Circum-Baltic Languages

Download or read book Circum-Baltic Languages written by Östen Dahl and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2001-12-31 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The area around the Baltic Sea has for millennia been a meeting-place for people of different origins. Among the circum-Baltic languages, we find three major branches of Indo-European —Baltic, Germanic, and Slavic, the Baltic-Finnic languages from the Uralic phylum and several others. The circum-Baltic area is an ideal place to study areal and contact phenomena in languages. The present set of two volumes look at the circum-Baltic languages from a typological, areal and historical perspective, trying to relate the intricate patterns of similarities and dissimilarities to the societal background. In Volume II, selected phenomena in the grammars of the circum-Baltic languages are studied in a cross-linguistic perspective.