Traveling Voices - The diachronic development of the voice system in Baltic, Slavic, and Germanic branches from a migrational perspective

A dialogue among biologists, linguists, archaeologists, and historians over the reconstruction of the prehistoric past of Indo-European peoples has just started with the recent results in the ancient DNA and isotope analyses.

This proposed project is intended to supply more linguistic support to the restoration of the contacts and the migration routes of the Indo-European peoples, particularly of the Baltic, Slavic, and Germanic branches.

Their migration process has been controversial, since the Baltic and Slavic branches share common traits with the Indo-Iranian branch (e.g., satem-assibilation of PIE palato-velars), while they share common linguistic features also with the Germanic branch (e.g., the oblique case markers with *-m- corresponding to *-bh- elsewhere).

In fact, the ancient genetic analysis suggests migration routes in which the Baltic, Slavic, Germanic, and Indo-Iranian branches migrated from the location of Yamnaya-culture westwards together, however, Indo-Iranian alone returned eastwards. The controversy among those languages must reflect these peculiar migration routes.

I intend to investigate the prehistoric development of the voice system of these language branches, and clarify the process in light of their aforementioned migration processes.

The expected results will provide not only linguistic evidence for the restoration of the migration processes of Indo-European peoples, but also with a typologically interesting case study on the voice system.