Hi all… I was going through Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia and in the “world Languages” section, there was a statement which said that Lithuanian was very closely related to sanskrit. But I did a little research in to few words in Lithuanian and didnt find much similarity to sanskrit (I have studied sanskrit earlier). May be I didnt actually come across the stuff related to sanskrit… any views on this?
I’ve heard this too from various Lithuanians, but I don’t think they meant the words were similar, just that the language is structurally similar. Beyond that I can’t tell you much.
Hint: Encarta simplifies stuff to death.
I just read the Encarta (1995) article on Lithuanian. Not one word about Sanskrit. Checking Ethnologue, it shows that Sanskrit is one of the Indo-Iranian languages of the Indo-European phylum & that Lithuanian is one of the Baltic languages of the Indo-European phylum; therefore, Lithuanian is related to Sanskrit. How closely it is related depends on one’s definition of “close,” presumably.
I think u missed it. Even in Encarta '95, there is an interactive part called “languages of the world”. Please click on that and select Lithuanian…u`ll find what I~m talkin about. Thanks
I did some searching on Britannica. There are ten main branches of the Indo-European family:
Anatolian (exinct. Hittite is one example)
Indo-Iranian (e.g. Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali)
Greek
Italic (Latin and by proxy the Romance Languages)
Germanic (e.g. Gothic, English, German, Swedish)
Armenian
Tocharian (exinct. Spoken in the first millenium AD by people in modern NW China)
Celtic
Balto-Slavic (e.g. Latvian, Lithuanian)
Albanian
Essentially, they say that these languages are grouped together because basic vocabulary items show similarity in structure and even pronunciation.
They give examples of the word for “ten” in several I-E languages (Latin decem, Greek deka, Sanskrit dasa, Gothic taihun). It also seems that the way verbs are conguated is very similar across these languages.
They have cool tables I can’t link to directly, since you need a subscription (and their Terms of Use agreement requires a damn linguist to translate) but the similarities are more apparent when you look at families of related words in each language, rather than pick a few words at random and compare them.
Take a look at http://www.bartleby.com/61/ and scroll down to “Indo European Roots”. Not about Lithuanian or Sanskrit, but some useful background information. No doubt outdated, but it’s worth every penny you pay for it.
Aha! Then you’ve missed the point of that interactivity. It’s merely to show you what the words or phrases are for the language or languages selected. You’ll notice that Navajo is included in that interactivity and nobody (well, nobody who knows anything) asserts that it’s related to the Indo-European phylum.
There was a thread on this a few months ago. Essentially, many Lithuanians grow up believing that their language is “one of the most ancient”, and really think that it is comparable to Sanskrit in a major way. A poster bemoaned the existence of this wide-spread urban myth among the populace.
The rumour arose from the fact that a few grammatical properties of Proto-Indo-European happen to have survived in both Sanskrit and Lithuanian. The vocabulary is overwhelmingly different. Sanskrit, for example, lost a lot of its Proto-IE roots when it absorbed words from the Dravidian language. The vocabulary of Lithuanian may have been influenced by the Battle-Axe people. Thus, the Sanskritist cannot read Lithuanian, and the Lithuanian cannot understand anything of Sanskrit.
Of course, you know it’s true because it was in Bill Bryson’s shoddy pop-linguistics work Mother Tongue, right next to the assertion that modern Frisians can read Beowulf. :rolleyes:
UnuMondo
Why not compare vocabulary? Here are the numbers 1 to 10:
vienas eka
du dva
trys tri
keturi catur
penki pañca
šeši shash
septyni sapta
aštuoni ashta
devyni nava
dešimt dasa
fire:
ugnis agni
man:
vyras vira
eye:
akis akshi
foot:
pede pada
son:
sûnus sûnu
Martin Lings pointed out the similarity in the phrase from an old Lithuanian song, dievo dukryte, which in Sanskrit is deva duktri. The Lithuanian thunder god was named Perkunas, and the corresponding thunder god in the Rg Veda is named Parjanya, which is related. Lithuania was the last country in Europe to remain pagan, until nearly the year 1400. That probably helped them to conserve ancient Indo-European lore longer than in the rest of Europe.
Why not compare vocabulary?
Not necessarily a fair test, since you’ve chosen the kind of archetypal words that are similar across many Indo-European languages. For instance, adding Latin to the comparison:
vienas eka unus
du dva duo
trys tri tres
keturi catur quattuor
penki pañca quinque
šeši shash sex
septyni sapta septem
aštuoni ashta octo
devyni nava novem
dešimt dasa decem
fire:
ugnis agni ignis
man:
vyras vira vir
eye:
akis akshi oculus
foot:
pede pada pes
son:
sûnus sûnu filius
Both languages are highly inflected – in many of the same ways – and very conservative in an evolutionary sense. Therefore comparative grammarians consider that they represent characteristics of the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European.
Similarity of vocabulary or its absence is not in itself evidence – rmember Grimm’s Law and its variants. The standard would be if they exhibit the same modifications in basic vocabulary (i.e., the few hundred substantives, adjectives, and verbs that might be expected to be in common use from 2000 BC to the present, stuff like father, mother, red, long, young, to be, to have, to stand, the first ten numerals). English “bread” and Russian “khleb” (bread), having nothing in common but the vowel sound, are in fact cognates, because one can track exactly what changes each made from a hypothetical ancestor word, and because similarly constructed words went through the same changes.
Lithuanian is supposed by some to be the most conservative of all modern Indo-European languages and Sanskrit is one of the oldest examples of an Indo-European language, also both Slavic and Indo-Iranian are members of the ‘satum’ group of sub-families in the Indo-European family.
But ‘very closley related’ is strecthing these ideas to breaking point, they’re members of different sub-families for a start.
[slight hijack]
My understanding is that Russian “khleb” is actually cognate with English “loaf”. The modern word “loaf” [url=“http://www.bartleby.com/61/59/L0215900.html”]descends from the Old English word “hlaf”. The initial “h” in OE “hlaf” makes the connection with Russian “khleb” easier to spot.
[/slight hijack]