Re: New project of mine

Hello Jan,

> What reminds me: Jan could be either Jan Havlis or me.
Oops :-)

> > The principality (I am yet to think out the name and
> things, you know)
> > continues until it is conquered by Mindaugas of Lithuania, and it is
> > subjugated by Lithuania and then Poland for some three centuries. At
> > that time the language experiences a heavy Lithuanian
> influence, mainly
> > in the lexicon, of course.
>
> Don't forget that the state language of the Grand Duchy of
> Lithuania in those
> days was not Lithuanian, but Old-Belorussian; Lithuanian was
> still a typical
> peasants' thing.
I did remember this (after writing the last post tho', I have to admit).
But there's a way around. (though I'm not too sure of this Old
Belorussian - I guess it was some kind of a transitive thing - some kind
of heavily Polonized South-West Russian. I fancy it goes under the
pseudonym of 'prosta mowa', which became Lithuania's literary language
(instead of South-West Russian Church Slavonic) until the Union with
Poland). The point in my language is that the areas where it was spoken
was not in contact with any Slavonic tribes, and the language mingling
resulted because of the influx of the Lithanian-speaking populace, which
wasn't there before the subjugation - the community surrounded by a
(more or less) homegenous Baltic entity was ever apart and hardly any
mingling resulted. With the disappearance of the border the Lithuanians
moved into the area, so now the eastern rural dialects hold a more
Lithuanian flavour, including SVO word order, versus the more
conservative western dialects (which are the basis for the literary
language - the richest port towns are there) where the old Finnic SOV
has held out.  It's a strange thing, I admit, that the rural dialects be
less conservative than the townlands' speech, but such is life :-)

> > In phonology, the Finnic substrate did not allow the
> development of the
> > palatalization correlation. However, the first
> palatalization of velars
> > did take place whie the Slavonic population was still
> distinct. However,
> > the Finns cannot cope with [tS] and [dZ], which they do
> substitute for
> > [t_j] and [d_j]. Slavic *tj and *dj also yield these.
>
> Fair enough.
Good to know :-)

So 'furnace' would be _piet'e_.

[details snipped]

Thanks,
Pavel
--
Pavel Iosad               pavel_iosad@mail.ru

'I am a philologist, and thus a misunderstood man'
                 --JRR Tolkien, _The Notion Club Papers_