Balti laenude uurimine avab meie kauget minevikku
Baltic Loanwords Offering Insights into our Distant Past

Summary/Abstract: the earliest written records of Baltic as well as of Finnic languages (Estonian included) date from slightly over 500 years ago. thus the earlier stages of the development of those languages have to be investigated by using indirect methods. Here, loanword studies are especially useful. Systematic research of the lexical relations of Finnic and Baltic languages has been going on for over a century, having hitherto yielded a solid number of shorter and longer studies as well as several overviews. the results have been applied to answer some key questions of Finnic ethnogenesis. Despite the long tradition of studies, Finnic linguists have not lost their interest in the Baltic languages as a valuable source for those who would like better to understand the evolution of the Finnic languages, their early dialectal division, or the development of certain linguistic phenomena, e.g. phonetic system, and its background. the results on Baltic-Finnic contacts help us better understand the pre-Estonian period. to shed more light on the character of the contacts, the article discusses, in a more or less popular style, some key questions of the evolution of the Baltic languages.

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