Paklydusi lietuvių kalba: 1891 metų lingvistinė mįslė
Lost Lithuanian; The linguistic puzzle of 1891

Summary/Abstract: On April 2, 1891 a letter by Sydney George Holland was printed in the London newspapers The Standard and The Times. In his letter Holland told about a poor girl in Marylebone Workhouse (central London) who had arrived from Hamburg and had no documents. She spoke neither English nor any other known language. Holland gave a few words, pronounced by the girl, with the hope that one of the readers would recognize the language and would help him to identify girl’s nationality. The letter of Holland was also sent to the Norwegian linguist Johan Storm. The next day (April 3rd) The Standard and The Times printed the answers to Holland’s letter, written by William Thynne Lynn and Gustav A. Schrumpf. Both indicated that the girl spoke Lithuanian. The same conclusion was drawn by Storm. Lynn noted that he had used August Schleicher’s Handbuch der Litauischen Sprache (most likely he used the second part of it, Lesebuch und Glossar [1857]) to identify some of Holland’s words. The orthography confirms this. He identified only some of Holland’s words, written phonetically, most likely because he did not know Lithuanian himself. The orthography attests to the fact that Schrumpf had checked Holland’s words in Friedrich Kuršaitis’s Wörterbuch der Littauischen Sprache (1883). It is likely that he looked for some words in Kuršaitis’s Deutsch-Littauisches Wörterbuch (1870–1874). Storm also used certain sources to trace down Holland’s words: the grammar by Schleicher, Ferdinand Nesselmann’s Wörterbuch der Littauiſchen Sprache (1851). One more possible source was the Etymologisches Wörterbuch der slavischen Sprachen by Franz Miklosich (1886).

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