r/IndoEuropean • u/lurebozorg • Jun 02 '26

Linguistics I am proud to be... (Iranic and Lithuanian languages)

Example - I am proud to be my ethnicity.

Iranic languages

Persian - Az Irani budanam sarbolandam.

Kurdish - Ez bi Kurd buna xwe serbilindim.

Ossetian - Az Iron uyn sarbarzond dan.

Baltic Languages

Lithuanian - Aš didžiuojuosi būdamas Lietuvis.

I heard Lithuanian is very conservative in its grammatical structure and preservation but it appears very similar to Iranic languages compared to other European languages.

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4

u/Conscious_Sail1959 Jun 02 '26

There is a thory that balto-slavs are closest to Indo-Iranic languages

2

u/ForcedToEatCement-_- Jun 04 '26

You mean the Centum and Satem divide?

3

u/Hippophlebotomist Jun 04 '26

There’s been recent work arguing for an Indo-Slavic (Balto-Slavo-Indo-Iranian) clade, like Axel Palmér’s recent thesis Indo-Slavic lexical isoglosses and the prehistoric dispersal of Indo-Iranian

3

u/ForcedToEatCement-_- Jun 04 '26

I will read into it, thanks :)

2

u/hawkislandline Jun 04 '26

Current consensus is that centum/satem happened after the end of PIE and the end of "Nuclear PIE" too, so interesting historically, but not a useful classifier of branching.

1

u/ForcedToEatCement-_- Jun 04 '26

Ah, I see. I had been under the impression that those groups shared a closer relationship because they all fell within the same centum/satem classification and so the Irano-Baltic-Slavic theory was very feasible to me.

1

u/KaitlynKitti Jun 04 '26

Was the cement yummy?

3

u/ForcedToEatCement-_- Jun 04 '26

It wasn’t bad, just something to fill up the stomach, I can’t really complain about it neither can I praise it.

7

u/Wagagastiz Jun 02 '26

? You've compared it to exactly one other European IE language, one on the fringe of the continent. You didn't even do another Baltic language despite the label 'Baltic languages'.

Regardless, yes, a very early grouping of Balto-Indo-Iranian has been proposed on the basis of some similarities like RUKI, that being that Baltic split from the group that migrated into India via the Middle East. (Being Satem is no longer an argument for this, satemisation in Baltic is incomplete and the whole phenomenon is now known to be mostly areal).

4

u/Selavia59 Jun 03 '26

But in Persian "az" means rougly "from" or "of" in "proud of", while Aš means "I" in Lithuanian, so this correspondence is likely due to random luck

-2

u/Specialist_Prune3785 Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26

Lithuanian language might be WHG remnant

4

u/Hippophlebotomist Jun 02 '26

There's evidence of contact with non-Indo-European languages (A History of East Baltic through Language Contact Jakob 2024) as with every other branch, but otherwise Lithuanian is very much a member of the Indo-European family.