[Challange] more archaic European languages

What should happen for Romance and Germanic languages spoken in W. Europe to retain much more inflectional morphology from their ancestral languages (Latin and Proto-Germanic) in the same way as Balto-Slavic languages did? Possible...?

Baltic and Slavic are the most conservative branch of Indo-European family, retaining much of the morphology of the Proto Indo-European language. Modern Lithuanian grammar is comparable to that of Sanskrit and Hoemric Greek.
 
Geography did help a lot : Baltic regions were quite isolated due to physical features (Baltic region being a collection of swamps) or human geography (being out of most of the ancient trade and migration roads).
At the point where these were no longer sufficient obstacles, differences prevented smooth cultural exchanges, and it grew from it even between Baltic peoples themselves.

Of course, it's a bit of an oversimplification, but isolation is the key there. At the point where Romance and Germanic languages get differenciated (VIIth/Xth centuries) you already have too much exchange structures and contacts to prevent a real archaisation as you require.

A less successful IE expansion, with a branch of PIE giving birth to a western equivalent of Tokarian, getting bogged down in Scandinavia or Frisia could be interesting possibilityes but History would be pretty much unreckognizable.

From what I remember, Old Armenian may have kept its lot of archaism itself, on nominal morphology. It may be a better candidate, but would ask to take a stance on the history of Armenian language.
Assuming a northern Black Sea origin, we may reshuffle a bit history in order to have Proto-Armenians getting more isolated than IOTL (maybe northern Caucasus?)

A wild tought, tough.
 
Of course, it's a bit of an oversimplification, but isolation is the key there. At the point where Romance and Germanic languages get differenciated (VIIth/Xth centuries) you already have too much exchange structures and contacts to prevent a real archaisation as you require.

OTOH Slavic has lots of archaic features but it was one common linguistic space since first attested and differentiated very late. It was also athwart many major trade routes. I'm not sure how deep in history you need to go for this isolation factor to be decisive?

Like, back in the Iron Age?
 
OTOH Slavic has lots of archaic features but it was one common linguistic space since first attested and differentiated very late.
That said, the differenciation of Proto-Slavic may owes a lot to the Scythian and (later Germanic) interactions with Eastern Europe. It seems that an important part of "identitarian" words (ritual and/or political) comes from these speeches.

Or at least, it's what I understood from the question.

I'm not sure how deep in history you need to go for this isolation factor to be decisive?
I'd think it's less isolation itself than continuous relative isolation. Would, for any reason, Baltic Sea trade having blossomed much earlier, I'd think that a "Proto-Baltic" continuum may have differenciated first rather than Slavic, for exemple.
 
Any of the following can slow down language change:

1. Literacy, especially mass literacy.
2. Low population density, but some sense of shared culture over a large enough area to contain many villages.
3. Low urbanization.

Basically, I'm describing Iceland.

A lot also depends on how phonology and morphology interact. In Germanic languages, and to a lesser extent in Romance languages, the stress accent encourages dropping final syllables, which encode inflectional morphology. This led most Germanic languages, and to a lesser extent the Romance languages, to level their case systems and verbal conjugations, and become more analytic. Greek and the Slavic languages did not undergo this process as extensively, and maintain a three-gender system with multiple cases.
 
It varies. While in (most) Romance languages nominal morphology underwent extreme simplification, verbal morphology did not. The passive voice disappeared completely and a number of participles were dropped. Other than this, most Romance languages have a very simialr amount of verbal forms to Latin.

You can look at other language families - Turkic languages are a good example of a language family that in spite of extensive contacts with ohter peoples *Arabs, Iranians, Greeks, Armenians, Chinese etc). remained very conservative gramatically
 
When it comes to Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, I think the best would be to let the Black death be less devastating.
 
When it comes to Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, I think the best would be to let the Black death be less devastating.
These three could easily have been as inflectional as Icelandic if the ones creating the standard languages had decided to do so. Getting to be more archaic than that, and have a language like the oldest inscriptions (AD 200-400) would need something else, perhaps a Holy Book written at that time.
 
These three could easily have been as inflectional as Icelandic if the ones creating the standard languages had decided to do so. Getting to be more archaic than that, and have a language like the oldest inscriptions (AD 200-400) would need something else, perhaps a Holy Book written at that time.

I think an important reason why those langauges changed so much, apart from the Black death, was that they had a lot of contact with Low German. This is especially true for the larger towns/cities. The language was simplified in the process of communicating with the Germans. Sure, some dialects changed less than others. I am no expert when it comes to dialects, but as far as I understand, at least some Norwegian dialects have the dative case and in Sweden you have some varieties of Scandinavian that must be considered a separate Language, as they are mutually intelligble with neither Swedish nor Norwegian/Danish. Still, if the language should be preserved in a way similar to Icelandic, you would need an early POD, or alternatively the elite would have to learn the language from scratch. Norwegian Landsmaal was more conservative than Swedish, Danish and the Riksmaal variant of Norwegian, but it still was far from Old Norse.
 
It varies. While in (most) Romance languages nominal morphology underwent extreme simplification, verbal morphology did not. The passive voice disappeared completely and a number of participles were dropped. Other than this, most Romance languages have a very simialr amount of verbal forms to Latin.

The synthetic future tense disappeared and was replaced by an analytic construction, which has since fused and turned into a new synthetic tense, which in French is already losing toward a new analytic construction: amabo -> amare habeo -> j'aimerai -> je vais aimer. In French the use of pronouns became mandatory as most inflections fell together, and the synthetic past tense has been relegated to literary registers.

You can look at other language families - Turkic languages are a good example of a language family that in spite of extensive contacts with ohter peoples *Arabs, Iranians, Greeks, Armenians, Chinese etc). remained very conservative gramatically

Turkic languages are agglutinative rather than fusional. This means that even when sound shifts cause affixes to erode, they get restored by analogy. On top of that, Turkic languages do not have the strong stress accent of Germanic languages or even Latin.

I think an important reason why those langauges changed so much, apart from the Black death, was that they had a lot of contact with Low German. This is especially true for the larger towns/cities. The language was simplified in the process of communicating with the Germans. Sure, some dialects changed less than others. I am no expert when it comes to dialects, but as far as I understand, at least some Norwegian dialects have the dative case and in Sweden you have some varieties of Scandinavian that must be considered a separate Language, as they are mutually intelligble with neither Swedish nor Norwegian/Danish. Still, if the language should be preserved in a way similar to Icelandic, you would need an early POD, or alternatively the elite would have to learn the language from scratch. Norwegian Landsmaal was more conservative than Swedish, Danish and the Riksmaal variant of Norwegian, but it still was far from Old Norse.

It wasn't just Low German, but also interdialectical borrowing. When you have several innovative urban centers in a Germanic language, what happens is that each center reduces unstressed vowels in a different way, merging different sets of affixes. As a result, the only way people from different cities can understand each other is to ignore these affixes and invent new analytic ways of showing syntactic role. This didn't happen in Icelandic because Iceland did not have cities.

Contact with Low German may have accelerated this trend, in the same sense that contact with Old Norse may have accelerated this trend in late Old English, but it didn't by itself cause it. After all, there was extensive contact between various Italian varieties (and between Italian and French), and yet this process did not happen in Italian after the initial transition from Vulgar Latin.

The Black Death... eh. It affected practically all of Europe and the Middle East. Scandinavia isn't special.
 

Ramontxo

Donor
When God made the world, He found the Basques living in *the Basque Country" .*.. And using "Euskera". Quite an old (archaic) European language.

*"Basque Country" in Basque is "Euskal Herria" and "Eus/zkadi" is Basque "Homeland", "Nation" Using one or another term (and even spelling "Euz/skadi with "z" or "s") has deep political meanings...
To tell the truth spelling Euzkadi with "Z" is only for very (very) "Sabininian" members of the "EAJ/PNV" and we are getting old an few...
 
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