On 2008-01-16 19:19, Rick McCallister wrote:
> Polish would seem to be the most conservative Slavic
> language in the sense that it preserves nasals,
You mean nasal vowels, I suppose. There's hardly any language that isn't
conservative in SOME respects. For example, Slovene and both Sorbian
languages still preserve the dual in nouns, adjectives, pronouns and
verbs (Polish lost it a few centuries ago). Several Slavic languages
(including Russian) have lexically/gramatically determined
(phonologically free) stress or accent (Polish has developed an almost
rigid rule of penult stress), Czech looks to me, impressionistically,
more conservative than Polish in matters of vocabulary (but this may be
an effect of the purist movement during the Czech National Revival in
the early decades of the 19th c.). Nasal vowels were lost in East Slavic
and the Czech/Slovak group pretty early, but other Slavic languages lost
them one by one in more recent times.
> has a
> complex grammar (unlike much of S. Slavic) but I think
> Piotr could answer that better.
If you have Bulgarian in mind, and if by a complex grammar you
understand complicated inflectional morphology, that's true. The
Serbo-Croatian inflectional system is every inch as complex as, and more
coservative than, that of Polish.
Piotr