Comparisons
The aorist is not dead: the Serbian past tense Russian lost centuries ago
Old Slavic had four past tenses. Russian's modern past collapsed all of that into one form and leans entirely on aspect to say the rest. Serbian kept the old aorist alive - not as a museum piece, but as a tense you will hear in a folk song, in a novel, and occasionally in an exclamation someone's grandmother makes at dinner.
6 min read