Ratu un riteņu nosaukumi baltu valodās: tradīcija vai novitāte?

ENThe article deals with some nomination problems in the Baltic languages, especially focussing on the etymological duplicates Latv. rats / ritenis, Lith. rātas / tekinis ‘wheel’, and Latv. rati / vāģi, Lith. rātai / vežimas ‘carriage’. Continuing the discussion about probable borrowing of relevant lexical units on the basis of Dutch linguists’ contribution to the international geolinguistic project “Atlas Linguarum Europae”, the material has been reviewed and some new typological features have been pointed out. In particular the author puts forward the idea about the common semantic structure of the inherited Indo-european vocabulary, which has already been reflected in different etymological sources as well as attested by the dialectal data of the Baltic languages. After a brief acquaintance with the advantages of contrastive geolinguistic approach and the exploration of lexical (morphological) variety represented by Latvian and Lithuanian dialectal names for wheel and carriage, it has been concluded that the slightly provocative question about the tradition or the novelty of the relevant items is quite complicated and should be obviously considered a matter of interpretation.