DICTIONARY OF REVIVED PRUSSIAN:

have absorbed all influences during all periods of their history including the German
influence, similarly as the latter affected Estonians and Latvians in their turn.
The grounding has been already completed. Today the Prussian language has
been restored grammatically and adapted for modern use lexically in the form of a
minimal starting lexicon. Electronic correspondence is taking place in revived
Prussian. All this is our Baltic cultural contribution to uniting Europe, which is
interested to recall all its cultural-historical components.
2. Recovering Prussian: comparative Linguistics and
interlinguistics
From the point of view of the grammatical structure and basic lexis, New Prussian is
the same Baltic language that is known from 3 Old Prussian Catechisms, which are
authentic printed documents of the 16 th c. (1545, 1561). The main basis of the language
also includes material from two authentic manuscripts, the Elbing Vocabulary with
802 entries rewritten at the turn of the 13 th / 14 th c., and words from 100-entries
Simon Grunau’s Vocabulary from the first quarter of the 16 th c.
Because all this material comes from different dialects and is of unequal worth,
with many misspellings, misprints, and inconsistent orthography, a scholar must first
analyze the spelling and perform a linguistic reconstruction before presenting his
own, or of any school, interpretation of the attested texts.
The two main tendencies are to interpret them as “spoiled by the German
copyists” and as “roughly well corresponding to the spoken language”. I adhere to
the opinion of my teacher Professor Vytautas Maþiulis, who considers the texts (except
Grunau’s Vocabulary) to be roughly authentic. Such view is not very popular because
it demands wider comparative efforts to treat Prussian, a West-Baltic language, as
essentially different even in grammatical structure from the well-known East-Baltic
Lithuanian and Latvian languages.
For a scholar whose native language is not Baltic but who has studied Lithuanian
and speaks it, there is a strong temptation to regard attested Prussian as if it has been
“spoiled” and to “correct” all forms in a Lithuanian manner with unprovable ad hoc
declarations of the kind “This was distorted by a German”, or “This combination
always renders the sound [...] in corresponding German spelling”.
On the other hand, attested monuments of Old Prussian reflect only a small
sphere of its use (mostly religious) even in remote centuries. Ca. 2000 attested words
(ca. 1800 attested in documents + geographical names etc.) are not sufficient to
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