Old Prussian Language - Relation To Other Languages

Relation To Other Languages

Old Prussian was closely related to the other extinct Western Baltic languages, Curonian, Galindian and Sudovian. It is more distantly related to the surviving Eastern Baltic languages, Lithuanian and Latvian. Compare the Prussian word seme (zemē), the Latvian zeme, the Lithuanian žemė.

Old Prussian contained loanwords from Slavic languages (e.g., Old Prussian curtis "hound," just as Lithuanian kùrtas, Latvian kur̃ts come from Slavic (cf. Ukrainian хорт, khort; Polish chart; Czech chrt, ), as well as a few borrowings from German, including Gothic (e.g., Old Prussian ylo "awl," as with Lithuanian ýla, Latvian īlens) and even Scandinavian languages.

In addition to the German colonists, groups of people from Poland, Lithuania, France, Scotland, England, and Austria, found refuge in Prussia during the Protestant Reformation and thereafter. Such immigration caused a slow decline in the use of Old Prussian, as the Prussians adopted the languages of the others, particularly German, the language of the German government of Prussia. Baltic Old Prussian probably ceased to be spoken around the beginning of the 18th century due to many of its remaining speakers dying in the famines and bubonic plague epidemics harrowing the East Prussian countryside and towns from 1709 until 1711. The regional dialect of Low German spoken in Prussia (or East Prussia), Low Prussian, preserved a number of Baltic Prussian words, such as kurp, from the Old Prussian kurpi, for shoe (in contrast to the standard German Schuh).

Until the 1930s, when the Nazi government began a program of Germanization, and in 1945, when the Soviets annexed Prussia and made Old Prussian place-names illegal, one could find Old Prussian river and place names in East Prussia, like Tawe, Tawelle, and Tawelninken.