Carpathian language: Difference between revisions

==Vocabulary==

''Main article: [[Carpathian vocabulary]]''

Although the Carpathian language is Indo-European, one can identify many words that do not have cognates within the Indo-European language family. Carpathian has borrowed a large portion of its vocabulary from the Balto-Slavic languages, mainly from Slovak, Polish, Ukrainian, as well as some words from Hungarian, a Uralic language, and an extinct Oghuric language, called Avar, that used to be spoken south of the Carpathian Mountains. The percentage of [[w:Paleo-Balkan languages|Paleo-Balkan]] loanwords can be estimated at approximately 5%, which is comparable to Romanian and Hungarian loanwords in Southern Lowlands dialects of Carpathian, but they constitute a specific portion of vocabulary, such as topographical features and plants. The [[w:Pre-Indo-European languages|Pre-Indo-European substrate]] is more well-preserved in Eastern Carpathian, particularly in the Highland dialects. In these borrowings, the voiced plosives are unstable or non-existent, which may indicate that the original languages lacked voicing distinction. The initial "s" before another consonant (often called the [[w:Indo-European s-mobile|s-mobile]]) is often dropped before a plosive, with some exceptions, such as ''stogas^W/stagas^E'' “stack” from PIE ''*stógos'' (which is also an example, where [[w:Winter's law|Winter's law]] failed to apply, suggesting that the word may be a loanword).