Old Church Slavonic

 

language belonging to the South Slavic group of the Slavic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Slavic languages). Although it is still the liturgical language of most branches of the Orthodox Eastern Church, Church Slavonic is extinct today as a spoken tongue. In its earliest period, from the 9th to 11th cent. A.D., this language is variously termed Old Church Slavonic, Old Church Slavic, or Old Bulgarian. The year 1100 is the conventional dividing line between the ancestor, Old Church Slavonic, and its descendant, the later Church Slavonic, which flourished as the literary language of a number of Slavic peoples before the 18th cent. Old Church Slavonic was created in the 9th cent. by St. Cyril and St. Methodius for their translation of the Gospels and other religious texts. Scholars disagree as to which spoken Slavic dialect was chosen by the two saints as the basis for the language of their translations. In any case, because this dialect was inadequate for their purpose, they had to enrich and transform it, drawing on the vocabulary and syntax of Greek. Old Church Slavonic is the first Slavic language known to have been recorded in writing. Two alphabets were devised for it, the Glagolitic and the Cyrillic. Tradition makes St. Cyril the inventor of both, although this view has been questioned; and both alphabets are said to have been derived in part from the Greek. The earliest suriving documents in Old Church Slavonic date from the 10th and 11th cent. In time, as the South and East Slavic tongues influenced this literary language in their respective regions, three major forms of the later Church Slavonic arose: Bulgarian, Serbian, and Russian. For various historical reasons, Russian Church Slavonic eventually became the dominant form. The Western Slavs were not caught up in this development, since they came under the domination of the Roman Catholic Church after the 11th cent. At first employed for religious writings, Church Slavonic later came to be used in secular compositions as well. Today it is written in the Cyrillic alphabet.

Bibliography

See G. Nandris, Handbook of Old Church Slavonic (1959); H. G. Lunt, Old Church Slavonic Grammar (4th ed. 1966); R. Picchio and H. Goldblatt, ed., Aspects of the Slavic Language Question (Vol. 1, 1984).

This article or section is missing citations or needs footnotes. Using inline citations helps guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies.

Old Church Slavonic Ѩзыкъ словѣньскъ językŭ slověnĭskŭ Spoken in: formerly in Slavic areas, under the influence of Byzantium (both Catholic and Orthodox)  Region: Eastern Europe Language extinction: in use only as a liturgical language Language family: Indo-European  Slavic   South    Eastern     Old Church Slavonic  Writing system: Glagolitic alphabet; Cyrillic alphabet Language codes ISO 639-1: cu ISO 639-2: chu ISO 639-3: chu Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

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Old Church Slavonic (also called Old Bulgarian or Old Slavic^[1]) is the first literary Slavic language, developed from the Slavic dialect of Thessalonica (modern Thessaloniki) by the 9th century Byzantine Greek missionaries, Saints Cyril and Methodius. It was used by them for translation of the Bible and other texts from Greek and for some of their own writings. It played a great role in the history of Slavic languages and evolved into Church Slavonic, which is still used as a liturgical language by some Orthodox and Greek-Catholic Churches of the Slavic peoples.

History

The language was standardized for the mission of the two apostles to Great Moravia in 863 (see Glagolitic alphabet for details). For that purpose, Cyril and his brother Methodius first codified Old Church Slavonic from the Southern Slavic dialect spoken in the neighbourhood (hinterland) of their city, Thessalonica (Solun in Slavic), in the Byzantine Empire.

As part of the preparation for the mission, in 862/863, the Glagolitic alphabet was created and the most important prayers and liturgical books, including the Aprakos Evangeliar (a Gospel Book lectionary containing only feast-day and Sunday readings), the Psalter, and Acts of the Apostles, were translated. (The Gospels were also translated early, but it is unclear whether Sts. Cyril or Methodius had a hand in this). The language and the alphabet were taught at the Great Moravian Academy (Veľkomoravské učilište) and were used for government and religious documents and books between 863 and 885. The texts written during this phase contain characteristics of the Slavic vernaculars in Great Moravia.

In 885, the use of the Old Church Slavonic in Great Moravia was prohibited by the Pope in favour of Latin. Students of the two apostles, who were expelled from Great Moravia in 886, brought the Glagolitic alphabet and the Old Church Slavonic language to the Bulgarian Empire. It was taught at two Bulgarian academies - in Preslav (capital 893-972) and Ohrid (capital 991/997-1015). The Cyrillic alphabet was developed shortly afterwards in the Preslav Literary School and replaced the Glagolitic one. The texts written during this era contain characteristics of the vernacular of Bulgaria. There are some linguistic differences between texts written in the two academies.

Thereupon the language, in its Bulgarian recension, spread to other South-Eastern and Eastern European Slavic territories, most notably to Croatia, Serbia, Bohemia, Lesser Poland, and the Russian principalities. The texts written in each country contain characteristics of the local Slavic vernacular.

Much later, local redactions of Old Church Slavonic were created for ecclesiastical and administrative use, and are collectively known as Church Slavonic (Macedonian: црковнословенски јазик, crkovnoslovenski jazik; Bulgarian: църковнославянски език, ts'rkovnoslavyanski ezik; Russian: церковнославя́нский язы́к, tserkovnoslavyánskiy yazík), but these terms are often confused. Church Slavonic maintained a prestige status, particularly in Russia, for many centuries—among Slavs in the East it had a status analogous to that of the Latin language in western Europe, but had the advantage of being substantially less divergent from the vernacular tongues of average parishioners. Some Orthodox churches, such as the Russian Orthodox Church, Bulgarian Orthodox Church and Serbian Orthodox Church, as well as several Greek Catholic churches, still use Church Slavonic in their services and chants today.

Script

Initially Old Church Slavonic was written with the Glagolitic alphabet, but later it was replaced by the Cyrillic alphabet. Only in Croatia was the local variant of the Glagolitic alphabet preserved. See Early Cyrillic alphabet for a detailed description of the script and information about the sounds it originally expressed.

Basis and local influences

Old Church Slavonic is evidenced by a relatively small body of manuscripts, most of which were written during the late 10th and the early 11th centuries. The language has a Southern Slavic basis with an admixture of Western Slavic features inherited during the mission of Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius to Great Moravia (863 - 885). The only well-preserved manuscript of Moravian recension, the Kiev Folia, is characterised by the replacement of some Southern Slavic phonetic and lexical features with Western Slavic ones. Manuscripts written in the medieval Bulgarian kingdom have, on the other hand, fewer Western Slavic features.

Old Church Slavonic is valuable to historical linguists since it preserves archaic features believed to have once been common to all Slavic languages. Some of these features are:

• nasal counterparts of the vowels o and e
• use of supershort vowels ь and ъ for Proto-Indo-European short i and u
• open articulation of the yat vowel
• [ň] and [ľ] for the Proto-Slavic [nj], [lj]
• Proto-Slavic declension system based on stem-endings (so-called o-stems, jo-stems, a-stems and ja-stems)
• aorists, the imperfect, Proto-Slavic paradigms for participles etc. were still used

The Southern Slavic nature of the language is evident from the following variations:

• phonetic:
  • use of [ra-], [la-] for the Proto-Slavic [or̃-], [ol̃-]
  • use of [s] for the Proto-Slavic [x] before the Proto-Slavic åi
  • use of [cv-], [dzv-] for the Proto-Slavic [kv'-], [gv'-]

• morphosyntactic
  • use of the dative possessive case in personal pronouns and nouns: рѫка ти; отъпоуштенье грѣхомъ; descriptive future tense using the verb хотѣти (to want); use of the comparative form мьнии (smaller) to denote "younger".
  • use of suffixed demonstrative pronouns (тъ, та, то). In Bulgarian and Macedonian these developed into suffixed definite articles.

Some of the phonetic features in Old Church Slavonic are typical only for Bulgarian, as follows:

• very wide articulation of the Yat vowel (Ѣ); originally still preserved in the Bulgarian dialects of the Rhodope mountains;
• Proto-Slavic reflexes of *tj ([t']) and *dj ([d']):

Proto-Slavic	Old Church Slavonic	Bulgarian	Czech	Macedonian	Polish	Russian	Slovak	Slovenian	Serbian
*dʲ	ʒd	ʒd	z	gʲ	ʣ	ʐ	ʣ	j	ʥ
*tʲ	ʃt	ʃt	ʦ	kʲ	ʦ	tɕ	ʦ	ʧ	ʨ
*gt/kt	ʃt	ʃt	ʦ	kʲ	ʦ	tɕ	ʦ	ʧ	ʨ

Macedonian recension

Macedonian is one of the oldest recensions of the Old Church Slavonic language and thrived in the period between the 10th and 14th centuries. The main literary center of this recension was the Ohrid Literary School (founded in the First Bulgarian Empire) whose most prominent member, and most likely founder, was Saint Clement of Ohrid. As this recension grew and thrived, several other literary centers emerged, among which most notable is the Lesnovo Literary School of the Lesnovo Monastery in north-eastern Macedonia. The main features are the following:

• the traditional form of writing i.e. continuous usage of the Glagolithic alphabet instead of the Cyrillic alphabet;
• a feature called mixing (confusion) of the nasals which is a unique Macedonian feature. Thus the development ѫ > ѧ occurs: behind the soft consonants р, л and н and in the cluster labial consonant + soft л. The vice versa case, development ѧ > ѫ occurs behind ш, ж, ц, ч, щ (шт), жд and j;
• wide usage of the soft consonant clusters шт and жд and, in the later stages, their development in the modern Macedonian phonems ќ = /kʲ/ and ѓ = /gʲ/ respectively;
• Strict distinction in the articulation of the yers and their vocalisation in strong position (ъ > o and ь > e) or omission in weak position;
• Confusion of ѧ with Ѣ and Ѣ with e;
• Denasalization in the latter stages: ѧ > e and ѫ > a, ѹ, ъ;
• Wider usage and keeping of the phoneme ѕ = /dz/ (which in all Slavic languages but Macedonian has merged with з);

Bulgarian recension

Several literary centres were operated in the Bulgarian Empire. These centred around the two main academies in Ohrid and Preslav. This led to the appearance of multiple Bulgarian recensions in the period from the 9th to the 11th centuries. Thus:

• both Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets were concurrently used
• in some documents the original supershort vowels [ъ] and [ь] merged and only one of the letters was used to represent both of them
• in West-Bulgarian recensions [ъ] was sometimes substituted with [o]
• in East-Bulgarian recensions the original ascending reflex (rь, lь) of syllabic 'r' and 'l' was sometimes changed to descending ьr, ьl or a combination of both was used
• original [ы] and [ъi] merged to [ы]
• sometimes the use of letter 'Ѕ' (dz) was unified with that of 'З' (z)
• verb forms naricajǫ, naricaješi were substituted or alternated with naričǫ, naričeši
• lexical - use of words with proto-Bulgar origin, such as кумиръ, капище, чрьтогъ, блъванъ, etc.

Moravian recension

While in the Prague fragments the only Moravian influence is replacing [št] with [c] and [žd] with [z], the recension evidenced by the Kiev Folia is characterised by the following features:

• confusion between the letters Big yus (Ѫ) and Uk (ѹ) occurs once in the Kiev Folia, when the expected form въсѹдъ is spelled въсѫдъ
• use of [c] for the Proto-Slavic *tj, use of [dz] for the Proto-Slavic *dj, use of šč for the Proto-Slavic *skj
• use of the words mьša, cirky, papežь, prěfacija, klepati, piskati etc.
• preservation of the group dl (e.g. modlitvami)
• use of the ending –ъmь instead of –omь in the masculine singular instrumental, use of the pronoun čьso

Later recensions (Church Slavonic)

Later use of the language in a number of medieval Slavic states resulted in the adjustment of Old Church Slavonic to the local vernacular, though a number of Southern Slavic, Moravian or Bulgarian features were also preserved. Some of the significant later recensions of Old Church Slavonic (referred to as Church Slavonic) in the present time are: Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian, Russian.

Croatian recension

The Croatian recension of Old Church Slavonic is one of the earliest known today. It only used the Glagolitic alphabet. The nasal sounds [ǫ] / [ę] had been substituted with [o] / [u] and a variety of reflections of the proto-Slavic *tj and *dj emerged.

Russian recension

The Russian recension was developed after the 10th century on the basis of the earlier Bulgarian recensions, from which it differed slightly. Its main features are:

• substitution of the nasal sound [ǫ] with [u]
• merging of letters [ě] and [ja]

Serbian recension

The Serbian recension was at first written in Glagolitic alphabet, but later switched to Cyrillic alphabet. It appeared in the 12th century on the basis of the East-Bulgarian recensions:

• nasal vowels [ǫ] and [ę] were replaced with [u] and [е]
• use of diacritical signs by the Resava recension

Authors

The history of Old Church Slavonic writing includes a northern tradition begun by the mission to Great Moravia, including a short mission in the Balaton principality, and a Bulgarian tradition begun by some of the missionaries who relocated to Bulgaria after the expulsion from Great Moravia.

Old Church Slavonic's first writings, translations of Christian liturgical and Biblical texts, were produced by Byzantine missionaries Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius, mostly during their mission to Great Moravia.

The most important authors in Old Church Slavonic after the death of Methodius and the dissolution of the Great Moravian academy were Clement of Ohrid (active also in Great Moravia), Constantine of Preslav, Chernorizetz Hrabar and John Exarch, all of whom worked in medieval Bulgaria at the end of the 9th and the beginning of the 10th century.

Nomenclature

The original name of the language in the Old Church Slavonic texts was simply "Slavic" (словѣньскыи ѩзыкъ slověnĭskyj językŭ),^[2] derived from the word словѣне slověne, the self-designation of the compilers of the texts.

The language is sometimes called "Old Slavic", but that term is undesirable as it may be confused with the distinct Proto-Slavic language.

The designation Old Bulgarian (German Altbulgarisch) was introduced in the 19th century by reputable linguists as August Schleicher, Martin Hattala and Leopold Geitler who noticed that the linguistic features of the first Slavic literary works are the same as those of the Bulgarian language. For similar reasons Russian linguist Aleksandr Vostokov used the term Slav-Bulgarian. The designation is, however, now considered by some as incorrect, as it implies that Old Church Slavonic was the ancestor exclusively of Bulgarian and that all manuscripts have a connection to Bulgarian.

The commonly accepted terms in modern English-language Slavic studies are Old Church Slavic (American usage) and Old Church Slavonic (British usage). Old Bulgarian can still be found in a number of sources and is the only designation used by Bulgarian linguistics. Some scholars use these terms for tradition's sake but believe that Old Macedonian better reflects the language's basis in the dialect of Thessaloniki spoken by Cyril and Methodius. This name is unrelated to current ethnic and political polemics surrounding the Republic of Macedonia, and its use predates these issues.

Modern Slavic nomenclature

Here are some of the names used by speakers of modern Slavic languages:

• Belarusian: старажытнаславянская мова (staražytnasłavianskaja mova) — 'Old Slavic'
• Bosnian: staro(crkveno) slavenski — 'Old (Church) Slavic'
• Bulgarian: старобългарски (starobălgarski) — 'Old Bulgarian'
• Czech: staroslověnština — 'Old Slavic'
• Croatian: staro(crkveno) slavenski — 'Old (Church) Slavic'
• Macedonian: старо(црковно) словенски (staro(crkovno) slovenski) — 'Old (Church) Slavic'
• Polish: staro-cerkiewno-słowiański — 'Old Church Slavic'
• Russian: старославянский язык (staroslavjánskij jazýk) — 'Old Slavic'
• Serbian: старо(црквено)словенски / staro(crkveno)slovenski — 'Old (Church) Slavic'
• Slovak: (staro) slovienčina — '(Old) Slavic'
• Slovenian: stara cerkvena slovanščina — 'Old Church Slavic'
• Ukrainian: старослов’янська мова (staroslovjans'ka mova) — 'Old Slavic'

References

1. ^ "Old Church Slavonic language." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. <http://search.eb.com/eb/article-9056967>. In older writing and in Bulgaria, it is often called Old Bulgarian — University of Texas Linguistics Research Center: Old Church Slavonic Online. Because of the language's importance in the development of Macedonian, it is sometimes called Old Macedonian (distinct from Ancient Macedonian) in the Republic of Macedonia — The European Library
2. ^ Nandris, Grigore (1959). Old Church Slavonic Grammar, p. 2 (London: University of London Athlone Press).

See also

• Proto-Slavic language
• Church Slavonic language
• Slavoserbian

External links

• Old Church Slavonic Wikipedia
• Old Church Slavonic Online, a comprehensive tutorial at the A. Richard Diebold Center for Indo-European Language and Culture, Linguistics Research Center, University of Texas at Austin

Slavic languages and dialects
East Slavic	Belarusian | Old East Slavic† | Old Novgorod dialect† | Russian | Carpathian Rusyn | Ruthenian† | Ukrainian
West Slavic	Czech | Kashubian | Knaanic† | Lower Sorbian | Pannonian Rusyn | Polabian† | Polish | Pomeranian† | Slovak | Slovincian† | Upper Sorbian
South Slavic	Banat Bulgarian | Bulgarian | Church Slavonic | Macedonian | Old Church Slavonic† | Serbo-Croatian (Bosnian, Bunjevac, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian, Šokac) | Slavic (Greece) | Slovenian
Other (†Extinct)	Proto-Slavic† | Russenorsk† | Slavoserbian†

cu:Словѣньскъ ѩзыкъ

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