Note: this set of lessons is for systems/browsers
with
Unicode
®
support and fonts spanning the
Unicode 3
character set relevant to the Baltic languages.
Lessons rendered in alternate character sets are available via links
(
Romanized
and
Unicode 2
)
in the left margin, and at the bottom of this page.
Baltic Peoples
The term 'Baltic' as a common name for Latvian, Lithuanian, and Old Prussian was first used
by the German linguist Ferdinand Nesselman in 1845. This name was derived from the Baltic Sea.
Lithuanian belongs to the Indo-European family, and is descended from the East Baltic branch.
Only Lithuanian and Latvian have survived from this large family. The Baltic, the Slavic, and
the Germanic languages have many common traits; there are even more similarities among the
Baltic and Slavic languages. These similarities have given rise to various theories: some
researchers claim there was a common Balto-Slavic stage after the break-up of the Proto-Indo-European,
others consider them to have resulted from convergence.
Archaeological data show that a large part of northeastern Europe, approximately from
Moscow to Berlin including the northen part of the Dniepr Basin, was Baltic-speaking territory
during the 1st millennia B.C. and A.D. Slavs entered this area later. This territory was covered
by near-impenetrable forests and was far from the major migration and more important trade routes.
These factors facilitated the preservation of an extremely archaic language family.
Lithuanian Origins and Geographic Location
Lithuanians are first mentioned in historical sources at the beginning of the 11th century.
The name "Lithuania" is mentioned for the first time in 1009 A.D. in the Quedlinburgh chronicles
("Annales Quedlinburgenses"), written in Latin as "Litua." A bit later, this name starts appearing
in Russian chronicles (Russian "Litva"). From the end of the 12th century, Lithuania is mentioned
frequently in source materials of Poland and Germany. The forms of the Slavic tradition (with root
i
instead of
ie
) became dominant in German (cf. "Litauen") and Latin (cf. "Lituania").
Researchers tend to localize the ethnographic Lithuanian teritory in the area between the Neris,
Nemunas, and Merkys rivers. The name
Zemaitish
(from the word
??mas
'low') was given to
the territory in the central lowlands of present-day ethnographic Lithuania; it was also used later
for the former Curonian lands that had been Lithuanianized, up to the Baltic Sea. The Curonian
substratum had a particularly distinct influence on the formation of the current Samogitian (Zemaitish)
dialect. In contrast to the Zemaitish, the Lithuanians who lived to the east were given the name
Aukstaitish
(from the word
auk?tas
'high'). The Lithuanian boundaries with both the West
(Prussians and Yotvingians) and East Balts (Curonians, Semigallians, Selonians and Latgallians) were
unstable. Some of those living in closer areas were Lithuanianized.
The West Baltic teritories were conquered by the Teutonic Knights in the 13th century. Lithuania,
united under Mindaugas (1236-1263), stopped the German assault in the Baltic area; however, fierce
battles continued between the Lithuanians and the Teutonic Order in this region for almost two hundred
years. The union with Poland in 1386 was very important in breaking down the power of the Teutonic
Knights. 1387 is considered the official date of adopting Christianity from Poland because, after
King Mindaugas' death, Lithuanians had reverted to paganism.
Lithuanians had begun expanding to the East in the second half of the 12th century. A very large
region of East Slavs, up to the Black Sea, was incorporated into the multinational Grand Duchy of
Lithuania. The chancellory language of Lithuania was based on an Eastern Slavic language, which can
be considered as the predecessor of Balatarusian.
After the Union of Lithuania and Poland in 1569, the Polish language became dominant in the
Zeczpospolita (a common Polish-Lithuanian state). Russification in the 19th century was very strong
in Lithuania, as Lithuanians were Roman Catholics. At the end of 19th century and the beginning of
the 20th, the reformation and standardization of Lithuanian was established.
Lithuanian Background
Lithuanian tribes on the left bank of the
N?munas
were under German rule for about 700
years. In the beginning the largest Lithuanian river, the
N?munas
, separated them from other
Lithuanians. After that, government boundaries and religion began to separate them. In the
year 1525 the Order of the Knights of the Cross was disbanded; its last grand master Albrecht
accepted Protestantism and created the secular Prussian duchy. An attempt was made to
incorporate the Lithuanians living there into the state, and to separate them from both the
religious and the cultural point of view from the other Lithuanians who lived in the Grand
Duchy of Lithuania and who had remained Catholics. The Lithuanians living in these two areas
even called themselves by different names: those in Lithuania Minor (i.e., in the Lithuanian
lands of Prussia) called themselves
lietuvninkai
, and those in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania
called themselves
lietuviai
.
With the goal of consolidating Protestantism and extending its influence to neighboring countries,
the government of the Grand Duchy of Prussia in the middle of the 16th century was very interested
in the preparation and the publication of religious texts. The better educated and more talented
pastors were empowered to prepare the most essential religious literature in the local languages.
The work begun by the author of the first Lithuanian book, Martynas Mazvydas (Mosvidius), and his
cousin Baltramiejus Vilentas, was continued at the end of the 16th century by Jonas Bretkunas.
As a result of the quantity and quality of religious writings prepared by him, he became the most
famous Lithuanian author in East Prussia. In addition to collections of hymns and sermons, he
was the first to translate, in the course of 12 years, the entire Bible into Lithuanian.
The 17th century witnessed a continuation of this collective tradition of producing religious
works in East Prussia, as well as linguistic works exemplified by the first Lithuanian grammar,
published by Daniel Klein in 1653.
The 18th century was a time when Lithuanian culture and literature flourished in East Prussia.
Here for the first time the pastor
Mykolas Merlinas
began a linguistic program with other
pastors on the kind of language to use with the common people. His followers began to gather
and publish Lithuanian folklore and folk songs in their linguistic tracts, grammars and
dictionaries. In the middle of the 18th century the first complete translation of the Bible
into Lithuanian was published, new editions of hymns were prepared, even several grammars and
dictionaries. The German poet Goethe was charmed by the beauty and the poetry of the Lithuanian
folk songs published in linguistic works. The philosopher Immanuel Kant was persuaded to affirm
the significance of the Lithuanian language and culture for East Prussia; he wrote the foreword
to a Lithuanian grammar. When later, in the 19th century, the Lithuanian language became an
object of unusual interest to Indo-Europeanists, they could rely partially on linguistic studies
of the previous century. In East Prussia the first original
belles-lettres
work,
The
Seasons
was written by
Kristijonas Donelaitis
; this work belongs to the golden inheritance
of world literature. When political conditions became unfavorable to Lithuanian culture in
Lithuania Major, and when later they lost their statehood (1797), Prusssian Lithuanians published
Lithuanian grammars and dictionaries, created
belles-lettres
, and investigated their
language, folklore, and mythology.
Following an unsuccessful uprising against Tsarist Russia in 1863, Lithuanians were forbidden
to use the Latin alphabet in their written documents. The Tsarist Russian government required
that all Lithuanian publications be printed in the Cyrillic alphabet. Therefore during this
complicated period books written with the Latin alphabet began to be published in East Prussia
and delivered to Lithuania from there. The initiator and supporter of this work is thought to
be the Samogitian bishop, Motiejus Valancius. Later activists of the Lithuanian revival used
the path which he had prepared, organizing here the publication of the first Lithuanian
newspapers. Almost two decades after the uprising, and with the advent of a new generation,
plans for the restoration of the Lithuanian government began to be raised, but this time not
on the basis of the Zeczpospolita (a common Polish-Lithuanian state), but on a national basis.
However, on the basis of nationality, a significant portion of the cultural heritage, which
in the course of several centuries had been created in the multinational Lithuanian grand
duchy, was frequently rejected because it might have undergone foreign influence or was
written in some language other than Lithuanian.
One of the most important signs of the national spring time in Eastern Europe was the revival
of the native language and a promotion of its importance. Activists of the Lithuanian national
revival in the first newspapers
Ausra
'Dawn' (1883-1886) and
Varpas
'Bell' also
began to publish ideas about the revival of the Lithuanian language and the creation of a new
standard language. In the language of the documents of that time there were many dialect forms
and Polonisms. The most active segment of society was no longer satisfied with the tradition
of the written language reaching back to the beginning of the 17th century, which reflected the
epoch of a common Lithuanian and Polish state. The West Aukshtaitish dialect became the basis
of the new standard language. This was close to the written language used in East Prussia.
Having considerable influence on the choice of this dialect was the fact that this variant of
the written language was the most thoroughly investigated and was described in the grammars
by August Schleicher and Friedrich Kurschat.
Linguistic work to codify the norms of standard Lithuanian was initiated at the end of
the 19th century and carried into the 20th by the linguists
Kazimieras B?ga
and
Jonas Jablonskis
, with their linguistic works and articles in the press, as well as by
other Lithuanian cultural activists and writers who helped enrich the language. During this
period, use was made not only of the living language, as by
Jablonskis
, but but also of
developmental characteristics of the standard language, correct usage, and the specifics of
different styles. An important contribution in this work was made by the Lithuanian Language
Society and the journal
Gimtoji kalba
'Native Language'.
Immediately after World War I, a great misfortune befell Lithuanian linguistics. With the
death of the outstanding Lithuanian linguist
Kazimieras B?ga
, Lithuanian linguistic
science collapsed. At the University of Kaunas there was no one to teach the linguistic
disciplines, so Alfred Senn and Franz Brender were brought in from Switzerland. Not until
1930, when
Pranas Skar?d?ius
and
Antanas Sal?s
had completed their studies in Germany
and returned to Lithuania, was the the renaissance of Lithuanian linguistics to begin.
In 1923 Lithuania Minor was divided into two parts: the
Kla?p?da
region fell to Lithuania,
and East Prussia remained in German control. Lithuanians in the
Kla?p?da
region always
emphasized their language, cultural and religious differences from the rest of Lithuania, and
did not call themselves Samogitians (
?ema??iai
) even though they were representatives of
that dialect. Retaining the tradition of Lithuania Minor, they still used the Gothic script,
especially in religious writings. They didn't want to hear anything about language reform
and the replacement of traditional borrowings with Lithuanian words, processes that were
taking place in the rest of Lithuania. For them, the greatest authorities in language were
Fridrichas Kur?aitis
(F. Kurschat) and August Schleicher.
In the years before World War II, a great deal was accomplished in the Republic of Lithuania:
terminology was created for various fields; separate language styles were established; orthography,
vocabulary, accentuation, place names and family names were normalized; dialect data, data for a
thesaurus-type dictionary, etc., were gathered. These activities later helped Lithuania hold out
during the Soviet occupation and even in some instances to continue, for better or worse, work that
had begun in earlier years, such as the publication of a large standard explanatory dictionary.
Lithuania is now one of the states of the European Union.
Latvian Origins, Geographic Location, and Background
About the end of the first millenium A.D., the territory known today as Latvia was populated by
four Baltic tribes: the Curonians in the west, the Semigallians in the south and the Selonians and
Lettgallians in the central and eastern parts of the land. The Livs, a Finnish-Ugric tribe, lived
on a stretch of land extending around the Bay of Riga and up into what today is southern Estonia.
Priests travelling with the Vikings from Scandinavia in the 9th and 10th centuries first introduced
Christianity to the Baltic tribes populating the western and southern parts of present day Latvia.
In the 10th and 11th centuries, Orthodox teachings, via Old Russian, were spread to the inhabitants
living in the eastern and central parts. No written legacies of the languages spoken in this area
during this period have been found, though archeologists speculate about the possibility that some
type of runic writing system borrowed from the Scandinavians may have been used. Borrowed words in
use today, which reflect this early Old Russian influence on the Latvian language, include for example
bazn?ca
'church',
gr?mata
'book',
svece
'candle',
sv?ts
'holy', and
zvans
'bell'.
The first written document in which Latvia is mentioned is in the Chronicle of Henry of Livonia
(Henrici Chronikon Lyvoniae), written in Latin by Henricus Lettus in 1225/26, with a supplement
in 1227. The chronicle tells the story of how the Augustinian monk Meinhard, together with crusaders
and tradesmen from Germany, sailed up the river Daugava in 1196 to begin the christianization of the
pagan Baltic tribes. Henricus Lettus, as his name implies, used the Latinate names of "Lettigallia"
and "Lethia," derived from the Lettgallian tribe, to designate the territory of present-day Latvia.
This root is still found in the older designation for the Latvian language as "Lettish," and in the
German name for Latvia as "Lettland."
After a century of warfare the pagan tribes lost their independence, and by the end of the 13th
century they were completely subjugated to the German-led Livonian Order and the Catholic Church.
Over the next few centuries, major differences in tribal language and culture gradually disappeared,
and by the 16th century the Semigallian and Lettgallian languages had formed the basis for a more or
less unified spoken Latvian language.
The Livs, who lived along the Daugava and Gauja rivers and spoke a Finno-Ugric language, were the
first to be quelled by the colonizing Germans. Their name was taken over as the name for Livonia, the
German dominated confederation which fell in the 16th century and which roughly corresponds to Latvia
and Estonia of today. About a hundred Livian speakers have survived to the present, and in the 20th
century they lived mainly in the Curonian fishing villages on the coast of the Baltic Sea between Kolka
and Mazirbe. The influence of Livian is found especially in the Tamnieku dialect, one of the three
major dialects of modern Latvian. The other two dialects are High Latvian, which is spoken in the east,
and Central Latvian, spoken in the area between Tamnieku to the west and High Latvian to the east.
In the 16th century, German-speaking clergymen began to translate hymnals, agendas, liturgies,
prayerbooks and fragments of the Bible into the Latvian language. The oldest preserved printed texts
are the Catholic Catechism (tr. 1585) and the Lutheran Handbook (Catechism, pericopes and psalm book,
tr. 1586/87).
Because the clergymen were not native speakers and because they were bound by rigid translation
conventions -- which dictated word to word translation of Christian texts in order to rule out the
possibility of sacrilege -- the resulting Early Written Latvian (EWL) was quite different from the
natural spoken language. EWL is characterized by an overabundance of German grammatical forms and
constructions. A striking example of German influence from this period is the introduction of the
conjunction
un
'and' into written Latvian, a loan from German
und
.
Georgius Mancelius (1593-1654), the former dean of Tartu University and court priest, introduced
extensive corrections to the earlier forms of EWL in his many publications, and is generally regarded
as having set the groundwork for modern Latvian literary language. A milestone in the standardization
of written Latvian was the translation of the Bible (published 1685-1694), which promoted the use of
the Central Latvian dialect as the basis for standard Latvian. This Bible translation also indirectly
provided for the use of the Central Latvian dialect as the basis for colloquial Latvian by the Latvian
people, as this was the one standard work that was distributed to the major parishes as part of their
inventory.
Along with the ideas of the Enlightenment, a new direction toward secular Latvian literature was
introduced by another German clergyman, Gothard Friedrich Stender (1714-1796). Interest in the presumed
simple and natural life of the "native peoples" and their folklore was expressed by German philosopher
Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), who published eleven Latvian folk songs in German translation in
his two volume book
Alte Volkslieder
(Old Folk Songs, 1778-1779).
After the end of the Swedish-Polish war in 1629, the eastern region of Latvia, today called Latgale,
was for a few hundred years under different administrative jurisdiction than the rest of Latvia (first
Polish/Lithuanian, then Russian). This, coupled with the fact that the majority of Latgalians were
Catholics as opposed to the Lutherans living in central and western Latvia, led to the development of
a distinct spoken language or dialect and a different writing tradition. The first book in Latgalian,
Evangelia toto anno
(The Evangelical Year), was published in 1753. A heavy blow to the region's
intellectual development was the ban on the use of the Latin alphabet between 1861 and 1904. By the
forced use of the Cyrillic alphabet, the Russian administration hoped to convert the Latgalians to the
Orthodox belief and turn them away from Roman Catholicism. However, the attempts to separate Latgale
from the rest of Latvia and to eradicate its writing tradition were not successful. Today Latgalian
is the main language spoken in Latgale, and the region's cultural development is supported by the
European Union.
Parallel to the written tradition dominated by the Baltic Germans, the Latvian peasantry kept up its
oral tradition of telling tales and singing folk songs. The first ethnic Latvian authors (i.e. whose
first language was Latvian) were published in the early 19th century, and the beginnings of Modern
Standard Latvian were established with the advent of the National Awakening in the 1850s. In the late
1860s, leading Latvian intellectuals discussed the necessity of recording their nation's folklore before
the oral tradition was lost.
Kri?j?nis Barons
(1835-1923), a mathematician and astronomer turned
folklorist, succeeded in collecting and systematizing almost a quarter of a million
dainas
(short
folk songs), which were published in eight volumes between 1900 and 1915.
By the time Latvia's independence was declared in 1918, a fully functional Modern Standard Latvian
(MSL) had developed in both written and spoken form. During the first period of Latvian independence
(1918-1939), Latvian was the country's primary language, and continual attention was given to questions
concerning orthography, style and terminology, as well as documentation and research of dialects,
folklore, etc.
During the Soviet occupation of Latvia (1945-1991), the Latvian language had a secondary position,
but the passing of the Latvian Language Law of 1989 and the renewal of Latvian independence in 1991 gave
Latvian the status of the official State Language of Latvia. Today, the National Language Commission
and the State Language Agency continues work in promoting the status of Latvian in Latvia, and advanced
research in Latvian is carried out at the many higher education institutes including the Latvian Language
Institute at the University of Latvia.
Baltic Language Lessons
Seven lessons are devoted to Lithuanian, and three are devoted to Latvian.
Note: there are great disparities in capability among personal computers in contemporary use. Unfortunately,
support for
Unicode
®
and/or the
repertoire of fonts installed on your personal computer
cannot be detected
by a web server! Accordingly,
we have prepared multiple versions of each lesson; this set of lessons is for systems/browsers
with
Unicode
support and fonts spanning the
Unicode 3
character set relevant to the Baltic languages.
(You may switch to other versions via links below.) Lessons:
- The unity of the flowing river
, by
Justinas Marcinkevi?ius
- Forest of the Gods
, by Balys Sruoga
- In the Shadow of the Altars
, by Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas
- The Fate of the Simoniai from the Village of Aukstujai
, by
Ieva Simonaityt?
- Uncles and Aunts
, by
Vai?gantas
(Juozas Tumas)
- The Seasons
, by Kristijonas Donelaitis
- the Book of Sermons, by
Jonas Bretk?nas
- "In the Shadow of Death," by
R?dolfs Blaumanis
- "Straumeni: The Story of an Old Farm in Zemgale through the Changing Seasons," by Edvarts Virza
- Matthew
2:1-6, translated by Johann Ernst Glück
Options:
Related Language Courses at UT
Online language courses for college credit are offered through the
University Extension
(link opens in a new browser window).
Baltic Resources Elsewhere
Our
Web Links
page includes pointers to
Baltic resources elsewhere
.