They mostly describe people, have negative connotations, and end in -a, for example vė́pla – dummy, el̃geta – beggar, naktìbalda – night-lumberer, a person who does not sleep at night, but mėmė̃ – gawk.
There are some words that have only singular (e.g., pienas – milk, auksas – gold, gripas – flu, laimė – happiness) or only plural (e.g., lubos – ceiling, miltai – flour, kelnės – trousers) forms.
Most such words are abstract (i.e., represent concepts like luck or love and not tangible things such as table or house), describe material or name a disease.
In the table below the numbers of nouns, received by the statistical analysis of the data in the Dictionary of contemporary Lithuanian language (Dabartinės Lietuvių kalbos žodynas; the fourth issue, 2000), are given grouped by the patterns of declension and accentuation.
Here are a few examples of nouns of the third accentuation pattern, the singular nominative and the plural dative and accusative cases: akmuõ, akmenìms, ãkmenis; áugalas, augaláms, áugalus; žándas, žandáms, žándus.
The different sound of a next-to-last syllable makes no grammatical distinction, for example, words nóras – wish and kū́nas – body, are of the same declensional and accentuation patterns.
The number of words (Dictionary of contemporary Lithuanian language / Dabartinės Lietuvių kalbos žodynas; the fourth issue, 2000) of the declensional patterns can be checked in the section above.
Old borrowings: vỹnas 2 (4) – wine, blỹnas 2 – pancake, rõžė 2 – rose, rūtà 2 (4) – rue, slyvà 2 (4) – plum, vyšnià 2 (1) – cherry, and some other.
The genitive case is many times used instead of the -inis, e.g. medžio dirbinys - an artwork from wood, šokių muzikos gabalas - dance music piece (šokinis would sound awkward).
Pronominal adjectives often indicate something unique, thus they are usually used with proper names: Juodoji jūra, Vytautas Didysis, Naujoji Zelandija.
Such adjectives are used in combination with other parts of speech having no gender (infinitive, some pronouns) or in zero subject sentences and tend to describe a general environment.
In each tense five examples are given: three belonging to each conjugation group (dirbti, norėti, skaityti), one reflexive (praustis) and būti – the only auxiliary verb in Lithuanian.
The only exception is when its accented syllable is penultimate (excluding the reflexive formant -si) and has a short vowel (bìjo – he is afraid) or a rising tone (skaĩto – he reads, praũsiasi – he washes himself): in that case the 1st and the 2nd persons of singular move the stress to the ending: bijaũ, bijaĩ; skaitaũ, skaitaĩ; prausiúosi, prausíesi.
E.g. dirbau = 'I worked', norėjai = 'You wanted', skaitėme = 'We read' (past tense) In the -ė conjugation type, the last stem consonant becomes palatalized.
The only exception is when its accented syllable is penultimate (excluding the reflexive formant -si) and has a short vowel (bùvo – he was) or a rising tone (skaĩtė – he read, praũsėsi – he washed himself): in that case the 1st and the 2nd persons of singular move the stress to the ending: buvaũ, buvaĩ; skaičiaũ, skaiteĩ; prausiaũsi, prauseĩsi.
They are used in various contexts for very different meanings, but they usually indicate an action that happened before another action said with another verb, noun or similar: Tos knygos neėmiau, nes jau ją buvau skaitęs – I didn't take that book because I had already read it; Po kelionės vaikai bus labai pasiilgę tėvų – After the trip the children will have badly missed their parents.
; Esu skaitęs, kad vaistai nuo peršalimo nepadeda – I read [some time ago] that pharmaceuticals are useless against common cold.
; Skaičiau, kad vaistai nuo peršalimo nepadeda – I read [that day, at a specific moment in my life] that pharmaceuticals are useless against common cold.
They correspond roughly to English "...was about to do something, when": Tėvas buvo beskaitąs laikraštį, bet kažkas paskambino – The father was about to read a newspaper, but someone called.
Instead of being composed of a conjugatable verb, they are made of pure active participle in nominative case, thus they must match the gender and number of the subject.
[3][4] The indirect mood, sometimes called "participle speech", has multiple uses, but primarily denote actions not experienced directly by the speaker and bearing a high degree of uncertainty: Čia kažkada stovėjusi tvirtovė – [I'm not really sure, it seems like] some time ago there stood a fortress here.
Another widely known use of the indirect mood is describing actions in fictional literature (especially folklore) (could be considered as an equivalent of French Passé simple, except that in Lithuanian it is not limited to the past): Kartą gyvenęs kalvis, kuris turėjęs du sūnus – Once there lived a smith who had two sons.
The perfect and inchoative forms are composed of the auxiliary verb būti in its simple imperative form and of an active participle of the main verb, matched according to gender and number of the person: Imperative perfect means an instruction of the speaker that has to be completed before some other event: Pirmadienį jau būkite apsisprendę – Please already have your decision made by Monday.
Imperative inchoative means an instruction of the speaker that has to be started before some other event and continued afterwards: Kai grįšiu, būkite bedirbą – When I'll come back, please be working.
It means a hypothetical action in the past that would have taken place if certain conditions had been met (corresponds to the semantically equivalent form in English): Vadovas būtų pritaręs renginiui, bet niekas nerodė iniciatyvos.
Passive voice structures with past participle are the passive equivalents of active voice perfect tenses: Siuntinį paštas bus pristatęs iki Kalėdų → Siuntys bus pašto pristatytas iki Kalėdų – The post office will have delivered the parcel until Christmas → The parcel will have been delivered by the post office until Christmas.
Mostly limited to official styles, but certain participles are actively used in colloquial speech as well, some of them being considered more adjectives than verbs: Jis suimtas už pasibaisėtiną elgesį su gyvūnais – He was arrested for an appalling behaviour with animals.
Present passive participles very often have an active meaning, especially if the verb is intransitive, and are one of the terminology building tools: kuliamoji mašina – a threshing machine, taupomasis bankas – a savings bank, grįžtamasis ryšys – a feedback.
Contrary to modern Slavonic languages, each and every Lithuanian verb, in spite of its aspect, has all tenses and forms described in previous chapters of this article.
The same is true considering any other part of sentence, but the Subject and the Verb aren't complementary words typically, and they often serve as the theme and as the rheme respectively.