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( Old Prussians)
The Old Prussians or Baltic Prussians (German Pruzzen or Prußen; Latin Pruteni; Latvian Pruši; Lithuanian Prusai; Polish Prusowie) were an ethnic group, autochthon Baltic tribes that inhabited Prussia, the lands of the southeastern Baltic Sea in the area around the Vistula and Curonian Lagoons. They spoke a language now known as Old Prussian and followed a religion believed by modern scholars to be closely related to Lithuanian paganism with such gods as Perkuns. During the 13th century, the Old Prussians were conquered by the Teutonic Knights, and gradually Germanized over the following centuries. The former German state of Prussia took its name from the Baltic Prussians, although it was led by Germans who had assimilated the Old Prussians; the old Prussian language was extinct by the 17th century.[1] The land of the Old Prussians consisted approximately of central and southern East Prussia — the present-day Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship of Poland, the Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia, and the southern Klaipeda Region of Lithuania.[2] The names of the Prussian tribes all reflected the theme of landscape. Most of the names were based on water, an understandable convention in a land dotted with thousands of lakes, streams, and swamps (the Masurian Lake District). Indeed, that landscape caused the very partial isolation that preserved the Baltic language group as the most archaic in Europe. To the south, the terrain runs into the Pripet Marshes at the headwaters of the Dnieper River; these have been an effective barrier over the millennia. The original pre-Baltic settlers generally named their settlements after the streams, lakes, seas, or forests by which they settled. The clan or tribal entities into which they were organized then took the name of the settlement. For example, Barta, the home of the Barti, is related to the name of the Bartis River in Lithuania, and such words as the Albanian berrak (a borrowing from Slavic) and Bulgarian bara, both meaning "swamp". A *bor- root can be reconstructed, meaning "swamp", to come from the o-grade of Indo-European *bher-; Indo-European has several *bher- roots, however, so the exact meaning and line of descent is unclear.
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