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Lithuanian is the official language of Lithuania, spoken by about 4 million native speakers (Lithuanians). The Lithuanian name for the language is lietuvių kalba. History
Classification Lithuanian is one of two living Baltic languages, along with Latvian. An earlier Old Prussian Baltic language was extinct by the 19th century. The Baltic languages form their own distinct branch of the Indo-European languages. Geographic distribution Lithuanian is spoken mainly in Lithuania. It is also spoken by ethnic Lithuanians living in today's Belarus, Latvia, Poland, and Russia, and by emigrant communities in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Estonia, Ireland, Russia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Uruguay and the United States. 2,955,200 people in Lithuania (including 3,460 Tatars), or about 80% of the 1998 population, are native Lithuanian speakers; most Lithuanian inhabitants of other nationalities also speak Lithuanian to some extent. The total worldwide Lithuanian-speaking population is about 4,000,000 (1993 UBS). Official status Lithuanian is the official language of Lithuania. Dialects The Lithuanian language has two principal dialects: Aukštaitian (Aukštaičių, Highland Lithuanian) and Samogitian (Samogitian, Žemaičių/Žemaitiu, Lowland Lithuanian). See maps at *. Standard Lithuanian is based on Western Aukštaitian. Mutual intelligibility between Aukštaitian and Samogitian is considered difficult by most Lithuanians. Sounds Vowels Lithuanian has 12 written vowels. In addition to the standard Roman letters, the ogonek accent is used to indicate long vowels, and is a historical relic of a time when these vowels were nasalized (as ogonek vowels are in modern Polish), and at an even earlier time were followed by an 'n' sound. Consonants Lithuanian uses 20 consonant characters, drawn from the Roman alphabet. In addition, the digraph "Ch" represents a velar fricative (IPA x); the pronunciation of other digraphs can be deduced from their component elements. Phonology Consonants Each consonant (except j}}) has two forms: palatalized and non-palatalized (bʲ}} - b}},dʲ}} - d}}, gʲ}} - g}} and so on). The consonants and their palatalized versions are only found in loanwords. (Adapted from http://www.lituanus.org/1982_1/82_1_02.htm with necessary changes according to Lithuanian Language Encyclopedia ) Vowels There are two possible ways to organize the Lithuanian vowel system. The traditional pattern has six long vowels and five short ones, with length as its distinctive feature: (Adapted from http://www.lituanus.org/1982_1/82_1_02.htm and http://www.lituanus.org/1972/72_1_05.htm .) However, at least one researcher suggests that a tense vs. lax distinction may be the actual distinguishing feature, or may be at least equally important as vowel length (. Such a hypothesis yields the chart below, where 'long' and 'short' have been preserved to parallel the terminology used above. Grammar Main article: Lithuanian grammar. The Lithuanian language is a highly inflected language in which the relationships between parts of speech and their roles in a sentence are expressed by numerous flexions. There are two grammatical genders in Lithuanian - feminine and masculine. There is no neuter gender per se, but there are some forms which are derived from the historical neuter gender, notably attributive adjectives. It has a free, mobile stress and is also characterized by pitch accent. It has five noun and three adjective declensions and three verbal conjugations. All verbs have present, past, past iterative and future tenses of the indicative mood, subjunctive (or conditional) and imperative moods (both without distinction of tenses) and infinitive. These forms, except the infinitive, are conjugative, having two singular, two plural persons and the third person form common both for plural and singular. Lithuanian has the richest participle system of all Indo-European languages, having participles derived from all tenses with distinct active and passive forms, and several gerund forms. Nouns and other declinable words are declined in seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, and vocative. In older Lithuanian texts three additional varieties of the locative case are found: illative, adessive and allative. The most common are the illative, which still is used, mostly in spoken language, and the allative, which survives in the standard language in some idiomatic usages. The adessive is nearly extinct. In practical terms, these declensions work to make word order less important than it is, for instance, in English. A Lithuanian speaker may word the English phrase "a car is coming" as either "atvažiuoja automobilis" or "automobilis atvažiuoja". The first prescriptive grammar book of Lithuanian was written in Latin by Daniel Klein and published in Königsberg in 1653. The first scientific Compendium of Lithuanian language was published 1856/57 by August Schleicher, a professor at Prague University. Today there are two definitive books on Lithuanian grammar: one in English - "Introduction to Modern Lithuanian" (called "Beginner's Lithuanian" in its newer editions) by Leonardas Dambriūnas, Antanas Klimas and William R. Schmalstieg, and another in Russian: Vytautas Ambrazas' "Grammatika Litovskogo Jazyka" ("The Grammar of the Lithuanian Language"). Lexical borrowings in the language The basic vocabulary of Lithuanian does not possess many loan words. Some words known as senieji skoliniai (old loan words) were borrowed from its close neighbours (Slavs and Germans) a very long time ago. Usually, when Slavs or Germans introduced a new concept or item, Lithuanians used the same word for that concept or item with minor changes to conform to the phonological system of the language. Words like stiklas, "glass" (from the Slavic "steklo"), muilas, "soap" (from the Slavic "mylo"), gatvė "street" (from the Germanic "gatwo"), spinta, a generic term for storage furniture, such as cupboards, wardrobes, bookcases, and so forth (from the German "Spind"), are all examples of old loan words. Like most other languages, Lithuanian has quite a few international words which came into the language along with 20th-century inventions. Some of them are direct, for example, ekonomija, schema, kosmosas, while others are hybrids, i. e. one stem is international and the other is Lithuanian. An example of the latter usage is šviesoforas, "traffic light" (lit. light-bearing). The policy of borrowing new foreign words is a compromise between simply accepting new words and coining new Lithuanian words. For scientific usage, it is much easier to simply accept the word in question, making minor changes to conform to the phonological system of the language. Therefore, the percentage of foreign words in technical contexts might readily reach 70% or more. In everyday usage, creating new Lithuanian words is preferred. Indo-European vocabulary Lithuanian is considered one of the more conservative modern Indo-European languages, and certain Lithuanian words are very similar to their Sanskrit counterparts. The Lithuanian and Sanskrit words for sūnus (son) and avis (sheep) are exactly the same, and many other word pairs differ only slightly, such as dūmas for smoke (dhumas in Sanskrit), antras for second (antaras in Sanskrit) and vilkas for wolf (vrkas in Sanskrit). However, Lithuanian verbal morphology shows many innovations. Lithuanian has some vocabulary items descended from the proto-language which are also found in in Latin. Examples include the following words (the first word is Latin, the second is the Lithuanian cognate): rota — ratas (wheel), senex — senis (an old man, compare English senile), vir — vyras (a man), anguis — angis (a snake in Latin, a species of snakes in Lithuanian), linum — linas (flax, compare with English 'linen'), aro — ariu (I plow), iungo — jungiu (I join), duo — du (two), tres — trys (three), septem — septyni (seven), gentes — gentys (tribes), mensis — mėnesis (month), dentes — dantys (teeth), noctes — naktys (nights), sedemus — sėdime (we sit) and so on. Many of the words from this list share similarities with other Indo-European languages, including English. But, despite frequent similarities in vocabulary, Lithuanian has many differences from Latin, and consequently from the Romance languages as well. Notably, structural differences almost exclude the possibility of any hypothesis that one of the languages is a descendant of the other. On the other hand, the numerous lexical and grammatical similarities between Baltic and Slavic languages suggest an affinity between these two language groups. However, there exist a number of Baltic (particularly Lithuanian) words, notably those that are similar to Sanskrit or Latin, which lack counterparts in Slavic languages. This fact was puzzling to many linguists prior to the middle of the 19th century, but was later influential in the re-creation of the Proto Indo-European language. In any event, the history of the earlier relations between Baltic and Slavic languages and a more exact genesis of the affinity between the two groups remains in dispute. Writing system Like many of the Indo-European languages, Lithuanian employs a modified Roman script. It is composed of 32 letters. The collation order presents one surprise: "Y" is moved to occur between "Į" (I ogonek) and "J" because "Y" actually represents a prolonged . Acute, grave, and macron/tilde accents can be used to mark stress and vowel length. However, these are generally not written, except in dictionaries, grammars, and where needed for clarity. In addition, the following digraphs are used, but are treated as sequences of two letters for collation purposes. It should be noted that the "Ch" digraph represents a velar fricative, while the others are straightforward combinations of their component letters. Examples (language) lietuvių (nationality) lietuvis (masculine), lietuvė (feminine) ("lĭetuvis", lĭetuvē) See also | |||||||||
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