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Proto-Slavic
Proto-Slavic (abbreviated PSl., PS.; also called Common Slavic or Common Slavonic) is the unattested, reconstructed proto-language of all Slavic languages. It represents Slavic speech approximately from the 2nd millennium B.C. through the 6th century A.D. 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. Rapid development of Slavic speech occurred during the Proto-Slavic period, coinciding with the massive expansion of the Slavic-speaking area. Dialectal differentiation occurred early on during this period, but overall linguistic unity and mutual intelligibility continued for several centuries, into the 10th century or later. During this period, many sound changes diffused across the entire area, often uniformly. This makes it inconvenient to maintain the traditional definition of a pro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proto-Balto-Slavic
Proto-Balto-Slavic (PBS or PBSl) 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 sub-branches Baltic and Slavic, and including modern Lithuanian, Polish, Russian and Serbo-Croatian, among others. Like most other proto-languages, it is not attested by any surviving texts but has been reconstructed using the comparative method. There are several isoglosses that Baltic and Slavic languages share in phonology, morphology and accentology, which represent common innovations from Proto-Indo-European times and can be chronologically arranged. Phonology Consonants Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated stops lost their aspiration in Proto-Balto-Slavic. Stops were no longer distinguished between fortis and aspirated but were voiceless and voiced. However, several new palatal (postalveolar) consonants had developed: *ś and *ź from earlier p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Balto-Slavic Lng
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. Although the notion of a Balto-Slavic unity has been contested (partly due to political controversies), there is now a general consensus among specialists in Indo-European linguistics to classify Baltic and Slavic languages into a single branch, with only some details of the nature of their relationship remaining in dispute. A Proto-Balto-Slavic language is reconstructable by the comparative method, descending from Proto-Indo-European by means of well-defined sound laws, and from which modern Slavic and Baltic languages descended. One particularly innovative dialect separated from the Balto-Slavic dialect continuum and became ancestral to the Proto-Slavic language, from which all Slavic la ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Slavic Languages
The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the Early Middle Ages, which in turn is thought to have descended from the earlier Proto-Balto-Slavic language, linking the Slavic languages to the Baltic languages in a Balto-Slavic group within the Indo-European family. The Slavic languages are conventionally (that is, also on the basis of extralinguistic features) divided into three subgroups: East, South, and West, which together constitute more than 20 languages. Of these, 10 have at least one million speakers and official status as the national languages of the countries in which they are predominantly spoken: Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian (of the East group), Polish, Czech and Slovak (of the West group) and Bulgarian and Macedonian (eastern dialects of the South group), a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Old Church Slavonic
Old Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic () was the first Slavic literary language. Historians credit the 9th-century Byzantine missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius with standardizing the language and using it in translating the Bible and other Ancient Greek ecclesiastical texts as part of the Christianization of the Slavs. It is thought to have been based primarily on the dialect of the 9th-century Byzantine Slavs living in the Province of Thessalonica (in present-day Greece). Old Church Slavonic played an important role in the history of the Slavic languages and served as a basis and model for later Church Slavonic traditions, and some Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches use this later Church Slavonic as a liturgical language to this day. As the oldest attested Slavic language, OCS provides important evidence for the features of Proto-Slavic, the reconstructed common ancestor of all Slavic languages. Nomenclature The name of the language in Old Church Slav ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Slavic First Palatalization
The Slavic first palatalization is a Proto-Slavic sound change that manifested as regressive palatalization of inherited Balto-Slavic velar consonants. Motivation An important tendency in Proto-Slavic – one which also operated throughout the Common Slavic period (ca. 300–1000 CE) and was the direct cause of the first palatalization – was so-called ''intrasyllabic synharmony''. Such intrasyllabic synharmony is said to be violated if a velar consonant occurs before a front (palatal) vowel, as the former is articulated in the region of the soft palate (or velum) near the back of the mouth and the latter in a region closer to the front of the mouth. Historically, speakers have resolved this opposition by assimilating the place of articulation of the velar consonant to that of the front vowel, thereby palatalizing it. This phenomenon is very common in the phonetic history of languages and marks the evolution of almost all modern Romance languages, as just one example. Formu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Slavic Second Palatalization
The Slavic second palatalization is a Proto-Slavic sound change that manifested as a regressive palatalization of inherited Balto-Slavic velar consonants that occurred after the first and before the third Slavic palatalizations. Motivation The second palatalization of velars is a direct consequence of the monophthongization of diphthongs, or more precisely, the change *aj > ē.Mihaljević 2002:157 While *kaj, *gaj and *xaj were in accordance with the principle of so-called ''intrasyllabic synharmony'' that operated during the Common Slavic period, the resulting *kē, *gē, and *xē defied the intrasyllabic synharmony. Namely, the velars ended up in front of the front vowel ē, and this contradicted the Proto-Slavic phonotactical constraints. This anomaly was resolved by palatalizing the velars, just as during the first palatalization. However, the results of the second palatalization were different and not completely uniform across Slavic territory, indicating one of the first di ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Monophthongization Of Diphthongs In Proto-Slavic
Monophthongization of diphthongs is a Proto-Slavic sound change in which diphthongs turn into vowels. It is one of the key events in the chronology of the Proto-Slavic language. The monophthongization of diphthongs restructured the Proto-Slavic language with a strong influence on its morphophonology. The change Proto-Balto-Slavic, the ancestor of Proto-Slavic, possessed three vocalic diphthongs: ''*ai'', ''*au'' and ''*ei''. In Proto-Slavic, these were monophthongized as follows, with the subscript indicating whether the vowels trigger the first palatalization or the second. * *ai > *ě₂, *i₂ - Early Slavic *snaigu > *sněgъ > Serbo-Croatian snijeg * *au > *u - Early Slavic *saušu > *suxъ > Serbo-Croatian suh * *ei > *i₁ - Early Slavic *kreivu > *krivъ > Serbo-Croatian kriv The fourth Proto-Indo-European vocalic diphthong, ''*eu'', had already become ''*jau'' in Proto-Balto-Slavic. It then developed into ''*ju'' in Proto-Slavic, following the same development as for ''*a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lithuanian Language
Lithuanian ( ) is an Eastern Baltic language belonging to the Baltic branch of the Indo-European language family. It is the official language of Lithuania and one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.8 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania and about 200,000 speakers elsewhere. Lithuanian is closely related to the neighbouring Latvian language. It is written in a Latin script. It is said to be the most conservative of the existing Indo-European languages, retaining features of the Proto-Indo-European language that had disappeared through development from other descendant languages. History Among Indo-European languages, Lithuanian is conservative in some aspects of its grammar and phonology, retaining archaic features otherwise found only in ancient languages such as Sanskrit (particularly its early form, Vedic Sanskrit) or Ancient Greek. For this reason, it is an important source for the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Baltic Languages
The Baltic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 4.5 million people mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. Together with the Slavic languages, they form the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European family. Scholars usually regard them as a single subgroup divided into two branches: Western Baltic (containing only extinct languages) and Eastern Baltic (containing at least two living languages, Lithuanian, Latvian, and by some counts including Latgalian and Samogitian as separate languages rather than dialects of the two aforementioned languages). The range of the Eastern Baltic linguistic influence once possibly reached as far as the Ural Mountains, but this hypothesis has been questioned. Old Prussian, a Western Baltic language that became extinct in the 18th century, has possibly retained the greatest number of properties from Proto-Baltic. Although related, Li ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indo-European Languages
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish, have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several continents. The Indo-European family is divided into several branches or sub-families, of which there are eight groups with languages still alive today: Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic; and another nine subdivisions that are now extinct. Today, the individual Indo-European languages with the most native speakers are English, Hindi–Urdu, Spanish, Bengali, French, Russian, Portuguese, German, and Punjabi, each with over 100 million native speakers; many others are small and in danger of extinction. In total, 46% of the world's population (3.2 billion people) speaks an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Comparative Method
In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor and then extrapolating backwards to infer the properties of that ancestor. The comparative method may be contrasted with the method of internal reconstruction in which the internal development of a single language is inferred by the analysis of features within that language. Ordinarily, both methods are used together to reconstruct prehistoric phases of languages; to fill in gaps in the historical record of a language; to discover the development of phonological, morphological and other linguistic systems and to confirm or to refute hypothesised relationships between languages. The comparative method was developed over the 19th century. Key contributions were made by the Danish scholars Rasmus Rask and Karl Verner and the German scholar Jacob Grimm. The first linguist to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prosody (linguistics)
In linguistics, prosody () is concerned with elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments (vowels and consonants) but are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, stress, and rhythm. Such elements are known as suprasegmentals. Prosody may reflect features of the speaker or the utterance: their emotional state; the form of utterance (statement, question, or command); the presence of irony or sarcasm; emphasis, contrast, and focus. It may reflect elements of language not encoded by grammar or choice of vocabulary. Attributes of prosody In the study of prosodic aspects of speech, it is usual to distinguish between auditory measures ( subjective impressions produced in the mind of the listener) and objective measures (physical properties of the sound wave and physiological characteristics of articulation that may be measured objectively). Auditory (subjective) and objective ( acoustic and artic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
