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According to some glottochronological speculations, the East Baltic languages split from West Baltic (or, perhaps, from the hypothetical proto-Baltic language) between 400 and 600 CE. [16] The differentiation between Lithuanian and Latvian started after 800 CE. At a minimum, transitional dialects existed until the 14th century or 15th century ...
Although related, Lithuanian, Latvian, and particularly Old Prussian have lexicons that differ substantially from one another and so the languages are not mutually intelligible. Relatively low mutual interaction for neighbouring languages historically led to gradual erosion of mutual intelligibility, and development of their respective ...
The differentiation between Lithuanian and Latvian started after c. 800 AD; for a long period, they could be considered dialects of a single language. [14] At a minimum, transitional dialects existed until the 14th or 15th century and perhaps as late as the 17th century.
Latvia and Lithuania followed a similar process, until the completion of the Latvian War of Independence and Lithuanian Wars of Independence in 1920. According to the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, "the Baltic States (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania)" were divided into German and Soviet "spheres of influence" (German copy).
Lithuanian rankà is ambiguous and could have originated from either ending, but the correspondence with East Lithuanian runku and Latvian rùoku point to Balto-Slavic *-ān. Use of the ending *-mis in the instrumental plural, e.g. Lithuanian sūnumìs, Old Church Slavonic synъmi "with sons".
It is believed that Semigallian possessed an uninflected pronoun, which was the equivalent to the Lithuanian savo (e.g. Sem. Savazirgi, Lith. savo žirgai, meaning 'one's horses'). [12] East Baltic would in many cases turn the diphthong *ei into a monophthong, pronounced like the contemporary Latvian jē and Lithuanian ė.
Ethnographic map of Lithuanians (Littauer) and Latvians (Letten) in 1847 by Heinrich Berghaus.The red line marks the border between Germany and Russia. During the Livonian War (1558–83), the territory of present-day Latvia north of the Daugava was transferred to Lithuania, it became the Duchy of Livonia (1561–1677), which was an autonomous province of the GDL in 1561–69, later it ...
In 1845, Georg Heinrich Ferdinand Nesselmann proposed a distinct language group for Latvian, Lithuanian, and Old Prussian, which he termed Baltic. [11] The term became prevalent after Latvia and Lithuania gained independence in 1918. Up until the early 20th century, either "Latvian" or "Lithuanian" could be used to mean the entire language ...