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Inspired by this answer to a different question, I ask what kind of features justify a claim that Balto-Slavic languages are closer to Germanic languages than to Indo-Iranian languages.

The features may be inherited or later acquired in a Sprachbund fashion but I want the answers to distinguish inherited and acquired features.

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    Excellent question. Balto-Slavic has never been my cup of tea, but even so, the only thing I can think of off the top of my head is the shared -m- (rather than -bh-) in the oblique dual/plural cases. I’m sure there are others, but they’re not coming to me at this hour…
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Oct 14, 2020 at 22:45
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    lexical considerations tend to put BS as closer to Germanic than anything else IIRC
    – Tristan
    Commented Oct 15, 2020 at 9:15
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    @Tristan: Lexical "closeness" does not necessarily imply subgrouping. Their are lots of Germanic loan words in most Slavic languages.
    – fdb
    Commented Oct 15, 2020 at 15:26
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    agreed. I was talking primarily about shared lexical isoglosses in the inherited vocabulary
    – Tristan
    Commented Oct 15, 2020 at 15:35
  • 5
    @Lucian Those "out-of-India" theories are indeed annoying since they are driven by ideology and not by the scientific method.
    – Sir Cornflakes
    Commented Oct 19, 2020 at 13:16

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