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48-587: Postelnic ( Romanian pronunciation: [posˈtelnik] , plural: postelnici, from the Slavic postel , "bed"; cf. Russian postelnichy ) was a historical rank traditionally held by boyars in Moldavia and Wallachia , roughly corresponding to the position of chamberlain . It was also known as stratonic (plural: stratonici ), and the office was known as postelnicie or statornicie . Initially, postelnici had as their main attribute tending to

96-612: A far more complicated set of declensions, where the suffixes (or prefixes, or infixes ) change depending on the gender of the noun , the quantity of the noun , and other possible factors. This complexity and the possible lengthening of words is one of the disadvantages of inflected languages. Notably, many of these languages lack articles . There may also be irregular nouns where the declensions are unique for each word (like irregular verbs with conjugation ). In inflected languages, other parts of speech such as numerals , demonstratives , adjectives, and articles are also declined. It

144-537: A more complex example, the sentence: becomes nonsensical in English if the words are rearranged (because there are no cases): But if English were a highly inflected language, like Latin or some Slavic languages such as Croatian , both sentences could mean the same thing. They would both contain five nouns in five different cases: mum – vocative (hey!), dog – nominative (who?), boy – genitive (of whom?), cat – accusative (whom?), street – locative (where?);

192-699: A part of interdisciplinary study of Slavic ethnogenesis, a lexicostatistical classification of Slavic languages. It was built using qualitative 110-word Swadesh lists that were compiled according to the standards of the Global Lexicostatistical Database project and processed using modern phylogenetic algorithms. The resulting dated tree complies with the traditional expert views on the Slavic group structure. Kassian-Dybo's tree suggests that Proto-Slavic first diverged into three branches: Eastern, Western and Southern. The Proto-Slavic break-up

240-521: A partial exception of Bulgarian and Macedonian , they have fully developed inflection -based conjugation and declension . In their relational synthesis Slavic languages distinguish between lexical and inflectional suffixes . In all cases, the lexical suffix precedes the inflectional in an agglutination mode. The fusional categorization of Slavic languages is based on grammatic inflectional suffixes alone. Prefixes are also used, particularly for lexical modification of verbs. For example,

288-553: A recent past. Pontic Steppe Caucasus East Asia Eastern Europe Northern Europe Pontic Steppe Northern/Eastern Steppe Europe South Asia Steppe Europe Caucasus India Indo-Aryans Iranians East Asia Europe East Asia Europe Indo-Aryan Iranian Indo-Aryan Iranian Others European Slavic languages descend from Proto-Slavic , their immediate parent language , ultimately deriving from Proto-Indo-European ,

336-546: A somewhat unusual feature of virtually free word order in a sentence clause , although subject–verb–object and adjective-before-noun is the preferred order in the neutral style of speech . Modern Bulgarian differs from other Slavic languages, because it almost completely lost declension , it developed definite articles from demonstrative pronouns (similar to "the" from "this" in English ), and it formed indicative and renarrative tenses for verbs . Since

384-519: Is agreed that Ancient Greeks had a "vague" idea of the forms of a noun in their language. A fragment of Anacreon seems to confirm this idea. Nevertheless, it cannot be concluded that the Ancient Greeks actually knew what the cases were. The Stoics developed many basic notions that today are the rudiments of linguistics . The idea of grammatical cases is also traced back to the Stoics, but it

432-590: Is better for geographically adjacent languages and in the written (rather than oral) form. At the same time, recent studies of mutual intelligibility between Slavic languages revealed, that their traditional three-branch division does not withstand quantitative scrutiny. While the grouping of Czech , Slovak and Polish into West Slavic turned out to be appropriate, Western South Slavic Serbo-Croatian and Slovene were found to be closer to Czech and Slovak (West Slavic languages) than to Eastern South Slavic Bulgarian . The traditional tripartite division of

480-451: Is dated to around 100 A.D., which correlates with the archaeological assessment of Slavic population in the early 1st millennium A.D. being spread on a large territory and already not being monolithic. Then, in the 5th and 6th centuries A.D., these three Slavic branches almost simultaneously divided into sub-branches, which corresponds to the fast spread of the Slavs through Eastern Europe and

528-684: Is never regarded as declined in Modern English, although formally, the words that and possibly she correspond to forms of the predecessor of the ( sē m., þæt n., sēo f.) as it was declined in Old English. Just as verbs in Latin are conjugated to indicate grammatical information, Latin nouns and adjectives that modify them are declined to signal their roles in sentences. There are five important cases for Latin nouns: nominative , genitive , dative , accusative , and ablative . Since

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576-824: Is not declined in Modern English. There are isolated situations where certain nouns may be modified to reflect gender, though not in a systematic fashion. Loan words from other languages, particularly Latin and the Romance languages, often preserve their gender-specific forms in English, e.g. alumnus (masculine singular) and alumna (feminine singular). Similarly, names borrowed from other languages show comparable distinctions: Andrew and Andrea , Paul and Paula , etc. Additionally, suffixes such as -ess , -ette , and -er are sometimes applied to create overtly gendered versions of nouns, with marking for feminine being much more common than marking for masculine. Many nouns can actually function as members of two genders or even all three, and

624-631: Is often restricted to specific contexts, depending on the dialect or the speaker. It is most typically used to refer to a single person of unknown gender (e.g. "someone left their jacket behind") or a hypothetical person where gender is insignificant (e.g. "If someone wants to, then they should"). Its use has expanded in recent years due to increasing social recognition of persons who do not identify themselves as male or female (see gender-nonbinary ). The singular they still uses plural verb forms, reflecting its origins. Some English adjectives and adverbs are declined for degree of comparison . The unmarked form

672-402: Is still not completely clear what the Stoics exactly meant with their notion of cases. In Modern English , the system of declensions is so simple compared to some other languages that the term declension is rarely used. Most nouns in English have distinct singular and plural forms. Nouns and most noun phrases can form a possessive construction. Plurality is most commonly shown by

720-417: Is subjective, and the objective whom (although it is increasingly common to use who for both). The one situation where gender is still clearly part of the English language is in the pronouns for the third person singular. Consider the following: The distinguishing of neuter for persons and non-persons is peculiar to English. This has existed since the 14th century. However, the use of singular they

768-629: Is the positive form, such as quick . Comparative forms are formed with the ending -er ( quicker ), while superlative forms are formed with -est ( quickest ). Some are uncomparable; the remainder are usually periphrastic constructions with more ( more beautiful ) and most ( most modestly ). See degree of comparison for more. Adjectives are not declined for case in Modern English (though they were in Old English), nor number nor gender. The demonstrative determiners this and that are declined for number, as these and those . The article

816-444: Is within the boundaries of modern Ukraine and Southern Federal District of Russia. The Proto-Slavic language existed until around AD 500. By the 7th century, it had broken apart into large dialectal zones. There are no reliable hypotheses about the nature of the subsequent breakups of West and South Slavic. East Slavic is generally thought to converge to one Old East Slavic language of Kievan Rus , which existed until at least

864-599: The Latin script , and have had more Western European influence due to their proximity and speakers being historically Roman Catholic , whereas the East Slavic and Eastern South Slavic languages are written in Cyrillic and, with Eastern Orthodox or Uniate faith, have had more Greek influence. Two Slavic languages, Belarusian and Serbo-Croatian , are biscriptal, i.e. written in either alphabet either nowadays or in

912-597: The Rusyn language spoken in Transcarpatian Ukraine and adjacent counties of Slovakia and Ukraine. Similarly, the Croatian Kajkavian dialect is more similar to Slovene than to the standard Croatian language. Modern Russian differs from other Slavic languages in an unusually high percentage of words of non-Slavic origin, particularly of Dutch (e.g. for naval terms introduced during

960-586: The Slavonic languages , are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic , spoken during the Early Middle Ages , which in turn is thought to have descended from the earlier Proto-Balto-Slavic language , linking the Slavic languages to the Baltic languages in a Balto-Slavic group within

1008-488: The ending -s (or -es ), whereas possession is always shown by the en clitic -'s or, for plural forms ending in s , by just an apostrophe. Consider, for example, the forms of the noun girl . Most speakers pronounce all forms other than the singular plain form ( girl ) exactly the same. By contrast, a few irregular nouns (like man /men) are slightly more complex in their forms. In this example, all four forms are pronounced distinctly. For nouns, in general, gender

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1056-495: The locative , the instrumental form of "down our street" could also be used: Different word orders preserving the original meaning are possible in an inflected language, while modern English relies on word order for meaning, with a little flexibility. This is one of the advantages of an inflected language. The English sentences above, when read without the made-up case suffixes, are confusing. These contrived examples are relatively simple, whereas actual inflected languages have

1104-730: The national languages of the countries in which they are predominantly spoken: Russian , Belarusian and Ukrainian (of the East group), Polish , Czech and Slovak (of the West group), Bulgarian and Macedonian (eastern members of the South group), and Serbo-Croatian and Slovene (western members of the South group). In addition, Aleksandr Dulichenko recognizes a number of Slavic microlanguages : both isolated ethnolects and peripheral dialects of more well-established Slavic languages. All Slavic languages have fusional morphology and, with

1152-501: The same word , and thus are not declensions. Pronouns in English have more complex declensions. For example, the first person " I ": Whereas nouns do not distinguish between the subjective (nominative) and objective (oblique) cases, some pronouns do; that is, they decline to reflect their relationship to a verb or preposition , or case . Consider the difference between he (subjective) and him (objective), as in "He saw it" and "It saw him"; similarly, consider who , which

1200-453: The vocative case usually takes the same form as the nominative, it is seldom spelt out in grammar books. Yet another case, the locative , is limited to a small number of words. The usual basic functions of these cases are as follows: The genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative also have important functions to indicate the object of a preposition. Given below is the declension paradigm of Latin puer 'boy' and puella 'girl': From

1248-587: The 12th century. Linguistic differentiation was accelerated by the dispersion of the Slavic peoples over a large territory, which in Central Europe exceeded the current extent of Slavic-speaking majorities. Written documents of the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries already display some local linguistic features. For example, the Freising manuscripts show a language that contains some phonetic and lexical elements peculiar to Slovene dialects (e.g. rhotacism ,

1296-521: The 14th or 15th century, major language differences were not between the regions occupied by modern Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, but rather between the north-west (around modern Velikiy Novgorod and Pskov) and the center (around modern Kyiv , Suzdal , Rostov , Moscow as well as Belarus) of the East Slavic territories. The Old Novgorodian dialect of that time differed from the central East Slavic dialects as well as from all other Slavic languages much more than in later centuries. According to Zaliznyak,

1344-527: The Balkans during the second half of the 1st millennium A.D. (the so-called Slavicization of Europe). The Slovenian language was excluded from the analysis, as both Ljubljana koine and Literary Slovenian show mixed lexical features of Southern and Western Slavic languages (which could possibly indicate the Western Slavic origin of Slovenian, which for a long time was being influenced on the part of

1392-598: The Indo-European family. The current geographical distribution of natively spoken Slavic languages includes the Balkans , Central and Eastern Europe , and all the way from Western Siberia to the Russian Far East . Furthermore, the diasporas of many Slavic peoples have established isolated minorities of speakers of their languages all over the world. The number of speakers of all Slavic languages together

1440-593: The Russian language developed as a convergence of that dialect and the central ones, whereas Ukrainian and Belarusian were continuation of development of the central dialects of East Slavs. Also Russian linguist Sergey Nikolaev, analysing historical development of Slavic dialects' accent system, concluded that a number of other tribes in Kievan Rus came from different Slavic branches and spoke distant Slavic dialects. Declension Declension occurs in many of

1488-536: The Slavic languages does not take into account the spoken dialects of each language. Within the individual Slavic languages, dialects may vary to a lesser degree, as those of Russian, or to a much greater degree, like those of Slovene. In certain cases so-called transitional dialects and hybrid dialects often bridge the gaps between different languages, showing similarities that do not stand out when comparing Slavic literary (i.e. standard) languages. For example, Slovak (West Slavic) and Ukrainian (East Slavic) are bridged by

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1536-442: The adjective little would be in the same case as the noun it modifies ( boy ), and the case of the determiner our would agree with the case of the noun it determines ( street ). Using the case suffixes invented for this example, the original sentence would read: And like other inflected languages, the sentence rearranged in the following ways would mean virtually the same thing, but with different expressiveness: Instead of

1584-594: The ancestor language of all Indo-European languages , via a Proto-Balto-Slavic stage. During the Proto-Balto-Slavic period a number of exclusive isoglosses in phonology, morphology, lexis, and syntax developed, which makes Slavic and Baltic the closest related of all the Indo-European branches. The secession of the Balto-Slavic dialect ancestral to Proto-Slavic is estimated on archaeological and glottochronological criteria to have occurred sometime in

1632-486: The equivalent of English "came out" in Russian is "vyshel", where the prefix "vy-" means "out" , the reduced root "-sh" means "come", and the suffix "-el" denotes past tense of masculine gender . The equivalent phrase for a feminine subject is "vyshla". The gender conjugation of verbs , as in the preceding example, is another feature of some Slavic languages rarely found in other language groups. The well-developed fusional grammar allows Slavic languages to have

1680-633: The following sub-branches: Some linguists speculate that a North Slavic branch has existed as well. The Old Novgorod dialect may have reflected some idiosyncrasies of this group. Although the Slavic languages diverged from a common proto-language later than any other groups of the Indo-European language family , enough differences exist between the any two geographically distant Slavic languages to make spoken communication between such speakers cumbersome. As usually found within other language groups , mutual intelligibility between Slavic languages

1728-469: The gender classes of English nouns are usually determined by their agreement with pronouns, rather than marking on the nouns themselves. There can be other derivations from nouns that are not considered declensions. For example, the proper noun Britain has the associated descriptive adjective British and the demonym Briton . Though these words are clearly related, and are generally considered cognates , they are not specifically treated as forms of

1776-564: The geographical separation between these two groups, also severing the connection between Slavs in Moravia and Lower Austria ( Moravians ) and those in present-day Styria , Carinthia , East Tyrol in Austria , and in the provinces of modern Slovenia , where the ancestors of the Slovenes settled during first colonization. In September 2015, Alexei Kassian and Anna Dybo published, as

1824-425: The interwar period, scholars have conventionally divided Slavic languages, on the basis of geographical and genealogical principle, and with the use of the extralinguistic feature of script, into three main branches, that is, East, South, and West (from the vantage of linguistic features alone, there are only two branches of the Slavic languages, namely North and South). These three conventional branches feature some of

1872-443: The last three decades, however, make this view very hard to maintain nowadays, especially when one considers that there was most likely no " Proto-Baltic " language and that West Baltic and East Baltic differ from each other as much as each of them does from Proto-Slavic. The Proto-Slavic language originated in the area of modern Ukraine and Belarus mostly overlapping with the northern part of Indoeuropean Urheimat , which

1920-476: The neighboring Serbo-Croatian dialects), and the quality Swadesh lists were not yet collected for Slovenian dialects. Because of scarcity or unreliability of data, the study also did not cover the so-called Old Novgordian dialect, the Polabian language and some other Slavic lects. The above Kassian-Dybo's research did not take into account the findings by Russian linguist Andrey Zaliznyak who stated that, until

1968-493: The period 1500–1000 BCE. A minority of Baltists maintain the view that the Slavic group of languages differs so radically from the neighboring Baltic group ( Lithuanian , Latvian , and the now-extinct Old Prussian ), that they could not have shared a parent language after the breakup of the Proto-Indo-European continuum about five millennia ago. Substantial advances in Balto-Slavic accentology that occurred in

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2016-407: The reign of Peter I ), French (for household and culinary terms during the reign of Catherine II ) and German (for medical, scientific and military terminology in the mid-1800's). Another difference between the East, South, and West Slavic branches is in the orthography of the standard languages: West Slavic languages (and Western South Slavic languages – Croatian and Slovene ) are written in

2064-460: The sleeping quarters of monarchs (at both the Moldavian and Wallachian courts ). In time, the office became associated with organizing audiences at both courts, and, during the 19th century, became the equivalent of a foreign minister . This Romania -related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Slavic languages The Slavic languages , also known as

2112-406: The subject and object. As an example, even though both of the following sentences consist of the same words, the meaning is different: Hypothetically speaking, suppose English were a language with a more complex declension system in which cases were formed by adding the suffixes: The first sentence above could be formed with any of the following word orders and would have the same meaning: As

2160-658: The word krilatec ). The Freising manuscripts are the first Latin-script continuous text in a Slavic language. The migration of Slavic speakers into the Balkans in the declining centuries of the Byzantine Empire expanded the area of Slavic speech, but the pre-existing writing (notably Greek) survived in this area. The arrival of the Hungarians in Pannonia in the 9th century interposed non-Slavic speakers between South and West Slavs. Frankish conquests completed

2208-580: The world's languages. It is an important aspect of language families like Quechuan (i.e., languages native to the Andes ), Indo-European (e.g. German , Icelandic , Irish , Lithuanian and Latvian , Slavic , Sanskrit , Latin , Ancient and Modern Greek , Albanian , Romanian , Kurdish , Classical and Modern Armenian ), Bantu (e.g. Swahili , Zulu , Kikuyu ), Semitic (e.g. Modern Standard Arabic ), Finno-Ugric (e.g. Hungarian , Finnish , Estonian ), and Turkic (e.g. Turkish ). Old English

2256-452: Was an inflectional language , but largely abandoned inflectional changes as it evolved into Modern English . Though traditionally classified as synthetic , Modern English has moved towards a mostly analytic language . Unlike English, many languages use suffixes to specify subjects and objects and word cases in general. Inflected languages have a freer word order than modern English, an analytic language in which word order identifies

2304-495: Was estimated to be 315 million at the turn of the twenty-first century. It is the largest and most diverse ethno-linguistic group in Europe. The Slavic languages are conventionally (that is, also on the basis of extralinguistic features, such as geography) divided into three subgroups: East , South , and West , which together constitute more than 20 languages. Of these, 10 have at least one million speakers and official status as

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