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In Indo-European studies, a thematic vowel or theme vowel is the vowel *e or *o from ablaut placed before the ending of a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word. Nouns, adjectives, and verbs in the Indo-European languages with this vowel are thematic, and those without it are athematic. Used more generally, a thematic vowel is any vowel found at the end of the stem of a word.
The Balto-Slavic languages form a branch of the Indo-European family of languages, traditionally comprising the Baltic and Slavic languages. Baltic and Slavic languages share several linguistic traits not found in any other Indo-European branch, which points to a period of common development and origin.
Lithuanian grammar retains many archaic features from Proto-Balto-Slavic that have been lost in other Balto-Slavic languages.
Proto-Balto-Slavic is a reconstructed hypothetical proto-language descending from Proto-Indo-European (PIE). From Proto-Balto-Slavic, the later Balto-Slavic languages are thought to have developed, composed of the Baltic and Slavic sub-branches, and including modern Lithuanian, Polish, Russian and Serbo-Croatian, among others.
Proto-Baltic is the unattested, reconstructed ancestral proto-language of all Baltic languages. It is not attested in writing, but has been partly reconstructed through the comparative method by gathering the collected data on attested Baltic and other Indo-European languages. It represents the common Baltic speech that approximately was spoken between the 3rd millennium BC and ca. 5th century BC, after which it began dividing into West and East Baltic languages. Proto-Baltic is thought to have been a fusional language and is associated with the Corded Ware and Trzciniec cultures.
Proto-Indo-European nominals include nouns, adjectives, and pronouns. Their grammatical forms and meanings have been reconstructed by modern linguists, based on similarities found across all Indo-European languages. This article discusses nouns and adjectives; Proto-Indo-European pronouns are treated elsewhere.
The phonology of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) has been reconstructed by linguists, based on the similarities and differences among current and extinct Indo-European languages. Because PIE was not written, linguists must rely on the evidence of its earliest attested descendants, such as Hittite, Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, and Latin, to reconstruct its phonology.
The Lithuanian language's declension system is similar to declension systems in ancient Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit, Latin or Ancient Greek. It is one of the most complicated declension systems among modern Indo-European and modern European languages.
Gothic is an inflected language, and as such its nouns, pronouns, and adjectives must be declined in order to serve a grammatical function. A set of declined forms of the same word pattern is called a declension. There are five grammatical cases in Gothic with a few traces of an old sixth instrumental case.
Hirt's law or Hirt–Illich-Svitych's law, named after Hermann Hirt, who originally postulated it in 1895, is a Balto-Slavic sound law that triggered the retraction of the accent under certain conditions.
Proto-Indo-European accent refers to the accentual (stress) system of the Proto-Indo-European language.
Meillet's law is a Common Slavic accent law, named after the French Indo-Europeanist Antoine Meillet, who discovered it.
Dybo's law, or Dybo–Illich-Svitych's law, is a Common Slavic accent law named after Soviet accentologists Vladimir Dybo and Vladislav Illich-Svitych. It was posited to explain the occurrence of nouns and verbs in Slavic languages which are invariantly accented on the inflectional ending. The latter is seen as an innovation from the original Proto-Balto-Slavic accent system, in which nouns and verbs either had invariable accent on the root, or "mobile" accent which could alternate between root and ending in the inflectional paradigm.
Lithuanian has eleven vowels and 45 consonants, including 22 pairs of consonants distinguished by the presence or absence of palatalization. Most vowels come in pairs which are differentiated through length and degree of centralization.
In the Lithuanian phonology, stressed heavy syllables are pronounced in one of two prosodically distinct ways. One way is known as the acute or falling accent: this may be described as "sudden, sharp or rough". In Lithuanian it is called tvirtaprãdė príegaidė, literally 'firm-start accent'. The second way is known as the circumflex or rising accent, which may be described as "continued, mild or smooth". In Lithuanian it is called tvirtagãlė príegaidė, literally 'firm-end accent'. Light syllables may be stressed or unstressed, but cannot be differentiated by accent.
Proto-Slavic is the unattested, reconstructed proto-language of all Slavic languages. It represents Slavic speech approximately from the 2nd millennium BC through the 6th century AD. As with most other proto-languages, no attested writings have been found; scholars have reconstructed the language by applying the comparative method to all the attested Slavic languages and by taking into account other Indo-European languages.
Proto-Slavic accent is the accentual system of Proto-Slavic and is closely related to the accentual system of some Baltic languages with which it shares many common innovations that occurred in the Proto-Balto-Slavic period. Deeper, it inherits from the Proto-Indo-European accent. In modern languages the prototypical accent is reflected in various ways, some preserving the Proto-Slavic situation to a greater degree than others.
This glossary gives a general overview of the various sound laws that have been formulated by linguists for the various Indo-European languages. A concise description is given for each rule; more details are given in their articles.
The Proto-Slavic language, the hypothetical ancestor of the modern-day Slavic languages, developed from the ancestral Proto-Balto-Slavic language, which is the parent language of the Balto-Slavic languages. The first 2,000 years or so consist of the pre-Slavic era, a long period during which none of the later dialectal differences between Slavic languages had yet happened. The last stage in which the language remained without internal differences that later characterize different Slavic languages can be dated around AD 500 and is sometimes termed Proto-Slavic proper or Early Common Slavic. Following this is the Common Slavic period, during which the first dialectal differences appeared but the entire Slavic-speaking area continued to function as a single language, with sound changes tending to spread throughout the entire area. By around 1000, the area had broken up into separate East Slavic, West Slavic and South Slavic languages, and in the following centuries it broke up further into the various modern Slavic languages of which the following are extant: Belarusian, Russian, Rusyn and Ukrainian in the East; Czech, Slovak, Polish, Kashubian and the Sorbian languages in the West, and Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian in the South.
The Fortunatov–de Saussure law, or de Saussure's law, is an accentological law discovered independently by the Russian linguist Filipp Fortunatov (1895) and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1896).
References
- Pedersen, Holger. 1933. Études lituaniennes. København: Levin & Munksgaard.
- Kortlandt, Frederik. 1975. Slavic Accentuation - A Study in Relative Chronology.