In the past, Church Slavonic was also used by the Orthodox Churches in theRomanian lands until the late 17th and early 18th centuries,[3] as well as by Roman CatholicCroats in theEarly Middle Ages.
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 localvernacular usage. These modified varieties orrecensions (e.g. Serbian Church Slavonic,Russian Church Slavonic, Ukrainian Church Slavonic inEarly Cyrillic script, Croatian Church Slavonic in Croatianangular Glagolitic and later inLatin script, Czech Church Slavonic, Slovak Church Slavonic in Latin script, Bulgarian Church Slavonic inEarly Cyrillic and BulgarianGlagolitic scripts, etc.) eventually stabilized and their regularized forms were used by the scribes to produce new translations of liturgical material fromKoine Greek, orLatin in the case of Croatian Church Slavonic.
Attestation of Church Slavonic traditions appear inEarly Cyrillic andGlagolitic 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 theMissale Romanum Glagolitice (1483) in angular Glagolitic, followed shortly by five Cyrillic liturgical books printed inKraków in 1491.
The Church Slavonic language is actually a set of at least four differentdialects (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 theMiddle Ages, even in places where the local population was not Slavic (especially inRomania). 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.[9] However, there existparishes which use other languages (where the main problem has been a lack of good translations).[10] 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.
Autonomous parts of theRussian 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 theRussian 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 theOld Church Slavonic language.
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 generalliterary language inRussia. Although it was never spokenper se outside church services, members of the priesthood, poets, and the educated tended to slip its expressions into their speech. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was gradually replaced by theRussian language in secular literature and was retained for use only in church. Although as late as the 1760s,Lomonosov argued that Church Slavonic was the so-called "high style" of Russian, during the nineteenth century within Russia, this point of view declined. Elements of Church Slavonic style may have survived longest in speech among theOld Believers after the late-seventeenth centuryschism in the Russian Orthodox Church.
Russian has borrowed many words from Church Slavonic. While both Russian and Church Slavonic are Slavic languages, some early Slavic sound combinations evolved differently in each branch. As a result, the borrowings into Russian are similar to native Russian words, but with South Slavic variances, e.g. (the first word in each pair is Russian, the second Church Slavonic):золото /злато (zoloto /zlato),город /град (gorod /grad),горячий /горящий (goryačiy /goryaščiy),рожать /рождать (rožat’ /roždat’). Since the Russian Romantic era and the corpus of work of the great Russian authors (fromGogol toChekhov,Tolstoy, andDostoevsky), 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.
In Russia, Church Slavonic is pronounced in the same way asRussian, with some exceptions:
Church Slavonic featuresokanye andyekanye, i.e., the absence ofvowel reduction in unstressed syllables. That is,о andе 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 letterе[je] is never read asё[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 letterΓ 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) asBoh [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).
The Old Moscow recension is in use amongOld Believers andCo-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,
A main difference between Russian and Ukrainian recension of Church Slavonic as well as the Russian "Civil Script" lies in the pronunciation of the letteryat (ѣ). The Russian pronunciation is the same asе[je]~[ʲe] whereas the Ukrainian is the same asі[i].Greek Catholic variants of Church Slavonic books printed in variants of theLatin 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).
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.
This is in limited use among Croatian Catholics. Texts are printed in the Croatian Latin alphabet (with the addition of letter⟨ě⟩ foryat) or in Glagolitic script. Sample editions include:
Josef Vajs [cs],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)[11]
Although the various recensions of Church Slavonic differ in some points, they share the tendency of approximating the originalOld 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 theyers is fully reflected, more or less to theRussian pattern, although the terminal ъ continues to be written. Theyuses are often replaced or altered in usage to the sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Russian pattern. Theyat continues to be applied with greater attention to the ancient etymology than it was in nineteenth-century Russian. The lettersksi,psi,omega,ot, andizhitsa are kept, as are the letter-based denotation of numerical values, the use of stress accents, and the abbreviations ortitla fornomina 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 theGospel of John, by tradition the first words written down bySaints Cyril and Methodius, (искони бѣаше слово) "In the beginning was the Word", were set as "искони бѣ слово" in theOstrog Bible ofIvan Fedorov (1580/1581) and as въ началѣ бѣ слово in theElizabethan Bible of 1751, still in use in the Russian Orthodox Church.
^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.
