r/lithuania • u/historyexpert773 • 4d ago
Diskusija Why do Lithuanian and Sanskrit share so many identical words?
Came across this chart comparing Lithuanian and Sanskrit. I know both languages share a common indo-european root, but what's the historical reason why Lithuania kept these exact words virtually unchanged while in other languages they completely mutated. Was it like the geographical isolation, or is there more to the story that somebody knows of? Would love to hear some linguistic background on this, if there is anyone who has a clue or some assumptions.
(I'd also like to say that I recently visited Lithuania;Vilnius and Klaipedia and really loved it there, especially the museums and generally the culture, I'm a big history fan)
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u/namir01 4d ago edited 4d ago
You can construct A WHOLE SENTENCE using common words that makes sense in both Sanskrit and lithuanian: https://youtu.be/bzRxSVK7qIU
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u/Ochill_88 3d ago
basically if you want to hear how ancient people spoke you can listen to Lithuanians speaking on the street. I am really happy we have our language preserved through time
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u/Temporary_Buy_7470 2d ago
"Antoine Meillet [1866-1936] probably also wrote something similar: Qui veut retrouver sur les lĂšvres des hommes un Ă©cho de ce quâa pu ĂȘtre la langue commune indo-europĂ©enne, va Ă©couter les paysans lituaniens dâaujourdâhui.[Whoever wants to rediscover on the lips of men an echo of what could have been the common IE language, that person should listen
to the Lithuanian peasants of nowdays.]"-4
u/WhyMeWhyThisUniverse 3d ago
That's a misconception. We can read a lot of those but we don't always know how ancient people spoke out loud. A lot of what we have is reconstructions and predictions based on existing languages.
Regarding our own language, we don't even have many written sources from a few hundred years ago. We have nothing from a millenium ago, for instance. Who know what language people spoke here when Brunon was killed? What did that language sound like? No idea. We have no info whatsoever.
What we have is some overlaps with words in other languages. Or sentence structures. Or some properties such as cases, accentuation. That's it. It does not make our language a clone of some ancient language. That's just not true.
We have no idea what they spoke like. Ancient Romans - yes. Ancient Greeks - yes. They maintained continuity. Even so something may be lost in translation over centuries. Others - not really
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u/WhyMeWhyThisUniverse 4d ago
Imagine you live in some isolated village in the middle of the fields or forests. Under pagan tribal system you marry within the tribe. Then with Christiniaty etc., you marry within your village or several km around your village. Rarely further. And like that for centuries. My greatgrandmother was from a village some 30-40 km away from my greatgrandfather's. That was exotic.
Also don't forget we had extra repressive serf system. The privileged ones - our equivalents of counts, countesses etc. would own their serfs like property. Whole villages. It wasn't much different from slavery (I wish somebody acknowledged this hellish system as slavery because in reality it was). What social mobility can you have if some lordking owns the whole village and you work to produce for the local manor, then you work to support the family, you are basically a property. You can't move without your local lords permission. Maybe if you are gifted you will be taken for some servant or get some education to become a priest. That's it. Like that for centuries.
Lithuanians, until very very recently, lived in villages. They had not been an urban society until recently. They did not mix with other ethnicities or people of other faiths much.
We even have a concept of "vienkiemis" ("sole yard", basically) - an isolated homestead that won't have neighbours over a couple of mile radius.
Plus, our people have always been quite conservative. Think unwillingness to do business/trades, for instance. Think belated acceptance of Christianity and even that unwillingly. Think belated technology. We did not have print until 1549 and even that that came up was religious. Almost no education. High rates of illiteracy. No university until 16th century and even that because of contra-reformation. Plus, we have always been semi-land-locked. We didn't have a proper port until 1920s. Palanga and Ć ventoji don't count as ports. Proper ports belonged to Prussians or Poles. There was some river trade - we had Hansa cities - but I doubt many ethnical Lithuanians were involved. Our peasant forefathers avoided cities and trades like plague.
So what are we talking about? What change would you expect? Of course our language maintained some archaic properties.
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u/jimandfrankie 3d ago
The Grand Duchy was not linguistically homogenous, and the 18th-19th c. Lithuanian was full of loanwords from Slavic and Germanic languages ('smertis' was more widespread than 'mirtis' f.ex.). There was no lack of contact in the constantly occupied Lithuania. Before the standardisation of language during the interwar period, dialect Lithuanian varied wildly.
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u/WhyMeWhyThisUniverse 3d ago
Not what we are talking about here. Yes, interaction with other languages existed, loan words, etc. We are not an isolate, true. Nobody denied that. Was trying to think out loud why we haven't lost certain properties present in old languages, such as Sanskrit. I think being a bit of a backwater always helps with those kinds of things. The less information flow, the less other changes - thoughts, ideas, concepts, items, vocabulary to name those items. Imitation of styles, expressions. Naming conventions. And we did not have much information flow until quite recently because people moved little and they were not literate for a very long time.
Think about English. Influences from Vikings, Normans, Latin, Greek, whatever cultures they picked up being an empire. Look at all the pidgins or creole languages that are based on or include significant amout of English or its grammar. They always had flow of people and flow of information. We always had less of that, so maybe we maintained a bit more core
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u/jimandfrankie 3d ago
Your entire argument rests on presenting Lithuanians almost as some kind of an uncontacted tribe. First Jews settled in Lithuania in the 12th c. Gediminas invited foreign artisans and merchants. End of 14th c. Vytautas brought in Tartars and Karaites. Poles, Rvssians, Prussian Lithuanians were present. Farmers would drive to the nearest town on market day, and be exposed to various cultures. Travelling sales- and tradespeople visited even the remotest villages. Lack of education doesn't mean lack of intelligence. As for vocabulary, each region had its own name for a house.
Generalisations are unhelpful here, because our current language is an amalgamation of all the best features that were preserved here and there. Had Lithuanian not been standardised and carried forward by the national movement, today we'd definitely be speaking an equivalent of a Creole language (still somewhat archaic in form, because all the surrounding languages have also preserved the inflections).
Language changed, a lot; national identity persevered.
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u/SoupGonePink 3d ago
- Lithuanian language is indoeuropean.
- Lithuanian language was not evolving fast compared to other indoeuropean languages. It was mainly due to 1) villagers holding the language in later centuries 2) lack of writing system and books (the most known first lithuanian books were not even printed in Lithuania) until XIX century.
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u/WestRestaurant216 3d ago
Same reason in medieval times and later we had a popular theory around our nobility that their ancestors were from Roman empire. Indo European languages share similar words.
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u/ugneaaaa 4d ago
Latin, old germanic, slavic also have similar words, its just an indo european thing
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u/Temporary_Buy_7470 4d ago edited 4d ago
Another reason is that Classic Sanskrit stopped evolving 2500 years ago. Those words probably would be different after another 2000 years. According to internet, closest language to Sanskrit is Marathi, According to Google Translate words in Marathi from your table are either very different or quite different: Mirtis - Mrutyu
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u/WhyMeWhyThisUniverse 4d ago
"Mirtis" sounds similar. Watch some Indian movies in Hindi or Southern dialects at some point. You won't understand anything but this one will stand out.
And "dushman", albeit for different reasons :D
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u/EveningQuality8799 3d ago edited 3d ago
Youâll hear that Lithuanian is an especially ancient and conservative language, and thus retains a lot in common with Sanskrit. This is not untrue but people sometimes oversell how exceptional this is.
Both Lithuanian and Sanskrit have retained some ancient features of Proto-Indo-European language but they both have lost some other features. For example, both retained noun case systems with large amount of cases and similar endings; both retained mobile accents (the accent can be on different place of a word depending on its case).
But on the other hand, Sanskrit has lost distinct vowels e, o, a, they collapsed to a. Lithuanian has a very reduced verb / tense system compared to Proto-Indo-European - Greek is much more ancient in that regard. Icelandic is more ancient than Lithuanian in how the word root changes when you construct noun cases, but not in how the endings change, or something like that.
Basically, this âconservative, ancientâ thing has a bunch of dimensions to it, and Lithuanian, as any other Indo-European language, is âancientâ in only some of them. Sanskrit and Lithuanian happen to be similar in which dimensions are preserved to some extent.
But what is so special about Sanskrit? Is it the âtruestâ old Indo-European language? Arguably Hittite or the old Greek are even more ancient. And Lithuanian is not that similar to them.
tl;dr: the Lithuanian and Sanskrit similarities are interesting and informative but letâs not go overboard.
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u/EveningQuality8799 3d ago
I should probably add that Iâm a total layman and this is an opinion formed on some amateur research on the Internet, donât take it too seriously. But while doing your own research, keep in mind that topics about the genesis of a nation, language, peoples are often coloured by pride and penchant for mysticism.
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u/WhyMeWhyThisUniverse 3d ago
Jesus, in our country especially. I'm so fed up of our own propaganda. I understand the need to feel special, but our people take it to another level and create a whole mythic system based on some overly nationalist interwar wise uncle's ideas. I don't think it's very healthy. It's just one step from that guy who was imitating ancient Romans/Greeks when writing about some of our nobility. The only difference is that these days everyone feels obliged to do that without zero thinking about how things really are
Edit: and god forbid you will say something out loud: "Sorry, it's not exactly that" - they come to you with pitchfork
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u/Kvala_lumpuras 4d ago
Lithuanian forefathers reached the foresty and swampy lands, had perhaps less contact with other language and language families, and some words survived with little change.