Old Prussian
Prūsiskai[1][2]: 387
Catechism in Old Prussian from 1545
Region	Prussia
Ethnicity	Baltic Prussians
Extinct	Early 18th century[3]
Language family	Indo-European Balto-Slavic Baltic West Baltic Old Prussian
Writing system	Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-3	prg
Linguist List	prg.html
Glottolog	prus1238
Linguasphere	54-AAC-a
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Old Prussian was a West Baltic language belonging to the Baltic branch of the Indo-European languages, which was once spoken by the Old Prussians, the Baltic peoples of the Prussian region. The language is called Old Prussian to avoid confusion with the German dialects of Low Prussian and High Prussian and with the adjective Prussian as it relates to the later German state. Old Prussian began to be written down in the Latin alphabet in about the 13th century, and a small amount of literature in the language survives.

Classification and relation to other languages

Old Prussian is an Indo-European language belonging to the Baltic branch. It is considered to be a Western Baltic language.

Old Prussian was closely related to the other extinct West Baltic languages, namely Sudovian, West Galindian^[4] and possibly Skalvian and Old Curonian.^{[5]: 33 [6]} Other linguists consider Western Galindian and Skalvian to be Prussian dialects.^[7]: 15

It is related to the East Baltic languages such as Lithuanian and Latvian, and more distantly related to Slavic. Compare the words for 'land': Old Prussian semmē , Latvian: zeme, Lithuanian: žemė, Russian: земля́, (zemljá) and Polish: ziemia.^{[citation needed]}

Old Prussian had loanwords from Slavic languages (e.g., Old Prussian curtis 'hound', like Lithuanian kùrtas and Latvian kur̃ts, cognate with Slavic (compare Ukrainian: хорт, khort; Polish: chart; Czech: chrt)), as well as a few borrowings from Germanic, including from Gothic (e.g., Old Prussian ylo 'awl' as with Lithuanian ýla, Latvian īlens) and from Scandinavian languages.^[8]

Influence on other languages

Germanic

The Low German language spoken in Prussia (or West Prussia and East Prussia), called Low Prussian (cf. High Prussian, High German),^[9] preserved a number of Baltic Prussian words, such as Kurp, from the Old Prussian kurpe, for shoe in contrast to common Low German: Schoh (Standard German Schuh),^[10] as did the High Prussian Oberland subdialect.^[11]

Until the 1938 changing of place names in East Prussia, Old Prussian river- and place-names, such as Tawe and Tawellningken, could still be found.^{[12][13][14]: 137}

Polish

One of the hypotheses regarding the origin of mazurzenie – a phonological merger of dentialveolar and postalveolar sibilants in many Polish dialects – states that it originated as a feature of Polonized Old Prussians in Masuria (see Masurian dialects) and spread from there.^[15]

History

Original territory

In addition to Prussia proper, the original territory of the Old Prussians may have included eastern parts of Pomerelia (some parts of the region east of the Vistula River). The language may also have been spoken much further east and south in what became Polesia and part of Podlasie, before conquests by Rus and Poles starting in the 10th century and the German colonisation of the area starting in the 12th century.^{[5]: 23 [16]: 324}

Decline

With the conquest of the Old Prussian territory by the Teutonic Knights in the 13th century, and the subsequent influx of Polish, Lithuanian and especially German speakers, Old Prussian experienced a 400-year-long decline as an "oppressed language of an oppressed population".^[17]: VII Groups of people from Germany, Poland,^[18]: 115 Lithuania, Scotland,^[19] England,^[20] and Austria (see Salzburg Protestants) found refuge in Prussia during the Protestant Reformation and thereafter.^[21]: 1 Old Prussian ceased to be spoken probably around the beginning of the 18th century,^[3] because many of its remaining speakers died in the famines and the bubonic plague outbreak which harrowed the East Prussian countryside and towns from 1709 until 1711.^[22]

Revitalization

In the 1980s, Soviet linguists Vladimir Toporov and Vytautas Mažiulis started reconstructing the Prussian language as a scientific project and a humanitarian gesture. Some enthusiasts thereafter began to revive the language based on their reconstruction.^{[21]: 3–4}

Most current speakers live in Germany, Poland, Lithuania and Kaliningrad (Russia). Additionally, a few children are native in Revived Prussian.^{[21]: 4–7 [23]}

Today, there are websites, online dictionaries, learning apps and games for Revived Prussian, and one children's book – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince – was translated into Revived Prussian by Piotr Szatkowski (Pīteris Šātkis) and published by the Prusaspirā Society in 2015.^{[21]: 4–7 [23]} Moreover, some bands use Revived Prussian, most notably in the Kaliningrad Oblast by the bands Romowe Rikoito,^[24] Kellan^[25] and Āustras Laīwan, as well as in Lithuania by Kūlgrinda on their 2005 album Prūsų Giesmės ('Prussian Hymns'),^[26] and Latvia by Rasa Ensemble in 1988^[27] and Valdis Muktupāvels in his 2005 oratorio "Pārcēlātājs Pontifex" featuring several parts sung in Prussian.^[28]

Dialects

The Elbing Vocabulary and the Catechisms display systematical differences in phonology, vocabulary and grammar. Some scholars postulate that this is due to them being recordings of different dialects:^{[17]: XXI–XXII} Pomesanian^{[7]: 25–89} and Sambian.^{[7]: 90–220}

Phonetical distinctions are: Pom. ē is Samb. ī (sweta- : swīta- 'world'); Pom. ō, Samb. ū after a labial (mōthe  : mūti 'mother') or Pom. ō, Samb. ā (tōwis : tāws 'father'; brōte : brāti 'brother'), which influences the nominative suffixes of feminine ā-stems (crauyō  : krawia 'blood'). The nominative suffixes of the masculine o-stems are weakened to -is in Pomesanian; in Sambian they are syncopated (deywis : deiws 'god').

Vocabulary differences encompass Pom. smoy (cf. Lith. žmuo) , Samb. wijrs 'man'; Pom. wayklis, Samb. soūns 'son' and Pom. samien, Samb. laucks 'field'. The neuter gender is more often found in Pomesianan than in Sambian.

Others argue that the Catechisms are written in a Yatvingized Prussian. The differences noted above could therefore be explained as being features of a different West Baltic language Yatvingian/Sudovian.^[29]

Phonology

Consonants

The Prussian language is described to have the following consonants:^{[30]: 16–28 [7]: 62}

There is said to have existed palatalization (i.e. , ) among nearly all of the consonant sounds except for /j/, and possibly for /ʃ/ and /ʒ/.^{[30]: 26 [16]: 348} Whether or not the palatalization was phonemic remains unclear.^[7]: 62

Apart from the palatalizations Proto-Baltic consonants were almost completely preserved. The only changes postulated are turning Proto-Baltic /ʃ, ʒ/ into Prussian /s, z/ and subsequently changing Proto-Baltic /sj/ into /ʃ/.^{[7]: 61–62 [16]: 348–349}

Vowels

The following description is based on the phonological analysis by Schmalstieg:^[31]

• /a, a:/ could also have been realized as
• /oː/ is not universally accepted, p.e. by Levin (1975)^[32]

Diphthongs

Schmalstieg proposes three native diphthongs:^{[30]: 19–20}

• /au/ may have also been realized as a mid-back diphthong eu after palatalized consonants.
• /ui/ occurs in the word cuylis, which is thought to be a loanword.

Grammaredit

With other remains being merely word lists, the grammar of Old Prussian is reconstructed chiefly on the basis of the three Catechisms.^[33]: ix

Nounsedit

Genderedit

Old Prussian preserved the Proto-Baltic neuter. Therefore, it had three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter).^{[34]: 41–42, 47 [35]: 40 [16]: 355–356}

Numberedit

Most scholars agree that there are two numbers, singular and plural, in Old Prussian,^{[34]: 41–42, 47 [35]: 40 [16]: 353} while some consider remnants of a dual identifiable in the existent corpus.^{[36][37][33]: 198}

Casesedit

There is no consensus on the number of cases that Old Prussian had, and at least four can be determined with certainty: nominative, genitive, accusative and dative, with different suffixes.^{[33]: 171–197 [16]: 356 [35]: 40} Most scholars agree, that there are traces of a vocative case, such as in the phrase O Deiwe Rikijs 'O God the Lord', reflecting the inherited PIE vocative ending *-e,^{[33]: 251 [7]: 109} differing from nominative forms in o-stem nouns only.^[16]: 356

Some scholars find instrumental forms,^[33]: 197 while the traditional view is that no instrumental case existed in Old Prussian.^[16]: 356 There could be some locative forms, e.g. bītai ('in the evening').^{[16]: 356 [38]}

Noun stemsedit

Declensional classes were a-stems (also called o-stems), (i)ja-stems (also called (i)jo-stems), ā-stems (feminine), ē-stems (feminine), i-stems, u-stems, and consonant-stems.^{[7]: 66–80 [35]: 41–62 [16]: 357 [30]: 42–43} Some also list ī/jā-stems as a separate stem,^{[7]: 66–80 [35]: 41–62} while others include jā-stems into ā-stems and do not mention ī-stems at all.^[30]: 37

Adjectivesedit

There were three adjective stems (a-stems, i-stems, u-stems), of which only the first agreed with the noun in gender.^{[16]: 360 [35]: 63–65}

There was a comparative and a superlative form.^{[35]: 65–66 [16]: 360–361}

Verbal morphologyedit

When it comes to verbal morphology present, future and past tense are attested, as well as optative forms (used with imperative or permissive forms of verbs), infinitive, and four participles (active/passive present/past).^{[33]: 211–233}

Orthographyedit

The orthography varies depending on the author. As the authors of many sources were themselves not proficient in Old Prussian, they wrote the words as they heard them using the orthographical conventions of their mother tongue. Zdroj:https://en.wikipedia.org?pojem=Old_Prussian
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