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Baltic Languages and Sanskrit
From the „Lithuania in the World”, 1996 No1.SANSKRIT AND LITHUANIAN
One of the most important stimuli for the emergence of historical-comparative linguistics was the acquaintance of Europeans with Sanskrit, the old language of India. Europeans believed that a Sanskrit scholar could understand and be understood by a Lithuanian farmer.
In 1786, Wiliam Jones (1746-1794), an English Justice of the Supreme Court of Judicature in Calcutta, read a paper before the Asiatic Society, founded by himself, in which he proclaimed that Sanskrit, this "wonderfully structured old language of India" is derived from the same source as Greek, Latin, and perhaps even Gothic and Celtic. This was a very bold idea, which produced a veritable revolution in linguistics.
European scholars turned their attention to Sanskrit, and started with old European languages. They created precise methodology which enabled them to understand phonetic changes and distinguish original words from loans. They taught themselves through the comparison of related words in different languages to reconstruct the extinct forms, which were very often similar or even identical with Sanskrit forms.
Linguists believed that comparative linguistics without Sanskrit is like astronomy without mathematics.
It is not difficult therefore to imagine the surprise of the scholarly world when that learned that even in their time somewhere on the Nemunas River lived a people who spoke a language as archaic in many of its forms as Sanskrit itself. Although it was not exactly true that a professor of Sanskrit could talk to Lithuanian farmers in their language, coincidences between these two languages were truly amazing, for example:
Sanskrit sunus son - Lith. sunus;
Sanskrit viras man - Lith. vyras;
Sanskrit avis sheep - Lith. avis;
Sanskrit dhumas smoke - Lith. dumas;
Sanskrit padas sole - Lith. padas.
We can be safe in asserting that these Lihuanian words have not changes their forms for the last five thousand years.
The most prominent Eurpean linguists visited to Lithuania in order to learn this archaic language from the lips of Lithuanians themselves, which helped them to investigate the history of other Indo-European languages.
Today, there is no doubt that Lithuanian has retained many ancient Indo-European forms. It is hard to say whether it was due to the character of the Lithuanians or of geographic position that their language has changed so little in the course of several thousand years. Scholars often make references to the Lithuanian language when conducting research on the history of other languages.
No wonder that Lithuanian is taught and studied not only in this country or Latvia. There are specialists of Lithuanian in Germany, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland, Italy, Switzerland, France, the USA and some other countries. The capital city of Lithuania - Vilnius - has become a world centre for Baltic studies.
The Lithuanian community in the United States of America founded the Department of the Lithuanian Language at Illinois State University in Chicago in 1984 in order to better know the culture and language of their parents and grandparents.
Because of its complex morphology and shifting stress, Lithuanian is not an easy language for foreigners to study. But increasingly more people want to learn it. Every summer, a group of people from abroad take a Lithuanian course at Vilnius University.
http://postilla.mch.mii.lt/Kalba/baltai.en.htm#SANSKRIT
Although the examples of Latvian aren't very correct I found a site with more than a few examples of similarities between Latvian and Sanskrit here.
The words are broken Latvian, but still the word roots are the same as in correct Latvian.
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