ABSTRACT
This branch of Indo-European is of special interest in comparative linguistics because of its retention of certain very archaic features, both phonological and morphological. Baltic is genetically close to, and seems to have been always geographically contiguous with, Slavonic and Germanic. East and West forms of Baltic are distinguished. O f several East Baltic languages known to have existed, only two survive - Lithuanian and Latvian. Evidence for the extinct congeners is entirely toponymic; thus the name of the Curonians survives in Courland (Latvian: kurzeme). The sole attested West Baltic language - Old Prussian - survived into the seventeenth century.
