Monday 27 August 2007

More Linguistic Ramblings


Following on from my previous post, it appears that many words in Lithuanian and Sanskrit show surprising resemblances. According to the Wikipedia article,
"the Lithuanian and Sanskrit words sūnus (son) and avis (sheep) are exactly the same, and many other word pairs differ only slightly, such as dūmas for smoke (dhumas in Sanskrit), antras for second (antaras in Sanskrit), and vilkas for wolf (vrkas in Sanskrit)."

Another of history's little surprises. Who would have thought that the Balts, for so long the last bastion of pagan belief in Europe, a nation of peasants living on the cold shores of a North European sea, should speak a language so similar to the speech of classical India and the Vedas?

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