Lithuanian–Ukrainian Language Parallels: Etymological Relationship and Typological Similarity

Abstract

The article aims to confirm an important hypothesis about the existence of separate parallels in the Lithuanian and Ukrainian languages. The absence of common areal boundaries of both languages with striking correspondences at different levels indicates the preservation of common lingual relics of the era of ancient contacts between speakers of Baltic and Slavonic dialects. The exclusivity of the Lithuanian-Ukrainian isoglosses, which do not extend to other languages of the Baltic and Slavonic groups of the Indo-European language family, is most likely the result of close lingual interaction between the Eastern Slavs and the ancestors of modern Lithuanians on the territory outlined by the river network of tributaries of the Dnipro in its upper reaches. Some of the relics turned out to be resistant to evolutionary processes, due to which they “survived” to our time as part of the descendant languages of ancient dialects. Preliminary data collection and linguistic analysis show that very close structural-etymological encounters are presented at several levels of the Lithuanian and Ukrainian language systems, namely, lexical, word formation and textual (phrases with a genetically common composition). The authors include typologically very close textual analogies at the phraseological level among the evidence of the development of joint innovations introduced by the ancestors of the speakers of Lithuanian and Ukrainian speech, which are probably based on common semantic-semiotic models generated by common cultural experiences of the two ethnic groups in the process of contacts.