Prussian

There are two dialects : Pomezansky (western, Marienburg and Elbing ) and Samlandian, or Sambian (eastern, Königsberg district). The Pomezansky dialect reflects the Elbing dictionary of the 14th century (802 words), three Catechisms of the 16th century were composed and printed in the Sambian dialect, representing German translations (the most developed, Enhiridion, 1561 , translated by Martin Luther 's Small Catechism) same The question of how the catechisms reflect the Prussian speech of informants and how distorted it is by translators, scribes and printers is debatable. By the medieval authors, in addition to the Pomizans and Sambians, 9 more Prussian tribes probably had their own dialects for others, but nothing remained of them.

Prussian was spoken in the southeastern Baltic , east of the Vistula . The area of ​​Prussian after the wars of the XIII - XV centuries that took place on this territory broke up into a number of small areas. From the beginning of the 17th century, the language gradually began to die out even in the last traditional areas (there is a record of the death of “the last old man who lived on the Curonian Spit and who knew Prussian” in 1677 ), the descendants of the Prussians by the beginning of the 18th century completely switched to Low German (sometimes some elements of the Prussian substrate in vocabulary). Very few written monuments of the Prussian language have survived, many of them reflect the strong influence of the Polish and German languages. Toponymy and anthroponymics , as well as Prussian borrowings and substrate elements in neighboring languages ​​( German , Polish , Western Lithuanian , Belarusian ), provide some additional insights into the Prussian language.

Among the sources of the Prussian language that have come down to us is the Basel fragment, which was accidentally discovered in the 1970s (XIV century, after 1369), and is considered the oldest Baltic text. This is a comic epigram written perhaps by Charles the Prussian at Charles University in Prague :

Usually the text is interpreted as: “Hello, sir! You are not a good comrade / father (?) If you want to drink, but you don’t want to give money. ”

Currently, there is a movement in the Kaliningrad region, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia associated with the name of Mikkels Klussis , to restore the (artificial) “Novoprusky language” both on the basis of the available information about Prussian and taking into account the German dialects of Prussia, which may preserved Prussian linguistic facts unknown from traditional sources ^[2] .

Of the current living languages, Prussian is closest to Lithuanian and Latvian.

In some respects, the Prussian language reveals a special proximity to the Slavic languages : these include general structural features in the field of morphology (in particular, the nominal declension).

Phonetics and phonology

For the Prussian phonetics are characteristic:

• the opposition of vowels in longitude — brevity;
• relatively simple consonant system;
• free accent ;
• opposing intonation ;
• palatalization and labilization of consonants;
• mixing hissing and whistling;
• diphthongization of long vowels;
• the preservation of di , ti , turning into hissing in Latvian and Lithuanian, but the transition si into hissing;
• changing deaf and voiced - in some cases associated with the perception of the Prussian language by the Germans.

Morphology

In morphology, the five cases of the name are known (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and vocative). In the later period (to which the monuments refer), the “preposition with the accusative case” was replaced by the oblique case, and the vocative was replaced by the nominative case. In the Pomezans dialect the middle genus was lost, lost in Latvian and Lithuanian. Prussian had a distinct possessive pronouns than the Latvian and Lithuanian basis. The catechisms represent a definite and indefinite article ; the question of how much this is a living phenomenon of Prussian speech, and not a mechanical word tracing from German, is controversial. In the Prussian verb, the forms of tense are distinguished (present, past and future), there is an analytical perfect with the verb to be (apparently, the Prussian phenomenon itself), four moods, a pledge. In Prussian there was a lexicalized verbal type of the Slavic type, in particular, the pure-like prefix of the perfect type po (cf. Lithuanian pa -), but it is poorly documented in the sources.

Syntax

There is not enough information about the Prussian syntax (in view of the fact that in catechisms, the word order in most cases exactly corresponds to the German original).

Vocabulary

The vocabulary presents borrowings from Slavic languages ​​(for example, dusi - “soul”, swetan - “peace”, somukis - “castle”) and Germanic ( adder - “or”, werts - “decent”, penningas - “money”).

Until the end of the XIX century. in international linguistics it was believed that the Prussian language belonged to the Slavic subgroup of Aryan languages (this interpretation is contained, in particular, in the British Imperial Dictionary ), ^[3] however, researchers of the XX century came to the conclusion that it belonged to the Baltic languages.

• Studying Prussian on the Internet (rus.)
• Prussian language, bibliography and links (English)
• Multilingual Prussian Dictionary : Pomezan and Zamlandskie dialects
• Prūsas Tāutas Prēigara is the first newspaper in Prussian, founded in 1989.
• Western (peripheral) Baltic languages (rus.)
• Prussian unofficial Wikipedia
• Prussian Revival Dictionary