Thread:User talk:CodeCat/Balto-Slavic glottal stop/reply (12)

In the past, research focused on East Baltic, mainly because it's widely attested in Latvian and Lithuanian. East Baltic does seem to have been a distinct group. But more research into Prussian (West Baltic) and its relationship with the other Balto-Slavic languages has cause linguists to realise that there probably was no Proto-Baltic after all, but that West Baltic and Slavic split off at more or less the same time. It's only really the radical changes that later applied to Slavic that make it stand out and makes Prussian seem much closer to Latvian and Lithuanian, but the reconstructable history seems to suggest otherwise. So Baltic is probably a paraphyletic group, consisting of the non-Slavic Balto-Slavic languages.