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1、Series IntroductionTodd B. Krause and Jonathan SlocumOld Church Slavonic is the name given to the language that is preserved in several manuscripts and a few inscriptions originating from the regions of the Moravian Empire, situated between the Vistula River and the easternmost extent of Carolingian
2、 influence, and the Bulgarian Empire, extending from the lower reaches of Macedonia in the south up beyond the Danube in the north. These are the regions of the first missionary work among the Slavs by the monks Cyril and Methodius, who devised in the 9th century AD the first full-fledged writing sy
3、stem to represent the indigenous language. The documents that survive are primarily ecclesiastical. They were produced in a religious tradition that used Old Church Slavonic as the liturgical medium very much the way Latin was used in the Roman Catholic Church.Note: this set of lessons is for system
4、s/browsers with Unicode support, including the full Cyrillic script. Lessons rendered in alternate character sets are available via links (Romanized and Unicode 2) in the left margin, and at the bottom of this page.Linguistic HeredityAlthough Old Church Slavonic (OCS) is the oldest documented Slavic
5、 language, it is not the language from which the other Slavic languages evolved any more than Sanskrit is the language from which the other Indo-European languages evolved. Rather, OCS is now thought to be a dialect of one of the branches of the Slavic languages.We may imagine that the community whi
6、ch later became Slavic speakers was at some time a dialect group of Proto-Indo-European (PIE). When the speech community became sufficiently separated from other PIE speakers to allow for independent language evolution, over time their dialect developed into what we may term Common Slavic (CS) or Pr
7、oto-Slavic (PSl). Subsequently the same process happened again whereby, through the course of migration and the vying for power of different neighboring and internal kingdoms or empires, divisions of the Common Slavic speech community became isolated from one another. By the time of Late Common Slav
8、ic (LCS), three distinct dialects had emerged: East, West, and South Slavic. Modern examples of this dialectal division would be Russian in the East, Czech and Polish in the West, and Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian in the South.Certain linguistic features show Old Church Slavonic to be a member of the
9、 South Slavic group of languages. For instance, the front nasal of LCS retains its front quality in South Slavic, whereas it develops a back quality in both the East and West dialects. Thus OCS has mso where Czech, for example, has maso. Likewise, South Slavic retains the nasal in the accusative plu
10、ral of ja-stem nouns, whereas in East and West Slavic the nasality is lost. Hence OCS konj in contrast to Old Russian kon (East Slavic) and Polish konie (West Slavic).It is supposed, however, that in the 9th century the dialectal differences were still minor enough that mutual intelligibility was po
11、ssible across a wide expanse of the Slavic-speaking community. This view is supported by the fact that the efforts of Cyril and Methodius were conducted through the medium of OCS alone; presumably they chose this language so that their translations would be suitable for conversion of the pan-Slavic
12、community. It is not quite clear to what degree the language of the OCS manuscripts resembles the actual spoken language of the region. It is often assumed that the language is the same as that which was spoken in the centuries preceding the work of Cyril and Methodius; but by the time the extant ma
13、nuscripts were written, the actual spoken language was beginning to diverge from the written language. Nevertheless, the written language continued to exert an influence of its own, even beyond the regions of its origin. For example, in the 11th century one finds in Old Russian, on the geographical
14、extremity of the Slavic community, constant stylistic and lexical borrowings from OCS as its own literature develops.Geographical LocationThe precise location of the archaic homeland of the Slavs is little more than conjecture. Most estimations center on a region bounded by the Bug river to the west
15、, the Pripjat to the north, the Don to the east, and the Dnieper to the south. But there is no consensus, and these tentative boundaries shift depending on the particular linguistic or cultural attributes being discussed. Often linguistic evidence is cited in the defense of geographic conjectures. F
16、or example, the words for yew and ivy are native to LCS (Russian tis, plju), but the term for beech is a loanword (Russian buk, cf. German Buche). Hence it is assumed that the beech tree cannot be native to the original Slavic-speaking area, and because the easternmost extent of the red beech is along a line extending from modern Kaliningrad (Koenigsberg) to the mouth of the Danube, the Slavs could not have lived west of this line.A few tribes mentioned in G
