In this book I have tried to answer one concrete question: how did Balto-Slavic acuteness arise? As often in our field, answering such a question implies addressing many others as well, from matters of Indo-European reconstruction to details of the historical grammar of the Baltic and Slavic languages. Whether I have succeeded in reconstructing how acuteness came into being is a question every reader will answer by himself. If nothing else, I have made a conscious effort to treat all issues related to the rise of acuteness, and to do so in the necessary detail. Thus, I hope this book will be useful even to scholars disagreeing with the ideas defended here.
In a sense, the origin of this book goes back to the time in which I began serious study of Balto-Slavic accentology around 15 years ago. More specifically, the first short and tentative, but already recognizable draft of this study was presented at the 12th International Workshop of Balto-Slavic Accentology in Ljubljana, June 2019. By the end of that year it became apparent that the topic required a book-length treatment, which afterwards occupied most of the time I could devote to scholarly work. From June 2020 to June 2022 the research was financially supported by a project from the Research Council of Lithuania (‘Origin and development of the acute in Baltic and Slavic’, Nr. S-LIP-20–5). It is my pleasant duty to acknowledge my debt to this institution.
I am happy to express my gratitude to José Andrés Alonso de la Fuente, Simon Fries, Eugen Hill, Jay Jasanoff, Götz Keydana, Ronald Kim, Jenny Larsson, Marek Majer, Vytautas Rinkevičius, Patrick Stiles and Yoko Yamazaki, who in one way or another assisted me during the process of writing this book, knowingly or not. My gratitude must be extended to two anonymous reviewers for their extremely useful comments. Closer to home, I am grateful to my colleagues of the Department of Baltic Studies at Vilnius University for their continuous support. Finally, I am indebted to Craig Melchert and Olav Hackstein for accepting the book in the series Brill’s Studies in Indo-European Languages & Linguistics and to Elisa Perotti and Manon Vrolijk for seeing through the whole editing process.
Needless to say, my greatest debt is to my family, who had to bear with me all this time. This book is lovingly dedicated to Daiva, Astrida and Raigardas.