Lithuanian Grammar
The Lithuanian language is a highly inflected language where relationship between parts of speech and their roles in a sentence are expressed by numerous flexions.
There are two grammatical genders in Lithuanian. It has a free and mobile stress. Lithuanian language is synthetic (or, inflected). It has 5 noun and 3 adjective declensions and 3 verbal conjugations. All verbs have present, past, past iterative and future tenses of the indicative mood, conditional and imperative moods (both without distinction of tenses) and infinitive.
These forms, except the infinitive, are conjugative, having 2 singular, 2 plural persons and the 3rd person form common both for plural and singular. Nouns and other declinable words are declined in seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, three types of locative, and vocative (nouns only).
The Lithuanian language vocabulary does not possess many loan words which makes it quite "pure". There are some loan words that are called senieji skoliniai (old loans) which were borrowed from the closest neighbours a long time ago. Such words are stiklas (Slavic origin), muilas (Slavic origin), gatve (gatwo), spinta (die Spind). These words will never be changed because they got in on time.
Other borrowed words are international words that can be found in many languages like telefonas, ciklas, schema etc. These words come from Latin or Ancient Greek and are not "dangerous" (since those languages do not exist anymore). However, there are many words which have Lithuanian counterparts, hence they should not be used.
Such words used to come from Russian in the past but now that Lithuania has regained its independence in 1991, English is starting to have increasingly stronger influence over Lihtuanian and many words have recently "flooded" the Language (like dispenseris, hakeris or singlas) and they are not to be tolerated. These problems are being discussed at present but finding good Lithuanian counterparts for these words is a difficult job.
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