In Lithuania I spent some time (OK, not a lot, but some) puzzling the strange Slav and Lithuanian grammar of "we". In English you can only say Sandra and I. OK, in some cases this can become Sandra and me, or even me and Sandra, when speaking. This is quite simple, as befits a language whose speakers are not taught grammar at school and thus have extreme difficulty imagining how complicated other languages can make things.
In Russian and Lithuanian you say "we with Sandra". This is not the royal we. I was pondering the statement and wondering how many people were included in the we. At the time it wasn't clear whether Sandra and Audrius were going to do something with me or without me. Was it "we two" or "we three"? In the end it was clear from the context it did not include me. If it did, presumably it would have to be "we with Sandra and Varske". In which case, what does "we" mean at all. And how would the grammar go in "Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all"?
This is a complicated story. I'll get to the point in a moment.
I have been muttering about learning Slovenian, without doing much about it. My sister waved her instant Slovenian grammar (2 pages) at me yesterday. I quickly spotted that Slovene does not just have singular and plural, it also has a dual. I was able to recognise this from a slight brush with classical Greek and a very retentive memory. With a dual, there is special grammar for pairs of things, which can of course be masculine feminine and neuter. Russian numbers are bad enough, distinguishing between 1, 2-4 and 5 and more. Clearly Slovene is going to be very complicated.
So when Gilmore Girls series 5 began on the TV this evening I was knocked out to find I could understand the title: "Midve z mamo" — "Me and my mother". And I recognised that midve is actually "we-two-female", not "me".
Who says soap operas are not educational!
