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Language Properties Appendix C Language properties Section 4.1 briefly describes the properties of the languages used in our experi- ments. Here we provide a slightly more detailed description of these languages. C.1 Slavic Languages Slavic languages are divided into three branches: South, West, and East Slavic. The South Slavic branch is split further into Western and Eastern subgroups. The Western subgroup is composed of Slovenian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian. The languages from the Western subgroup are spoken in Slovenia, Bosnia and Herze- govina, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro,and the adjacent regions. The Eastern sub- group consists of Bulgarian in Bulgaria and adjacent areas, and Macedonian in the Republic of Macedonia, Bulgaria, Greece and Albania. West Slavic includes Czech in the Czech Republic and Slovak in Slovakia, Upper and Lower Sorbian in Ger- many, and Lekhitic (Polish and its related dialects, Kashubian, Polabian, Obodrits). Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian belong to the East Slavic branch. C.2 Czech General. The Czech language is one of the West Slavic languages. It is spoken by most people in the Czech Republic and by Czechs all over the world — about 12 million native speakers in total (http://www.ethnologue.com). Morphology. Czech is a richly inflected language like other Slavic languages. Czech nouns and adjectives distinguish gender, number, and case, and in some cases, animacy. There are seven cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, in- strumental, locative, and vocative. About half of the singular noun paradigms have a distinctive vocative form shared by no other case; no adjectival, pronominal, nu- meral or plural noun paradigms have distinct vocative forms (i.e. vocative = nomi- native). There are three genders, the subcategory of animacy functioning within the masculine only. In the singular, animate accusative equals genitive, which itself, in 168 Appendix C. Language properties West – Czech – Polish – Slovak – Sorbian (Lusatian) South – Western ∗ Slovenian ∗ Serbian ∗ Bosnian ∗ Croatian – Eastern ∗ Bulgarian ∗ Macedonian East – Belarusian – Russian – Ukrainian Figure C.1. Slavic languages the core (hard) masculine paradigm, differs from the inanimate genitive. Similarly, animate dative and locative usually differ from their inanimate equivalents. In the plural, the animate and inanimate differ only in nominative. As in the other Slavic languages, the morphology of numerals is complex in Czech. For example, among the cardinal numbers, only ‘1’, ‘2’, ‘3’, and ‘4’ function adjectivally and retain the morphology of case. The inflection of the other cardinal numerals is limited to the oblique-case ending -i. Ordinal (multidigit) num- bers have all digits in the ordinal form, for example dvacátý pátý, ‘25th’ and are fully declining (at least in Literary Czech). Two-digit numerals between whole tens may have an inverted one-word form (e.g. pˇetadvacátý, ‘25th’). For verbs, person is expressed through inflection. Three tenses are recog- nized, a superficially simple system refined by the Slavonic aspects. Present time meanings are expressed by the basic conjugated forms. The imperative is expressed morphologically in second and first person plural, and analytically in others. The.
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