DICTIONARY OF REVIVED PRUSSIAN:

communicate even in the street or in the kitchen today. One needs at least 9000
words for simple everyday communication, 30000 words for an average modern
communication, 40000 words for a good communication in various modern spheres,
much more for a rich modern language. The boundary of 30000 words seems to be
ideal to serve needs of various groups of Baltic Prussians dispersed in various parts
of the modern world. Unfortunately, today even the boundary of 10000 words has
not been overpassed yet.
Many necessary words cannot be retrieved from the attested material. These
words must be created according to several strict principles that are accepted by all
participants of the experiment.
The easiest way would be volitional creation of words according to simple
procedures as in Esperanto (e.g. to take Lithuanian and Latvian roots and adapt them
to the rules of the Prussian word derivation). However one should try to preserve
maximum authenticity. This may be achieved by discovering ways in which concrete
unknown words really did appear or must have appeared at all stages of Prussian up
to the present day. The said ways may be found by analyzing attested material
according to methods of historical comparative linguistics. Going this way, one may
be sure that among the total number of recovered words there will be inevitable
coincidences with facts that really existed but now have been lost, something that is
excluded when Lithuanian and Latvian roots are artificially used.
Only when the said way appears to be impossible, one can Prussianize Lithuanian
and Latvian words, except in cases where there are compelling reasons to use
international terms or local vernacularisms. Therefore, the recovery of Prussian
combines the historical comparative method with features of interlinguistics.
In addition to using inner reconstruction as part of traditional research, the
recoverer of Prussian also uses complementary reconstruction, or complementary
explication (see further, Section 5). Even the descriptive identification of phonemes
appears necessary at the initial stage when one decodes which Old Prussian dialect
to use as basis for the standard New Prussian language.
3. Transposition of all attested material onto one common level
The language attested in historical documents reflects different Old Prussian dialects.
The dialect of the Elbing Vocabulary is assumed to be Pomezanian. The Catechisms
come from Samland, the 3 rd Catechism having been translated in Pobethen. Presence
of o (*/ô/) in the Elbing Vocabulary versus -a < -*`, ` /`/ in the Catechisms is the
main feature that distinguishes these dialects, cf. Towis E vs. T`ws III ‘father’.
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