Baltic languages

>>69168909
/sralt/

>>69168927
Bravo, Poland

>>69168927
>>69169027
Thanks for your input

>>69169096
(you)re welcome

>>69168909
Lithuanian's archaic features are somewhat overblown.

PIE masculine *-os stems are quite well preserved in Lithuanian, as "-as", while in Latvian they are simply "-s". However, Greek preserves it even better, as "-os".

In terms of noun cases, Lithuanian has lost the ablative. And Latin, a language with the ablative, has lost the instrumental. So no language has retained all the PIE cases.

Also, both Lithuanian and Latvian have lost the neuter gender.

In terms of verbs, the passive is lost.

Pls respond

Interesting bits:
https://archive.org/details/comparativegramm01boppuoft
http://www.lexiline.com/lexiline/lexi51.htm

>>69169334
The second link is a bit weird. Latvian is well known for being more innovative than Lithuanian.
There are 2 sound changes I can think of that happened in Lithuanian but did not in Latvian:

1) Palatalisation
2) /a:/ -> /o/.

>>69169322
>>69169322
On the off subject, how would you compare your language to Finnish? Yours is also a language of the Baltic region. Slavic languages also don't have ablatives, but we do have the nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative, instrumental

>>69169487
Finnish is more conservative. Estonian has lost vowel harmony, fused many affixes, and underwent many soundchanges. Estonian is not fully agglutinative like Finnish.

Although Finnish has some sound changes that are innovations, like /o:/ -> /uo/.

>>69169529
In which cases is it not agglutinative? This is interesting. I thought your languages are always exlusively agglutinative and use vowel harmony

So it makes it...easier, for the average IE speaker, than Finnish?

>>69169573
Agglutination is pretty much the fact that affixes have only 1 meaning and don't change in any way when attached to a word.

Let's take the word "maa" - "land" in Estonian.

The genitive singular stays the same - "maa", because the final -n is lost in Estonian.'
The nominative plural is "maad" - simple -d suffix.
The genitive plural is "maade" - not connected to the genitive singular or nominative plural at all.

Let's take the word "kuningas" - "king".

Nom: Pl: kuningad
Gen. Sg: kuninga ; Pl: kuningate
Partitive: Sg: kuningat ; Pl: kuningaid

This is not agglutination. Although we still do have a lot of it.

Note: no language is purely agglutinative or purely fusional. Some plural pronominal forms of adjectives in Lithuanian are formed using agglutination. And Estonian is a mix of the two.

>>69169691
So Estonian is becoming more fusional...
What a time to be alive
Agglutinative genocide, best day of my life

>>69169923
Yep. Language changes cyclically, so in general:

Polysynthetic (i.e Yupik and others, where a sentence is a single word) -> agglutinative -> fusional -> analytic

English is currently fusional -> analytic, and Mandarin is fully analytic.

>>69169998
I believe Macedonian is also overwhelmingly analytic, despite being a Slavic language

>>69169998
Actually, my mistake, the cycle should be:

fusional -> analytic -> agglutinative -> fusional

>>69170167
Macedonian and Bulgarian (they are pretty much the same language) are similar to English in the fact that they have mostly lost noun cases and use prepositions.