Balto-Slavic: what Meillet was Thinking, or, what was Meillet Thinking?!
Antoine Meillet was as serious an Indo-Europeanist as there ever was, and yet not everything he wrote is uncontroversial. His take on Balto-Slavic, from Les dialectes indo-européens (1908, 2nd edn. 1922), is one such case – see Szemerényi 1957 – and specifically Meillet’s claim that there is no compelling evidence for a Balto-Slavic subgroup within Indo-European. I explore here just what Meillet meant by “‘dialect’ of Indo-European” in relation to Balto-Slavic, e.g. what gave rise to the 10 (or so) branches (branches as “dialects”) within the Indo-European family, or dialect variation within Proto-Indo-European itself. Further, in the 1922 “avant-prôpos”, Meillet refers to the Indo-European unity as “national” in nature, raising the question of the relevance of Meillet’s sense of the relationship between language and nation (Moret 2013) to the issue of a possible Balto-Slavic unity.
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