West Baltic Languages - Old Prussian (Paperback)

Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Prussian is an extinct Baltic language, once spoken by the inhabitants of Prussia in an area (see map and article by Marija Gimbutas below) of what later became East Prussia (now north-eastern Poland and the Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia) and eastern parts of Pomerelia (some parts of the region east of the Vistula River). It was also spoken much further east and south in what became Polesia and part of Podlasia with the conquests by Rus and Poles starting in the 10th century and by the German colonisation of the area which began in the 12th century. In Old Prussian itself, the language was called Prsiskan (Prussian) or Prsiskai Bil (the Prussian language). According to Gimbutas, the entire area has thousands of river names that can be traced back to an original Baltic language, even though they have undergone Slavicization. The sti, mentioned by Tacitus in his Germania, may have been a people who spoke Old Prussian. Tacitus describes them as being just like the Suebi (a group of Germanic peoples) but with a more Britannic-like (Celtic) language. Old Prussian was closely related to the other extinct Western Baltic languages, Curonian, Galindian and Sudovian. It is more distantly related to the surviving Eastern Baltic languages, Lithuanian and Latvian. Compare the Prussian word seme (zem), the Latvian zeme, the Lithuanian em. Old Prussian contained a few borrowings specifically from Gothic (e.g., Old Prussian ylo "awl," as with Lithuanian la, Latvian lens) and even Scandinavian languages.The language also has many Slavic loanwords (e.g., Old Prussian curtis "hound," just as Lithuanian krtas, Latvian kurts come from Slavic (cf. Polish chart). There are many loanwords directly from German, the result of German colonization in the 13th century. ... More: http://booksllc.net/?id=22577