Taranis
Elite member
Regarding Proto-Balto-Slavic, I am not sure. The problem is that it's very difficult to estimate when such early or "deep" split-up events happened because there's few signature terms to time this (mainly words that must have entered into vocabulary at a certain stage because they obey or do not obey to certain sound laws). Generally, it's pretty clear that amongst the living language families, the Germanic languages are closest to the Baltic- and Slavic languages, but when Pre-Germanic and Pre-Balto-Slavic diverged from each other is very hard to estimate. As a rule of thumb, the changing rate of languages is not homogenous: languages can exhibit few changes across comparably long stretches, but have considerable changes in relatively short time.
One "signature innovation" if you will of Balto-Slavic is the change Initial Gh to Z. I gave multiple examples of that above. When did this change happen? Very hard to say, in my opinion. It also stands to reason that not all Balto-Slavic sound laws did occur simultaneously, so we might be talking about a relatively long "Balto-Slavic stage".
Regarding the differences between Latvian and Lithuanian, as well as the (extinct) West-Baltic languages (ie, Old Prussian), there are indeed some considerable differences there (if you give me some time, I can work out some demonstrable evidence of that). But, I think it's absolutely conceivable to argue that the splitup of the Baltic languages occured earlier than the split-up of the Slavic languages.
One "signature innovation" if you will of Balto-Slavic is the change Initial Gh to Z. I gave multiple examples of that above. When did this change happen? Very hard to say, in my opinion. It also stands to reason that not all Balto-Slavic sound laws did occur simultaneously, so we might be talking about a relatively long "Balto-Slavic stage".
Regarding the differences between Latvian and Lithuanian, as well as the (extinct) West-Baltic languages (ie, Old Prussian), there are indeed some considerable differences there (if you give me some time, I can work out some demonstrable evidence of that). But, I think it's absolutely conceivable to argue that the splitup of the Baltic languages occured earlier than the split-up of the Slavic languages.