Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/04/03
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 10:19 PM 4/3/2001 +0200, Matej Novak wrote: >Slovenian language has three differentiations by persons: Singular, Plural, >and Dual (two persons). There are only two other languages in the world that >have Dual as well. > >It also has three genders; Masculine, Feminine, and Neuter. > Slovenian is a branch of South Slavic and, as such, is descended from Primitive Indo-European (as are the languages of most LUGers, from Irish to Hindi, from Swedish to Greek. PIE had: Nouns: three numbers (singular, dual, plural) eight cases (nominative, vocative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, ablative) three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) Verbs: three numbers (singular, dual, plural) two aspects (perfective, imperfective) four tenses (past, present, future, aorist) six moods (infinitive, verbal adjective, verbal noun, indicative, optative, subjunctive) It also had a pitch accent in place of the stress accent we all know and love. How these various attributes wafted down into modern Indo-European languages is fascinating -- Latin has the ablative absolute, Ancient Greek the genitive absolute, both apparently descended from a common IE form which, when the Greek genitive absorbed certain functions of the IE ablative case, wafted over to form the Greek genitive absolute. Russian dropped the elaborate moods of PIE quite late, after the time of Ivan the Terrible, but retained an almost pure IE aspect/tense structure. Modern English and Gaelic have pretty much merged and abandoned direct modal subjunctive and optative usages, but have substituted modal forms of the verb "to be" in their stead. And so forth. I believe Czech is the last IE language to retain the pure pitch accent, though Hindi has traces of this as well, while Lithuanian is the only modern IE language, I recall, to have all eight cases in play. But, as always, the needed references are upstairs. Marc msmall@roanoke.infi.net FAX: +540/343-7315 Cha robh bas fir gun ghras fir!