Dear Reddit Users,
I was watching a lecture on Prussia where it was mention that the word Prussia is actually of Slavic origin and that the language of Old Prussias was Slavic.
I did some reading and it looks like that the language of Old Prussians was actually a form of Baltic language rather than Slavic.
If anyone made a more thorough research on that subject and would like to say a few words about it?
Thank you
Hi- and thank you for asking such an interesting linguistic question.
Reconstructing Old Prussian is difficult, not simply because it is a dead language, but because relatively little of the language survives in written records, as well. If you are looking for a brief English summary of the Old Prussians themselves, I'd recommend Norman Davies' Vanished Kingdoms, pgs. 336-344.
The old Prussian language, as it is currently understood by linguists, fits into the West Baltic branch of Balto-Slavic trunk of the Indo-European language tree. Its closest spoken relatives are Latvian and Lithuanian. We can observe this in the language of family in Old Prussian:
English: Father/Old Prussian: towis/Latvian: Tēvs/Lithuanian:Tėvas
English: Mother/Old Prussian: mothe/Latvian: Māte/Lithuanian: Motina
English: Brother/Old Prussian: Brāti/Latvian: Brālis/Lithuanian: Brolis
English: Sister/Old Prussian: swestro/Latvian: māsas/Lithuanian: sesuo
English: Husband/Old Prussian: sallūbaiwīrins/Latvian: laulības vīrieši/Lith: santuokos vyrus
English: Daughter/Old Prussian: duckti/Latvian: Meita/Lithuanian: duktė
So, as you can see, while it is not identical, there is a connection between these three languages. For more detailed information about this connection, I would highly recommend the work of Lithuanian scholar Vytautas J. Mažiulis. You can find more about him, and links to his various published works here: