Hypothetical Slavic language

[Otto Kretschmer]

If there was a Slavic language that split from the rest of Slavic family in 200-500 AD, would it still be considered Slavic or a separate branch of Balto Slavic?

[WeepingElf]

If there was a Slavic language that split from the rest of Slavic family in 200-500 AD, would it still be considered Slavic or a separate branch of Balto Slavic?

That's merely a question of definition. A language diverging at that time would still definitely be closer to the rest of Slavic than to Baltic.

[Moose-tache]

A scenario like this would push back "Proto-Slavic" by a couple of centuries, but otherwise it would probably just be called Slavic. If lots of iconic Slavic changes happened between 200 and 600 AD so that Splitski sounded very un-Slavic, or if there were political or nationalist concerns involved, then history might have come up with another term for it, just as history has left us with awkward terms to define the three branches of Balto-Slavic that exist today. But really, it wouldn't matter much to the classification.

Otto, are you switching your focus form Germanic to Slavic, or is this question a one-off?

[Otto Kretschmer]

I never had this much focus on Germanic to begin with

This question was inspired by Turkic languages. The Turkic family is split into Common Turkic anf r-Turkic which split from the rest of the family several centuries earlier. I wondered whether the same would be the case with Slavic languages. I thought it would and we'd have a larger Para-Slavic family but some people may have a different opinion

[hwhatting]

A scenario like this would push back "Proto-Slavic" by a couple of centuries, but otherwise it would probably just be called Slavic. If lots of iconic Slavic changes happened between 200 and 600 AD so that Splitski sounded very un-Slavic, or if there were political or nationalist concerns involved, then history might have come up with another term for it, just as history has left us with awkward terms to define the three branches of Balto-Slavic that exist today. But really, it wouldn't matter much to the classification.

Slavic entered the Balkans in the 6th century AD, so that's when the South Slavic languages started to diverge; a language splitting of at that time would be just a branch of Slavic. 200 AD is more tricky; we have relative chronologies for the sound changes from Balto-Slavic to Proto-Slavic, but I don't know who can say how far they had progressed at that point*1). Still, I guess that the language would already be closer to Slavic than to Baltic in phonology and morphology if it split off around that time.
*1) Some things can be deduced based on loans from Romance and Germanic and into Gothic, e.g. Gothic plinsjan "to dance" (P-Sl. plęše- with š < *-s-je-) shows that when Gothic loaned the word, which must have happened between 200 - 400 AD, the nasal vowels were still sequences of vowel + nasal, and -s-j- was still a discernible sequence and hadn't yet coalesced into a sibilant. I've seen studies on the absolute chronology of individual sound changes, but I don't know if there is a general overview somewhere.

[Pabappa]

are we sure about that? .... i dont mean to make things difficult for the sake of it but ... this is presumably for a conlang, so .... it seems to me the suffix -jan could have been present because the Goths analogized it to their native sequence, and thus would have done so even if the acoustic impression was of a single consonant /š/. Likewise, for the nasal vowel, I think it's reasonable to assume a language without nasal vowels could hear them as being identical to their native sequences of vowel + /n/ because that is more acoustically similar than a plain vowel would be.

[hwhatting]

are we sure about that?

No, we're not. It's only a reasonable assumption. For the nasal vowel, we know that Lekhitic / Polish has the successor to a centralised vowel plus homorganic nasal as continuation of the Slavic nasal vowels before stops, so together with the Gothic evidence this makes it more likely that there were still a distinct vowel element plus nasal element in Proto-Slavic when Gothic loaned the word than to assume re-interpretation in Gothic and re-emergence of the separate nasal element in Lekhitic. For -sj-, it's possible that Gothic substituted that for [ʃ] ot [ɕ] or whatever the sound could have been at that time in Proto-Slavic, but the easier assumption is again that there still were two elements that hadn't yet merged when the loaning took place. To be sure about the absolute chronology, we would have to look at loans from and into other languages with similar sequences as well, for which I don't have the time now.