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Inspired by this answer to a different question, I ask what kind of features justify a claim that Balto-Slavic languages are closer to Germanic languages than to Indo-Iranian languages.

The features may be inherited or later acquired in a Sprachbund fashion but I want the answers to distinguish inherited and acquired features.

jlawler
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Sir Cornflakes
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    Excellent question. Balto-Slavic has never been my cup of tea, but even so, the only thing I can think of off the top of my head is the shared -m- (rather than -bh-) in the oblique dual/plural cases. I’m sure there are others, but they’re not coming to me at this hour… – Janus Bahs Jacquet Oct 14 '20 at 22:45
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    lexical considerations tend to put BS as closer to Germanic than anything else IIRC – Tristan Oct 15 '20 at 09:15
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    @Tristan: Lexical "closeness" does not necessarily imply subgrouping. Their are lots of Germanic loan words in most Slavic languages. – fdb Oct 15 '20 at 15:26
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    agreed. I was talking primarily about shared lexical isoglosses in the inherited vocabulary – Tristan Oct 15 '20 at 15:35
  • obviously that's still not enough to establish a node conclusively (for which you'd need to do the proper comparative work of reconstructing the proto-form for that node's descendants), but afaik, with the possible exception of late-PIE (after Anatolian and maybe Tocharian split off), no such intermediate nodes (at a higher level than the usual Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian nodes at least) have been reconstructed to a sufficient extent to become consensus – Tristan Oct 15 '20 at 15:52
  • One of my best friends is Slavic; he usually employs my help in all things computer-related, including typing. I distinctly remember helping him out once with a thesis on Slavic history; one aspect he personally seems to have found particularly annoying was the fact that (at least) one of the works he employed in composing his gave a rather lengthy explanation as to Slavic languages being allegedly an offshoot of Indo-Aryan ones; as for Germanic ones, I don't recall them even being mentioned there at all; then again, my memory is far from perfect, and one authors' argument is not indisputable. – Lucian Oct 19 '20 at 03:41
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    @Lucian Those "out-of-India" theories are indeed annoying since they are driven by ideology and not by the scientific method. – Sir Cornflakes Oct 19 '20 at 13:16
  • @Tristan, "no such intermediate nodes (at a higher level than the usual Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian nodes at least) have been reconstructed to a sufficient extent to become consensus", that being said, the question is, how has anyone made such an argument that the linked answer implied. I think "higher level" is confusing; for clarity, one has to imagine trees growing downwards in your view, which is quite the apt metaphor, if you see it as lightning that comes from field-potential, branches eraticly as the wind blows, recombines and discharges into only few ground terminals. – vectory Oct 21 '20 at 17:14
  • @vectory I didn't say they had. I was addressing a weakness of my claim that in terms of lexical isoglosses, BS was closest to Germanic. That weakness being that lexical isoglosses are insufficient to conclusively demonstrate the existence of a node – Tristan Oct 22 '20 at 09:19
  • @Tristan An answer that illustrates some isoglosses that are insufficient to justify a node but sufficient to support the claim of closeness is an acceptable answer to me. – Sir Cornflakes Oct 22 '20 at 09:23
  • @jk-ReinstateMonica just browse Kroonens Dictionary for the 'NEUR' label (viz. Northern-European) attached to lemmas that only have comparands in Baltic (maybe Slavic too, IIRC). Although, Kroonen is not a source for the claim in question, and the introduction does not expound on the labels. Maybe I will find examples. – vectory Oct 22 '20 at 15:50

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