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Comment by jim180 | Hacker News Reader

Lithuanian and Latvian are Baltic languages. Nothing to do with Slavic...

I was thinking about separating the two groups when I was writing this but was afraid of getting too verbose, though in retrospect that probably would have made more sense regardless of the historical lineage. My apologies if this came off as inconsiderate.

I updated my original comment, and learned a good amount about that dispute as a result, so thanks for calling it out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balto-Slavic_languages

See the section "historical dispute".

I think some people get touchy about them being lumped together if their last period of commonality (per the article) was 1400 BCE. For comparison, I believe all the Slavic languages were mutually intelligible around 1200 AD. But much more recently than this, in the last few centuries, there have been notable attempts by east slavs to absorb the Baltic language cultures and deny them.

I doubt that South Slavic and West/East Slavic were mutually intelligible at 1200 AD.

I doubt West and East Slavic were. But inside those geographic groups they probably were (Czech and Polish AFAIR were around that time).

Depends on your standards, too. Even today, any pair of slavic speakers should have a head start in understanding each other. Put them next to each other for a month and they should be talking, at least about basic everyday things.

Not quite. My anecdotal examples. I'm Polish.

I was in Crimea for about 2 weeks (in 2012) they split me Russian there. I couldn't understand a word they said. And I didn't learn to understand than for 2 weeks of travel there.

I could understand some words from Ukrainian (I traveled by train from Lviv).

Another example is Croatian, I've been there on vacation and renting a room. I couldn't understand a word they said and didn't learn any.

TlI can understand some Czech (because this is the closest language together with Slovakian to Polish) but that's it.

I wouldn't mix Slavs from different groups together. They evolved separately and are as close as English and German.

I may be off by 100-200 years, but this is what I read. There were accents and regionalisms but they were all mutually intelligible.

It is an example I think of often, about how quickly languages can change. In the scale of 1000 years, a lot changes. Most of the diversity in Romance languages is from around that timescale too, it really started to diverge substantially around 900ad-1100ad.

Balto-Slavic branch divides into Baltic and Slavic language groups so nothing wrong here

Yup, most of Eastern Europe are Balto-Slavic. While the division from the Eastern Slavic languages (Russian, Belarussian, Ukranian, etc) is distant, they are still Slavic. From Eastern Europe, only Estonian is not a Slavic language.

Hungarian too, although there’s a question about whether Hungary is Eastern or Central Europe.

Ah, yes, how could I forget! As a side note, though also Finno-Ugric then similarity in sound and appearance from Finnish or Estonian at least appears very far.

Yeah Hungarian is just a thing on its own.

“There’s a question” implies that there is a ground truth that might be discovered to resolve this rather than simply a clash of different purely arbitrary definitions of the same terms.

Not my intention. In fact my intention was the opposite: just to highlight it’s a bit of a contentious topic.

The Visegrad 4 (Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary)are generally taken to be "Central European". The strict East/West division is largely a product of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain.

Perhaps. The UN still calls them “Eastern European” though.

No, the distinction into West/Central/East Europe was also relevant in the centuries prior. You're right with, that East Europe starts with Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.

> No, the distinction into West/Central/East Europe was also relevant in the centuries prior.

I never said it wasn't.

> The strict East/West division is largely a product of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain.

> From Eastern Europe, only Estonian is not a Slavic language.

Well, that and Romanian. And Hungarian. And outside the EU, Albanian. And Georgian, Azeri and Armenian if you consider those Eastern Europe.

Albania is not "East Europe", but South East. Same as Greece.

That's just your opinion, and the UN would disagree: https://www.un.org/dgacm/en/content/regional-groups#:~:text=...

Some of my fellow Romanians will also claim they're Central European, but in my mind, all the ones I listed are Eastern European countries. I'd even include Turkey and Kazakhstan in there, part of the latter is to the West of the Urals, which is what we normally consider the border between Europe and Asia.

That's cute. It is clear thats an outdated political organization and not geographical. Read at the groupings. Greece is more eastern than Albania (and it is one hour off timezone), and it says 'western' which is not the case by any geographic means.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/382295560/figure/fi...

https://www.worldatlas.com/r/w960-q80/upload/03/90/9b/countr...

Albania is clearly south east europe.

And, I don't care about your random Romanian friend's anecdote.

> Albania is clearly south east europe.

Yes, it is clearly south east Europe. East.

> And, I don't care about your random Romanian friend's anecdote.

Who's my friend?

I regret being that loose with the designation :), Romanian and Hungarian are valid counter arguments.

In my mind, I was thinking of the belt of countries between Russia and Central Europe, starting from the Baltics down to the Balkan (excluding Greece).

Even by your definition, I can count at least seven countries where the official language is not Slavic. And that's not even including all the Altaic, Romance and other assortment of regional languages, many of which have some sort of official status.

Latvian and Lithuanian are not at all Slavic.

There is a branch that contains both Baltic and Slavic languages, but there's also one that contains Albanian and Greek.

Albanian and Greek are both completely separate branches, and both unique on the tree (they don't have common cousins like the others).

There have been some attempts to tie Albanian to Germanic, or Greek, or other branches, but they all have failed.

At some point they all are Indo_european, but they split a way ago.

> most of Eastern Europe are Balto-Slavic

and

> only Estonian is not a Slavic language.

So following this logic saying "in Eastern Europe, only Estonian is not a Baltic language" would make as much sense?

It is just one of the theories, there is no clear evidence to suggest that Baltic and Slavic were the same language thousands of years ago.

Well there is if you go far enough. It's just the question when did they split off from each other. However there is no question that Baltic and Slavic are more closely related to each other than any other non extinct Indo-European languages.

The fact they they are the closest surviving relatives on it own doesn't mean it makes sense to group them together (i.e. Italo-Celtic is also a theorized subgroup in a similar way but nobody is disputing that Celtic and Italic languages evolved into distinct groups).

Then there is a huge amount of missing links and unknown unknowns. e.g. Thracian and Dacian probably were also pretty close to Baltic or Slavic (maybe even closer to Baltic than Slavic is but we don't know enough about them to make any conclusive claims at all... but we at least know these languages existed)

Plenty of wrong here, considering Lithuanian and Latvian are utterly unintelligible to slavs, save for loanwords, but Slavic languages between themselves retain some level of intelligibility, which even spawned two competing constructed languages.

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