Is Lithuanian the Oldest Language? - Olga Olina | PGO 2020

Hello and welcome everyone.

My name is Olga, I'm speaking now from Berlin.

I'm currently completing my Masters degree in Comparative Indo-European Linguistics.

at Humboldt University of Berlin.

During my studies I learned several ancient languages,

for example Sanskrit, Old Persian, Hittite, Hieroglyphics, Luwian, Latin,

and for the past 3 years, my hobby was Lithuanian.

I have been tutoring some lessons in Lithuanian and Sanskrit, and introductory courses in historical linguistics.

I'm also currently working on a research project aimed at editting all Old Lithuanian texts up to 1000 words.

But today I will be speaking of not Old Lithuanian, but the modern Lithuanian language.

And I will try to uncover the truth behind its claimed antiquity.

And I will demonstrate why this language is particularly important for Indo-European linguistics.

The idea of this presentation hit me one day when I was searching the web

for some exciting material for my students about ancient languages,

so - my astonishment - the first recommended source about ancient languages

was not only misleading, but it was quite nonsensical.

It suggested that Lithuanian was 5000 years old, placed as 7th oldest world language.

First of all, I would like to make clear

this statement doesn't make any sense.

Languages are evolving all the time,

from one language into another.

Since we don't know anything about the oldest language in the world,

- the written sources developed much later than the first languages emerged -

and the beginnings of the history of languages are not documented.

It doesn't make any sense to talk about any single language as the oldest.

Rather, we should talk about 'conservative features' of particular languages.

Historical linguists who study the evolution of languages

were able to prove that from this list,

Sanskrit, Greek, Lithuanian and Farsi

are in fact all descendants of the same language,

which we call the Proto-Indo-European,

and they are therefore of the same age.

The Proto-Indo-European,

according to the most widespread hypothesis,

was spoken somewhere here,

in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe

approximately 3000/4000 years Before Christ.

Somewhere north of the Caucasian Mountains,

where today there's the border between eastern Ukraine and southwest Russia.

Proto-Baltic peoples/tribes migrated to the north,

(probably in unity with the Slavic tribes,

which we can infer due to multiple similarities between the Baltic and Slavic languages,

not only in the words, but in the language structure).

When they settled down, Proto-Baltic tribes had contacts with Finns in the north,

(and in fact, the Finns during that period were still nomadic peoples).

The Finns learned the settled way of life from the Balts.

This can be shown from [linguistic paleontology]; multiple borrowings in Finnic languages are related to [Baltic] agricultural terms and animal husbandry.

The Balts also had other contacts,

such as Ilyrians, Drakkians(?), Scythians - but all those languages have died out.

From that Indo-European homeland,

Indo-European languages have spread to every single (inhabited) continent of our planet.

In fact, the Indo-European language family, is the most widespread in the world.

With 3.2 billion native speakers,

spread out almost everywhere around the globe.

On this map you can see,

dark blue countries have an Indo-European language spoken natively by the majority of the population;

light blue countries have an Indo-European language as an official language, among others.

The Indo-European language family is not only the most widespread,

it is also the best researched language family in the world.

The research of the Indo-European language family started approx. 200 years ago.

The first publication came out in 1816 in Berlin.

Since then, a lot of discoveries have been made.

And a lot of artefacts have been found by archaeologists,

who can study the relationship between the languages and the language's archaeological origins.

It is common to show linguistic relationships in the form of a tree.

This practice originates in Darwin's theory of evolution.

If you look at this particular tree

it doesnt show all IE languages,

but it tries to show the amount of speakers of several IE languages,

including our Lithuanian!

Only around 3 millions speakers worldwide; just a tiny branch on the tree.

On this other, more schematic representation of the language tree,

Here's our Balto-Slavic branch of languages.

As I told you, Baltic and Slavic peoples left the IE homeland together,

so their languages also evolved together, until a certain point in time,

and then they split into 2 separate groups,

and then the Baltic languages, in turn, split into 2 different groups as well,

eastern and western groups.

Western Baltic is only represented by the now extinct Old Prussian language.

Its last speaker died in the early 18th century.

Both Eastern Baltic languages (Lithuanian and Latvian) are still spoken today.

The West and the East Balts,

began to diverge in their speech around 1000 BC.

Their languages became distinct no later than 300 BC.

Approx. 800 years later, (c.500 AD),

the language of the northern part of the East Slavic tribes began to change rapidly.

The final syllables became shortened.

The stress patterns changed.

The whole linguistic system became restructured.

Those East Balts which settled in a different territory to the north;

they gave rise to the language which we call Latvian.

The southern part of the East Balts remained,

and their language stayed very archaic.

This is the language we now call Lithuanian.

Since we've now established the lineage of Lithuanian,

I would like to now talk about possible reasons why people claim that Lithuanian is one of the oldest languages in the world.

Why would anyone call a language old?

Due to its textual transmission?

If we examine Lithuanian, this is certainly not the case.

The oldest written record of an Indo-European language

is in the written Hittite language,

an ancient language of Anatolia.

The oldest written Hittite document, the so-called Anitta text, was transmitted around 2000 BC.

This is very different to Lithuanian!

Writing was introduced in Lithuania during the Middle Ages, along with Christianity.

During that time, Lithuanian readers maintained their contacts with western nations. And the Pope in Rome, and Latin.

Latin was the language of the scholarly elite.

Unsurprisingly, the first publications concerning Lithuanian history and culture were in the Latin language.

One of the most notable such works is

De moribus tartarorum, lituanorum et moscorum

It is a treaty published by a person under pseudonym

Michalonis Lithuani.

This treatise was written as late as the mid 16th century, and not published until 1615.

It contains some historical information,

on Lithuanians and other peoples, their neighbours.

It compares Lithuanian pagan traditions to ancient Roman traditions.

It also lists 74 Lithuanian words, which are compared with similar sounding Latin words.

Numerous Latin books were written by Lithuanian authors during that time.

They published in Krakow, Riga and Vilnius.

In fact Vilnius's first printing press started in in 1522.

In the 16th century, there were 158 Latin books published in Vilnius.

But the first book to be actually written in the Lithuanian language, rather than Latin,

was the Catechism by Martynas Mažvydas

which printed in 1547 in Königsberg (today's Kalingrad).

This book marks the beginning of Lithuanian literature, and is therefore considered to be the most important artefact of Lithuanian history.

It consists of a primer, a catechism, a book of songs with musical notes, a prayer book, a translation of Holy Writ, and original prefaces and dedications.

The book was aimed at spreading the Protestant religion,

and fighting the remains of pagan beliefs.

It was very important to Martynas Mažvydas the author to make it accessible

to a broader audience, so he also called it

'The simple words of catechism' and the language used is quite simple.

Here is the first page of the catechism's text.

Excuse me for the suboptimal quality.

There's one thing I'd like to show you.

The first/title page of the catechism doesn't mention the authorship.

But the author perpetuated his own name by composing an acrostic poem.

When reading the initial letters of lines 3–19 of the preface, it spells out MARTJNVS MASVJDJVS, or the name Martynas Mažvydas in Latin.

Another Lithuanian book I would like to share with you is the 'Postil of Littau'.

As the title suggests, it was written in German.

Which was quite common practice,

lots of Germans had contacts with Lithuanians and wrote books about them.

This is the first ethnographic account of Lithuanians.

Though it was written in 1690, it is very accessible to a modern reader.

It is extremely entertaining.

Although not everything is politically correct,

and not all 'facts' are really true,

but the interesting thing is

that out of 15 chapters, dealing with religion, culture, and the customs of the Lithuanian people,

it features one chapter on the Lithuanian language.

There are some riddles and proverbs and fun facts about the Old Lithuanian language,

and a few theories about genetic relationships.

So now, obviously Lithuanian's claimed antiquity is not due to its attestation.

Let's turn to the writing system.

Perhaps most of you know that the first writing system that we know of

was developed by the Sumerian people

in Mesopotamia about 3000 BC -

and obviously not by Lithuanians,

Lithuanians only adopted writing during the Christian period,

using Latin at first,

so they also adapted the Latin alphabet to their needs.

The Lithuanian alphabet has changed slightly over time.

It is currently comprised of 32 letters,

with some additional diacritical marks to mark vowel length and the typical Baltic/Slavic palatalized sounds (Č, Š, and so on).

It is largely a phonetic writing system, so you can learn to read Lithuanian almost instantly.

There are some digraphs used.

One curious fact about the Lithuanian alphabet is that the letters F and H, as well as the digraph CH, denote sounds only appearing in loanwords.

They were not actually used way back in time.

So for example France is called Prancūzija in Lithuanian.

Another idea about antiquity comes from Lithuanian lexemes,

because the Lithuanian language retained very many ancient lexemes.

In the area marked here, there are rivers with names which can be etymologized to Lithuanian or Baltic words.

This was the area of impenetrable forests populated by the Balts approximately 2000 BC to 1000 BC.

They were basically undisturbed by anyone, for example the major migrations didn't come into this area.

That's why they could retain quite a bit of archaic vocabulary.

Today the territory where Baltic languages are spoken is much, much smaller.

Native speakers will tell you "our language is particularly old and ancient because there are many words in Sanskrit that are just the same in Lithuanian".

It is true. For example this list shows some of the lexemes between those 2 languages.

But we should not make theories based on languages' genetic relationships based only on lexemes.

Just imagine this scenario:

Due to computers and the internet being so often referred to in the English language, all around the world,

a future linguist might assume that English is the root of all other languages.

The real true way to establish a genetic relationship between several languages is a systematic comparison of their grammatical features.

So, quoting Wikipedia's page on Lithuanian grammar; "Lithuanian grammar retains many archaic features from Proto-Indo-European that have been lost in other Indo-European languages and is consequently very complex".

This claim is true. All aspects of Lithuanian language, (including phonetics, grammatical structure, lexicon)

are still comparatively archaic compared to other modern Indo-European languages.

I will now present some facts about those some of those archaic features.

One of the less complex features of Lithuanian is the future tense.

In order to build future tense in Lithuanian you have to remove the T element of the infinite of the word of the verb.

For example, "dirbti" (to work) you would remove the T element (which marks the infinitive),

and you add the suffix S, and attach personal endings to that suffix.

This suffix S (and its sound) is very old, in fact its also used in Sanskrit to build future tense.

Quite unique!

Another important archaic feature of Lithuanian is the nominal declension.

So apart from some loan words such as "taboo" or "taxi",

all Lithuanian words including proper names are inflected.

There are 7 inherited cases in in total. The nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, and vocative.

So depending on the last vowel or last sound of the stem of the noun stem,

nouns are divided into 5 declension types.

This is a really ancient feature of the Proto-Indo-European.

Maybe some of you who learned a Classical language like Latin or Sanskrit know this feature;

that you you don't learn one declension but you systematically learn one after another.

This is the case in Lithuanian as well.

Look at this table; compare this to the English language.

In English, if you want to to to express something like this, all you need to know is the word itself and how to build a plural.

Book --> Books... sometimes more complicated... Mouse --> Mice.

In Lithuanian, you need to first identify the stem class which the word belongs to,

and then you need to think about its grammatical gender,

then you need to think about the number,

and afterwards you think about the function in the sentence,

and only afterwards you need to pick the right ending from this table.

You attach it to the word and then you're done.

You could say that English is an extreme example of an analytical language,

but some other languages like Russian also have a complex system of nominal declension,

but in the nominal declension of Lithuanian, there are some special archaic features;

the locative case for example is constructed without a preposition,

so in order to say "in Berlin" in Lithuanian,

you just say "Berlynas" without any preposition like you would need to use in Russian or English.

This air element is also very archaic,

as well as the S element in the locative plural of Lithuanian.

Another case is the vocative case.

This is the list of all the endings you would need to know for the vocative case,

so if you address a person um by name or profession or family status or something similar,

you would need to learn all of those endings and if you just say "Vytautas" (a very popular Lithuanian name),

it's just the nominative case and if you would want to talk to or ask Vytautas something,

you would need to say "Vytautai".

Why did Lithuanian retain all those endings?

Why is the nominal declension system so intact compared to others Indo-European languages?

This is due to the accentuation.

Accentuation in other Indo-European languages has changed massively.

The example of Germanic languages is perhaps best.

So before the Germanic languages split into separate languages and developed into what we know as know as modern English, Swedish, Danish, German and so on..

earlier Germanic langauges fixed stress on the initial syllable at the very beginning of the word.

When languages do that, the tendency is for the last syllable to be pronounced less effectively.

Over the centuries, those syllables were lost.

That's how Germanic languages lost their declension endings.

Lithuanian kept the accentuation.

Although it didn't keep the original Proto-Indo-European accentuation, it kept the pitch accent and mobile stress.

This is unfortunately not marked in the everyday texts,

and is one of the hardest features to learn.

Some learner textbooks unfortunately don't mark the stressed syllable.

If I had chosen to include the tables of all the the stress patterns, then my slides would be doubled and there would be no end to my presentation!

So let's leave this topic for now, by saying that the accentuation of Lithuanian is a complicated matter.

It's been studied for decades, but it's still a very complicated topic.

The last point is the Lithuanian syntax.

It is normally an SVO language, but it does have a comparatively free order.

You can change sentences' word order,

but keep in mind that with the changed order you would stress different information and different parts of the sentences.

So to finish off, I would like to also mention some innovations of Lithuanian.

So Lithuanian has seen multiple phonological changes.

For instance all the palatalizations which are common both to Baltic and Slavic languages,

it lost ablative case and adopted additional locative cases.

It developed definite adjectives, it regularized the gradation of adjectives and adverbs,

especially the verbal system which has been drastically reduced.

Some tenses such as aorist and perfect tense were lost.

The optitive mood was lost.

The middle voice was also lost, and instead Lithuanian uses reflexive verbs for that,

It developed a very complex system of participles.

This list is not exhaustive! If it were, I'd need to give another full presentation!

But what i would like you to take away from this presentation,

is the the fact that Lithuanian is a very archaic language, with multiple conservative features,

and that is why it is very important for Indo-European linguists.

Thank you very much for your attention, and now it's question time.

This is a very good question, this is a question that has been disputed since since the very beginnings of Indo-European studies.

To me, it is quite clear that that Baltic and Slavic developed together, and later split from each other,

and then even later, the East and West Baltic languages split in their turn.

Most of the similarities between them are due to close contact since there was no consequent migration during those times.

I hope that answers your question.

Yes and no.

I don't think that globalization is the reason why Lithuanian is losing its conservative features,

but yes, Lithuanian is losing its conservative features all the time right now.

Young people in towns, especially Vilnius and Kaunas, are not using accentuation markings.

They are stressing syllables in a different way. Not in the way of the textbook.

This is causing some immediate changes in the morphological structure of the language.

For example, "ska-NUS" is the textbook word for "tasty", with the stress on the last syllable.

Lihutanian youth often say "SKA-nus" instead.

So you can see this shift in stress from the end of the words to the beginning of the word.

Linguists understand that the last syllable is pronounced less and less stressed and at some point it will disappear,

but this will not be in our lifetime languages don't evolve that fast.

Complexity is a difficult question to assess.

If you assess by the elements of actual sounds that are present in the ending syllables, then yes it is indeed.

One of the well preserved features of Lithuanian which I mentioned earlier...

Lithuanians attach the endings "-as" to many nouns.

So the obvious example are names.

People called Thomas are lucky. Honorary Lithuanian citizens thanks to the "-as" ending!

But if you're called Niels, for example, you would become Nielsas in Lithuanian.

This is not a feature of Slavic languages. It's an ancient element.

It also appears primarily but not exclusively in the nominative case.

Do you accept this as a measure of complexity? If so, then the answer to your question is "Yes, the Lithuanian system is more complex".

It is one of the main reasons why Lithuanian rather than a Slavic language is seen as an example of an archaic Indo-European language.

Well there are multiple differences between Latvian and Lithuanian.

If a Lithuanian takes a written text in Latvian, they would be able to understand some words,

but the two languages are not mutually intelligible in conversation.

Slavic languages are famous for having the fewest divergences between each other,

compared to all other sub-branches/sub-groups of Indo-European languages,

so if you happen to speak one Slavic language and you go to a different Slavic country, you will probably be understood.

This is not the case with Latvian and Lithuanian.

In fact, I just started learning Latvian, and it's like starting from scratch.

I know some differences due to historical phonology between those two languages,

but the accentuation of Latvian has changed,

and when the those two languages split from each other around 500-600 AD, the differences were really massive

So you need to separately learn each of those languages.

Oh, I'm very happy you asked!

Visit Lithuania, spend some time there.

I visited Lithuania several times.

If you're a student, you might want to check some scholarships offered by the Lithuanian government and do a summer course there.

Non-students can also participate in the summer courses of Kaunas University and Vilnius University, and possibly others.

If you're a student you can also take a semester in Lithuania through the Erasmus program,

and do one semester with different courses - not only Lithuanian languages courses,

but also other subjects, through the medium of Lithuanian.

Another tip - if you happen to come from Berlin and there is a summer course in Berlin, free of charge.

But the the participant number is very limited, so if you're interested in this course please contact me privately; send me an email, or so on.

Otherwise you can also contact me. I am doing online lessons on Lithuanian language, so that would be another possibility to learn Lithuanian.

Well the last recommendation is; there are accentuated books on the Lithuanian language, some learning materials - use those.

Contact me by email or in the Polyglot Gathering telegram group, let me know your mother tongue, and I will happily recommend you some materials.

Well, yes, I think I've already answered that question.

It is one of those things that parents and children often argue about.

The older generation view the youth's use of Lithuanian as incorrect.

The ones I presented today are all kept in the regular speech.

There are some others in Old Lithuanian which are not, but I did not include those in my presentation.

For example, in Old Lithuanian there is a "dual number system".

So the Proto-Indo-European had 3 numbers.

If you thought that the numeral declension of of Lithuanian was complex, you should check out the Proto-Indo-European declension system!

It's 8 cases, and 3 different numbers.

So Old Lithuanian has some "rests of duel" and some other archaic features lost to modern Lithuanian.

But those which I covered in my presentation are all still used nowadays.

Yes. It is a clear tendency to do that.

New and complex Lithuanian words are often formed to express something more widely known as an English word [for example new types of technology].

Language evolves naturally.

You can't really force changes. You can try, but it will be impossible to completely remove words like (?)"chatas" from Lithuanian.

Yes. They do. It's the same as that which is also used in Sanskrit. [i.e. Proto-Indo-European].

So, thank you very much for your questions.

If you happen to have any more questions, or if you happen to have a particular interest in the Lithuanian language,

or in historical linguistics,

please feel free to contact me.

I'd be happy to answer all your questions.

Thank you very much and have fun with the rest of the event.