Balt

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A person belonging to one of the peoples who traditionally inhabit the Baltic region of northeastern Europe, such as Latvians or Lithuanians
2. A native of the Baltic coastal region of northeastern Europe, especially one whose ancestry is Latvian, Lithuanian or Prussian
3. Someone from the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, a member of the ethnic groups that speak the Baltic languages

Etymology: The word "Balt" is a back-formation: English speakers took the existing adjective "Baltic" and, by stripping off the ending, produced a new noun for a person from the region. It is a useful reminder that a word can be built backward from its own parent, not only forward from a root. That parent word has a deeper story. The adjective "Baltic" comes from Medieval Latin "Balthae," a name for the people and the region around the Baltic Sea, which is itself the source of the Latin adjective "Balticus." The sea's name is the one that lies behind everything else here, and the Latin forms passed into English through scholarly and geographical writing rather than through everyday speech. Working backward from the adjective, English eventually produced "Balt" as a noun for a native of the Baltic region. The earlier Proto-Balto-Slavic and Germanic forms in the source tree show that the name was old in the languages of the area long before English took it up.