Spoken language is old, written - young
The ancient Baltics lived sedentary and
did not tend to mix with other nations
that’s why they kept the archaic lan-
guage model. Lithuanian belongs to the
largest Indo-European language family
in the world, the Baltic language group.
Scientists believe it is the most charac-
teristic part of the primary language that
the Lithuanian language has retained. It
is characterized by an inherited very old
language structure: declension, short
and long vowels, diphthongs, etc. Lithu-
anian language has many similarities
to Sanskrit, an ancient classical literary
language in India (e.g. Sanskrit ákṣi –
Akis, Ávi – Avis, Dánta – Tooth, Devá
– God, Dína – day, son – sons). By the
way, Sanskrit is still used as a scientific
and liturgical language (Hindu, Bud-
dhism and Jainism).
It isǹ t known when it was started to write in
Lithuanian. Written language of the Grand Duchy
of Lithuania was Latin, Slavic cleric and Polish. In
the 18th century, Polish tried to oust even spoken
Lithuanian, but ordinary people didǹ t stop talking
it. The emergence of the Lithuanian written lan-
guage is actually associated with the first Lithu-
anian printed book in 1547, “Catechism” by Marty-
nas Mažvydas, the Evangelical Lutheran priest, the
pioneer of Lithuanian writing. There was also the
first Lithuanian alphabet in it. It is known, that writ-
ten Lithuanian texts have been discovered before.