Belarusian affixes in Lithuanian

Summary

Affix function number of borrowed affixes

Description

Information is taken from Inčiuraitė-Noreikienė, Pakerys and Stundžia (2015), examples are mainly from Zinkevičius (1966:30–31, 334). Further background information is from Arkadiev and Kozhanov (2023), Deksne (2022), Nau and Arkadiev (2015), and Wiemer (2009). The borrowed affixes discussed here are not part of modern Standard Lithuanian, but occur in regional spoken Lithuanian, mostly in South-Eastern dialects, including those on the territory of modern Belarus (Tuomienė 2020). For example, for the derivational prefix da- it is known that, even though words with da- occur across the whole Lithuanian language area, the closer to Belarus the variety is, the more frequently they appear. The use of these hybrid formations seems to be discouraged in the standard language (Kozhanov 2014:267–268). In case of da-, it is argued that it was borrowed a very long time ago or might even be inherited (Kozhanov 2013:72). Assuming da- was borrowed, it is one out of a set of three interrelated verbal aspect prefixes that were most likely borrowed directly, since they display a strong tendency to combine with native stems (95%). The verbalizer suffix -ui was also most likely borrowed directly, as it also occurs primarily (in 70% of the cases) with native stems. In addition to Belarusian, Polish dialects of Podlachia may be a source language for these borrowed affixes.

3 verbal derivational prefixes

  • pad- ‘addition, approach, movement under’, e.g. pad-áugau (under-grow.1.singular.past) ‘I grew up’, pad-kált (under-strike.infinitive) ‘to shoe (horses)’.
  • raz- ‘completion via separation, dispersal’, e.g. raz-dãrai (separation-do.2.singular.present) ‘you open the door (all the way)’, rãz-vogė (separation-steal.3.past) ‘she/he stole (everything)’.
  • da- ‘point of achievement of the action, until’, e.g. da-dùrti (until-stab.infinitive) ‘add (a remark)’, ne-da-kẽpęs (negation-until-baking) ‘not quite smart’, da-rašyti (until-write.infinitive) ‘to finish writing’ (Kozhanov 2014).

1 verbalizer suffix

  • -ui ‘verbalizer, spend time doing something with X’ e.g. nakt-ùi-t (night-verbalizer-infinitive) ‘to spend the night’, dar̃b-uj-a (work-verbalizer-present.3) ‘she/he works’, piet-ùj-a (lunch-verbalizer-present.3) ‘she/he has lunch’. This form is likely derived from the reinterpretation of East Slavic verbs with the imperfective verbalizer -ova-, which alternates with -uj in present tense.