Part of
Existential Constructions across Languages: Forms, meanings and functionsEdited by Laure Sarda and Ludovica Lena
[Human Cognitive Processing 76] 2023
► pp. 301–324
A striking peculiarity of the Baltic languages (Old Prussian, Lithuanian, Latvian) is the paradigm of the verb ‘to be’. Whereas Old Prussian, the only documented West Baltic language, still had an Indo-European-looking paradigm, Lithuanian and Latvian, the two members of East Baltic, have developed new forms for ‘to be’ and its negation. Most striking is the situation in Latvian, where the third person is ir ‘he is, they are’ (= Lithuanian yrà), but its negative nav ‘he is not, they are not’. The aim of this paper is to determine the origin of this suppletive relationship.