Organizers:
Description:
This workshop aims to assess the evidence for a special relationship between the Balto-Slavic and Germanic branches of Indo-European. Since Schleicher included Germanoslaven as one of the primary nodes of his Stammbaum (Schleicher 1853), the idea that the two branches have a special affinity attracted no less than three monographs (Hessencamp 1876; Stang 1972; Nepokupny et al. 1989). Nowadays, however, the general atmosphere seems to be one of agnosticism (Kümmel 2022: 264; Pronk 2022: 287) or of an alternative grouping of Balto-Slavic with Indo-Iranian (Ringe, Warnow & Taylor 2002: 87; Olander 2019; Kassian et al. 2021; Kroonen 2022: 166–167). In these models, the similarities with Germanic are put down to contact rather than common inheritance.
In recent years, interest in Indo-European phylogenetics has been growing, partially thanks to a series of high-profile studies attempting to adapt the computational methods of evolutionary biology (Grey & Atkinson 2003; Bouckhaert et al. 2012; Chang et al. 2015; Heggarty et al. 2023). While widely criticized by linguists, these studies have contributed to a re-ignition of the debate, including a recent monograph on Indo-European phylogeny (Olander (ed.) 2022) and important studies on the competing Germano-Celtic (van Sluis et al. 2023) and Indo-Slavic (Palmér 2024) hypotheses.
The scholarly interest in Indo-European migrations has achieved additional momentum as a result of the ancient DNA revolution, which laid to rest the old debate regarding the Indo-European homeland (Allentoft et al. 2015; Haak et al. 2015), paving the way for more nuanced debates on the internal diversification of the language from the steppe. A recent preprint study by McColl et al. (2024) has presented aDNA evidence suggesting a possible trans-Baltic vector for the spread of the Germanic languages dating after 4000 BP. Could this evidence favour a phylogenetic grouping of the two branches or provide a new context for contact between the two groups?
It is generally acknowledged that the best indication of a linguistic grouping is the presence of a significant number of shared exclusive innovations, with innovations in the realm of inflection being most probative (Clackson 2022). However, the issue with relying on inflection alone is a dearth of evidence, both because grammatical morphemes are often very short (Campbell & Poser 2008: 215–223), and because there are few of them. Much more evidence can be found in the lexicon, which was, for instance, the focus of Stang (1972).
In the fifty years that have passed since Stang’s study, not all of the 188 lexical isoglosses he identified stand up to scrutiny. The comparison of English short with Lithuanian sker̃sti ‘to butcher’ (Stang 1972: 59) is rendered questionable by the discovery of Winter’s Law (Winter 1978), while improved documentation of some languages renders certain isoglosses non-exclusive: Lithuanian lèsti and Old English lesan ‘pick, gather’, are joined by Hittite liss- (Oettinger 1979: 206). Archaeobotanical evidence demonstrates that the Baltic word for ‘rye’ must be from Germanic, because rye cultivation only reached the East Baltic in the Roman Iron Age (Jakob 2024: 194).
Should there prove to be a significantly large number of isoglosses, how can this fact be interpreted: a linguistic subgroup, the result of contact, or a combination thereof? And if the shared words are the result of contact, where did they come from? After all, words are rarely created out of thin air. Could some have been borrowed from unattested languages which were later replaced by the ancestors of Germanic and Balto-Slavic?
We invite contributions on the following topics:
- Discussion of lexical, derivational, grammatical, and morphological isoglosses between Baltic, Slavic and Germanic.
- Interpretation of isoglosses: contact or shared innovations?
- Discussion of the mechanisms behind how these isoglosses came about.
We also welcome multidisciplinary angles of research.
Registration:
If you would like to submit a paper for this workshop, please fill out the registration form (will be available in February 2025).