Church Slavonic
| Church Slavonic | |
|---|---|
| Church Slavic | |
| Црькъвьнословѣньскъ ѩзыкъ Церковнославѧ́нскїй Ѧ҆зы́къ ⱌⱃⰽⰲⰰⱀⱁⱄⰾⱁⰲⱑⱀⱄⰽⱜ ⰵⰸⰻⰽⱜ ⱌⰹⱃⱏⰽⱏⰲⱏⱀⱁⱄⰾⱁⰲⱑⱀⱐⱄⰽⱏⰹ ⱗⰸⱏⰻⰽⱏ | |
Spiridon Psalter in Church Slavonic | |
| Region | Eastern and Southeast Europe |
Native speakers | None[1] |
| |
Early form | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-1 | cu |
| ISO 639-2 | chu |
| ISO 639-3 | chu (includes Old Church Slavonic) |
| Glottolog | chur1257 Church Slavic |
| Linguasphere | 53-AAA-a |
Church Slavonic,
In addition, Church Slavonic is used by some churches which consider themselves Orthodox but are not in communion with the Orthodox Church, such as the Montenegrin Orthodox Church and the Russian True Orthodox Church. The Russian Old Believers and the Co-Believers also use Church Slavonic.
Church Slavonic is also used by
In the past, Church Slavonic was also used by the Orthodox Churches in the Romanian lands until the late 17th and early 18th centuries,[3] as well as by Roman Catholic Croats in the Early Middle Ages.
Historical development
Church Slavonic represents a later stage of
After the
By the early 12th century, individual Slavic languages started to emerge, and the liturgical language was modified in pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and orthography according to the local
Attestation of Church Slavonic traditions appear in
The first Church Slavonic printed book was the Missale Romanum Glagolitice (1483) in angular Glagolitic, followed shortly by five Cyrillic liturgical books printed in Kraków in 1491.
Recensions
The Church Slavonic language is actually a set of at least four different dialects (recensions or redactions; Russian: извод, izvod), with essential distinctions between them in dictionary, spelling (even in writing systems), phonetics, and other aspects. The most widespread recension, Russian, has several local sub-dialects in turn, with slightly different pronunciations.
These various Church Slavonic recensions were used as a liturgical and literary language in all Orthodox countries north of the Mediterranean region during the Middle Ages, even in places where the local population was not Slavic (especially in Romania). In recent centuries, however, Church Slavonic was fully replaced by local languages in the non-Slavic countries. Even in some of the Slavic Orthodox countries, the modern national language is now used for liturgical purposes to a greater or lesser extent.
The Russian Orthodox Church, which contains around half of all Orthodox believers, still holds its liturgies almost entirely in Church Slavonic.[8] However, there exist parishes which use other languages (where the main problem has been a lack of good translations).[9] Examples include:
- According to the decision of the All-Russian Church Council of 1917–1918, service in Russian or Ukrainian can be permitted in individual parishes when approved by church authorities.
- Parishes serving ethnic minorities in Russia use (entirely or in part) the languages of those populations: Sakha (Yakut), etc.
- Autonomous parts of the Russian Orthodox Church prepare and partly use translations to the languages of the local population, as Ukrainian, Belarusian, Romanian (in Moldova), Japanese, and Chinese.
- Parishes in the diaspora, including ones of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, often use local languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Portuguese, etc.
What follows is a list of modern recensions or dialects of Church Slavonic. For a list and descriptions of extinct recensions, see the article on the Old Church Slavonic language.
Russian (Synodal) recension
 |
The Russian recension of New Church Slavonic is the language of books since the second half of the 17th century. It generally uses traditional Cyrillic script (poluustav); however, certain texts (mostly prayers) are printed in modern alphabets with the spelling adapted to rules of local languages (for example, in Russian/Ukrainian/Bulgarian/Serbian Cyrillic or in Hungarian/Slovak/Polish Latin).
Before the eighteenth century, Church Slavonic was in wide use as a general
Standard (Russian) variant
In Russia, Church Slavonic is pronounced in the same way as Russian, with some exceptions:
- Church Slavonic features okanye and yekanye, i.e., the absence of vowel reduction in unstressed syllables. That is, о and е in unstressed positions are always read as [o] and [jɛ]~[ʲɛ] respectively (like in northern Russian dialects), whereas in standard Russian pronunciation they have different allophones when unstressed.
- There should be no de-voicing of final consonants, although in practice there often is.
- The letter е [je] is never read as ё [jo]~[ʲo] (the letter ё does not exist in Church Slavonic writing at all). This is also reflected in borrowings from Church Slavonic into Russian: in the following pairs the first word is Church Slavonic in origin, and the second is purely Russian: небо / нёбо (nebo / nëbo), надежда / надёжный (nadežda / nadëžnyj).
- The letter Γ can traditionally be read as voiced fricative velar sound [ɣ] (just as in Southern Russian dialects); however, occlusive [ɡ] (as in standard Russian pronunciation) is also possible and has been considered acceptable since the beginning of the 20th century. When unvoiced, it becomes [x]; this has influenced the Russian pronunciation of Бог (Bog) as Boh [box].
- The adjective endings -аго/-его/-ого/-яго are pronounced as written ([aɣo/ago], [ʲeɣo/ʲego], [oɣo/ogo], [ʲaɣo/ʲago]), whereas Russian -его/-ого are pronounced with [v] instead of [ɣ] (and with the reduction of unstressed vowels).
Ukrainian and Rusyn variants
A main difference between Russian and Ukrainian variants of Church Slavonic as well as the Russian "
Typographically, Serbian and Ukrainian editions (when printed in traditional Cyrillic) are almost identical to the Russian ones. Certain visible distinctions may include:
- less frequent use of abbreviations in "nomina sacra";
- treating digraph ⟨оу⟩ as a single character rather than two letters (for example, in letter-spacing or in combination with diacritical marks: in Russian editions, they are placed above ⟨у⟩, not between ⟨о⟩ and ⟨у⟩; also, when the first letter of a word is printed in different color, it is applied to ⟨о⟩ in Russian editions and to the entire ⟨оу⟩ in Serbian and Ukrainian).
Old Moscow recension
The Old Moscow recension is in use among Old Believers and Co-Believers. The same traditional Cyrillic alphabet as in Russian Synodal recension; however, there are differences in spelling because the Old Moscow recension reproduces an older state of orthography and grammar in general (before the 1650s). The most easily observable peculiarities of books in this recension are:
- using of digraph ⟨оу⟩ not only in the initial position,
- hyphenation with no hyphenation sign.
Serbian recension
The variant differences are limited to the lack of certain sounds in Serbian phonetics (there are no sounds corresponding to letters ы and щ, and in certain cases the palatalization is impossible to observe, e.g. ть is pronounced as т etc.). The medieval Serbian recension of Church Slavonic was gradually replaced by the Russian recension since the early 18th century.
Nowadays in Serbia, Church Slavonic is generally pronounced according to the Russian model.
Croatian recension
This is in limited use among Croatian Catholics. Texts are printed in the Croatian Latin alphabet (with the addition of letter ⟨ě⟩ for yat) or in Glagolitic script. Sample editions include:
- Missale Romanum Glagolitice
- Ioseph Vais, Abecedarivm Palaeoslovenicvm in usvm glagolitarvm. Veglae, [Krk], 1917 (2nd ed.). XXXVI+76 p. (collection of liturgical texts in Glagolitic script, with a brief Church Slavonic grammar written in Latin language and Slavonic-Latin dictionary)
- Rimski misal slavĕnskim jezikom: Čin misi s izbranimi misami..., Zagreb: Kršćanska sadašnjost, 1980 (The ISBN specified even at the publisher 978-953-151-721-5 is bad, causing a checksum error) (in Croatian Latin script)[10]
Czech recension
Church Slavonic is in very limited use among Czech Catholics. The recension was developed by Vojtěch Tkadlčík in his editions of the Roman missal:
- Rimskyj misal slověnskym jazykem izvoljenijem Apostolskym za Arcibiskupiju Olomuckuju iskusa dělja izdan. Olomouc 1972.[11]
- Rimskyj misal povelěnijem svjataho vselenskaho senma Vatikanskaho druhaho obnovljen... Olomouc 1992.[12]
Grammar and style
Although the various recensions of Church Slavonic differ in some points, they share the tendency of approximating the original Old Church Slavonic to the local Slavic vernacular. Inflection tends to follow the ancient patterns with few simplifications. All original six verbal tenses, seven nominal cases, and three numbers are intact in most frequently used traditional texts (but in the newly composed texts, authors avoid most archaic constructions and prefer variants that are closer to modern Russian syntax and are better understood by the Slavic-speaking people).
In Russian recension, the fall of the
The vocabulary and syntax, whether in scripture, liturgy, or church missives, are generally somewhat modernised in an attempt to increase comprehension. In particular, some of the ancient pronouns have been eliminated from the scripture (such as етеръ /jeter/ "a certain (person, etc.)" → нѣкій in the Russian recension). Many, but not all, occurrences of the imperfect tense have been replaced with the perfect.
Miscellaneous other modernisations of classical formulae have taken place from time to time. For example, the opening of the
See also
- Outline of Slavic history and culture
- List of Slavic studies journals
- List of Glagolitic books
- List of Glagolitic manuscripts
- Old Church Slavonic
Notes
- ^ Old Church Slavonic: црькъвьнословѣньскъ ѩзыкъ, romanized: crĭkŭvĭnoslověnĭskŭ językŭ, lit. 'Church-Slavonic language';
Russian Church Slavonic: Церковнославѣньскїй ѧзыкъ, romanized: Cerkovnoslavěnskij jazyk;
Croatian Church Slavonic: ⱌⱃⰽⰲⰰⱀⱁⱄⰾⱁⰲⱑⱀⱄⰽⱜ ⰵⰸⰻⰽⱜ, romanized: crkavnoslověnskь jezikь;
Czech Church Slavonic: ⱌⰹⱃⱏⰽⱏⰲⱏⱀⱁⱄⰾⱁⰲⱑⱀⱐⱄⰽⱏⰹ ⱗⰸⱏⰻⰽⱏ, romanized: cirkevnoslověnskyj jazyk
References
- ^ Church Slavonic at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)
- ^ Hammarström, Harald; Forke, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2020). "Church Slavic". Glottolog 4.3.
- ^ Petre P. Panaitescu, Studii de istorie economică și socială (in Romanian)
- ^ Aco Lukaroski. "St. Clement of Ohrid Cathedral – About Saint Clement of Ohrid". Archived from the original on 16 May 2015. Retrieved 5 March 2015.
- ^ Dvornik, Francis (1956). The Slavs: Their Early History and Civilization. Boston: American Academy of Arts and Sciences. p. 179.
The Psalter and the Book of Prophets were adapted or "modernized" with special regard to their use in Bulgarian churches, and it was in this school that glagolitic writing was replaced by the so-called Cyrillic writing, which was more akin to the Greek uncial, simplified matters considerably and is still used by the Orthodox Slavs.
- ISBN 978-0-521-81539-0.
- ISBN 978-0-19-161488-0.
- ^ See Brian P. Bennett, Religion and Language in Post-Soviet Russia Archived 2013-02-25 at the Wayback Machine (New York: Routledge, 2011).
- ^ See the report of Fr. Theodore Lyudogovsky and Deacon Maxim Plyakin, Liturgical languages of Slavic local churches: a current situation Archived 2012-09-03 at archive.today, 2009 (in Russian), and a draft of the article Liturgical languages in Slavia Orthodoxa, 2009 (also in Russian) of the same authors.
- ^ "Rimski misal slavĕnskim jezikom". Kršćanska sadašnjost. Retrieved 2012-10-16.
"German review of Rimski misal slavĕnskim jezikom". Slovo. Retrieved 2012-06-04. - ^ "Review (in Croatian) of Rimskyj misal (Olomouc, 1972)". Slovo. Retrieved 2012-06-04.
- ^ "Review (in Croatian) of Rimskyj misal (Olomouc, 1992)". Slovo. Retrieved 2012-06-04.
External links
- Old Church Slavonic and the Macedonian recension of the Church Slavonic language, Elka Ulchar (in Macedonian)
- What Languages are Actually Spoken in Ukraine 2023-05-15
- Orthodox Christian Liturgical Texts in Church Slavonic
- Bible in Church Slavonic language (Wikisource), (PDF) Archived 2019-07-16 at the Wayback Machine, (iPhone), (Android)
- Problems of computer implementation (in Russian)
- Slavonic - the input tool for Church Slavonic (in Russian)
- Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). . Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
- Church Slavonic Virtual Keyboard
- CyrAcademisator Transliteration tool for Church Slavonic including a virtual keyboard.
- Slavonic Computing Initiative
- The textbook of the Church Slavonic language "Literacy" - online version (with soundtrack).
- Church Slavonic Typography in Unicode (Unicode Technical Note no. 41), 2015-11-04, accessed 2023-01-04.
