Add baltic languages to the mix as well! Lithuanian is like a slavic language with all the inflection drama but with additional word types that are currently mostly gone from slavic languages.
Well, Lithuanian is also a Proto-Indo-European language. But the one that somehow got sucked into a time warp from the past. And it even has a tonal pitch accent in addition to the stress pattern, just to make it more interesting.
It's not a "proto-indo-european"! It did change, and change massively. But it seems that because of how the number of native speakers was always low, and thr populayion was concentrated in a relatively isolated part of Europe, this evolution was more self-contained and reflective.
The language seems to have more archaic features and forms than, say, closely related slavic languages, and its vocabulary has more similarities to old sanscrit than one's average european language.
For curios language learners this means that the grammar is harder than even (already hard enough) slavic grammars.
Wow, I had no idea. This sounds extremely interesting. I need to read more about Lithuanian language (at least grammar, sadly I don't have time to learn yet another language)
