Church Slavonic

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For the first Slavic literary language, see Old Church Slavonic.

Church Slavonic
Church Slavic
Црькъвьнословѣ́ньскъ ѩꙁꙑ́къ
Церковнославѧ́нскїй Ѧ҆зы́къ
ⱌⱃⰽⰲⰰⱀⱁⱄⰾⱁⰲⱑⱀⱄⰽⱜ ⰵⰸⰻⰽⱜ
ⱌⰹⱃⱏⰽⱏⰲⱏⱀⱁⱄⰾⱁⰲⱑⱀⱐⱄⰽⱏⰹ ⱗⰸⱏⰻⰽⱏ
Spiridon Psalter in Church Slavonic
RegionEastern and Southeast Europe
Native speakers
None[1]
Early form
Glagolitic alphabet
Cyrillic alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-1cu
ISO 639-2chu
ISO 639-3chu (includes Old Church Slavonic)
Glottologchur1257  Church Slavic
Linguasphere53-AAA-a
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Church Slavonic

Czech Republic and Slovakia, Slovenia and Croatia. The language appears also in the services of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese, and occasionally in the services of the Orthodox Church in America
.

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

Roman Catholic Church
(Croatian and Czech recensions).

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

Scripture and liturgy from Koine Greek
were made.

After the

Old Bulgarian, were declared official in Bulgaria in 893.[5][6][7]

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

Latin
in the case of Croatian Church Slavonic.

Attestation of Church Slavonic traditions appear in

Early Cyrillic and Glagolitic script
. Glagolitic has nowadays fallen out of use, though both scripts were used from the earliest attested period.

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

An example of Russian Church Slavonic computer typography
Further information (in Russian): ru:Изводы церковнославянского языка

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

Further information (in Russian): ru:Синодальный извод церковнославянского языка

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

schism
in the Russian Orthodox Church.

grad), горячий / горящий (goryačiy / goryaščiy), рожать / рождать (rožat’ / roždat’). Since the Russian Romantic era and the corpus of work of the great Russian authors (from Gogol to Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky
), the relationship between words in these pairs has become traditional. Where the abstract meaning has not commandeered the Church Slavonic word completely, the two words are often synonyms related to one another, much as Latin and native English words were related in the nineteenth century: one is archaic and characteristic of written high style, while the other is found in common speech.

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/g] (and with the reduction of unstressed vowels).

Old Moscow recension

Further information (in Russian): ru:Старомосковский извод церковнославянского языка

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.

Ukrainian and Rusyn recension

Further information (in Ukrainian): uk:Київський ізвод

A main difference between Russian and Ukrainian recension of Church Slavonic as well as the Russian "

yat (ѣ). The Russian pronunciation is the same as е [je]~[ʲe] whereas the Ukrainian is the same as и [i]. Greek Catholic variants of Church Slavonic books printed in variants of the Latin alphabet
(a method used in Austro-Hungary and Czechoslovakia) just contain the letter "i" for yat. Other distinctions reflect differences between palatalization rules of Ukrainian and Russian (for example, ⟨ч⟩ is always "soft" (palatalized) in Russian pronunciation and "hard" in the Ukrainian one), different pronunciation of letters ⟨г⟩ and ⟨щ⟩, etc. Another major difference is the use of Ґ in the Rusyn variant. Г is pronounced as h and Ґ is pronounced as G. For example, Blagosloveno is Blahosloveno in Rusyn variants.

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).

Serbian recension

Further information:
Old Serbian language and Medieval Serbian law

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 beginning in the early 18th century.

Nowadays in Serbia, Church Slavonic is generally pronounced according to the Russian model.

Croatian recension

Further information: Baška tablet

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

ksi, psi, omega, ot, and izhitsa are kept, as are the letter-based denotation of numerical values, the use of stress accents, and the abbreviations or titla for nomina sacra
.

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

Saints Cyril and Methodius, (искони бѣаше слово) "In the beginning was the Word", were set as "искони бѣ слово" in the Ostrog Bible of Ivan Fedorov (1580/1581) and as въ началѣ бѣ слово in the Elizabethan Bible
of 1751, still in use in the Russian Orthodox Church.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ 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
  2. ^ Also known as Church Slavic,[2] New Church Slavonic, New Church Slavic or just Slavonic (as it was called by its native speakers)

References

  1. ^ Church Slavonic at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022) Closed access icon
  2. ^ Hammarström, Harald; Forke, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2020). "Church Slavic". Glottolog 4.3.
  3. ^ Petre P. Panaitescu, Studii de istorie economică și socială (in Romanian)
  4. ^ Aco Lukaroski. "St. Clement of Ohrid Cathedral – About Saint Clement of Ohrid". Archived from the original on 16 May 2015. Retrieved 5 March 2015.
  5. ^ 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.
  6. ISBN 978-0-521-81539-0
    .
  7. ISBN 978-0-19-161488-0
    .
  8. ^ See Brian P. Bennett, Religion and Language in Post-Soviet Russia Archived 2013-02-25 at the Wayback Machine (New York: Routledge, 2011).
  9. ^ 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.
  10. ^ "Rimski misal slavĕnskim jezikom". Kršćanska sadašnjost. Retrieved 16 October 2012.
    "German review of Rimski misal slavĕnskim jezikom". Slovo. Retrieved 4 June 2012.
  11. ^ "Review (in Croatian) of Rimskyj misal (Olomouc, 1972)". Slovo. Retrieved 4 June 2012.
  12. ^ "Review (in Croatian) of Rimskyj misal (Olomouc, 1992)". Slovo. Retrieved 4 June 2012.
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