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52-553: Pribislav , Przibislaus (from Slavic пробивающая слава , "pribi" – pierced, breaking or "more, much more" and "slav" - glory ) is a Slavic origin name . Its feminine form is Pribislava . Notable bearers of the name include: Slavic languages The Slavic languages , also known as the Slavonic languages , are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from

104-684: A proto-language called Proto-Slavic , spoken during the Early Middle Ages , which in turn is thought to have descended from the earlier Proto-Balto-Slavic language , linking the Slavic languages to the Baltic languages in a Balto-Slavic group within the Indo-European family. The current geographical distribution of natively spoken Slavic languages includes the Balkans , Central and Eastern Europe , and all

156-480: A sentence clause , although subject–verb–object and adjective-before-noun is the preferred order in the neutral style of speech . Modern Bulgarian differs from other Slavic languages, because it almost completely lost declension , it developed definite articles from demonstrative pronouns (similar to "the" from "this" in English ), and it formed indicative and renarrative tenses for verbs . Since

208-633: A part of interdisciplinary study of Slavic ethnogenesis, a lexicostatistical classification of Slavic languages. It was built using qualitative 110-word Swadesh lists that were compiled according to the standards of the Global Lexicostatistical Database project and processed using modern phylogenetic algorithms. The resulting dated tree complies with the traditional expert views on the Slavic group structure. Kassian-Dybo's tree suggests that Proto-Slavic first diverged into three branches: Eastern, Western and Southern. The Proto-Slavic break-up

260-553: A recent past. Pontic Steppe Caucasus East Asia Eastern Europe Northern Europe Pontic Steppe Northern/Eastern Steppe Europe South Asia Steppe Europe Caucasus India Indo-Aryans Iranians East Asia Europe East Asia Europe Indo-Aryan Iranian Indo-Aryan Iranian Others European Slavic languages descend from Proto-Slavic , their immediate parent language , ultimately deriving from Proto-Indo-European ,

312-399: A subject such as it , even if nothing is actually being represented by it . In this case, it is an expletive and a dummy pronoun . In imperative clauses, most languages elide the subject, even in languages which typically requires a subject to be present, e.g. One criterion for identifying a subject in various languages is the possibility of its omission in coordinated sentences such as

364-399: A verb has a form which is known as the nominative case : for example, the form 'he' (not 'him' or 'his') is used in sentences such as he ran , He broke the window , He is a teacher , He was hit by a motorist . But there are some languages such as Basque or Greenlandic , in which the form of a noun or pronoun when the verb is intransitive ( he ran ) is different from when the verb

416-404: Is to learn French . A sentence such as It was John who broke the window is more complex still. Sentences beginning with a locative phrase, such as There is a problem, isn't there? , in which the tag question isn't there? seems to imply that the subject is the adverb there , also create difficulties for the definition of subject. In languages such as Latin and German the subject of

468-413: Is transitive ( he broke the window ). In these languages, which are known as ergative languages, the concept of subject may not apply at all. The subject ( glossing abbreviations : SUB or SU ) is, according to a tradition that can be traced back to Aristotle (and that is associated with phrase structure grammars ), one of the two main constituents of a clause , the other constituent being

520-590: Is better for geographically adjacent languages and in the written (rather than oral) form. At the same time, recent studies of mutual intelligibility between Slavic languages revealed, that their traditional three-branch division does not withstand quantitative scrutiny. While the grouping of Czech , Slovak and Polish into West Slavic turned out to be appropriate, Western South Slavic Serbo-Croatian and Slovene were found to be closer to Czech and Slovak (West Slavic languages) than to Eastern South Slavic Bulgarian . The traditional tripartite division of

572-447: Is dated to around 100 A.D., which correlates with the archaeological assessment of Slavic population in the early 1st millennium A.D. being spread on a large territory and already not being monolithic. Then, in the 5th and 6th centuries A.D., these three Slavic branches almost simultaneously divided into sub-branches, which corresponds to the fast spread of the Slavs through Eastern Europe and

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624-470: Is good reveals that something unusual is indeed afoot, since the attempt to question the location fails if the subject does not immediately follow the finite verb. This further observation speaks against taking spiders as the subject in sentence 2. But if spiders is not the subject, then the sentence must lack a subject entirely. The existence of subject-less clauses can be construed as particularly problematic for theories of sentence structure that build on

676-436: Is not always a perfect match between the semantic predicand and the subject, as a predicate may be predicated on an argument in another clause (see raising ). From a functional perspective, a subject is a phrase that conflates nominative case with the topic . Many languages (such as those with ergative or Austronesian alignment ) do not do this, and by this definition would not have subjects. All of these positions see

728-412: Is not considered to be the grammatical subject, but can be described as the topic of the sentence. While these definitions apply to simple English sentences, defining the subject is more difficult in more complex sentences and languages. For example, in the sentence It is difficult to learn French , the subject seems to be the word it , and yet arguably the real subject (the thing that is difficult)

780-514: Is uneasy davor. about it Mir graut davor. me-DAT {is uneasy} {about it} 'I am uneasy about it.' Since subjects are typically marked by the nominative case in German (the fourth criterion above), one can argue that this sentence lacks a subject, for the relevant verb argument appears in the dative case, not in the nominative. Impersonal sentences in Scottish Gaelic can occasionally have

832-444: Is within the boundaries of modern Ukraine and Southern Federal District of Russia. The Proto-Slavic language existed until around AD 500. By the 7th century, it had broken apart into large dialectal zones. There are no reliable hypotheses about the nature of the subsequent breakups of West and South Slavic. East Slavic is generally thought to converge to one Old East Slavic language of Kievan Rus , which existed until at least

884-584: The Latin script , and have had more Western European influence due to their proximity and speakers being historically Roman Catholic , whereas the East Slavic and Eastern South Slavic languages are written in Cyrillic and, with Eastern Orthodox or Uniate faith, have had more Greek influence. Two Slavic languages, Belarusian and Serbo-Croatian , are biscriptal, i.e. written in either alphabet either nowadays or in

936-575: The Rusyn language spoken in Transcarpatian Ukraine and adjacent counties of Slovakia and Ukraine. Similarly, the Croatian Kajkavian dialect is more similar to Slovene than to the standard Croatian language. Modern Russian differs from other Slavic languages in an unusually high percentage of words of non-Slavic origin, particularly of Dutch (e.g. for naval terms introduced during

988-402: The predicate , whereby the predicate says something about the subject. According to a tradition associated with predicate logic and dependency grammars , the subject is the most prominent overt argument of the predicate. By this position all languages with arguments have subjects, though there is no way to define this consistently for all languages. Even in languages such as English, there

1040-404: The suffix "-el" denotes past tense of masculine gender . The equivalent phrase for a feminine subject is "vyshla". The gender conjugation of verbs , as in the preceding example, is another feature of some Slavic languages rarely found in other language groups. The well-developed fusional grammar allows Slavic languages to have a somewhat unusual feature of virtually free word order in

1092-575: The 12th century. Linguistic differentiation was accelerated by the dispersion of the Slavic peoples over a large territory, which in Central Europe exceeded the current extent of Slavic-speaking majorities. Written documents of the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries already display some local linguistic features. For example, the Freising manuscripts show a language that contains some phonetic and lexical elements peculiar to Slovene dialects (e.g. rhotacism ,

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1144-521: The 14th or 15th century, major language differences were not between the regions occupied by modern Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, but rather between the north-west (around modern Velikiy Novgorod and Pskov) and the center (around modern Kyiv , Suzdal , Rostov , Moscow as well as Belarus) of the East Slavic territories. The Old Novgorodian dialect of that time differed from the central East Slavic dialects as well as from all other Slavic languages much more than in later centuries. According to Zaliznyak,

1196-515: The Balkans during the second half of the 1st millennium A.D. (the so-called Slavicization of Europe). The Slovenian language was excluded from the analysis, as both Ljubljana koine and Literary Slovenian show mixed lexical features of Southern and Western Slavic languages (which could possibly indicate the Western Slavic origin of Slovenian, which for a long time was being influenced on the part of

1248-564: The Russian language developed as a convergence of that dialect and the central ones, whereas Ukrainian and Belarusian were continuation of development of the central dialects of East Slavs. Also Russian linguist Sergey Nikolaev, analysing historical development of Slavic dialects' accent system, concluded that a number of other tribes in Kievan Rus came from different Slavic branches and spoke distant Slavic dialects. Subject (grammar) For

1300-536: The Slavic languages does not take into account the spoken dialects of each language. Within the individual Slavic languages, dialects may vary to a lesser degree, as those of Russian, or to a much greater degree, like those of Slovene. In certain cases so-called transitional dialects and hybrid dialects often bridge the gaps between different languages, showing similarities that do not stand out when comparing Slavic literary (i.e. standard) languages. For example, Slovak (West Slavic) and Ukrainian (East Slavic) are bridged by

1352-748: The West group), Bulgarian and Macedonian (eastern members of the South group), and Serbo-Croatian and Slovene (western members of the South group). In addition, Aleksandr Dulichenko recognizes a number of Slavic microlanguages : both isolated ethnolects and peripheral dialects of more well-established Slavic languages. All Slavic languages have fusional morphology and, with a partial exception of Bulgarian and Macedonian , they have fully developed inflection -based conjugation and declension . In their relational synthesis Slavic languages distinguish between lexical and inflectional suffixes . In all cases,

1404-580: The ancestor language of all Indo-European languages , via a Proto-Balto-Slavic stage. During the Proto-Balto-Slavic period a number of exclusive isoglosses in phonology, morphology, lexis, and syntax developed, which makes Slavic and Baltic the closest related of all the Indo-European branches. The secession of the Balto-Slavic dialect ancestral to Proto-Slavic is estimated on archaeological and glottochronological criteria to have occurred sometime in

1456-462: The basis of extralinguistic features, such as geography) divided into three subgroups: East , South , and West , which together constitute more than 20 languages. Of these, 10 have at least one million speakers and official status as the national languages of the countries in which they are predominantly spoken: Russian , Belarusian and Ukrainian (of the East group), Polish , Czech and Slovak (of

1508-410: The binary subject-predicate division. A simple sentence is defined as the combination of a subject and a predicate, but if no subject is present, how can one have a sentence? Subject-less clauses are absent from English for the most part, but they are not unusual in related languages. In German, for instance, impersonal passive clauses can lack a recognizable subject, e.g. Gestern yesterday wurde

1560-454: The criteria (agreement and position occupied) suggest that a chaotic force around here is the subject. When confronted with such data, one has to make a decision that is less than fully arbitrary. If one assumes again that criterion one (agreement) is the most reliable, one can usually identify a subject. Yet another type of construction that challenges the subject concept is locative inversion , e.g. The criteria easily identify spiders as

1612-531: The example sentences below, the subjects are indicated in boldface. The subject is a constituent that can be realized in numerous forms, many of which are listed in the following table: There are several criteria for identifying subjects: Of these three criteria, the first one (agreement) is the most reliable. The subject agrees with the finite verb in person and number (and sometimes in gender as well). The second and third criterion are merely strong tendencies that can be flouted in certain constructions, e.g. In

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1664-403: The first criterion as the most telling; the subject should agree with the finite verb. Another difficult case for identifying the subject is the so-called inverse copular constructions , e.g. The criteria combine to identify the boys as the subject in sentence 1. But if that is the case, then one might argue that the boys is also the subject in the similar sentence 2, even though two of

1716-432: The first sentence, all three criteria combine to identify Tom as the subject. In the second sentence, which involves the subject-auxiliary inversion of a yes/no-question , the subject immediately follows the finite verb (instead of immediately preceding it), which means the second criterion is flouted. And in the third sentence expressed in the passive voice, the 1st and the 2nd criterion combine to identify chemistry as

1768-626: The following sub-branches: Some linguists speculate that a North Slavic branch has existed as well. The Old Novgorod dialect may have reflected some idiosyncrasies of this group. Although the Slavic languages diverged from a common proto-language later than any other groups of the Indo-European language family , enough differences exist between the any two geographically distant Slavic languages to make spoken communication between such speakers cumbersome. As usually found within other language groups , mutual intelligibility between Slavic languages

1820-460: The following: The man hit the woman and [the man] came here. In a passive construction, the patient becomes the subject by this criterion: The woman was hit by the man and [the woman] came here. In ergative languages such as the nearly extinct Australian language Dyirbal , in a transitive sentence it is the patient rather than the agent that can be omitted in such sentences: Balan d ugumbil baŋgul yaraŋgu balgan, banin u 'The man ( bayi yara ) hit

1872-549: The geographical separation between these two groups, also severing the connection between Slavs in Moravia and Lower Austria ( Moravians ) and those in present-day Styria , Carinthia , East Tyrol in Austria , and in the provinces of modern Slovenia , where the ancestors of the Slovenes settled during first colonization. In September 2015, Alexei Kassian and Anna Dybo published, as

1924-425: The interwar period, scholars have conventionally divided Slavic languages, on the basis of geographical and genealogical principle, and with the use of the extralinguistic feature of script, into three main branches, that is, East, South, and West (from the vantage of linguistic features alone, there are only two branches of the Slavic languages, namely North and South). These three conventional branches feature some of

1976-443: The last three decades, however, make this view very hard to maintain nowadays, especially when one considers that there was most likely no " Proto-Baltic " language and that West Baltic and East Baltic differ from each other as much as each of them does from Proto-Slavic. The Proto-Slavic language originated in the area of modern Ukraine and Belarus mostly overlapping with the northern part of Indoeuropean Urheimat , which

2028-409: The lexical suffix precedes the inflectional in an agglutination mode. The fusional categorization of Slavic languages is based on grammatic inflectional suffixes alone. Prefixes are also used, particularly for lexical modification of verbs. For example, the equivalent of English "came out" in Russian is "vyshel", where the prefix "vy-" means "out" , the reduced root "-sh" means "come", and

2080-471: The neighboring Serbo-Croatian dialects), and the quality Swadesh lists were not yet collected for Slovenian dialects. Because of scarcity or unreliability of data, the study also did not cover the so-called Old Novgordian dialect, the Polabian language and some other Slavic lects. The above Kassian-Dybo's research did not take into account the findings by Russian linguist Andrey Zaliznyak who stated that, until

2132-484: The period 1500–1000 BCE. A minority of Baltists maintain the view that the Slavic group of languages differs so radically from the neighboring Baltic group ( Lithuanian , Latvian , and the now-extinct Old Prussian ), that they could not have shared a parent language after the breakup of the Proto-Indo-European continuum about five millennia ago. Substantial advances in Balto-Slavic accentology that occurred in

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2184-429: The person and number of the subject, Japanese and Mandarin have no such forms at all. This dropping pattern does not automatically make a language a pro-drop language . In other languages, like English and French, most clauses should have a subject, which should be either a noun (phrase), a pronoun, or a clause. This is also true when the clause has no element to be represented by it. This is why verbs like rain must have

2236-407: The reign of Peter I ), French (for household and culinary terms during the reign of Catherine II ) and German (for medical, scientific and military terminology in the mid-1800's). Another difference between the East, South, and West Slavic branches is in the orthography of the standard languages: West Slavic languages (and Western South Slavic languages – Croatian and Slovene ) are written in

2288-567: The simple sentence John runs , John is the subject, a person or thing about whom the statement is made. Traditionally the subject is the word or phrase which controls the verb in the clause , that is to say with which the verb agrees ( John is but John and Mary are ). If there is no verb, as in Nicola ;– what an idiot! , or if the verb has a different subject, as in John ;– I can't stand him! , then 'John'

2340-441: The subject determining person and number agreement on the finite verb , as exemplified by the difference in verb forms between he eats and they eat . The stereotypical subject immediately precedes the finite verb in declarative sentences and represents an agent or a theme. The subject is often a multi-word constituent and should be distinguished from parts of speech , which, roughly, classify words within constituents. In

2392-399: The subject in sentence 1. In sentence 2, however, the position occupied suggests that under the bed should be construed as the subject, whereas agreement and semantic role continue to identify spiders as the subject. This is so despite the fact that spiders in sentence 2 appears after the string of verbs in the canonical position of an object. The fact that sentence 3 is bad but sentence 4

2444-433: The subject, e.g. In sentence 1, the first criterion (agreement) and the second criterion (position occupied) suggest that there is the subject, whereas the third criterion (semantic role) suggests rather that problems is the subject. In sentence 2, in contrast, agreement and semantic role suggest that problems is the subject, whereas position occupied suggests that there is the subject. In such cases then, one can take

2496-511: The subject, whereas the third criterion suggests that by Tom should be the subject because Tom is an agent. The fourth criterion is better applicable to other languages, the exception being the subject and object forms of pronouns, I/me , he/him , she/her, they/them . The fifth criterion is helpful in languages that typically drop pronominal subjects, such as Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Latin, Greek, Japanese, and Mandarin. Though most of these languages are rich in verb forms for determining

2548-563: The way from Western Siberia to the Russian Far East . Furthermore, the diasporas of many Slavic peoples have established isolated minorities of speakers of their languages all over the world. The number of speakers of all Slavic languages together was estimated to be 315 million at the turn of the twenty-first century. It is the largest and most diverse ethno-linguistic group in Europe. The Slavic languages are conventionally (that is, also on

2600-549: The woman ( balan d ugumbil ) and [she] came here' This suggests that in ergative languages of this kind the patient is actually the subject in a transitive sentence. There are certain constructions that challenge the criteria just introduced for identifying subjects. The following subsections briefly illustrate three such cases: 1) existential there -constructions, 2) inverse copular constructions , and 3) locative inversion constructions. Existential there -constructions allow for varying interpretations about what should count as

2652-639: The word krilatec ). The Freising manuscripts are the first Latin-script continuous text in a Slavic language. The migration of Slavic speakers into the Balkans in the declining centuries of the Byzantine Empire expanded the area of Slavic speech, but the pre-existing writing (notably Greek) survived in this area. The arrival of the Hungarians in Pannonia in the 9th century interposed non-Slavic speakers between South and West Slavs. Frankish conquests completed

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2704-404: Was nur only geschlafen. slept Gestern wurde nur geschlafen. yesterday was only slept 'Everybody slept yesterday.' The word gestern 'yesterday' is generally construed as an adverb, which means it cannot be taken as the subject in this sentence. Certain verbs in German also require a dative or accusative object instead of a nominative subject, e.g. Mir me- DAT graut

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