LCTL of the Month: Lithuanian

You can't learn much from a word like “deer.”  Even among English nouns, this one lives a somewhat boring life.  For starters, it doesn't even have the decency to tell you if we're talking about “one deer” or “ten thousand deer.”  A “deer” is a “deer” no matter if it is the subject, the object or the location in a sentence.

is huge

	The deer	ran through he woods
I hit	the deer	with my car
The rack on	that deer
Feed	the deer	a carrot

The linguistic property usually responsible for keeping track of these differences is called case.  English lost most of its case system many centuries ago, except for words such as “I”, “me” and “mine,” which continue to express their role in the sentence by changing their sound. Outside of those, it is up to context to determine what role a word plays in the action.

By contrast, words in other European languages are much more liquid: they take the shape of the grammatical container they fill.  In this month's installment of Schendo's LCTL of the Month Club, we will turn our attention to an Indo-European language that, at least  in the opinion of the French Linguist Antonie Meillet, changed its case system the least from the ancestral language of most of Europe's (and India's) tongues, Lithuanian.


While some of the Less Commonly Taught Languages featured here are endangered or spoken by only small groups of people, Lithuanian is a state language and an official language of the European Union.  It is spoken by somewhere between three and four million native speakers.  The vast majority of whom live in Lithuania, a Baltic country in Northeast Europe.  Although it is closely related to neighboring Latvian, the two languages are not mutually intelligible.

According to the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures, case is “a common device to express the syntactic and semantic relationships between clausal constituents,” which doesn't tell me much either.  In short, case is a way of describing the role of a word in a sentence.  Is it the main actor?  Is it the thing being acted upon?  Is it the location or owner of something else?  Lithuanian has seven “official” cases:

Nominative: The subject of a sentence.
Genitive: The possessor of something else
Accusative: The direct object
Dative:  The indirect object
Locative: The location of something else
Instrumental: The “with”-case
Vocative: The “Hey you!”-case

The above list is, of course, a horrible, horrible oversimplification.  The in's and out's of when to use which case are complex, but the important point is that every noun in every sentence has to be one of the seven.  And which one case it is determines how the word is pronounced.  Let us take a look at one word, somebody everyone has, a mother:

Nominative motina
Genitive motinos
Dative motinai
Accusative motiną
Instrumental motina
Locative motinoje
Vocative motina

So, if you say your mother makes the best haluški this side of Vilnius, you would use “motina.”  If you say you gave her a present for mother's day (of course you did) you would use “motinai.”  The form of a word changes depending upon its role in the sentence.

At this point, speakers of English (or Chinese, for that matter) may be feeling rather relieved that they only have to know one word.  Things only get more complex, however, for Lithuanian speakers.  Let's say you live in a rather progressive area of the world and happen to have two mothers.  Now everything is different:

Nominative motinos
Genitive motinų
Dative motinoms
Accusative motinas
Instrumental motinomis
Locative motinose
Vocative motinos

Okay, so that's 14 forms of a word, seven singular and seven plural.  Still not so bad.  But, then again, the forms for your brother (“brólis”), sister (“sesuõ”) and son (“sūnùs”) all follow different patterns.  In all, Lithuanian has five different ways (or declensions) which express the relationship of a noun to the rest of the stuff (sure, that's a technical term) in the sentence.

The result is the following table of case endings (shamelessly lifted from Wikipedia):

click for big version

You could look at this table as something like a road map.  The correct case of thief's can be found at the corner of Singular boulevard and Genitive street in the Third Declension neighborhood: “vagies.”

Thus is the price you pay for making your words more precise.

However unfamiliar this case system is to an English speaker, it is not at all uncommon.  Nor is Lithuanian the most complex case system out there. Finnish has fifteen cases and Slovene has separate case endings for singular (1), dual (2) and plural (3+) nouns.  On the other hand, some people go their whole lives without ever using a case system.  Chinese has none, nor does Vietnamese or Zulu.

In the end, case may be just another linguistic tool that humans use to solve the universal problem of communication, neither indispensable nor useless.