Selonian was a Baltic language spoken by the Eastern Baltic tribe of the Selonians, who until the 15th century lived in Selonia, a territory in South Eastern Latvia and North Eastern Lithuania.
During the 13th-15th centuries the Selonians lost their language after being assimilated by the Latgalians and partly by the Lithuanians.
It is considered that the Selonian language retained the proto-Baltic phonemes *an, *en, *in, *un like the Lithuanian language, but like the Latvian language the proto-Baltic *kʲ, *ɡʲ changed to c, dz, and the proto Baltic *š, *ž changed to s, z.
Traces of the Selonian language can still be found in the territories the Selonians inhabited, especially in the accent and phonetics of the so-called Selonian dialect of the Latvian language. There are some traces of the Selonian language in the North Eastern sub-dialects of the Aukštaitian dialect of Lithuanian language, mostly in the lexicon.
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Famous quotes containing the word language:
“What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.”
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