A branch of the Indo-European language family that includes modern Lithuanian, spoken by 3 million people, modern Latvian, spoken by 2 million people, and Old Prussian, Yotvingian, Curonian, Selonian, and Semigallion. It is quite closely related to Slavic.

Scottish slang for cold, as applied to the weather.

Example: "You'd better take your coat, Mathew, its absolutely baltic outside."

Use of this word seems to connote a particular kind of cold day; dark, overcast, probably raining, or more likely sleeting. However, extremely cold weather does not seem worthy of the title. One possible explanation for this is that, on a merely cold day (as against, say, two feet of snow), one may chance it and wear a normal jacket, instead of the more sensible thick warm overcoat. One will then feel the cold a heck of a lot more and thus complain about it.

An interesting point to note is that the word, by virtue of having hard B, T, and C consonants and easily shoutable vowels, has found applications as a mild expletive. For example, if you're standing waiting for a bus in the cold and rain, shouting "Its BALTIC!!!" can have mild theraputic benefits.

The word is presumably a reference to the Baltic Sea, a rather cold, nasty place.

A less common name for the 4-6-4 steam locomotive wheel arrangement; the more common name used in North America was Hudson. The term Baltic was favored by the Milwaukee Road among others.

The Baltic languages are a sub-family of the Indo-European languages spoken today only in the former Soviet republics of Latvia and Lithuania. The surviving languages, Latvian and Lithuanian, are members of the Eastern Baltic branch, while Old Prussian was a member of the Western Baltic branch and went extinct sometime around the start of the 18th century. The Baltic branch dates to around 1000 BCE, while its two branches were distinct by around 300 BCE. The Baltic languages are thought to have a close relationship with the Slavic languages, all descending from a single Proto-Balto-Slavic language, though a minority of historical linguists posit instead a relation with the Germanic languages or that they are a separate branch of the Indo-European family.

At one point, the extent of the language family was considerably larger, as evidenced from a number of Baltic geographic names in present-day Slavic territories. Speakers of Baltic languages populated much of Poland, Belarus, and as far east as Moscow. Later inhabitation by speakers of Germanic and Slavic languages pushed Baltic speakers into their present-day territory. It's thought the Indo-European tribespeople who became speakers of Baltic languages settled the area in the 13th century BCE. Histories mention the different Baltic tribes starting in 98 BCE, while the oldest specific evidence for the existence of any of the Baltic languages is a German-Prussian dictionary dating to around 1350 CE. Religious works - hymnals and catechisms - in Latvian and Lithuanian are known from the mid-16th century, the late date due to the relative stubbornness of the Baltic people toward Christianization.

The particularly interesting feature of the Baltic languages is that they appear to preserve many features of the Indo-European languages that have been lost in every other remaining branch. Lithuanian, in particular, seems to be archaic and has provided a great deal of information in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European. Both remaining Baltic languages are highly inflected, with the numerous noun and verb endings typical of Indo-European languages. They retain numerous noun cases, three grammatical numbers (including the dual number), and several verb moods, all of which date back to Indo-European.

West Baltic languages

• Galindan
• Old Prussian

Spoken in Eastern Prussia, which is now divided between Poland, Lithuania, and Russia. It went extinct around the end of the 17th century or beginning of the 18th due to a plague.

• Sudovian (or Yotvingian)

• Latvian (1.5 million speakers)

Latvian is the official language of Latvia. It has seven noun cases, two grammatical genders, and is written in a highly phonetic modification of the Roman alphabet. Latvian was discouraged under the Soviet government; a large portion of the ethnically Latvian population was moved to other areas of the Soviet Union and new immigrants rarely learned the language; by the end of the Soviet era, only 52% of Latvia was ethnically Latvian. Thus, today, only around 60% of the population of Latvia speaks it. Today, the government encourages immigrants to learn Latvian, but bilingual education is provided to several different minority groups, which may be encouraging the further decline of the language.

• Lithuanian (4 million speakers)

The official language of Lithuania, Lithuanian (as noted above) is distinct in possessing perhaps the closest resemblance of any modern language to Proto-Indo-European. Its phonology is more conservative than that of any other modern Indo-European language, and even moreso it has preserved the morphology (the assembling of words from component stems) and the lexicon (i.e. vocabulary) of PIE. Like Ancient Greek and Sanskrit, it has preserved the PIE pitch accent system, which means that accented syllables are raised in pitch rather than stressed as in English. Ablaut is another common feature among Indo-European languages; it refers to using different vowels within a word to distinguish categories like tense and person (as in the English "sing, sang, sung"). In most Indo-European languages, ablaut is no longer productive - it's no longer applied to new words, and word forms that were originally due to ablaut have often become camouflaged by later changes. Lithuanian is unique in preserving a productive form of ablaut and it reveals many old ablaut patterns lost in most other Indo-European languages.

It has seven cases, nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, and vocative, with the illative still present in some idiomatic usages. It has lost the adessive and allative cases. It has two grammatical genders, four verb tenses, and three verb moods. Like Latvian, it is printed in a highly phonetic adaptation of the Roman alphabet. Around 80% of the population of Lithuania speaks it today; it was granted more tolerance by the Soviet Union than Latvian.

• Samogitian (often considered a dialect of Lithuanian)
• Curonian
• Selonian
• Semigallian

Bal"tic (?), a. [NL. mare Balticum, fr. L. balteus belt, from certain straits or channels surrounding its isles, called belts. See Belt.]

Of or pertaining to the sea which separates Norway and Sweden from Jutland, Denmark, and Germany; situated on the Baltic Sea.

© Webster 1913.