Language contact
LCS includes lexical borrowings from what must have been neighboring speech communities. Political and military vocabulary items were borrowed from the Germanic peoples to the west, such as Gmc. *kuningaz 'king' ~ LCS *kŭnędzĭ 'prince', Gmc. *doms 'judgement' ~ LCS *duma 'thought', Gmc. *helmaz ~ LCS *šelmĭ 'helmet'. A few spiritual elements were borrowed from the Indo-Iranian speech community: notably LCS *bogŭ 'god' and *bogatŭ 'rich' correspond to Avestan baga 'god', Sanskrit bhagas 'distributor' and bhagavant- 'honorable', and Phrygian (Zeus) Bagaios 'lord'. Similarities with the Baltic languages are so great that some suggest a common Balto-Slavic branch of PIE. The contacts of the Slavic speakers with these three different speech communities provide another set of clues to their original location.
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