Languages

[Anteroinen]

Oh yes, there will probably also be all sorts of nice consonant changes in the stem with different case markers and such. But, hey, it isn't Polish, so you won't have to deal with four different kinds of morphemic e.

[ENIHCAMBUS]

Polish is a polished language. :B

[Anteroinen]

Nothing cunning linguist can't handle!

[The Abacus]

What about the tenses and grammar?

[Anteroinen]

Well, if you want to be technical Slavic languages – the ones I know anything about anyway – have simple tense systems, BUT (and yes those capitals are necessary) Slavic languages have these complicated, crazy aspect systems, which stem from first deciding to take into usage these nifty little derivational suffixes and prefixes with lexical aspect and suddenly people stop using the old past forms and oh dear, what now and everyone goes bonkers.

So some languages do past with periphrastic forms (i.e they have several separate parts, like English in "have done"), so end up using only participles, some invent new past forms and then you have Bulgarian which... which... well you see this inflection chart on Wiktionary and see if you can figure out what. Pretty impressive though.

Oh, but I left out the greatest part. So now that aspect is linked to these prefixes and suffixes and stuff, people have – sometimes pretty much arbitrarily – decided to assign either the imperfective or the perfective aspect on a verb, and each verb has a complementing pair. So now, instead of learning one verb and its meaning, you need to learn one verb, its meaning, its aspect pair, the possible differences between these two and remember them.

In reality though, I jest, this is really interesting, and you certainly can wrap your head around it. Slavics just have had an interesting verb-past. As far as I know, the nouns are pretty tame in comparison.

[Oleander]

I disagree; Slavic aspectual distinctions are fairly simple. None of the Slavic languages distinguish any more than perfective vs. imperfective, which is pretty vanilla when you compare it to all of the attested systems in the entire world. Even more, that's pretty much the only thing about them that's really wild.

[Anteroinen]

I was more marvelling at the flabbergastingly weird way it chooses to do that distinction.

[Oleander]

Is that weird, though? English and other Germanic languages do it as well, to a lesser degree in some cases. Georgian has a system of verbal prefixes that pattern as adpositions in many verbs, but indicate aspect and tense distinctions in others. Some dialects of Quechua have the directional marker that used to correspond to 'away from here' now indicates the completive aspect. The part about lexical prefixes is fairly common among languages where such a thing makes sense. As for the suppletive or irregular verb forms in different tenses or other situations--that's almost universal.

[Vurn]

Yeah Polish aspectual prefixes often function by themselves as prepositions.

[ENIHCAMBUS]

Is strange how we are having a discussion of slavic languajes withouth [censored]