Old Church Slavonic Language - Basis and Local Influences

Basis and Local Influences

Old Church Slavonic is evidenced by a relatively small body of manuscripts, most of which were written in First Bulgarian Empire 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 Saints Cyril and Methodius to Great Moravia (863–885). The only well-preserved manuscript of the 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 Second Bulgarian Empire have, on the other hand, few 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:

• Most significantly, the yer (extra-short) vowels: /ĭ/ and /ŭ/;
• Nasal vowels: /ɛ̃/ and /ɔ̃/;
• Near-open articulation of the yat vowel (/æ/);
• Palatal consonants /ɲ/ and /ʎ/ from Proto-Slavic *ň and *ľ;
• Proto-Slavic declension system based on stem endings, including those that later disappeared in attested languages (e.g. u-stems);
• Dual as a distinct grammatical number from singular and plural;
• Aorist, imperfect, Proto-Slavic paradigms for participles.

Old Church Slavonic is also likely to have preserved an extremely archaic type of accentuation (probably close to the Chakavian dialect of modern Serbo-Croatian), but unfortunately no accent marks appear in the written manuscripts.

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

• Phonetic:
  • ra → /la/ by means of liquid metathesis of Proto-Slavic *or, *ol clusters
  • sě from Proto-Slavic *xě < *xai
  • cv, (d)zv from Proto-Slavic *kvě, *gvě < *kvai, *gvai
• morphosyntactic use of the dative possessive case in personal pronouns and nouns: 'рѫка ти' (rǫka ti, "your hand"), 'отъпѹщенье грѣхомъ' (otŭpuštenĭje grěxomŭ, "remission of sins"); periphrastic future tense using the verb 'хотѣти' (xotěti, "to want"); use of the comparative form 'мьнии' (mĭniji, "smaller") to denote "younger".
  • morphosyntactic use of suffixed demonstrative pronouns 'тъ, та, то' (tŭ, ta, to). In Bulgarian and Macedonian these developed into suffixed definite articles.

Old Church Slavonic has some extra features in common with Bulgarian:

• Near-open articulation of the Yat vowel (ě); still preserved in the Bulgarian dialects of the Rhodope mountains;
• The existence of /ʃt/ and /ʒd/ as reflexes of Proto-Slavic *ť (< *tj and *gt, *kt) and *ď (< *dj).
• Use of possessive dative for personal pronouns and nouns, as in 'братъ ми' (bratŭ mi, "my brother"), 'рѫка ти' (rǫka ti, "your hand"), 'отъпѹщенье грѣхомъ' (otŭpuštenĭje grěxomŭ, "remission of sins"), 'храмъ молитвѣ' (xramŭ molitvě, 'house of prayer'), etc.
• Periphrastic compound future tense formed with the auxiliary verb 'хотѣти' (xotěti, "to want"), for example 'хоштѫ писати' (xoštǫ pisati, "I will write").