Относительная хронология основных фонетических изменений в истории верхнелатышского диалекта

Summary/Abstract: The present article deals with the sound changes that occurred in High Latvian after the split of Proto-Latvian into dialects. The basic aim was to establish a relative chronology for all of them; it is presented in tabular form at the end of the article. A corollary to our conclusions is that the view advocated by Lelis and Breidaks, according to which High Latvian constitutes an independent branch of East Baltic alongside Lithuanian and Latvian, must be rejected: all sound changes characteristic of High Latvian are best explained starting out from Proto-Latvian. The details of several sound changes are clarifed, e. g., it is shown that High Latvian has gone through four independent processes of metaphony, of which the 1st and 3rd have hitherto been treated as one in the literature.

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