Old Prussian language


Old Prussian was a Western Baltic language belonging to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European languages, once spoken by the Old Prussians, the Baltic peoples of the Prussian region. The language is called Old Prussian to avoid confusion with the German dialects of Low Prussian and High Prussian and with the adjective Prussian as it relates to the later German state. Old Prussian began to be written down in the Latin alphabet in about the 13th century, and a small amount of literature in the language survives.

Original territory

In addition to Prussia proper, the original territory of the Old Prussians might have included eastern parts of Pomerelia. The language might have also been spoken much further east and south in what became Polesia and part of Podlasie, with the conquests by Rus and Poles starting in the 10th century and the German colonisation of the area that began in the 12th century.

Relation to other languages

Old Prussian was closely related to the other extinct Western Baltic languages, namely Curonian, Galindian and Sudovian. It is related to the Eastern Baltic languages such as Lithuanian and Latvian, and more distantly related to Slavic. Compare the words for "land": Old Prussian semmē, земля́, zeme and žemė.
Old Prussian contained loanwords from Slavic languages, as well as a few borrowings from Germanic, including from Gothic and from Scandinavian languages.

Decline

With the conquest of the Old Prussian territory by the Teutonic Knights in the 13th century, and the subsequent influx of Polish, Lithuanian and especially German speakers, Old Prussian experienced a 400 year-long decline as an "oppressed language of an oppressed population". Groups of people from Germany, Poland, Lithuania, France, Scotland, England, and Austria found refuge in Prussia during the Protestant Reformation and thereafter. Old Prussian ceased to be spoken probably around the beginning of the 18th century, due to many of its remaining speakers dying in the famines and bubonic plague epidemics which harrowed the East Prussian countryside and towns from 1709 until 1711. The Germanic regional dialect of Low German spoken in Prussia, called Low Prussian, preserved a number of Baltic Prussian words, such as kurp, from the Old Prussian kurpi, for shoe in contrast to common Low German Schoh.
Before the 1930s, when Nazi Germany began a program of Germanisation, one could find Old Prussian river- and place-names there, such as Tawe and Tawellningken.

Sample texts

Versions of the Lord's Prayer

Lord's Prayer after Simon Grunau
Lord's Prayer after Prätorius
Lord's Prayer in Old Prussian
Lord's Prayer in Lithuanian dialect of Insterburg
Lord's Prayer in Lithuanian dialect of Nadruvia, corrupted

A list of remains of Old Prussian

  • Prussian-language geographical names within the territory of Prussia. Georg Gerullis undertook the first basic study of these names in Die altpreußischen Ortsnamen, written and published with the help of Walter de Gruyter, in 1922.
  • Prussian personal names.
  • Separate words found in various historical documents.
  • Vernacularisms in the German dialects of East and West Prussia, as well as words of Old Curonian origin in Latvian and West-Baltic vernacularisms in Lithuanian and Belarusian.
  • The so-called Basel Epigram, the oldest written Prussian sentence. It reads:
This jocular inscription was most probably made by a Prussian student studying in Prague ; found by Stephen McCluskey in manuscript MS F.V.2, fol. 63r, stored in the Basel University library.
  • Various fragmentary texts:
Recorded in several versions by Hieronymus Maletius in Sudovian Nook in the middle of the 16th century, as noted by Vytautas Mažiulis, are:
  • #Beigeite beygeyte peckolle
  • #Kails naussen gnigethe
  • #Kails poskails ains par antres – a drinking toast, reconstructed as Kaīls pas kaīls, aīns per āntran
  • #Kellewesze perioth, Kellewesze perioth
  • #Ocho moy myle schwante panicke – also recorded as O hoho Moi mile swente Pannike, O ho hu Mey mile swenthe paniko, O mues miles schwante Panick
  • A manuscript fragment of the first words of the Pater Noster in Prussian, from the beginning of the 15th century: Towe Nüsze kås esse andangonsün swyntins.
  • 100 words of the Vocabulary by friar Simon Grunau, a historian of the Teutonic Knights, written in his Preussische Chronik. Apart from those words Grunau also recorded an expression sta nossen rickie, nossen rickie.
  • The so-called Elbing Vocabulary, which consists of 802 thematically sorted words and their German equivalents. Peter Holcwesscher from Marienburg copied the manuscript around 1400; the original dates from the beginning of the 14th or the end of the 13th century. It was found in 1825 by Fr Neumann among other manuscripts acquired by him from the heritage of the Elbing merchant A. Grübnau; it was thus dubbed the Codex Neumannianus.
  • The three Catechisms printed in Königsberg in 1545, 1545, and 1561 respectively. The first two consist of only six pages of text in Old Prussian – the second one being a correction of the first into another Old Prussian dialect. The third catechism, or Enchiridion, consists of 132 pages of text, and is a translation of Luther's Small Catechism by a German cleric called Abel Will, with his Prussian assistant Paul Megott. Will himself knew little or no Old Prussian, and his Prussian interpreter was probably illiterate, but according to Will spoke Old Prussian quite well. The text itself is mainly a word-for-word translation, and Will phonetically recorded Megott's oral translation. Because of this, the Enchiridion exhibits many irregularities, such as the lack of case agreement in phrases involving an article and a noun, which followed word-for-word German originals as opposed to native Old Prussian syntax.
  • Commonly thought of as Prussian, but probably actually Lithuanian :
  • # An adage of 1583, Dewes does dantes, Dewes does geitka: the form does in the second instance corresponds to Lithuanian future tense duos
  • # Trencke, trencke!

    Grammar

With other remains being merely word lists, the grammar of Old Prussian is reconstructed chiefly on the basis of the three Catechisms. There is no consensus on the number of cases that Old Prussian had, and at least four can be determined with certainty: nominative, genitive, accusative and dative, with different desinences. There are traces of a vocative case, such as in the phrase O Deiwe Rikijs "O God the Lord", reflecting the inherited PIE vocative ending *. There was a definite article ; three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter, and two numbers: singular and plural. Declensional classes were a-stems, ā-stems, ē-stems, i-stems, u-stems, ī/jā-stems, jā/ijā-stems and consonant-stems. Present, future and past tense are attested, as well as optative forms, infinitive, and four participles.

Phonology

The following description is based on the phonological analysis by Schmalstieg :

Consonants

  • It is said that palato-alveolar fricatives // could have been recorded as well.
  • There is said to have existed palatalization among all of the consonant sounds except for // and possibly for // and //.
  • The sounds // and // also existed in Old Prussian, but are disputed whether they are native to the language.

    Vowels

FrontBack
Mid
Open

  • // may have also been realized as a mid-back diphthong .

    Revived Old Prussian

A few linguists and philologists are involved in reviving a reconstructed form of the language from Luther's catechisms, the Elbing Vocabulary, place names, and Prussian loanwords in the Low Prussian dialect of German. Several dozen people use the language in Lithuania, Kaliningrad, and Poland, including a few children who are natively bilingual.
The Prusaspirā Society has published their translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince. The book was translated by Piotr Szatkowski and released in 2015. The other efforts of Baltic Prussian societies include the development of online dictionaries, learning apps and games. There also have been several attempts to produce music with lyrics written in the revived Baltic Prussian language, most notably in the Kaliningrad Oblast by Romowe Rikoito, Kellan and Āustras Laīwan, but also in Lithuania by Kūlgrinda in their 2005 album Prūsų Giesmės, and in Latvia by Rasa Ensemble in 1988 and Valdis Muktupāvels in his 2005 oratorio "Pārcēlātājs Pontifex" featuring several parts sung in Prussian.
Important in this revival was Vytautas Mažiulis, who died on 11 April 2009, and his pupil Letas Palmaitis, leader of the experiment and author of the website Prussian Reconstructions. Two late contributors were Prāncis Arellis, Lithuania, and Dailūns Russinis, Latvia. After them, Twankstas Glabbis from Kaliningrad oblast and Nērtiks Pamedīns from East-Prussia, now Polish Warmia-Mazuria actively joined.

Literature

  • Georg Heinrich Ferdinand Nesselmann, , Königsberg, 1871.
  • Georg Heinrich Ferdinand Nesselmann, , Berlin, 1873.
  • E. Berneker, Die preussische Sprache, Strassburg, 1896.
  • R. Trautmann, , Göttingen, 1910.
  • Wijk, Nicolaas van, , Haag, 1918.
  • G. Gerullis, Die altpreussischen Ortsnamen, Berlin-Leipzig, 1922.
  • G. Gerullis, Georg: Zur Sprache der Sudauer-Jadwinger, in Festschrift A. Bezzenberger, Göttingen 1927
  • R. Trautmann, Die altpreussischen Personnennamen, Göttingen, 1925.
  • J. Endzelīns, Senprūšu valoda. – Gr. Darbu izlase, IV sēj., 2. daļa, Rīga, 1982. 9.-351. lpp.
  • L. Kilian: Zu Herkunft und Sprache der Prußen Wörterbuch Deutsch–Prußisch, Bonn 1980
  • J. S. Vater: , Katechismus, Braunschweig 1821/Wiesbaden 1966
  • J. S. Vater: Mithridates oder allgemeine Sprachenkunde mit dem Vater Unser als Sprachprobe, Berlin 1809
  • V. Mažiulis, Prūsų kalbos paminklai, Vilnius, t. I 1966, t. II 1981.
  • W. R. Schmalstieg, An Old Prussian Grammar, University Park and London, 1974.
  • W. R. Schmalstieg, Studies in Old Prussian, University Park and London, 1976.
  • V. Toporov, Prusskij jazyk: Slovar', A – L, Moskva, 1975–1990.
  • V. Mažiulis, Prūsų kalbos etimologijos žodynas, Vilnius, t. I-IV, 1988–1997.
  • M. Biolik, Zuflüsse zur Ostsee zwischen unterer Weichsel und Pregel, Stuttgart, 1989.
  • R. Przybytek, Ortsnamen baltischer Herkunft im südlichen Teil Ostpreussens, Stuttgart, 1993.
  • M. Biolik, Die Namen der stehenden Gewässer im Zuflussgebiet des Pregel, Stuttgart, 1993.
  • M. Biolik, Die Namen der fließenden Gewässer im Flussgebiet des Pregel, Stuttgart, 1996.
  • G. Blažienė, Die baltischen Ortsnamen in Samland, Stuttgart, 2000.
  • R. Przybytek, Hydronymia Europaea, Ortsnamen baltischer Herkunft im südlichen Teil Ostpreußens, Stuttgart 1993
  • A. Kaukienė, Prūsų kalba, Klaipėda, 2002.
  • V. Mažiulis, Prūsų kalbos istorinė gramatika, Vilnius, 2004.
  • LEXICON BORVSSICVM VETVS. Concordantia et lexicon inversum. / Bibliotheca Klossiana I, Universitas Vytauti Magni, Kaunas, 2007.
  • OLD PRUSSIAN WRITTEN MONUMENTS. Facsimile, Transliteration, Reconstruction, Comments. / Bibliotheca Klossiana II, Universitas Vytauti Magni / Lithuanians' World Center, Kaunas, 2007.
  • V. Rinkevičius, . 2015.