Baltų substratas rytų slavų kalbose /

• Published in: Baltistica
• Main Author: Laučiūtė, Jūratė Sofija
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: Lithuanian; English
• Published: 2005
• Subjects: Northwest Russia
• Online Access: https://vb.ku.lt/KU:ELABAPDB2439906&prefLang=en_US

Although many archeological and onomastic publications demonstrate the existence of a Baltic substratum over a rather large section of the territory of the Eastern and Western Slavs, some Slavic studies scholars still ignore the influence exerted by this substratum in the evolution of the vocabulary, phonetics and other linguistic aspects of Slavic dialects. One group of linguists adheres to the principle that in elucidating the causes of changes taking place in a language, one must give priority to the patterns of internal language development. Others identify the lexical substratum with marginal (borderland) borrowings. But a drawback to the notion of substratum influence is the extremely large number of common features exclusive to the Balts and the Slavs, such that loanwords are ignored, especially the older loanwords of substratum origin. Scholars find somewhat more substratum Balticisms in the Polish and Belarusian dialects (especially in the Polesje region), but in northwest Russia, where there is a great abundance of hydronyms of Baltic origin, conspicuously few appellative Balticisms are reported. This article not only draws attention to this paradox, but also attempts to determine in which layers of the Russian vocabulary certain still unidentified loanwords from the Baltic languages are concealed.