7.4 Language Contact and Phonological Change

The southern and southeastern shores of the Baltic are (or have been previously) the home of Baltic peoples, whose languages preserve the Indo-European polytonicity, albeit inmodified form. TheGerman and Polish speakers of that territory have not developed tone; however, there is some evidence that language contact has influenced Polish sentence intonation in the variety of Polish that is in contactwith Lithuanian [16].

The prosodic system of Lithuanian appears not to have been essentiallymodified as a result of its contactswith neighboring languages. The Latvian system, on the other hand, shows considerable influence fromFinno-Ugric languages spoken in the same territory and to the north of the area in which Latvian is presently spoken [23].

The prosodic systemof Latvian differs fromthat of Lithuanian in two basic respects: in contrast to the free accent of Lithuanian, accent in Latvian is fixed on the first syllable, and Latvian has developed a third tone in addition to the two inherited tones that it shareswithLithuanian. It is generally accepted that these two differences from Lithuanian are due to contact with Livonian, a Finno-Ugric languagewith stress on the first syllable.

The Latvian third tone, manifested as a glottal modification, is phonetically very similar to the Danish stod. It arose in Latvian in connectionwith the retraction ofword stress to a first syllable that carried an original acute accent (the termis used to refer to the pitch pattern that appears in Lithuanian as a long falling tone and in Latvian as a long even tone). In words that were already accented on the first syllable, the acute continues in Latvian as the long even tone that Endzelin [3, p. 126] refers to as Dehnton. In words in which the word stress was retracted to an originally unstressed first syllable with the acute, the first syllable now carries the third tone often referred to as broken tone; the German term is Stosston. In classical threeaccent areas the sole historical source of the third tone is this reflex of Baltic and Slavic acute. In a number of other dialects, the broken tone goes back both to one of the reflexes of Baltic and Slavic acute and to all rellexes of Baltic and Slavic circumflex; thus, the third tone may also appear in unaccented syllables such as affixes and endings.

Evidence for the claimthat the development of the third tone is due to language contact is to be found in a closer study of Latvian dialects [14]. Latvian is often classified into twomain dialects: Low Latvian and High Latvian. Low Latvian, in turn, is divided into the Central dialect and the so-called Tamian or Livonian dialects. Here the term Livonian is used to refer to the dialects of Latvian rather than to the Finno-Ugric language of the Livonians. The Tamian dialects are spoken in territories

that according to historical and archeological evidence were formerly inhabited by Livonians. In some of the areas Livonian became extinct by themiddle of the nineteenth century; it survives inKurzeme, on the coast, in the speech of a few hundred Latvian-Livonian bilinguals. Now the Tamian dialects exhibit a number of characteristics that are clearly Finno-Ugric in origin. Some of these characteristics have strongly inlluenced standard Latvian. Among the latter are a great number of Livonian loanwords: Zeps [23] counted about 80 that are current in the Latvian standard language and stated that approximately 400 Finnic loans are attested in Latvian, even though it is impossible in many cases to decide whether the words came into Latvian from Livonian or from Southern Estonian. Grammatical loans include the development of some characteristic features that are absent in Lithuanian, such as the syntactic model for expressing possession.

The Tamian dialects show a large number of additional typically Finno-Ugric features that are likewise found in Livonian. For example, there are some phonemic subsystems in Tamian dialects inwhich the old Indo-European voiced-voiceless opposition has been reevaluated as tense [ibid.]. There is even evidence of a breakdown of the grammatical gender system: Livonian, as a Finno-Ugric language, has no grammatical gender.

The influence of Livonian upon the development of the Latvian prosodic system thus may be taken as extremely probable, if not certain. Livonian survives in Kurzeme, albeit precariously, and thus is available for investigation. It can be shown that during the centuries of adstratumrelationship, Livonian has, in turn, been influenced by Latvian.

Themost dramatic parallel between Latvian and Livonian is the presence of tonal oppositions in Livonian. No other Finno-Ugric language has phonemic tone. Livonian has been variously described as having three tones that are identicalwith those of Latvian, having a phonemic opposition between presence and absence of stod [ibid.], and as having an accentual systeminvolving five types of stressed syllables ofwhich four aremarked each by a specific syllable accent carrying labels like acute, grave, drop, and broken [22]. Even if one were to adopt the simplest solution – that Livonian has acquired a phonemic opposition between presence and

absence of stod – it still remains necessary to account for the presence of stod in Livonian.

Posti (1942) considers the rise of stod in Livonian to be due to internal factors. Decsy (1965) assumes that stod was borrowed from Latvian relatively late – during the nineteenth century. Interestingly, the presence of stod in Livonian was first recognized by a Dane, Vilhelm Thomsen, in 1890; it is of course no accident that Thomsen himself spoke a language characterized by the presence of stod.

Livonian exhibits many other features, both phonological and grammatical, that can best be explained through extensive borrowing from Latvian. For example, it has borrowed all eleven Latvian verbal prefixes; Livonian, as a Baltic-Finnic language, started out without either verbal prefixes or prepositions [3].

Taking all factors into consideration, it appears reasonable to assume that the development of tonal oppositions in Livonian is due to language contact and thus can be attributed to the incorporation of Livonian into the Sprachbund around the Baltic Sea.