The area around the Baltic Sea has for millennia been a meeting-place for people of different origins. Among the circum-Baltic languages, we find three major branches of Indo-European — Baltic, Germanic, and Slavic, the Baltic-Finnic languages from the Uralic phylum and several others. The circum-Baltic area is an ideal place to study areal and contact phenomena in languages. The present set of two volumes look at the circum-Baltic languages from a typological, areal and historical perspective, trying to relate the intricate patterns of similarities and dissimilarities to the societal background. In Volume I, surveys of dialect areas and language groups bear witness to the immense linguistic diversity in the area with special attention to less well-known languages and language varieties and their contacts.

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to Proto-Indo-European, Balto-Slavic and Proto-Slavic accentology; a branch of diachronic linguistics dealing with the development of syllable stress, intonation, and quantity at the word level. Of particular interest in the book is its detailed summary of the major approaches and solutions to accentology of the last thirty years. Furthermore, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of research on accentuation of the Indo-European proto-language and the accentuation of Balto-Slavic languages. Such research is integral to our knowledge of how accentual patterns developed from the reconstructed proto-language to the modern Indo-European languages.

The development of the prosodic system from Indo-European to Balto-Slavic is dominated by two major innovations: the rise of mobility and the rise of acuteness. This book provides a new account of the latter. It stands out from previous works for being informed by recent advances in phonological typology and tonogenesis and, especially, for its comprehensiveness. All matters related to the rise of acuteness are treated in detail. As a result, the book includes new insights on several issues of Balto-Slavic historical phonology and morphology as well.

The year 2017 saw a multitude of conferences and exhibitions devoted to the centenary of the Russian Revolutions, both in Russia and in other parts of the world. The commemoration of this event would be incomplete without an exploration of its Northern dimension; in October 2017, UiT The Arctic University of Norway hosted the conference The Russian Revolutions of 1917: The Northern Impact and Beyond. Norway and Russia are both northern states, and the two countries have a common border in the High North. Some articles in this volume, based on the conference proceedings, investigate the impact of the Russian Revolution in Norway and Sweden, while others deal with the High North, e.g. the Revolution and Civil War in Northern Russia and the radicalization of the workers’ movement of Northern Norway; some are also devoted to representations of the Russian Revolution at exhibitions and on the big screen.

Die Vorgeschichte des slavischen Aoristsystems proposes a new look on the paradigmatic organization of the finite verb in Proto-Slavic. It rests on the study of the diachronic and synchronic conditioning of paradigmatic preferences of Proto-Slavic primary verbs and is shown to account for the complementary distribution of partially syncretistic aorist stem formations into six classes (bases of the systematic description adopted here). Major development trends reveal clear parallels with other Indo-European branches. Along with the discussion of paradigmatic constellations, diachronic background, etymology and grammar, the work comprises a nearly complete attestation of aorists and past participles of primary verbs including prefixal compounds in canonic OCS and those outside the canon, and is designed as an extensive reference book both for Indo-Europeanists and Slavists. Die Vorgeschichte des slavischen Aoristsystems bietet eine neue systematische Beschreibung des älteren gemeinslavischen Verbalsystems aus synchroner und diachroner Perspektive. Im Zentrum steht die nahezu vollständige Erfassung und Bewertung der Aoristformen des Altkirchenslavischen. Sie erscheinen hier in neuer paradigmatischer Klassifikation (in sechs Klassen), mit ausführlicher Dokumentation ihrer Beleglage und ihrer synchronischen Oppositionen (: Präsens- und Infinitivstämmen, Partizipien). Die systematische und historische Konditionierung der paradigmatischen Präferenzen primärer Verbalstammbildungen wird neu beleuchtet. Ihre sprachgeschichtliche Verankerung wird im Vergleich mit inner- und außerslavischen Entsprechungen nach dem aktuellen Stand – unter Einschluss der Prosodie – dargestellt. Das Buch eignet sich als Referenzorgan zum slavischen Verbum für Slavisten, Indoeuropäisten und allgemeine Sprachwissenschaftler.