Old Lithuanian

[David L. White]

> What are the cases of "Old Lithuanian" nominal morphology borrowing you have
> in mind? Do you mean the ones like allative (locative case denoting
> direction towards something, e.g. tevop(i) "towards the father"), adessive
> (... denoting proximity to something, e.g. upeip(i) "by the river"), etc.?

        No.  These appear to be abstract modeling, not borrowing.  The cases
I have in mind (I am too lazy/busy to look them up) involve final /-n/ which
it has been alledged was actually borrowed from Fennic, as part of the
process of creating the new category, whatever it was .... It's in TK
somewhere.

> Would you say these are examples of pattern / model borrowing from some
> Fennic source (as it is sometimes suggested)?

        Yes.  I have heard that Latvian has a lot more of that sort of thing
than does Lithuanian, but I do not know.

> How would you describe "creeping infiltration" in this ("Old Lithuanian")
> case?

        Perhaps "marginal infiltration" would be better.  I mean where a
part, typically small, of a language's morphology is borrowed from a foreign
source.  I used "creeping" because my guess is that over time, if the two
languages remain in extensive contact, the proportion could well go up.  But
I have no actual examples where this is known. (In the case of Baltic, the
shift over to this from some sort of Fennic probably did not take that
long.)

> How can it be compared to Rumanian? What exactly is the nominal
> morphology borrowing case in Rumanian?

        Rumanian has borrowed the feminine vocative of Bulgarian.  For
better or worse, the vocative in Rumanian is obslescent, so we are losing
our example here.  But the Bulgarian element thus introduced is marginal.

Dr. David . White