This article explores the extent to which Philipp Ruhig’s Betrachtung der Littauischen Sprache (1745) features basic elements of a historical-comparative grammar of the Baltic languages, and thereby anticipates later developments in the discipline. It is demonstrated that Ruhig’s approach to the question of the history of Lithuanian in particular, and Baltic more generally, is conceptually akin to our modern approach: he conceives of Lithuanian as an entity with a particular history. While also making use of non-linguistic data, he then employs a comparative approach to try to establish this history, comparing linguistic data from different languages (such as Lithuanian, Old Prussian, Slavic languages, and Greek) with the help of correspondence sets. At the same time, it must be conceded that Ruhig’s approach is underdeveloped in the sense that he does not attempt to go beyond what he subjectively perceives as obvious similarity in order to establish clear-cut, systematic regularities and processes of language change. In this he deviates considerably from our modern methodology, instead aligning with the scholarly traditions of his predecessors and contemporaries. It can thus be shown that, while he does indeed approach Baltic language history more comprehensively than his predecessors, Ruhig is still very much a child of his time.
Simon Fries (Mon,) studied this question.