How Old are the Baltic Languages? - LexiLine Journal 281

In a message dated 8.6.2004 01:14:48 Westeuropäische Normalzeit,
bad_sand2000@yahoo.com writes:

>What does it mean that "the lexical origin of words can be
>reconstructed in the Latvian Language without recourse to any other
>source or languages. What does it mean that Latvian is an original
>language. Does this mean that all protolanguages can be
>reconstruced in the Baltic languages? Does this mean that the
>Baltic languages can be considered the Proto-World language? I am
>just curious and write back soon.

Here is my answer:

I think the Baltic languages - and this is acknowledged by mainstream linguists - are very archaic. Indeed, and here is the novelty of my claim, I find that Latvian and Lithuanian are so archaic that these languages - in my opinion - still pretty much represent the Indo-European language as much of Europe must have spoken it thousands of years ago. Take a look at a comparison of the Latvian and ancient Hittite (1500 BC) word declensions for "water" at
http://www.lexiline.com/lexiline/lexi16.htm

Moreover, I find I need no recourse to any other language to derive the roots of words - these are easily found within the language itself.

Example: Latvian "zeme" is "earth" and "zem" means "down, below".

Another example: the Latvian word "aug" meaning "grow" is a root alleged to be original in Indo-European even by the mainstream linguists and has many cognates in Latvian, e.g. "augums" meaning "stature, physical size", or "augli" meaning "fruits, the growth of the fields and the harvest", and augsts ("high, tall"). All of these can be traced to the root word aug (by the way, we have this word in English as "high" and in German as "hoch"). I need not go to Latin augere "to increase" (whence English grow) to find the root aug, it is already located in the Latvian language. Quite the contrary, Latin can go to the Latvian to find the root for augere since the actual root AUG had disappeared from Latin.

The list is endless. There is no need in Latvian to look to Greek or Latin or any other language for the roots of these words.