Terje Mathiassen, “A Short Grammar of Lithuanian”
English | 1996 | ISBN: 0893572675 | pdf | pages: 256 | 1,6 mb
This book is one of the few grammars of Lithuanian out there, and it helped me get a basic grasp of the nature and structure of the language. Lithuanian is an interesting language in that it resembles Sanskrit more than the other Indo-European languages in the rest of Europe. Hence, it is a highly inflected language that preserves many of the archaic features of classical Sanskrit, such as having seven noun cases, three numbers (single, dual, and plural), and six verb conjugations. Lithuanian has two sets of adverbs. The first set is used when the subjects of the main and subordinate clause refer to the same person; the second set is used when the subjects of the main and subordinate clauses are different. This is called a “switch-reference system.” *
Why Lithuanian is such a language isolate in Europe no-one really knows for sure, but it has been ascribed to the early settlement of the region by Indo-Aryan peoples from the east who brought an early form of Indo-European with them. There is a precedent to this in that it is thought that the inhabitants of present-day Latvia, which borders on Lithuania, are the only Caucasian people that have continuously inhabited their region of the Baltics for the last 3,000 years. Latvian is Lithuanian’s closest relative. And there is archeological evidence that the Lithuanians are descended from the Baltic tribes that have inhabited the region since about the 11th millenium B.C.
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