Linguistic review

Lithuanian is a fusional language. It has:

• two grammatical genders: masculine and feminine,
• singular and plural number ,
• 7 grammatical cases ,
• 5 declensions,
• 6 adjectival declensions (3 masculine and 3 feminine),
• adverbs,
• prepositions,
• pronouns (personal, possesive, indicative, interrogative, indefinite),
• numerals (cardinal , ordinal),
• 3 grammatical conjugations,
• 4 simple tenses (present, future, momentaneous past, multiple past) and 8 complex tenses (4 simultaneous and 4 perfect),
• moods: indicative, conditional, imperative, inferential,
• active, passive and reflexive voice,
• 13 active and passive participle forms (Vaičiulytė-Romančuk 2006Vaičiulytė-Romančuk 2006 / komentarz/comment/r /
  Vaičiulytė-Romančuk, Ona 2006. Gramatyka języka litewskiego. Warszawa: Ex Libris.
  ).

The stress in Lithuanian is variable. It means that any part of a word can be stressed. Apart from that, the Lithuanian language has two intonations (rising and falling) which are tagged with the following marks:

• ~ circumflex – it means rising intonation,
• ՛ acute accent – it means falling intonation,

Moreover, there is also the

• ` grave accent – which means word stress.

Those marks play a doubly important role, because not only do they mark the syllable as stressed, but also identify the  intonation pattern (in the case of the circumflex and acute accents) (Vaičiulytė-Romančuk, 2006: 12Vaičiulytė-Romančuk 2006 / komentarz/comment/r /
Vaičiulytė-Romančuk, Ona 2006. Gramatyka języka litewskiego. Warszawa: Ex Libris.
).
There are 4 accentual types of nouns, according to which the stress of the word is determined.  Stress can change within one word depending on the grammatical case it is in.


Accentuation of a word ’batas’ (a shoe) and ‘batai’ (shoes), belonging to the second type. (Butkus 2011: 12Butkus 2011 / komentarz/comment/r /
Butkus, Alvydas 2011. Lietuvių-latvių ir latvių-lietuvių kalbų žodynas. Kaunas: Aesti.
)

Lexical similarity is not limited to the similarities between Lithuanian and Latvian. A certain amount of Baltic vocabulary was borrowed by Finno-Ugric languages in time when peoples using those languages led a nomadic lifestyle -mostly  words concerning the nomadic lifestyle, e.g. names of seeds (fiń. siemen, lit. sėmenys ‘seed’) (Zinkevičius 1996: 13Zinkevičius 1996 / komentarz/comment/r /
Zinkevičius, Zigmas 1996. The history of the Lithuanian language. Wilno: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidykla.
).

Lithuanian was strongly influenced by Slavic languages (especially Polish and Belarussian). Slavic borrowings in the dialect of the Dzuks are phonetically more similar to Belarussian forms, for example: abrusas, Bel. abrus, Pol. obrus; bačka, Bel. bočka, Pol. bečka; ščupokas, Bel. ščupak, Pol. szczupak (Marcinkiewicz 2003: 104Marcinkiewicz 2003 / komentarz/comment/r /
Marcinkiewicz, Józef 2003. Polsko-litewskie kontakty językowe na Suwalszczyźnie. Poznań: Zakład Graficzny UAM.
).