Linguistic characteristics

Cases

Most Slavic languages reflect the old Proto-Slavic pattern of seven case forms (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, locative, instrumental, vocative), which occurred in both the singular and the plural. There was also a dual number, meaning two persons or things. In the dual, the cases that were semantically close to each other were represented by a single form (nominative-accusative-vocative, instrumental-dative, genitive-locative). The dual is preserved today only in the westernmost area (i.e., in Slovene and Sorbian). The trend toward the modern, more-analytical type of construction using prepositions and away from the synthetic type using case endings exclusively (as in Proto-Slavic and the archaic Slavic languages) is evident in the gradual elimination of the use of the locative forms without prepositions. The end result of that development is seen in Bulgarian and Macedonian, in which noun declension has almost completely disappeared and has been replaced by syntactic combinations using prepositions (na kniga ‘of a book, to a book’). In Serbian and Croatian and in the western part of the West Slavic area (Sorbian and Czech), the same tendency to lose some of the distinctions between cases is observed, but to a lesser degree. In the other West Slavic languages and in East Slavic, on the other hand, the old system of declension by case endings has been preserved in spite of the large number of loanwords and other neologisms that have no case distinctions at all (e.g., borrowed Russian nouns like kino ‘cinema,’ or acronyms ending in a vowel like Rayono ‘district education department’).

Noun forms

The declension of pronouns has been preserved in all Slavic languages. Old combinations of adjectives with pronouns gave rise to the definite forms of adjectives (e.g., feminine dobra-ja ‘good-the’). Such forms still contrast with the indefinite forms in South Slavic, but in the other languages the indefinite forms either have been gradually lost or else have been preserved only to serve a special function, that of predicate after ‘to be.’ In Bulgarian and Macedonian, as well as in some northern East Slavic dialects, an article is used, placed after a noun or adjective (e.g., in Bulgarian and Macedonian, kniga-ta ‘book-the,’ dobra-ta kniga ‘good-the book’). The three main genders are masculine, feminine, and neuter. Most Slavic languages distinguish animate and inanimate masculine noun forms; some (e.g., Polish) also have personal and nonpersonal masculine forms.

Verb tenses

In the modern Slavic languages the verb is inflected to show present and past tenses. In the early history of the individual languages, however, a distinction was made between two past tenses, the aorist and the imperfect (the aorist denotes the occurrence of an action without reference to its completion, repetition, or duration; the imperfect is a verb tense designating a continuing state or an uncompleted action, especially in the past); that distinction is still preserved in modern South Slavic (with the exception of Slovene). Slavic has almost no traces of the Indo-European old perfect tense but, from combinations of a participle (verb + suffix l + masculine, feminine, or neuter endings) and forms of ‘to be,’ created new perfect (and pluperfect) tenses. Thus, from *dati ‘to give’ there is a form *dalŭ jesmǐ ‘I have given’ for a male speaker, *dala jesmǐ for a female. Later those perfect forms came to be used as past tense forms in different Slavic languages. Slavic verbs usually come in pairs, one of which expresses the perfective (completed) and the other the imperfective (uncompleted) aspects of the same verb—e.g., Russian dat’ ‘to give’ (i.e., ‘to complete the process of giving’), davat’ ‘to be in the process of giving.’

The present tense form of a perfective verb may be used to express future meaning in East and West Slavic. Imperfective verbs need an auxiliary to make their future tense. South Slavic future tenses use an auxiliary (mostly from ‘want’) in both aspects. The eastern South Slavic languages, Bulgarian and Macedonian, have lost the infinitive form of the verb through the influence of non-Slavic Balkan languages, and they have developed verb forms to differentiate between an action witnessed by the speaker and one not witnessed (hence only reported).

Syntax

A striking feature of Slavic syntax is the widespread use of possessive adjectives (e.g., Russian Bož’ja milost’ ‘divine mercy’) instead of the genitive case of the noun (milost’ Boga ‘the mercy of God’). Word order in the Slavic languages is characterized by a gradual shift of the verb from the beginning to the middle of the sentence (subject–verb–object). Other important features of Slavic syntax are related to that medial positioning of the verb and the consequent occurrence of the verb before the object. For example, modifiers and prepositions are usually placed before nouns. Today they follow nouns only in some set phrases like Church Slavonic Boga radi ‘for God’s sake,’ with radi ‘for the sake of’ following the noun Boga ‘God.’

Originally the verb occupied the initial position, which throws light on the origin of the reflexive verbal forms; these may be traced to the Proto-Slavic combination of the verb with a reflexive pronoun that occurred immediately after the verb and was pronounced as one accentual unit with the verb.

The rules for the shift of the stress in syntactic combinations with enclitics (an enclitic is a word treated in pronunciation as part of the preceding word) were identical for verbs and nouns. Depending on the accentuation of the verb or noun, the stress could be shifted either to the enclitic (as in Bulgarian esen-és ‘last autumn’) or to the proclitic, or preceding unstressed word (as u in Serbian and Croatian uˋˋ jesēn ‘in the autumn’).