Talk:Baltic languages

message: What is meant, saying "the Balts did not use writing until fairly recently ?" Lithuanians used written language before the Christianizing rarely. If someone said they didn't used at all, it were quite the truth. It was a cultural tradition, for all their neighbors used written language more often at this time, and this kind of language was doubtless known for Lithuanians. But from the times of  Christianizing , it was used. It was used more and more, and breaking the tradition, in the end of XIX century Lithuanians became a nation with quite big census of literacy (more than 60%. I don't have precise data currently). Printed books in Lithuanian  appeared first time about one hundred years later, they did in the Europe at all. Do you mean it "recently"? The same is with Latvians, here only the dates differ a bit.     Prussian or Old-Prussian language dropped out in about the beginning of XVII century. Later German, Lithuanian (in the north part) and Polish (in the south-east part) languages were used in Prussia only, until 1944. user: LinasLit —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.59.14.50 (talk • contribs) 10:46, 11 January 2004
:Christian Europe had a higher literacy rate than pagan Europe. (Not that Medieval serfs were all that literate.) Lithuania was one of the last places in Europe to become officially Christian, in 1387. In actual practice, the conversion of the populace did not begin in earnest until Lutheran missionaries arrived. Then the Catholic Church played catch-up. If we equate Christianization with the advent of literacy, then Lithuania at least got off to a late start. Zyxwv99 (talk) 22:22, 3 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  What 'recently' means? 

message: Before the first conquest attempts a thousand years ago...
Was that really so? 
1009 A.D. first mentioning of Lithuania in written sources, and border conflicts with slavic people  is all i know from that period. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Vytautas (talk • contribs) 14:58, 29 June 2004
:A reference indicating written Lithuanian/Baltic prior to the 10th century is needed. I don't beleive such a reference exists: lack of written Lithuanian of this date, much less 1000BC or 2000BC is one of the stumbling blocks to the study of archaic Baltic and Indo-European. user: Linas —Preceding unsigned comment added by Linas (talk • contribs) 18:12, 30 December 2004 
::It Was, Just not in Lithuanian
Muonium777 (talk) 13:03, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  First conquest attempts

message: A deletion discussion is taking place for a related article linked from this one:
* Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Samples_of_Baltic:_Old_Prussian%2C_Latvian%2C_Lithuanian_compared_to_Slavic:_Polish_Language_(2nd_nomination) --Tony SidawayTalk 06:22, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Deletion

message: Thanks, for remark and undo - 
(cur) (last)  12:17, 17 July 2007 Dbachmann (Talk | contribs) (9,796 bytes) (rv. PCT may be "modern", but nobody believes in it. This article isn't about neolithic culture of the Baltics.) (undo), I really made mistake, not mentioning, that by scientific research (habil dr. Algirdas Girininkas, former chief of department at institute of Academy of Sciences) comparing the long sequence of Baltic sea cost cultures there was prooved not disrupted continuity of those cultures starting from the very beginning, so it was concluded that language developed continuously too. The oldest layer of Finnish is Baltic...Some very old loans from Basque (sea...) are detected in Baltic and Lithuanian too. Baltic verb system is much more close to German than Slavic. Baltic suffered these influences - protoSlavic-German, and later Finnish. Slavic - much more. Baltic languages are the most conservative and archaic ide languages, so let for us to explain to the people about our roots. One of the scientists who develops this theory is  Prehistorian Marcel Otte (world known, famous and evaluated to be leader) from Université de Liege. So, the question is not "nobody believes it" but how scientificaly and logicaly it was created by the team ttp://www.continuitas.com/workgroup.html.
colin renfrew stresse in 1997 - As I was saying earlier, the real problem is the interface between these three fields of archeology or culture-history, genetics, and historical linguistics. And nobody's a master of all these fields, so I don't feel too diffident; one's always an amateur if you're going between them. . So complex view describing languges origin problems is necessary. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.62.22.250 (talk • contribs) 14:54, 17 July 2007
::::This administrator Dbachmann pushes the old hypothesys based on ideas of some polish historicians (Henryk Lowmianski. Studja nad początkami spoleczenstwa i panstwa Litewskiego. T I-II.Wilno, 1931-32.) - According to one old theory from 50-60ties of XX age, the Indo-European tribes speaking the dialects that would become the Baltic languages probably settled in the area South of the Baltic coast in about the 13th Century B.C. and later migrated towards the coast where they met an indigenous population of subsistence fishermen and farmers speaking a proto-Finnic language.
This is nonsence, becouse of much earlier baltic tribes Bronze age beginning at the coast of Baltic sea than 13th Century B.C.!!!78.62.22.250 08:20, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Discussion with administrator Dbachmann

message: Hi, the text in the history/prehistory section seems highly implausible to me. Apart from being written in poor English, which makes it very hard to read, it clearly contains pseudoscientific claims. It is utterly impossible that Baltic speakers arrived at 8000 BC, when the IE languages probably didn't exist yet. This reads a like an attempt to make the Baltic languages seem as distinct as possible form the Slavic languages group, in order to eliminate the concept of a Baltic-Slavic group, advocated by Soviet scientists with an equally political agenda. Steinbach (fka Caesarion) 14:02, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The ethnogenesis of the polyethnic Middle Dnieper Culture has been covered in The Horse, The Wheel, and Language, by David W. Anthony, Princeton University Press, ISBN10: 0691058873. The offshoots which evolved regional subcultures spoke inherited languages contributing to modern Baltic and Slavic. The mythical propaganda is melting away fast. People lie. The evidence doesn't lie - Grissom.  Sudowite (talk) 02:21, 9 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Prehistory? 

message: The ridiculous lie that before proto-Baltic and proto-Slavic languages there was a proto-Balto-Slavic is just unbelievably insulting and untrue. There was a proto-Balto-Slavo-Germano-Celto-Romano-etc. language, which is proto-Indo-European, but if Baltic really was one with another language group, it is likely that Baltic was in the same group with Germanic, Celtic, or Romance. 
Germanic, because the grammar is similar and some words are interesting, such as Leute means People in German, Lietuva means Lithuania in Lithuanian, and also Volk means People means Vokietija is Germany in Lithuania.  
Celtic, because Tacitus said that the languages of the Aestii resembled the ones of Britain. 
Romance because of the similarities between Lithuanian and Latin. 
Due to the history of the two remaining Baltic countries, Lithuania and Latvia, who have been in many unions, wars and overall, a lot of contact with Slavs, this is where a lot of similarities come from. Rather than the languages splitting to differ, they became more alike as the time passed, due to these countries constantly being under control or united with Russia, Poland, and Ruthenia(Belarus and Ukraine). There barely, if any, Baltic linguists that will ever accept the theory of Balto-Slavic, because everyone knows the very few similarities are due to history and contact, not a common ancestor. It is also disrespectful to group the two together, due to a theory. Looking at the Indo-European Languages page, Balto-Slavic is written as one thing, however, it is untrue, and therefore should be separated, because the Balto-Slavic theory is unproven, and it never will be, because it is false, likely due to Soviet propaganda as well, making the world think that Balts are the same thing as Slavs, and that's the attitude many linguists seem to take. Almost every Slav agrees with the theory, yet almost every Balt opposes it. Due to the fact it is a very unconvincing theory, someone that monitors Wikipedia, would you please change the articles and make it right? Balto-Slavic never existed, except for when proto-Indo-European was around, and that's when they split, just like Germanic, Romance, Celtic, Hellenic, and the rest of the Indo-European languages. Baltic is no closer to Slavic than Celtic, Romance, Germanic, Albanian, or any other Indo-European language group is.173.72.35.239 (talk) 00:40, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: WHATS WRONG WITH YOU?!?!?!?!
Muonium777 (talk) 13:06, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

text: Fortunately, linguistics is not driven by nationalistic ideals or denial for political expediency.  "Balto-Slavic is defined by at least three unique phonological features in Indo-European: the development of a distinction between rising and falling pitch accents; the change of the syllabic resonants typically to resonants preceded by i; and the change of *VRHC to *V:RC" (Benjamin W. Fortson IV, Indo-European language and Culture, an introduction, 2004, pg. 365).  Both the so-called Pennsylvania family tree and the so-called New Zealand family tree link Baltic and Slavic as more closely related to each other than either is to any other Indo-European group (James Clackson, Indo-European Linguistics, An Introduction, 2007, pp. 11-12).  No politics, no hysteria, no nationalistic pride involved.  Just cold, hard linguistic facts.  (Taivo (talk) 02:22, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: And especially, no "Soviet propaganda" involved. While it's true most Russian Indo-Europeanists of both the Soviet and the post-Soviet era believe in Balto-Slavic, so do most non-Russian Indo-Europeanists (except for those who are Latvian or Lithuanian). Balto-Slavic is pretty much as well established as any sub-branch of Indo-European can be, perhaps slightly more controversial than Indo-Iranian, but more plausible (and more widely believed) than other proposed subgroupings like Italo-Celtic or Greco-Armenian, and far more plausible (and far more widely believed) than any attempt to link the Baltic languages with the Germanic, Celtic, or Italic languages at a post-PIE date. Linking Baltic and Slavic languages is in no way disrespectful to anyone, but refusing to believe an objectively well-supported theory for no better reason than that you hate Slavs is disrespectful, and very poor scientific practice. —Angr 11:38, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  Having been lumped with the ethno-fascist über-nationalist Russo- Slavo-phobic subhuman WP hordes, that's as reasonable a barometer as any measuring the defense of one's nation and people. That said, Baltic root words (like Volga) stretch into Russia, nowhere near the Goths/Germans/et al. It is the German that has come into Latvian by proximal association (pardon my not using the proper linguistic term)--clearly visible in comparing Latvian, Latgalian dialect, and Lithuanian--not the Slavic. And in the latest theory, it is not Baltic that is some orphan offshoot of Slavic, it is Slavic that is the offshoot of the parent Balto-Slavic, ergo, Latvian and Lithuanian are surviving parents, and the Slavic languages the offshoots. So, it is the Slavic that branched off from the Baltic, not the other way around--which portrayal, an anathema to many Baltic nationalists, was a theory likely driven more by current numbers of speakers as opposed to scientific linguistic research. PetersV <SMALL><SMALL>     </SMALL> TALK</SMALL> 17:17, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: While I might use a different analogy, I tend to agree with Vecrumba/PetersV.  The divisions between the different Slavic languages are relatively shallow while the divisions between the three attested Baltic languages are deep.  That implies that the differentiation of Proto-Slavic is more recent than the differentiation of Latvian and Lithuanian.  So the image is one of Proto-Balto-Slavic breaking into (perhaps) four parts--Pre-Lithuanian, Pre-Latvian, Pre-Prussian, and Proto-Slavic.  Proto-Slavic then embarked on its own history of spread and diversification.  Even if the initial break was between Proto-Slavic and Proto-Baltic, Proto-Baltic diversified long before Proto-Slavic did.  (Taivo (talk) 17:43, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  I should mention, that personally once I (Latvian) manage to deal with Latgalian, Lithuanian is not much further off, many root words are similar if not identical. Where Germanisms have crept into Latvian, the original root word is still found in other related words in Latvian--or is simply a secondary choice. Personally I think there's a lot of latitude as to when the Baltic languages branched off from each other, as everything else, a topic for further scholarship and debate. :-) PetersV <SMALL><SMALL>     </SMALL> TALK</SMALL> 19:59, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Proto Balto-slavic language is not a lie, but there are two different classifications in east Europe (where Baltic and Slavic languages are native) and in the Western World. In Russia, Ukraina, Poland (tree biggest slavic-speaking countries - I dont know about others), Latvia (baltic-speking country) - there are no term Balto-Slavic in classification - there are: Indoeuropian-->Baltic and Indoeuropian-->Slavic, but in english there are Indoeuropian-->Balto-Slavic--> and then Baltic and Slavic. I dont know why there are 2 different classifications, but in my opinion there (in this article) is worth to admit it. When I tried to correct, admin deleted it and called "POW" and "political reasons"--Riharcc (talk) 10:31, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

text:  The languages which became Celtic, Albanian, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, were derived from a mixing of various indigenous European people and IE steppe immigrants - with their descendants migrating to mix with other indigenous groups later in different locations. Balto-Slavic was rather brief period in various regions where IE Satem speakers mixed with various indigenous people ( Tripolye C2, Lengyel, and TRB cultures ) and with IE Centum speakers ( Globular Amphora  and Catacomb cultures ) in diferent degrees. Balto-Slavic is accurate as a generic generalization of such a multi-ethnic convergence, but can be viewed in a way like Celto-Italic is. Cool, huh? Sudowite (talk) 02:54, 9 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Balto-Slavic is a lie 

message: What to do with new-prussian? it is an unquestionable fact that the reconstructed language is in everyday use for long time now... internet is full with sites where people speak prussian. About the clasification - it is west baltic, and it is comprehensible with language written in catechisms. the NEW part is - only words who simply are neaded in 21 century, and many prusianised internationalisms. there is no words who are simply somehow "maded", it is a high level scientific fake. for example - if the same root of the word exists in latvian lithuanian - and slavic languages - simply it also has to be in prussian. so - yes i think there should be written one more language.  New-Prussian, next to old-prussian.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.246.141.190 (talk) 15:15, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Never heard of it. Sounds like a conlang to me, probably not notable enough for mention in this article, or indeed at Wikipedia at all. +Angr 15:20, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

text: New Prussian is definitely not a conlang , it is based on the historical Sembian Prussian of the Catechisms, as opposed to the West Baltic Pomesian of the Elbing Vocabulary. The scholastic integrity of their Language publications eclipse most Wiki dribble. New Prussian is progressing well with language revitalization in a way similiar to the Miami-Illinois language and as the successful Hebrew language.  + Sudowite 15:20, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text:  Oh yes it is. 95% of vocabulary of this New Prussian are neologisms, which have absolutely nothing to do with the really attested Old Prussion, of which nobody has a clue how it sounded like (written in terrible orthography, in several dialects). --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 03:32, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

text: New Prussian has high scholastic standards, but also needs to adapt to modern life, hence the neologisms (which are in fact few). Ivan will calm down when he comprehends that धेना is a legacy of the Abashevo culture by the Urals.  + Sudowite 19:46, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  New Prussian

message: I reverted a change indicating "baltic" group of IE instead of balto-slavic. I also reworded the section on subgrouping that made reference to Mallory and Adams since it is impossible to read their articles on baltic resp. slavic and still maintain that their view is that Balto-slavic as a linguistic subgroup does not have value. I do not doubt that someone will not agree with my edits, so I humbly ask anyone with a differing view to provide sufficiently recent (the 50's or 80's will not do since a lot of work has been done since then and a scholarly concensus has been reached, as you can see in any standard work from the past 15 years) sources, that also take into consideration the established common innovations and explains why they are not valid.
As a reminder to everyone reading the work of Mallory: linguistics and archaeology are quite different disciplines. His work is interesting because he tries to combine them into a single narrative. That is truly remarkable work, but not always conclusive or coherent. There are many uncertainties that stem from the gaps in both disciplines and even worse: established data that points in totally different directions. This wikipedia article, however, is solely regarding the linguistic aspects based on linguistic data, not the analysis of pottery and burial customs. Amilah (talk) 00:21, 20 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  The never ending story  of subgrouping 

message: The view that Baltic forms a family seperate from Slavic is a minority view promoted solely by Lithuanian and Latvian linguists out of nationalistic sentiment. The validity of the Balto-Slavic family is supported by vitually every other source, as given in the sources at the end of the "Relationship with other Indo-European languages". Overstatin support for the "Baltic alone" theory, while relegation the "Balto-Slavic theory" to an afterthought, is POV. Unbiased sources are need to prove that the "Baltic alone" theory has any substantial and significant support, especially outside of the Baltic countries. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 14:05, 2 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: The source currently cited specifically states that nationalism does not invalidate scholarship, so let's leave the lede as it is. The lede puts the "separate branch" into the minority view, there is no undue weight here or "relegating" Baltic-Slavic to an afterthought. VєсrumЬа ►TALK 14:21, 2 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, and see that is exactly the problem - this view is promoted by and to only people who are interested in these languages and article. I actually checked everything Google had to offer on respective term in Latvian - from what came up I doubt people even understand what it means. So you are effectively introducing a time bomb - eventually somebody will come by and start correcting it, probably rooting out the scientific view altogether. Trust me, I have javascript with changes related to Latvia on my watchlist - always, always somebody has to remove Balto-slavic. So why the hell not present it in article to keep it neutral? If you say it is a minority view get a source that says so, write so in the article, but leave that view there so that readers don't get confused ~~Xil (talk) 15:00, 2 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: The big problem with your version was the way that it was written, as it mentioned the minority view prominently first, and relegated the majority view to an afterthought. There were weight problems, too. If you can rewrite it the other way around, be my guest, as long as you don't violate WP:GEVAL. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 15:20, 2 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: What's wrong with Vecrumba's current version? If it does explicitly say so, does it matter which comes first? ~~Xil (talk) 16:30, 2 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, it matters which comes first.  Encyclopedic writing requires the majority position to precede a minority position because the reader is looking for what is widely known and not minority positions.  I've rewritten Vercumba's text to get rid of the overly argumentative "some scholars, other scholars" structure and replaced them with "probably" and "may" and have reordered to put the majority position first.  That is standard scientific and encyclopedic writing practice.  The ordering majority to minority should remain, but if other editors prefer that "scholars" are mentioned, then we can replace that separately.  But it DOES make a difference and majority views should always precede minority views in an encyclopedia.  --Taivo (talk) 16:40, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

text: @Xil: Surely you're joking? April Fool's was yesterday. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 16:46, 2 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Okay. But with "probably" it just looks ridiculous - like Wikipedia isn't sure, not that there are two different positions ~~Xil (talk) 17:51, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

text: @Taivo. I agree with Xil. "Probably" is bad because that's not what the sources say. I'd remove it per synth. I'd also remove all mention of the minority position from the lede because it is not discussed in the article at all, so it shouldn't be mentioned in the lede. Besides, we don't start out the "Evolution" article with "Evolution is probably XYZ, but maybe GodDidIt". See my point? We have to have some way of judging the weight of the minority position before including it, and we have no source to do that. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 17:56, 2 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't have a problem with removing the minority position, since it is not, as you say, discussed in the article.  The lead would then simply say, "The Baltic languages are part of the Balto-Slavic branch of Indo-European".  My only major point was that if the minority position is included, it must be second.  --Taivo (talk) 18:58, 2 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I have a problem (per above). Also the source doesn't really say it is a minority view, but rather that the issues is controversial and briefly reflects both views, so as far as that goes there is no probably, minority, majority or what not, so if you remove it, might as well remove both (as far as I am concerned just saying "Baltic languages is a group of related IE languages" is enough and satisfies both views, but I doubt you will agree). The article is start class there is a potential for such discussion appearing under relationship with other IE languages. Obviously plenty of sourced discussion going on here on talk, some of the facts probably could be added in the article ~~Xil (talk) 19:16, 2 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: It's not very hard to show that Baltic-Slavic is the mainstream position with sourcing.  "The notion of a single Balto-Slavic speech community has been controversial in some circles, in part because of political tensions.  But all major Indo-Europeanists are agreed that Baltic and Slavic deserve to be grouped together..." (Benjamin W. Fortson IV, Indo-European Language and Culture, An Introduction (2nd ed., 2010, Wiley-Blackwell), pg. 414.  Separating them is clearly the minority view and is partly political in nature.  Per WP:LEDE the lead paragraph should reflect the contents of the article, so adding mention of the controversy in the lead before explicating it in the text is not the right direction.  Adding a paragraph in the body and than including it in the lead is the correct order of things.  And, no, I do not agree with "Baltic is a group of Indo-European languages".  That is simply pushing the minority view.  The majority view is "Balto-Slavic" and that's what the lead should present.  Once a paragraph on the minority view has been added, then a comment in the lead following the majority view can be added.  --Taivo (talk) 19:31, 2 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: If at all. Fringe and tiny minority views do not get mentioned in the lede. You would have to establish that it is more than a fringe or tiny minority view before you could mention it there. The Fortson source says that "all major Indo-Europeanists are agreed that Baltic and Slavic deserve to be grouped together...". This strongly suggests that "Baltic alone" is a fringe or tiny minority view. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 19:43, 2 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: No it not pushing anything - if I said that English is IE language it would not be incorrect, would it? Now Baltic languages have about 4 million speakers most of which probably haven't heard anything about all the major Indo-Europeanists and their Balto-slavic classification and every single one of this supposed minority will jump in action to correct the article. Also I think it goes to show something that I didn't find a single scientific source in Latvian discussing Balto-slavic - research on particular languages usually is centered around the community which speaks it (Lithuanians seem equally at loss at what is going on here, so I assume it is not a well known concept in their community either). And in any case all I want is for both views to be included and that you reword it a little so it doesn't sound as if somebody is uncertain - clearly both sides are very certain in their views :) ~~Xil (talk) 22:49, 2 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: It's not about the certainty of the practitioners, it's about the fact that outside the Baltic republics, Indo-Europeanists almost universally link Baltic and Slavic.  Politics is a very strong component of the anti-Balto-Slavic position.  Baltic is a Balto-Slavic group within Indo-European.  Saying that "Baltic is an Indo-European group" is simply thinly disguising the anti-Balto-Slavic position that there is no Balto-Slavic group.  If we mention the anti-Balto-Slavic position at all in the lead depends on if and how it is presented in the article itself.  It is a minority view with a significant political component.  Wikipedia doesn't play politics.  --Taivo (talk) 04:08, 3 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Man, I am not questioning anything - I don't understand how comparative linguistics work. I just request that both views are represented as one of them is virtually unheard of in Baltic States where the languages are spoken. And if you are so sure why do you write "probably"? We are wasting time here talking about nothing, I am just going to change it myself so you can then correct it if you find that wording could be more academic in some way ~~Xil (talk) 07:43, 3 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't want to be rude, but wikipedia, (and science-related matters in general), would be better off if people who have no clue about the scientific proceedings would take the time to at least read a little bit in an introductory book of some kind before attempting to write about the subject. At least read the relevant part in the only recent book that is presented as support against the Balto-Slavic view, since the author seems to have changed his mind. Yes, he still mentions an uncertainty, but then he goes on to list a lot of shared innovations (even missing one of the more important) without presenting any counter-evidence, and in other parts of the book Balto-Slavic is treated as a branch. Don't read the rest of the book if you are interested in historical or IE linguistics, it is not very good and the project itself is absurd. Moreover, what most people using a language thinks about it is not a scientific argument. Amilah (talk) 19:26, 11 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: You completely missed the point - nobody is questioning that view, just that it is ignored to the point that this seeming scientific consensus isn't even mentioned anywhere, if you look in languages discussed in the article. Virtually any article on scientific matter that is doubted by masses mentions the opposing views e.g. somebody here mentioned Evolution - that article has whole section discussing creationism, so does article on Global warming. But here you can't humor the opposition with one line in the lead (which should summarize contents of the article, so no reason not to mention it there anyways, if it is mentioned later on). Plus, Amilah, you never mention what book you are talking about ~~Xil (talk) 13:24, 12 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text:  My bad. I was talking about the book by Quiles, but I see now that it has been removed as a reference, so it doesn't matter anymore. However, in the field of IE studies, there are all sorts of minority views, and a genereal public that doesn't know anything and doesn't really care. In the case of evolution, there are many people who dipute it even after reading through a lot of research, and thus the subject may be called controversial and motivate a mention in the lede, but when it comes to historical lingustics and subgrouping, you might expect people to read the entire article and hopefully take a glance at the references before making up their minds and start editing the post. Then it might be worthwile to include it in the lede, but if people cannot even bother to learn some basics of historical linguistics or even read through the entire article before shouting "impossible", then their opinions is more about politics than science and really nothing to bother about, regadless of what language they speak. Amilah (talk) 09:19, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Separate family. 

message: Someone just added "& Finnic" to the title of this subsection, then after the first sentence added the text 25 years later this opinion was contrasted by genetic linguists who reported a strong connection between Finnic & Baltic.[7], this opinion is supported by the high frequency of N1c1 a haplogroup thats dominant amongst Finnic speakers reaching frequencies of approximately 60% among Finns and approximately 40% among Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians.[8][9]
25 years later than what? What opinion was contrasted? Finnic & Baltic what? If Finnic & Baltic speakers, then say so. The apostrophe is missing in "thats" only I don't want to correct it as someone may want to revert the whole thing. And finally, it's a well-known fact that Baltic and Finnic speaking peoples have been neighbors for thousands of years, with evidence of continual borrowing from each other's languages. That there should also be intermarriage should come as no surprise. After all, this is what happened with Uralic and Altaic. One suggestion: discussion of Baltic's relation to Finnic should maybe go in a separate subsection. Zyxwv99 (talk) 18:51, 16 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: The Baltic and Finno-Ugric tribes were culturally distinct. While my short nose and dark hair speak to myself having Liv (i.e., Finno-Ugric) roots amongst my Latvian, I don't see that biological considerations necessarily affect cultural ones, given that the geographic boundaries of Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian culture have been stable for millennia. I completely agree that borrowings (Finnic, German, Russian, etc.) should be treated separately. VєсrumЬа ►TALK 20:49, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

text: The material was basically irrelevant. Population genetics says nothing about how languages are related. Baltic and Finnic languages are completely unrelated. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 20:58, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

text: (ec) IMO, if Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanian populations are all 40% of "X", then since there was never that level of intermarriage between them to create that level of homogeneity amongst the three, the "40%" is just another statistic searching for a raison d'être. VєсrumЬа ►TALK 21:01, 16 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: There is though major Finnic influence, especially in some dialects of Latvian, thus a mention would be warranted. It is unclear though what is the text about - do genetic linguistics consider genetic relations in population good enough reason to consider strong relationship between languages? ~~Xil (talk) 14:54, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: "Finnic influence in Latvian" is not relevant to this article.  Historical linguists accept the fact that languages borrow from other languages--no news here.  But you don't understand that "genetic" in linguistics is not the same as "genetic" in biology--they are completely separate things.  My ancestors spoke Celtic languages and you'd find lots of Celtic DNA in my family, but we don't speak a Celtic language, we speak a Germanic language.  Language is not transferred through DNA, thus it wouldn't matter if the Latvians were 99% Finnic--their language is 100% Indo-European, it is descended from Proto-Indo-European, not from Finnic.  --Taivo (talk) 16:33, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I said "especialy", not "exlusively". Now my question was is this considered to be a field of research in linguistics, which maybe provides different findings, but is still relevant to some extent, or is it purely genetic thing, not relevant to linguistics? ~~Xil (talk) 19:33, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Genetics is not linguistics and vice versa; there are no "different findings" in linguistics based on DNA.  The methodology of historical linguistics has nothing whatsoever to gain from DNA research.  Once a language family has been determined by purely linguistic means, on some occasions DNA research can point to directionality of movement or a homeland, but DNA is completely irrelevant for determining linguistic relationships.  --Taivo (talk) 20:48, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Relationship with other Indo-European languages & Finnic 

message: This article mentions that the group has several archaic features of Indo-European languages. Which ones are these?  --Caiilajoe (talk) 16:20, 23 March 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Do a web search there are plenty of good sources on this. The book quoted also is found online. Here, I guess, Proto-Balto-Slavic language might discuss them to some extent ~~Xil (talk) 06:11, 27 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Archaic features 

message: The range of the Eastern Balts once reached to the Ural mountains.Marija Gimbutas 1963. The Balts. London : Thames and Hudson, Ancient peoples and places 33.J. P. Mallory, "Fatyanovo-Balanovo Culture", Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997David W. Anthony, "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World", Princeton University Press, 2007
Seriously? This seems to equate the Neolithic Fatyanovo–Balanovo culture of 3200–2300 BC (!!) with the medieval Eastern Balts. That strikes me as wild. That would be like identifying the northern Corded Ware/Single Grave culture with the medieval Norse or the Globular Amphora culture with the Western Slavs. There is a gap of more than 3000 years here, in which (for example) Proto-Indo-Iranian dispersed from the Volga area throughout Western/Southern Asia, changing wildly in the process, and disappearing in its original homeland, and Proto-Oceanic dispersed all over the Pacific, turning into very divergent languages such as Polynesian. Or, for a more conservative language, think Proto-Kartvelian and Old Georgian, which are far from identical. No, I don't buy it. I doubt that even anything like Proto-Balto-Slavic existed as early as 2000 BC. I can buy that Fatyanovo–Balanovo was Indo-European, but not more than that; I doubt there's any halfway plausible reason to identify it with any attested branch. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 09:12, 2 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fatyanovo 

message: “Balto-Slavic” is a rather doubtful concept and its current political context of Russian expansionism it’s impossible to ignore. The use of Balto-Slavic or Baltic & Slavic is probably more about contemporary political stance than about any science. The authors on Wikipedia side with those who say Balto-Slavic and the Baltic Languages entry in Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, doesn’t even mention the concept.
Many Lithuanians who attended school attentively in the Soviet times would be surprised to find out that their language is Balto-Slavic. Not surprisingly, one of the authors in the references of the Wikipedia entry Balto-Slavic languages, Thomas Olander, named his PhD Det baltoslaviske problem – Accentologien. Problem implies a solution. The same Wikipedia has an entry Final Solution. The choice of the title is astonishing.
The articles on Wikipedia (Baltic languages, Balto-Slavic languages, Proto-Balto-Slavic language and Indo-European languages) assert the existence of Balto-Slavic and do not provide any scientific evidence for this, if you take a closer look. The biggest argument I encountered was that the majority of scholars uphold that view.
The section Historical dispute of the entry Balto-Slavic languages in Wikipedia lists seven sources. Anyone who has ever come into contact with mathematical statistics would know very well that one doesn’t make any scientific conclusions from seven observations. The entry Indo-European languages in Wikipedia mentions four sources, one of them from the XIX century.
Nevertheless, the arguments themselves are not provided. The reader has to have trust: “Beekes (1995:22), for example, states expressly that "[t]he Baltic and Slavic languages were originally one language and so form one group".[8] Gray and Atkinson's (2003) application of language-tree divergence analysis supports a genetic relationship” (from Balto-Slavic languages in Wikipedia).
The accuracy and scientific validity of these articles is questionable. The entries on the “Balto-Slavic problem” may be more interesting as raw data, as a possible indication of political bias. Maybe to play a scientist even wasn’t very difficult, because the discourse about Indo-European linguistics takes us into the midst of the XIX century.
“In the 16th century, European visitors to the Indian Subcontinent began to suggest similarities between Indo-Aryan, Iranian and European languages”, says Wikipedia (Indo-European languages). I have just returned from Sapmi and kept listening to Sami radio at home afterwards. Remarkably, I found it strikingly similar and often understandable to a Lithuanian for a language that is not even Indo-European.
Let’s return to the basics: “A media text is made by a particular media institution and this will also affect the way that it is constructed and the meaning it communicates” (from Revision Express AS and A2 Media Studies, Mr Ken Hall & Philip Holmes). Sometimes it’s great to know who bakes your bread.
:What is this nonsense? No sources, POV and pretty much imaginary in every single way. This doesn't belong here at all. – Sabbatino (talk) 14:27, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  A Balto-Slavic Note 

message: The 1975 World Book encyclopedia articles on Latvia and Lithuania mentioned both Latvian and Lithuanian languages are thought by some linguists to be distantly related to Greek. It's possible the Baltic languages and the Greeks moved apart after the Kurgan hypothesis migrations across Eastern Europe around 3,000 BCE. Greek is thought to be related to Armenian in some ways, but Greek is a Centum branch language while Armenian is a Satem branch language, like the Baltic and Slavic languages. The Centum and Satem branches are named after the words "Cent" which means one hundred in Latin, Germanic and Celtic languages, versus "Sat" for Iranian and Indian languages.  2605:E000:FDCA:4200:D962:2182:F3EB:EEB3 (talk) 20:08, 15 March 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: You need to read some actual books on Indo-European.  The Centum and Satem hypotheses were abandoned long ago.  Yes, Greek is distantly related to the Balto-Slavic languages, just as are English, Hindi, Persian, Hittite, Spanish, Irish, Albanian, etc.  --Taivo (talk) 20:41, 15 March 2016 (UTC)
replies: text:  More specifically, it was the idea that they are branches. The satem change is now considered an areal change that spread through a late PIE continuum. CodeCat (talk) 23:23, 15 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Baltic languages connection with Greek 

message: There is a sentence "Tens[19] of scholars among whom the Russian Toparov printed a book on the topic[20] have found many linguistic similarities between Baltic and ancient Balkan languages pointing to the many close parallels between Dacian and Thracian placenames and those of the Baltic language-zone."  I can't parse this sentence (and I'm a native speaker of English).  In particular, the clause "the Russian Toparov printed a book on the topic" doesn't fit.  I am not sure what it's trying to say, so I'm hesitant to re-word it, but perhaps "Some scholars, including Toparov[20], have found..."  In this re-wording, I removed the "printed a book", since that is irrelevant.  I don't read Russian, so I couldn't check the relevance of Toparov's work; in my suggested re-wording, I did omit the fact that he's Russian, which doesn't seem relevant.  And fwiw, ref [19] is an ethnomusicology study, and probably not relevant to this question.  It does cite a few linguists at one point, but not "tens".  100.36.60.54 (talk) 16:15, 16 June 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: The whole section should be moved after the subsequent one and definitely needs serious copy-editing, not just the Toparov part. VєсrumЬа ►TALK 04:54, 21 June 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Edit needed 

message: The entry suggests the "geographic distribution" - meaning, I understand, the native location - of "Baltic languages" is "Northern Europe."
Wouldn't it be a false suggestion?
Isn't the "geographic distribution" located, actually, in Eastern Europe or, if one so pleases, in North-Eastern Europe?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.103.225.108 (talk) 12:25, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: It seems that the UN considers the Baltic states to be in Northern Europe, rather than eastern Europe, although this may not always have been the case Emmy571 (talk) 22:24, 26 July 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  AREN'T THE LANGUAGES AND SPEAKERS BASED IN EASTERN EUROPE? 

message: The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion:
* 
Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 17:22, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion 

message: The article mentions twice that the Baltic languages are divided into two branches, East and West Baltic, however the "Branches" section of the article has three sections. Either this is a mistake because the Dnieper branch is not a branch of Baltic, or because it is part of one of the other two branches Emmy571 (talk) 00:40, 27 July 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, this should be cleaned up. Only East and West Baltic ( you wrote "Slavic") are attested; a distinct Dnieper Baltic branch is postulated by Dini based on toponyms and East Baltic words which might go back a Dnieper Baltic substratum. But this is speculative and should not appear in the tree diagram as an established fact. –Austronesier (talk) 20:49, 27 July 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for your explanation. Yes, you're right, of course I meant Baltic not Slavic, I should have proofread my comment before posting it. Thank you for pointing it out, I'll edit it Emmy571 (talk) 17:26, 28 July 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Baltic branches 

message: The lead currently says: . This is like feeding our readers with speculations and leaving them in the dark about what is actually widely accepted among Balticists. Based on Dini's monograph, I propose to change it to:
* Based on hydronymic evidence, scholars agree that the Baltic speech area covered a much wider area than today, ranging from the Vistula to the Dnieper (or even further on both ends, although this remains controversial).
For details, there is the section "Geographic distribution".
Another thing: @, can you find a single source that mentions the full number of Baltic speakers? Doing arithmetics is always a bit problematic, since different sources might use different criteria or give figures from different years. I think we can leave things temporarily as they are, but not permanently. Austronesier (talk) 16:23, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hypothetical scope of Baltic in the lead