ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis) (06/21/85)
>I am in the process of learning Slovak and >I was wondering the following: >(1) Is anyone else interested in discussing it? > >(2) Does anyone have good references to learn >Slovak, or Ukranian? >and >(3) for the purpposes of this group, can anyone relate >the Slavic languages to the Romance languages, when did they >"split" or differentiate? -- R. Switzer Sure. The IndoEuropean language family began splitting around ~2000BC: CENTUM languages SATEM languages greek baltic latin lithuanian,estonian french slavonic portuguese N:great Russian spanish little R=ukrainian italian white Russian rumanian W:czechoslovak celtic polish Q:gaelic wendish P:welsh S:CS->bulgarian breton serbocroat teutonic slovene gothic aryan N:icelandic OPersian -> farsi swedish Sanskrit norwegian hindustani/urdu danish bengali W:Hi:german singhalese Lo:dutch armenian english albanian The division between CENTUM/SATEM is somewhat arbitrary and is based on one of the earliest consonant splits in {k}, as in the word for `hundred' *k'mtom = L centum = Gk he-katon = Skt s'ata = OIr cet = Ger hund = Church Slavonic (CS) suto => Russian sto. Other IE dialect differences could be used to split IE into north/south branches; features shared among teutonic and slavonic groups are: an extra set of adjective endings, and dative plural in -m-. The baltic and slavonic groups have both preserved the IE 8-case system to a remarkable degree, and also share much vocabulary, as well as the verbal infinitive ending -ti. A major slavic innovation is the perfective/imperfective aspect in most verbs, which denotes whether an action is viewed as a single event or continuing over time. The stem slav- is probably from the slavic word slova=`word', in this case implying `those who speak'. Linguistic evidence may suggest a distinct protoslavic tongue as early as 1000BC. Some historians guess that the Slavs settled near eastern Poland several centuries before the christian era prior to a later waves of teutonic invaders between 0-300AD. Tacitus first mentions the Slavs as nomads between the foothills of the Carpathians and the land of the Finns. Later references describe them as unwarlike, ardent farmers. The slavs diffused northeast towards Russia and south towards Bulgaria from ~100-400AD, when the turko-tatar hordes (~400-1200) from asia entered. Today, the geographical extent of the slavic languages is split by Romanians and Hungarians and cut off by Turks to the south. By 600 the identity of the Slavs had disintegrated into at least three groups north, west, and south. Church Slavonic (CS) is earliest literary slavic language, and used an alphabet devised by St. Cyril (Cyrilic) in 918 devised from Greek letters, naturally enough, since he was of East Orthodox Christian presuasion. Though CS is basically Old Bulgarian, it was probably not too different from the dialects to have been easily understood by most Slavs in ~1000. One of the remarkable historical events to impact the Russian branch was a Viking invasion in 862 by the Varingians (ON vaeringjar, R vremennych, Gk barangoi), also called the Rus, who reputedly sailed down the atlantic, thru the mediterranean and black seas and up the Dnieper? river. Russian developed at least four major dialects: north great R, white R, little R, and Muscovite. Little Russian is also known as Ukrainian or Ruthenian. Today's standard Russian derives from a mixture of Muscovite and great Russian. All are today written with cyrilic letters. West slavic is today represented by Polish, Czechoslovak (with its dialects Czech and Slovak). Wendish is also in this group, but I have no idea if it is still spoken, cut off as they (are,were) by German speaking people. Polish, Czech and Slovak are all written in roman characters, due to the predominately Catholic faith traditionally in those regions. South Slavic languages are Bulgarian, and the languages of Yugoslavia, Slovene and Serbocroatian (with its dialects Serb and Croatian). Bulgarian has evolved the furthest of any slavic language, having lost its case system. Croatian and Slovene use the roman alphabet, Bulgarian and Serbian the cyrilic. I'd guess that the difference in alphabets was likewise according to traditional religious allegiance to either western or eastern christian churches. Here's a crude linguistic map taken from a ~1935 text showing the approximate extent of the various slavic languages. Things may be somewhat different today.. GGGGGGGGGGGGGG G=Great Russian Baltic / GGGGGGGGGGGGGG M=Muscovite / Baltic GGGGGGGGGGGGGG W=White Russian ^^^^^^^' Languages GGGGMMMMGGGGGG w=Wendish w WWWWWWWGGGGMMMMGGGGGG P=Polish PPPP WWWWWWWWWWWWWWGGGGGGGGGGGGGG C=Czech PPPPPPPPPPWWWWWWWWWWWWWWGGGGGGGGGGGGGG S=Slovak Germany PPPPPPPPPPPPWWWWWWWWWWWWWWGGGGGGGGGGGGGG s=Slovene PPPPPPPPPPPPPPWWWWWWWWWWWWWWGGGGGGGGGGGGGG c=SerboCroatian PPPPPPPPPPPPPUUUUUUUUUWWWUUGGGGGGGGGGGGGG B=Bulgarian w PPPPPPPPPPUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGG w PPPPPPPPPPUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGG PPPPPPPPPPUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGG CCCCCCCCCPPPPPPPPPPUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGG CCCCCCCCCCCSSSSSSSSSSUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGG CCCCCCCCCCCSSSSSSSSSSUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGG SSSSSSSSSSUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGG Hungary UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU ssssss UUUUUUUUUUUU ssssssssc Rumania / / ccccccccccccc / / ccccccccccccc / Black \ cccccccccccccccBBBBBBBBBBBBBB Sea \ cccccccccccccBBBBBBBBBBB \ cccccccccBBBBBBBBBBB \ BBBBBBBBBB^^^^ \ BBBBBB \ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ \ \ / Greece | Turkey -michael
ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis) (06/26/85)
I mistakenly included Estonian as a baltic language in a previous
article. It is not even IndoEuropean, but Finno-Ugric.
Humble apologies to all, especially Estonians, and thanks to Donn Seeley
for pointing out this stupid error. Lettish (Latvian) should have gone
into its slot.
-michaelmark@dssovax.UUCP (Mark Beyer) (06/26/85)
> A major slavic innovation > is the perfective/imperfective aspect in most verbs, which denotes > whether an action is viewed as a single event or continuing over > time. Doesn't French have an imperfect tense ? Are you saying that they got it from the slavic languages ?
grass@uiucdcsb.Uiuc.ARPA (07/03/85)
>/* Written 10:41 am Jun 26, 1985 by mark@dssovax.UUCP in uiucdcsb:net.nlang */ >> A major slavic innovation >> is the perfective/imperfective aspect in most verbs, which denotes >> whether an action is viewed as a single event or continuing over >> time. > >Doesn't French have an imperfect tense ? Are you saying that they >got it from the slavic languages ? >/* End of text from uiucdcsb:net.nlang */ The perfective and imperfective in slavic languages carry some of the same meanings as the imperfect and preterit in, say, Spanish (I know it better than French). E.g., habitual or continuing action vs. a one time completed event. But, in Spanish this show up in two past conjugations of one verb stem. And that is essentially that. In Slavic languages, every verb has a perfective and imperfective STEM (example: to think: (Rus.) dumat'/ podumat'). It's like getting two verbs for the price of one. In East Slavic languages like Russian and West Slavic languages like Czech there are two forms of conjugation (ignoring participles..): the past and the present/future. (The past endings are derived from a Common Slavic past participle, and in some Slavic languages, like Serbo-Croatian, are still accompanied by an auxiliary verb). In these languages, the two stems with the past tense endings give two aspects of the past tense. The imperfective verb gives something that is similar (but not the same...) to the Spanish imperfect past (Rus. on dumal. "He was thinking, he used to think"). The perfective stem gives a past tense similar to the preterit (Rus. on podumal. "He thought a bit, He thought"). The imperfective verb with the present/future endings gives the present tense (Rus. On dumaet. "He thinks, he is thinking, he does think'). The perfective with these endings gives a future tense (Rus. On podumaet. "He will think, he will think a bit"). Russian has a second imperfective future tense as well which is formed with an auxiliary verb and the imperfective infinitive (on budet dumat' "He will be thinking"). This has the same sort of continuing action, focus on ongoing action as the imperfective past, vs. the perfective future that focuses on completion. The perfective/ imperfective system in Slavic languages permeates the entire verb conjugation system. It is not a matter of two isolated tenses (as in Spanish or French), but more basic than that. The situation is more complicated in South Slavic languages such as Bulgarian, Macedonian, and to some extent Serbo-croatian. These languages have perfective/ imperfective verb pairs, but they also have more active verb conjugations in the past tense. There is a past tense similar in form to the one of Russian and Czech, but there is also a simple past form, similar to a preterit, and an imperfect past. These can be formed of both the perfective and imperfective verbs. This is much closer to what the Slavic verb system was in Common Slavic. (I guess since Bulgarian and Macedonian lost most of the noun case system, they had to do something to keep an even level of language difficulty :-) ). In Serbo-croatian, these verb forms are a bit old-fashioned sounding (folk speech, literary usage). In Bulgarian and Macedonian they are used to contrast between events recounted that were witnessed (first hand knowledge) vs. events that are recounted second hand. In short, the verb system in Slavic languages is quite a bit different than that of Romance languages, and the words "imperfective" and "perfective" used in connection with Slavic languages doesn't mean quite the same thing it does in the context of Romance languages. - Judy Grass, University of Illinois - Urbana {ihnp4,pur-ee,convex}!uiucdcs!grass grass%uiuc.arpa
rob@ptsfa.UUCP (Rob Bernardo) (07/08/85)
>>> A major slavic innovation >>> is the perfective/imperfective aspect in most verbs, which denotes >>> whether an action is viewed as a single event or continuing over >>> time. >> >>Doesn't French have an imperfect tense ? Are you saying that they >>got it from the slavic languages ? >>/* End of text from uiucdcsb:net.nlang */ > >The perfective and imperfective in slavic languages carry some of the same >meanings as the imperfect and preterit in, say, Spanish (I know it better >than French). E.g., habitual or continuing action vs. a one time completed >event. But, in Spanish this show up in two past conjugations of one >verb stem. And that is essentially that. > >In Slavic languages, every verb has a perfective and imperfective STEM >(example: to think: (Rus.) dumat'/ podumat'). It's like getting two >verbs for the price of one. There is a slightly different distinction made by Russian imperfective/perfective and by Romance imperfect/perfect. The Romance distinction depends upon how the action is viewed. The perfect past is used for an event that is viewed as a single punctual act, and the imperfective past is used for an event that is habitual or on-going. The Slavic distinction depends on whether the action went to completion. The imperfective verb stem is used for incomplete actions, and the perfective verb stem for complete actions. The chart below shows roughly how the two distinctions are slightly skewed. DISCLAIMER: Although I know the Romance languages quite well, I only know Russian as a (former) linguist who has read Russian grammars (and has one in front of him right now). habitual act on-going act incomplete completed punctual act punctual act English I ate everyday I was eating I ate some I ate the bread up. when the phone of the bread. rang. Russian |-------imperfective verb-------------------| |-perfective verb---| Romance |-----imperfect tense--------| |------perfect tense----------------| Verbal aspect cannot distinguish between the two. Other means must be used. For example, Spanish uses 'comer' for 'eat' but makes it grammatically (but not semantically) reflexive, 'comerse' for 'eat up'. -- +--------------+-------------------------------+ | Rob Bernardo | Pacific Bell | +--------------+ 2600 Camino Ramon, Room 4E700 | | 415-823-2417 | San Ramon, California 94583 | +--------------+-------------------------------+---------+ | ihnp4!ptsfa!rob | | {nsc,ucbvax,decwrl,amd,fortune,zehntel}!dual!ptsfa!rob | +--------------------------------------------------------+