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From: vallath@ucbcad.UUCP (Vallath Nandakumar)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Slavic languages and sealing wax
Message-ID: <65@ucbcad.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 7-Jul-85 00:03:45 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbcad.65
Posted: Sun Jul  7 00:03:45 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 13-Jul-85 09:26:52 EDT
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Organization: UC Berkeley CAD Group, Berkeley, CA
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I found, when learning Russian, that the most difficult
aspect :-) of using Russian verbs correctly was when they were
in the infinitive and imperative forms.  Use of a finite
Russian verb in the indicative mood is fairly straightforward,
and is almost a direct correspondence from English or
Malayalam tenses.   (Malayalam, A Dravidian language from
South India, is my mother tongue.  I feel that the tense
system of English, and more so of Malayalam, conveys verbal meaning
much more efficiently than the aspect system of Russian, but this could
very well be because my knowledge of Russian is quite limited.)

Did other people find it also true that the imperative and
infinitive were tough going for non-Slavic speakers?

Somebody mentioned earlier that the Slavic languages developed
an aspect system at some time he/she was able to state.
What system of tenses was there before that?

Judy (whose article was very interesting), mentioned that
Bulgarian has a separate tense to describe what was directly
observed and what was not.  Sanskrit has such a mood, aspect or
whatever you want to call it, and it had a full conjugation
system for all three persons and numbers (singular, dual and
plural).  Those erudite scholars of Sanskrit pointed out that
the verb can never be used in the first person, but one
scholar, more erudite than the rest, made up a list of
statements in which the tense could be used.

For example:
"I was so drunk that I went and punched the king on his nose".

You can bet that the speaker did not know waht he was doing if
he was in ancient India!

Vallath Nandakumar
Dept. of EECS, UC Berkeley.

esvax.vallath@berkeley.arpa, ucbvax!ucbesvax!vallath