Customer Reviews:
 Good perhaps for academics, not for ordinary learners December 17, 2005
John R. Peters
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
The book seems comprehensive in its coverage of grammar, but not organized at all around the needs of the ordinary learner.
Rather it seems directed towards the academic linquistic professional. As a result, it is very difficult for the ordinary learner to get the fundamentals from this book, possible, but difficult. Here is an example of why from page 49: "By heteroclitics can be understood either 1)suppletive paradigms (i.e., alternations of phonemically completely different allomorphs like for instance good:better in the English adjectival comparison or rebenok 'child', pl. deti in the Russian noun declension) or 2) paradigms where the nom. sg. stem deviates from the other stem forms in the paradigm or 3) paradigms where the sg. stem differs from that of the plural..." Most of us who want to learn to use a grammar to read or write the language could care less about "suppletive paradigms" yet the book is filled with such arcane language.
Such professional jargon makes the book relatively useless and quite difficult to understand for the ordinary learner of Lithuanian. At the same time, if you skip this jargon and the rules for pronounciations, it is possible, though hard-slogging, to get the fundamentals of grammar from this book for learning to read or write Lithuanian.
Having learned Latin from the textbooks of Allen and Greenough and such which were oriented to teaching grammar to those trying to learn the language, it is a bitter disappointment to pick up Mathiassen's book and wade through the jargon to try to figure out simple questions that ordinary language learners want to know about. This book is definitely not for such learners; it is not oriented to those who want to learn grammar in order to read or write the language.
John Peters
A purely synchronic presentation October 18, 2005
Christopher Culver
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
A SHORT GRAMMAR OF LITHUANIAN by Terje Mathiassen is exactly what its title suggests, a lightweight overview of the phonology, morphology, and syntax of Lithuanian. It is similar to an installment in Routledge's "Essential Grammar" line.
Unfortunately, the grammar is nearly entirely synchronic. I would imagine that most people in need of a Lithuanian grammar, especially one published by Slavica, are Indo-Europeanists who are interested in the historical development of Lithuanian. While Mathiassen's grammar occasionally mentions IE topics, they are essentially footnotes. So, beware, if you are into comparative Indo-European linguistics, this will not serve your needs. The typesetting is also poor, but one comes to accept this from Slavica publications.
As a simple grammar for students of the modern language, however, it is one of the few resources available. The presentation of the accent and ablaut is admirable
 Good introductory grammar of little-known language November 11, 2003
magellan (Santa Clara, CA)
6 out of 9 found this review helpful
This book is one of the few grammars of Lithuanian out there, and it helped me get a basic grasp of the nature and structure of the language. Lithuanian is an interesting language in that it resembles Sanskrit more than the other Indo-European languages in the rest of Europe. Hence, it is a highly inflected language that preserves many of the archaic features of classical Sanskrit, such as having seven noun cases, three numbers (single, dual, and plural), and six verb conjugations. Lithuanian has two sets of adverbs. The first set is used when the subjects of the main and subordinate clause refer to the same person; the second set is used when the subjects of the main and subordinate clauses are different. This is called a "switch-reference system." * Why Lithuanian is such a language isolate in Europe no-one really knows for sure, but it has been ascribed to the early settlement of the region by Indo-Aryan peoples from the east who brought an early form of Indo-European with them. There is a precedent to this in that it is thought that the inhabitants of present-day Latvia, which borders on Lithuania, are the only Caucasian people that have continuously inhabited their region of the Baltics for the last 3,000 years. Latvian is Lithuanian's closest relative. And there is archeological evidence that the Lithuanians are descended from the Baltic tribes that have inhabited the region since about the 11th millenium B.C. Speaking of Latvian, I have to include a funny note here about it. I had a Latvian friend and roommate in college, and it is one of the funniest languages you will ever hear spoken. For example, you will hear Latvian speakers sometimes say something that clearly sounds in English like "Sh_t is f_cked." I'm not kidding. The actual phrase in Latvian is more like "Sh_ttas ist f_ckts," but at normal speed it sounds like what I said. The word for binoculars is "keekeezers." A popular Latvian food is "peerugs," which are like bite-size piroshkis, but which sounds like something you'd get for your dog. "Gullet" is another popular dish, and it looks like it came from someone's gullet too. It's a gelatin-like dish made from boiling down beef bones, and is eaten with some mustard. It sounds and looks sort of disgusting but it tastes good. I have a funny story about Lithuanian, too. One of my father's friends grew up in Chicago, where there is a Lithuanian section. One time we were talking about languages, and he told me that the worst insult in the Lithuanian is, "Kaip dau sheek da shouda rukshtas pienna." At least that's what it sounded like in English. This translates as, "How's your a_s for blowing buttermilk?" Lithuanian has been called the most linguistically conservative language in Europe, and as I said, is considered something of a language isolate. However, it may not be as isolated as it at first appears, as the Gypsies speak a language known as Romansh, whose closest relative is thought to be Sanskrit, and Basque is the third language in modern Europe that appears to be closer to Sanskrit than to the other present-day European languages. Basque is a pretty strange language itself, being a so-called ergative language, unlike most Indo-European languages. In fact, Basque is the only ergative language in Europe. In ergative languages, the subject is marked with an agentive prefix or postfix, so that the direct object of a transitive verb has the same case as the subject of an intransitive verb. This is what is called the ergative case, and its case marker is different from the absolutive case for subjects of transitive verbs. Basque also has other unique features among the Indo-European languages. It lacks the passive voice, and another oddity is that there are no reflexive pronouns such as myself/himself/herself/ourselves/themselves, although it has the standard set of pronouns. In an interesting article on Basque, Jon Patrick, a professor of psycholinguistics, points out, "Generally it can be said that Euskara (or Basque) has a limited vocabulary but a comprehensive set of grammar rules that makes language generation a highly constructive/creative act, whereas English relies on an extensive vocabulary to provide a breadth of expression. To my mind this feature makes Euskara a more powerful language than English, for example, one word in Euskara can have up to 458,653 different forms just using up to 2 levels of recursion of the standard suffixes." But getting back to Lithuanian, today few people know that Lithuania had a thriving empire from the 9th to the 13th century that stretched from modern Lithuania to southern Russia. The present country is all that is left of this empire. For these reasons, Lithuanian as a language is more interesting than I had thought at first, so I ended up reading this grammar as result. Overall, this was a good introductory grammar, especially considering that there are only a few out there, although I would now like to find a comparative study that discusses and compares the language with Sanskrit, Romansch, and Basque and any of the other related languages that may exist. I had one final comment. Despite English and Lithuanian being very distantly related, it is still possible to find words that are obviously similar. For example, "senele" and "senelis" are the words in Lithuanian for grandfather and grandmother, respectively, which are suspiciously similar to the words "senile" and "senescence" in English. And the word "sunus" in Lithuanian is the word for "son." Considering that English and Lithuanian probably diverged 3,000-5,000 years ago or more, this is a pretty amazing resemblance. *I'm indebted to the UCLA Language Materials Project webpage for this description.
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