Year: 2022
Type: book-chapter
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.
Author: Tijmen Pronk
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4296930125