REVIEWS

ON THE SOUTHEASTERN BORDER OF THE ANCIENT BALTIC TERRITORY

B. V. Sedov, Balto-Iranian Contact on the Left Bank of the Dnieper, “Soviet Archaeology,” 1965, No. 4, pp. 52—62.

V. Toporov and O. Trubachev’s monograph “A Linguistic Analysis of the Hydronyms of the Upper Dnieper Region,” published in 1962¹, received wide acclaim in our country and abroad. This response was not limited to numerous reviews and annotations; it was much more significant. The monograph became the subject of substantive discussion and debate, and provided a stimulus for further searches and research². It is still too early to judge whether future research will confirm all the ideas and hypotheses advanced in the monograph; however, its most important conclusions (the presence of Baltic hydronyms as far as the Seim basin and the relative chronology of Baltic and Slavic hydronyms in the Upper Dnieper region) remain indisputable.

One of the most important and recent conclusions of V. Toporov and O. Trubachev’s monograph was the determination of the southeastern boundary of the distribution of Baltic hydronyms and the identification of direct linguistic contacts between the Balts and Iranians. This bold conclusion substantially revised M. Vasmer’s assertion that Slavic tribes had separated the Balts and Iranians by the last centuries of the first millennium BCE. The material culture separating the northern Iranians from the southern Balts is generally called the Yukhnovo culture by archaeologists (named after a settlement). Until recent years, the Yukhnovo culture had been unanimously attributed to

¹ V. N. Toporov, O. N. Trubachev, Linguistic Analysis of the Hydronyms of the Upper Dnieper Region, Moscow, 1962.

² For example, at the two large-scale toponymy conferences held after the publication of the monograph “A Linguistic Analysis of the Hydronyms of the Upper Dnieper Region,” the authors of at least several papers addressing the problem of the Baltic place-name substratum also drew on that monograph; cf. Ф. И. Гордеев, К вопросу о происхождении гидронима Москва, in: Всесоюзная конференция по топонимике СССР (Тезисы докладов и сообщений), Ленинград, 1965, p. 100; А. С. Стрыжак, Основные гидронимические ареалы Средне-поднепровского левобережья, ibid., p. 131; В. А. Жучкевич, Гидронимические исследования и историко-географическая реконструкция топонимического ландшафта, in: III республиканська ономастична (гідронімічна) конференція (тези), Київ, 1965, p. 31; В. П. Петров, Балтика і славіка в гідронімії України, ibid., p. 115.

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the Slavs. Perhaps the first to question the Slavic affiliation of this culture was H. Mora, suspecting that it might be Baltic. P. Tretyakov, one of the most prominent archaeologists in our country, had regarded the Yukhnovo culture as Slavic, but later changed his view (in 1963). The problem of the ethnic affiliation of the Yukhnovo culture, however, was not thereby resolved. Archaeologist V. Sedov addresses this problem using linguistic data, especially toponymic evidence, in his article “On Balto-Iranian Contacts on the Left Bank of the Dnieper”³. Without delving into the details of the argument, we can mention the most important conclusions, which will be of considerable help to linguists interested in Balto-Iranian and Balto-Slavic linguistic relations. First of all, the author argues that the Yukhnovo culture is undoubtedly Baltic. The author writes: “A detailed comparison of the archaeological and toponymic maps of the Early Iron Age demonstrates the validity of the conclusion that most Iranianisms in the Seim region were left by other tribes..., and suggests that a large proportion of the hydronyms of Baltic origin in the Seim basin have survived from the time when tribes of the Yukhnovo culture lived here” (p. 57).

This conclusion, based on a careful comparative analysis of material-culture remains in the Seim basin, fully confirms V. Toporov and O. Trubachev’s hypothesis that direct contacts between the Baltic and Iranian languages existed in the Seim basin. Linguists, however, will perhaps be most interested in the date of the Balto-Iranian contacts established in V. Sedov’s article. As is well known, this date could not be established on the basis of linguistic evidence alone (linguistic analysis of hydronyms can at best indicate only the relative chronology of these contacts). In V. Sedov’s view, the Balts brought the Yukhnovo culture to the Seim region around the fifth–fourth centuries BCE. The Balts most likely moved into the Seim region from the north, perhaps from the Desna basin. Thus, contacts between the Baltic and Iranian languages must have begun around the fifth–fourth centuries BCE. V. Sedov also attempts to determine how long the Balto-Iranian contacts may have lasted. In his view, contacts that began around the fifth–fourth centuries BCE may have continued for some four or five centuries, that is, until the beginning of our era. The Iranian (Scythian) tribes of the Seim region most likely did not withdraw when the Balts arrived there from the north, but were assimilated by the newcomers before the beginning of our era.

From what has been said here (even if some of these claims are revised in the future), it is clear that the Seim basin was indeed a site of direct contact between the Baltic and Iranian languages. Moreover, there can now be no doubt that the Balts of the Seim region—the successors of the Yukhnovo culture—were a peripheral group of the southern Balts, who arrived there later from the north and apparently disappeared earlier than the other Dnieper Balts.

Thus V. Sedov’s article “On Balto-Iranian Contacts on the Left Bank of the Dnieper,” whose appearance may have been prompted in part by the above-mentioned conclusion of V. Toporov and O. Trubachev’s monograph concerning direct linguistic contacts between the Balts and Iranians in the Seim basin, not only confirmed that conclusion through an analysis of archaeological data, but also established the Balto-

³ V. Sedov has also written other works related to the Baltic past: В. В. Седов, Следы восточнобалтийского погребального обряда в курганах древней Руси, “Soviet Archaeology,” 1961, No. 2, pp. 103—121; В. В. Седов, Курганы летягов, ibid., 1964, No. 4, pp. 36—51, etc.

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the approximate date of Iranian contacts. From a methodological point of view, this is very important, since toponymy and archaeology, working together, can provide very important information about the earliest period in the history of peoples. In this case, what is interesting is that toponymy played the role of a scout, following whose tracks researchers in other fields not only avoided error but also confirmed the preliminary conclusions of toponymy.

A. Vanagas

OUTLINE OF THE HISTORY OF SLAVIC MORPHOLOGY

П. С. Кузнецов, Очерки по морфологии праславянского языка, Москва, 1961, 144 p.

P. Kuznetsov, a prominent specialist in Slavic languages, examines in his book the formation of the Proto-Slavic nominal and verbal inflectional systems and touches on certain aspects of their development during the Proto-Slavic period. The author analyzes linguistic phenomena by relating them to one another. This enables him to trace quite successfully the causes that gave rise to the phenomena under analysis.

The formation and development of the Proto-Slavic morphological system cannot be understood without the Baltic languages. In P. Kuznetsov’s book, the analysis of Baltic-language data occupies a very important place. Of all the Indo-European languages, the Proto-Baltic morphological system is the closest to the Slavic morphological system. For this reason, P. Kuznetsov, perhaps somewhat overstating this closeness, uses the term “common Balto-Slavic language” (общеславянобалтийский язык). The “common Balto-Slavic language” (or proto-language) has not been reconstructed in either phonetics or morphology. Its reconstruction also eluded the author of the book under review. The morphological systems of the Baltic and Slavic languages are similar, but not identical. For example, the nominal inflection systems contain a number of endings that P. Kuznetsov does not consider to have derived from a single source: gen. sg. Lithuanian rank-os (where -os comes from *-as) and Old Church Slavonic žen-y (where P. Kuznetsov derives -y from *-om+-s); instr. sg. Lithuanian sūnu-mi (where -mi most likely comes from *-mī; this is indicated by Samogitian -mi) and Old Church Slavonic rabo-mъ (where -mъ comes from *-mi); gen. pl. Lithuanian vilk-ų (where -ų comes from *-ōn) and Old Church Slavonic rab-ъ (where -ъ comes from *-on, since in Slavic *-ōn would have yielded -ą); instr. pl. Lithuanian vilk-ais (where -ais comes from *-ōis) and Old Church Slavonic rab-y (-y could not have arisen phonetically from *-ōis). The inflectional differences listed here may be very ancient, inherited from the Indo-European linguistic community. On the whole, nominal inflection in the Baltic and Slavic languages is very similar, but this similarity did not arise from shared innovations in the Baltic and Slavic languages; rather, the languages inherited it from the Indo-European linguistic community. With this in mind, the term “common Balto-Slavic language” seems unjustified.

On reading the book, it becomes clear that the author intends to find a common basis for many facts and phenomena in Baltic and Slavic morphology, even where they differ. For example, P. Kuznetsov argues (though very cautiously) that “the common

¹ K. Būga, Rinktiniai raštai, I, Vilnius, 1958, p. 566 (išnaša).

16. Lietuvių kalbos gramatinė sandara

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