I can’t improve on Christopher Culver’s description at Безѹмниѥ, where I found this link, so I’ll just quote it:
Cyril Babaev… has written a historical grammar of Lithuanian with some interesting comments on Lithuanian’s evolution from Proto-Indo-European. Babaev’s Indo-European Database contains links to other grammars. It is probably the most useful site ever hosted at a Bizland.com address.
I find by googling that Babaev, who is not a linguist by profession, has also done a similar grammar of Old English. I should add that Bridget in Christopher’s comments says “I’m not sure I trust the IE Database site. I was just looking at Hittite & Lycian and noticed 3 or 4 things that are either just plain wrong or disputed at best.” Since it’s a hobby for Babaev, I guess that’s only to be expected.
I’ve looked at the Babaev site and it would be ten times more useful (and easy to read) if it used an encoding that showed up as Lithuanian orthography. Instead, it used a, for ą (very confusing in tables of endings where a, and ą aren’t always distinguished.
Another good site for some basic info on Lithuanian is http://www.lietpol.pl
The English version is pretty skimpy, but there’s a nice basic grammar of modern Lithuanian if you can read Polish.
Is it the same Babaev as http://language.babaev.net/ ? This site is often quoted on fido7.ru.linguist group, but I never had a look, until now.
oh, and link to Безѹмниѥ is 404.
What are the fourth and eighth letters in the Cyrillic word above?
They appear on this computer of a friend of mine as little boxes.
.
Mark, I’m not 100 % sure of the details, but I’m sure they’re obsolete cyrillic letters of some kind. I can see them and they look pretty ungainly, so I’ll risk the wrath of the more philologically inclined and say good riddance.
Huh. Chris’s site seems to be down. Hope it’s just temporary.
Oh, and the first mystery letter is an o-u ligature, the second an i-e ligature. The name transliterates as bezumie.
I didn’t pay my webhosting bill on time, so my site will be down for a couple of days. I hope that my MySQL database hasn’t been deleted, ’cause otherwise the blog is gone, but I’m sure my webhosting firm isn’t so draconian.