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Slavic/Latin case system relation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6587 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes  2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 1 of 8 23 January 2007 at 8:59am | IP Logged | ||
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I would like to ask a question..if possible..regarding the case system relation between the Latin language and the Slvaic languages.
I'm no expert at all and I can only speak from the point of view of 3 Slavic languages and a very superficial knowlege of Latin. I allways heared, that the Slovak case system is derived from Latin. Slovak and Russian languages have 6 cases each, Czech and Latin have 7. I'm not sure about Russian, but the Slovak language has a 7th case too (the Vocative..it's actually the 5th case), only it's rarely used. They almost corerspond with the Latin ones, but these 3 Slavic languages don't have the Ablative case and Latin doesn't seem to have the Instrumental case. now..the thing that I would like to ask is, how is this possible? The Roman Empire collapsed in 476 A.D. and the first knowlege of Slavic tribes in this area is dated to the 5-6 century A.D. so they missed eachother. Even if Latin was in use afterwards..maybe in churches..but it took a while until the first Slavic kings were baptised..do you think that it had such an impact on Slavic nations as far as in the region of later Kiev or city of Vladimir, that would change their languages so much? The Slavic nations and their languages close to the former Roman empire maybe could have been influenced by Latin, but Kievskaja Rus? or is this just a mere coincidence then? if not..if Latin really influenced the Slavic languages..how was it possible in such a short time? Furthermore, how can a language be changed in such a drastic manner in such a short time to be accepted by the regular people? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6946 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 2 of 8 23 January 2007 at 9:46am | IP Logged | ||
It's not a question of influence. The idea is that Latin and Slavic languages had a common ancestor language, from which they diverged. You can try reading about the "Indo-European" language family starting from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-european, but there may be better places. The reason this family is called "Indo-European" is because the concept first arose out of the realization of many similarities between Sanskrit and Latin. From what I've heard, Sanskrit had 8 cases - anything less is presumably the result of reduction. Edited by frenkeld on 23 January 2007 at 10:13am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6587 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 3 of 8 23 January 2007 at 9:51am | IP Logged | ||
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That's a reasonable explanation.
what do you think about the fact that people usually say that the slavic languages were influenced by Latin and are based on the Latin case system? I was pointing out more to this fact. do you think it's a wrong assumption? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6946 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 4 of 8 23 January 2007 at 9:55am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know the history of Slavic languages, but it's hard to imagine a language starting out without cases and then acquiring them as a result of some sort of "influence". I am not a linguist, but this seems very improbable.
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| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6587 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 5 of 8 23 January 2007 at 10:05am | IP Logged | ||
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Speaking for Slovakian..our language has loads of Latin loanwords and the cases themselves have Latin names, so I guess this is the reason for the assumption, that the case system was influenced by Latin .. or as they say..it was based on the Latin case system.
I'm starting to think this is improbable too. maybe not in the way, that there were no cases before in the Slavic languages and suddenly they appeared. but maybe there were 4, then under the influence of Latin 2 additional ones were added.. I think it's improbable too. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7159 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 6 of 8 23 January 2007 at 10:07am | IP Logged | ||
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There are a few resemblances between Czech and Latin endings. Presumably a holdover from the proto-Indo-European system of cases.
bonus dominus > boni domini ~ dobry student > dobri studenti bonum verbum > bona verba ~ dobre slovo > dobra slova (source: Sova (1962) "A Practical Czech Course for English-Speaking Students") If you're curious, look at Lithuanian grammar. I'm finding it to be much more complicated than any Slavonic grammar that I have encountered and it divides the nouns into classes like Latin. Presumably, this was what the old Balto-Slavonic language was like, but over time the descendants who were on the Slavonic side "simplified" their language. If you're really into it, get a copy of the book "Common and Comparative Slavic: Phonology and Inflection with Special Emphasis on Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian." (Townsend and Janda) or "The Slavonic Languages" (ed. Comrie and Greville). The former gives a lot of detail on how Proto-Indo-European > Early Proto-Slavonic > Late Proto-Slavonic > modern daughter languages. I found it very helpful in understanding the connections between the Slavonic languages that I've studied and why for instance Czech and Croatian don't seem very intuitive to me compared to Polish and Slovak. The latter has a succint chapter on Proto-Slavonic , while its chapter on Slovak gives some information on how the old traits from Proto-Slavonic appear in the modern language. (ex. the reason why declining numerals in most modern Slavonic languages is very complicated is because the almost total disappearance of the old dual "screwed up" the declension of all numbers after 1)) Edited by Chung on 23 January 2007 at 10:14am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arti Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 7015 days ago 130 posts - 165 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: French, Czech | Message 7 of 8 24 January 2007 at 7:49am | IP Logged | ||
I'm sure it is not :) The fact that case names are latin is easily explained. Latin grammar was described long time ago and when some slovak linguists decided to describe their own language (i guess they knew latin as it was obligatory at that time) and they saw that it had the latin-like grammar so it was unnecessary to create new words for case names or for any other categories, so Slovak was simply desribed like Latin. Russian language has its own case names, but they were translated from Latin unlike in Slovak and that's all :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6600 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 8 of 8 25 January 2007 at 2:30pm | IP Logged | ||
About vocative in Russian... it used to have it, but doesn't any more. Not sure when exactly it went out of use, but in the nineteenth century it was still used. Ukrainian and Belarusian still have it, and probably some dialects have it too... although in spoken Russian there has appeared something like a new form of vocative, which is only used with words that belong to the first declension type and formed by the dropping the a at the end of the word: Мам, позвони мне, когда придёшь! Марин, как дела? (I personally hate when people use my name this way in written form, but in spoken it's perfectly ok with me) Юль, что случилось? (the nominative forms of these words are: мама, Марина, Юля. I think this form is mostly used with names) Edited by Serpent on 25 January 2007 at 2:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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