This is a report of a joint conference of Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies (AABS) and the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies (SASS) held at Yale University in 2014. The report features the papers/talks on Baltic linguistics, ranging from cultural aspects of the languages and lexicographic matters to linguistic aspects such as etymology and word formation.
The 9th Conference on Baltic Studies in Europe, Transitions, Visions andBeyond, was organized by the Center for Baltic and East European Studiesat Södertörn University, and held in Stockholm, 12–15 June 2011. Theconference attracted over 200 participants from all over the world, and thepanel sessions covered nearly all aspects of Baltic Studies, including linguistics,history, political studies, economics, media, culture, literature and the arts.Three key-note speakers were featured; Bengt Jacobsson (Södertörn) openedthe conference with the paper “Changes in Governance: Europeanization andthe Baltic States”, on the second day Valdis Muktupāvels (Riga) talked aboutlocal, regional and continental components of national musical culture, andon the last day, Tiina Kirss (Tallinn) addressed post-Soviet memory work inher talk “Writing Baltic Lives: Continuities and Caesuras”.In the following, I will attempt to briefly summarize the main points of the papers in the linguistic section, which was organized by Raimo Raag(Uppsala) and Pēteris Vanags (Stockholm).
Många av världens språk är besläktade, vissa närmare än andra. Man brukar tala om olika språkfamiljer, varav den största är den indoeuropeiska. Dit hör såväl svenskan som flertalet europeiska språk, men även utomeuropeiska språk som hindi och persiska. Många ord har liknande ljudbild. Tänk på ett ord som näsa som ju heter nose på engelska, Nase på tyska, nos på ryska, nosis på litauiska, nasus på latin och så vidare. När man undersöker de indoeuropeiska språken i detalj visar det sig dessutom att de har en liknande struktur. Liksom orden går strukturen tillbaka på ett gemensamt ursprung.
From a synchronic point of view, the various accentuation systems found in the Baltic and Slavic languages differ considerably from each other. We find languages with free accent and languages with fixed accent, languages with and without syllabic tones, and languages with and without a distinction between short and long vowels. Yet despite the apparent diversity in the attested Baltic and Slavic languages, the sources from which these languages have developed - the reconstructed languages referred to as Proto-Baltic and Proto-Slavic respectively - seem to have had very similar accentuation systems. The prehistory and development of the Baltic and Slavic accentuation systems is the main topic of this book, which contains sixteen articles on Baltic and Slavic accentology written by some of the world's leading specialists in this field.