Balto-Slavic

Abstract

Since the times of Bopp and Schleicher, Baltic and Slavic have been treated as a single branch of the Indo-European language family. Throughout the nineteenth century, this view remained unchallenged, and it is presented as received wisdom in Brugmann’s Grundriss (1897: 20–1). At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, Meillet (1905: 201–2; 1922: 40–8) challenged the idea of a Balto-Slavic unity and argued that those similarities between Baltic and Slavic that are not archaisms inherited from (dialectal) Proto-Indo-European are due to parallel innovations. Throughout the twentieth century, the matter remained controversial. Balto-Slavic unity was defended by Rozwadowski (1912) and Vaillant (1950: 14), for example, while scholars like Senn (1941; 1970), Fraenkel (1950: 73–112), Pohl (1992), Schmid (1992) and Andersen (1996) remained sceptical and explained the similarities in terms of language contact and convergence.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 41 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.