Supine

Supin is an Indo-European form of the verb name (in the accusative case; it was also in Proto-Slavic , now it is in the Lusatian and Slovenian languages, relict in Czech , from the Romance languages ​​it is preserved only in the Romanian language ). Supin means the goal, usually used in the verb of movement.

For example: lat. eō dormītum “I go to sleep”, the pre-Slavic * jídǫ sápat with the infinitive * sъpati. That is, the word "sleep" in this example, if there is a supine in the language, should be in its form, and not in the infinitive, as in modern Russian. In some northern dialects of the Russian language, after the verbs of movement, there is a so-called “solid” infinitive, which, most likely, is a form of supine: I go spa t ~ inf. to sleep .

In Latin, in addition to pan-Indo-European soup, there was also supinum II on -tu (originally ablative on behalf of -tu-), used only in some stable expressions: horribile dictu “scary to say” , as well as on -tui (dative): aqua potui jucunda "potable water . "

In Latvian, suppin ended, and in some dialects it still ends in “-tu” (<< -tuN), for example: ēstu . Over time, in most dialects, the vowel “-u” has disappeared, and now the supine coincides with the infinitive, for example: ēst (eat, eat). The difference between the supine and the infinitive is preserved only in pronunciation: the infinitive is pronounced with the narrow “e [e]” or “ē [e:]”, and the supine is pronounced with the wide “e [æ]” or “ē [æ:]” (in modern Latvian spelling the sounds [e (:)] / [æ (:)] do not differ in writing, although they function as separate phonemes). Thus, the writing ēst is pronounced [e: st] in the infinitive and [æ: st] in the supine.

In modern Lithuanian, supine is formed with the ending “-tų [tu:]”. Since the Lithuanian subjunctive mood dates back to analytical constructions consisting of a supine and the auxiliary verb “ būti (to be) ” in a special form (which dropped in the 3rd person), in modern language the supine coincides with the third person subjunctive form: “ jis artų (he would plow) - jis eina artų (he goes to plow) . ” In modern colloquial Lithuanian supine, we use it only in some dialects and is considered an archaic form in the literary language (like dualism ). Instead of suppin in Lithuania, they use the infinitive in speech and writing: “ jis eina arti ”. Only the fact that the object of such a verb always stands in the genitive, rather than the accusative case, reminds of the supine. For example, a construction with a soup can look like this: " jis eina knygos skaitytų - he goes to read a book ." The object of the soup: a book - is in kind. case. When replacing the supine with an infinitive, the object still remains in the genus. case: " jis eina knygos skaityti ". In this case, just “ read the book ” will be “ skaityti knygą ”.

In modern Swedish, the term “supine” is used not for the old form of supine, but for a special innovative form, dating back to the past participle form of the middle gender (unlike the latter, Swedish supine has a different pronunciation of the suffix in the fourth conjugation {-it ~ -et } and is used only in analytical forms of the past tense, for example jag har tagit - I took it ).