicists, Indo-Europeanists, and other historical linguists.

Comparative linguistics · Demonstrative · Diphthong · Historical linguistics · Linguistics · Noun · Philology · Phonology · Slavic languages · Sociology · Stress (linguistics) · Tone (literature) · Verb · Vowel · European Linguistics and Anthropology · History · Linguistic research and analysis · Linguistics and language evolution · Philosophy