Old Church Slavonic

Old Church Slavonic
словѣ́ньскъ ѩзꙑ́къ slověnĭskŭ językŭ
Spoken in	formerly in Slavic areas, under the influence of Byzantium (both Catholic and Orthodox)
Region	Eastern Europe
Era	Since 9th century; currently in use only as a liturgical language
Language family	Indo-European Balto-Slavic Slavic South Eastern Old Church Slavonic
Writing system	Glagolitic, Cyrillic
Language codes
ISO 639-1	cu
ISO 639-2	chu
ISO 639-3	chu
Linguasphere	53-AAA-a
This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.

Old Church Slavonic or Old Church Slavic (OCS) (словѣ́ньскъ ѩзꙑ́къ, slověnĭskŭ językŭ) was the first literary Slavic language, first developed by the 9th century Byzantine Greek missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius who were credited with standardizing the language and using it for translating the Bible and other Ancient Greek ecclesiastical texts as part of the Christianisation of the Slavic peoples.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]} It played an important role in the history of the Slavic languages and served as a basis and model for later Church Slavonic traditions, and some Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches use Church Slavonic as a liturgical language to this day.

History

The language was standardized for the mission of the two apostles to Great Moravia in 863 (see Glagolitic alphabet for details). For that purpose, Cyril and his brother Methodius started to translate religious literature to Old Church Slavonic, allegedly based on Slavic dialects spoken in the hinterland of their home-town, Thessaloniki,^[11] in the region of Macedonia.

As part of the preparation for the mission, in 862/863, the Glagolitic alphabet was created and the most important prayers and liturgical books, including the Aprakos Evangeliar (a Gospel Book lectionary containing only feast-day and Sunday readings), the Psalter, and Acts of the Apostles, were translated. (The Gospels were also translated early, but it is unclear whether Sts. Cyril or Methodius had a hand in this). The language and the alphabet were taught at the Great Moravian Academy (Veľkomoravské učilište) and were used for government and religious documents and books between 863 and 885. The texts written during this phase contain characteristics of the Slavic vernaculars in Great Moravia.

A leaf from the Flowery Triod (Triod' cvetnaja) from about 1491, one of the oldest printed Byzantine-Slavonic books, National Library of Poland.

In 885, the use of the Old Church Slavonic in Great Moravia was prohibited by the Pope in favour of Latin. Students of the two apostles, who were expelled from Great Moravia in 886, brought the Glagolitic alphabet and the Old Church Slavonic language to the Bulgarian Empire. It was taught at two Bulgarian literary schools in Preslav (capital 893–972) and Ohrid (capital 991/997–1015).^[12][13][14] The Cyrillic alphabet was developed shortly afterwards in the Preslav Literary School and replaced the Glagolitic one. The texts written during this era contain characteristics of the vernacular of Bulgaria. There are some linguistic differences between texts written in the two academies. Thereupon the language, in its Bulgarian dialects, spread to other South-Eastern and Eastern European Slavic territories, most notably to Croatia, Serbia, Bohemia, Lesser Poland, and principalities of the Kievan Rus'. The texts written in each country contain characteristics of the local Slavic vernacular. By the mid-eleventh century, OCS diversified into regional versions: Bulgarian, Serbian, Old Russian, and up to the fifteenth century, also Czech and Croatian. These local offspring of OCS, are called “Church Slavonic” languages.^[15]

Apart from the Slavic countries, Slavonic has been used as a liturgical language by the Romanian Orthodox Church, as well as a literary and official language of the prince courts of Wallachia and Moldavia (see Old Church Slavonic in Romania), before gradually being replaced by Romanian starting with the 18th century.

Church Slavonic maintained a prestige status, particularly in Russia, for many centuries – among Slavs in the East it had a status analogous to that of the Latin language in western Europe, but had the advantage of being substantially less divergent from the vernacular tongues of average parishioners. Some Orthodox churches, such as the Macedonian Orthodox Church, Russian Orthodox Church, Bulgarian Orthodox Church and Serbian Orthodox Church, as well as several Greek Catholic churches, still use Church Slavonic in their services and chants today.

Script

Initially Old Church Slavonic was written with the Glagolitic alphabet, but later Glagolitic was replaced by the Cyrillic alphabet.^[16] Only in Croatia was the local variant of the Glagolitic alphabet preserved. See Early Cyrillic alphabet for a detailed description of the script and information about the sounds it originally expressed.

Example of Old Church Slavic, Paraskeva Pyatnitsa Chapel, Krasnoyarsk, Russia

Grammar

Main article: Old Church Slavonic grammar

As an ancient Indo-European language, OCS has highly inflective morphology. Nominals can be declined in three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), three numbers (singular, plural, dual) and seven cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, instrumental, dative, genitive, and locative. Synthetic verbal conjugation is expressed in present, aorist and imperfect tenses, while perfect, pluperfect, future and conditional tenses/moods are made by combining auxiliary verbs with participles or synthetic tense forms.

Basis and local influences

Old Church Slavonic is evidenced by a relatively small body of manuscripts, most of which were written in Bulgaria 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 Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius to Great Moravia (863–885). The only well-preserved manuscript of Moravian dialect, the Kiev Folia, is characterised by the replacement of some Southern Slavic phonetic and lexical features with Western Slavic ones. Manuscripts written in the medieval Bulgarian tsardom 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:

• The nasal vowels /ɛ̃/ and /ɔ̃/
• Supershort^{[clarification needed]} /i/ and /u/.
• Open articulation^{[specify in IPA]} of the yat vowel.
• [ɲ] and [ʎ] from Proto-Slavic *nj and *lj
• Proto-Slavic declension system based on stem-endings (so-called o-stems, jo-stems, a-stems and ja-stems)
• aorists, the imperfect, Proto-Slavic paradigms for participles etc. were still used

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
  • /s/ from the Proto-Slavic *x before *ąi
  • /tsv/ and /dzv/ from the Proto-Slavic *kv', *gv'

• morphosyntactic
  • use of the dative possessive case in personal pronouns and nouns: rǫka ti; otъpuštenьe grěxomъ; descriptive future tense using the verb xotěti ("to want"); use of the comparative form mьnii (smaller) to denote "younger".
  • use of suffixed demonstrative pronouns (tъ, ta, to). In Bulgarian and Macedonian these developed into suffixed definite articles.

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

• 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 *tj and *dj or *gt and *kt before front vowels.
• Use of possessive dative for personal pronouns and nouns, as in bratъ mi, rǫka ti, otъpuštenьe grěxomъ, xramъ molitvě, etc.
• Descriptive future tense with the auxiliary verb xotěti, for example xoštǫ pisati

Proto-Slavic	OCS	Bulg.	Czech	Maced.	Pol.	Rus.	Slovak	Sloven.	Cro./Serb.
*dʲ	ʒd	ʒd	z	ɟ	dz	ʑ	dz	j	dʑ
*tʲ	ʃt	ʃt	ts	c	ts	tɕ	ts	tʃ	tɕ
*ɡt/kt	ʃt	ʃt	ts	c	ts	tɕ	ts	tʃ	tɕ

Moravian dialect

The language was standardized for the first time by the mission of the two apostles to Great Moravia in 863. While in the Prague fragments the only Moravian influence is replacing /ʃt/ with /ts/ and /ʒd/ with /z/, the dialect evidenced by the Kiev Folia is characterised by the following features:

• Confusion between the letters Big yus (Ѫ) and Uk (ѹ) occurs once in the Kiev Folia, when the expected form въсѹдъ is spelled въсѫдъ
• /ts/ from Proto-Slavic *tj, use of /dz/ from *dj, /ʃtʃ/ *skj
• use of the words mьša, cirky, papežь, prěfacija, klepati, piskati etc.
• preservation of the consonant cluster /dl/ (e.g. modlitvami)
• use of the ending –ъmь instead of –omь in the masculine singular instrumental, use of the pronoun čьso

Bulgarian dialect(s)

Map of the First Bulgarian Empire with its literary centres, the places where the two earliest revisions of Old Church Slavonic were developed along with the Cyrillic alphabet

Old Church Slavonic was developed initially in the First Bulgarian Empire and was taught in Preslav (Bulgarian capital between 893 and 972), and in Ohrid (Bulgarian capital between 991/997 and 1015).^[17][18][19] It didn't represent one regional dialect but a generalized form of early eastern South Slavic, which cannot be localized.^[20] The existence of two major literary centres in the Empire led in the period from the ninth to the eleventh centuries to the development of two dialects, named "(Eastern) Bulgarian" and "(Western) Macedonian" respectively.^[21][22] Some researchrs do not distinguish different Bulgarian dialects, but only one, called "Macedo-Bulgarian"^[23] or simply "Bulgarian".^[24][25] Others, as Horace Lunt, have changed their opinion with time.^[26] The development of the Slavic literacy at that time, was crucial for the development of distinct Bulgarian ethnic consciousness in the state.^[27]

(Eastern) Bulgarian dialect

The (Eastern)^[28] Bulgarian dialect^[29][30][31] is one of the oldest dialects of the Old Church Slavonic language.^[32] The main literary centre of this dialect was the Preslav Literary School. The Cyrillic alphabet is attributed to this school, as the earliest datable Cyrillic inscriptions have been found in the area. A number of prominent Bulgarian writers and scholars worked at the school, including Naum of Preslav (until 893), Constantine of Preslav, John Exarch, Chernorizets Hrabar, etc. The main features of this dialect are the following:

• The Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets were used concurrently.
• In some documents the original supershort vowels ъ and ь merged with one letter taking the place of the other.
• In Macedonian dialects ъ was sometimes substituted with о.
• In Bulgarian dialects the original ascending reflex (рь, ль) of syllabic /r/ and /l/ was sometimes metathesized to ьр, ьл; or a combination of the ordering was used.
• The central vowel ы merged with ъи.
• Sometimes the use of letter ⟨Ѕ⟩ (/dz/) was merged with that of ⟨З⟩ (/z/).
• The verb forms нярецяйǫ, нарицайеши were substituted or alternated with наричǫ, наричеши.
• Use of some words with Bulgar origin, such as кумиръ, чрьтогъ, блъванъ, etc.

Present-day Modern Bulgarian was standardized on the basis of the 19th-century Eastern Bulgarian vernacular.

(Western) Macedonian dialect

The (Western)^[33] Macedonian dialect^{[34][35][36][37]} is one of the oldest dialects of Old Church Slavonic. The dialect is named so by modern scientists because its literary centre, Ohrid, is located in what today is referred to as the geographical region of Macedonia, today part of the Republic of Macedonia. At that period, administratively Ohrid was in the province of Kutmichevitsa in the First Bulgarian Empire until 1018.^[38] The main literary centre of this dialect was the Ohrid Literary School, whose most prominent member and most likely founder, was Saint Clement of Ohrid. The language variety that was used in the area started shaping Macedonian dialects.^[39][40] This dialect is represented by the Codex Zographensis and Marianus, among others. The main features of this dialect are the following:

• Continuous usage of the Glagolithic alphabet instead of the Cyrillic alphabet;
• A feature called "mixing (confusion) of the nasals" so that /ɔ̃/ became [ɛ̃] after /rʲ lʲ nʲ/, and in a cluster of a labial consonant and /lʲ/. /ɛ̃/ became [ɔ̃] after sibilant consonants and /j/.
• Wide use of the soft consonant clusters /ʃt/ and /ʒd/; in the later stages, these developed into the modern Macedonian phonemes /c/ /ɟ/
• Strict distinction in the articulation of the yers and their vocalisation in strong position (ъ → /o/ and ь → /e/) or deletion in weak position;
• Confusion of /ɛ̃/ with yat and yat with /e/;
• Denasalization in the latter stages: /ɛ̃/ → /e/ and /ɔ̃/ → /a/, оу, ъ;
• Wider usage and retainment of the phoneme /dz/ (which in all Slavic languages but Macedonian has dеaffricated to /z/);

The Macedonian language was standardized in 1945 on the basis of the Central Macedonian dialects which evolved from the Macedonian dialect. Even though nowadays the Macedonian dialects make the Macedonian language itself,^[39][40] most sources before the Second World War referred to them as Bulgarian dialects.^{[41][42][43][44][45][46]}

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Later dialects

Main article: Church Slavonic

Later use of the language in a number of medieval Slavic states resulted in the adjustment of Old Church Slavonic to the local vernacular, though a number of Southern Slavic, Moravian or Bulgarian features were also preserved. Some of the significant later dialects of Old Church Slavonic (referred to as Church Slavonic) in the present time are: Slovene, Croatian, Serbian, Russian. In all cases, denasalization of the yuses occurred; so that only Old Church Slavonic and modern Polish retained the old Slavonic nasal vowels.

Serbian dialect

The Serbian dialect^[47] was written in mostly Cyrillic, but also the Glagolitic alphabet depending on region, by the 12th century the Serbs used exclusively the Cyrillic alphabet (and Latin script in coastal areas). The 1186 Miroslav Gospels is written in the Serbian dialect. Characteristics are as follows:

• nasal vowels were denasalised and in one case closed: *ę > e, *ǫ > u, e.g. OCS rǫka -> Sr. ruka ("hand"), OCS językъ -> Sr. jezik ("tongue, language")
• extensive use of diacritical signs by the Resava dialect
• use of letters i, y, ě for the sound /i/ by the Bosnian variant, and i, y for the sound /i/ by other variants of the Serbian dialect.

Due to Bulgaria becoming annexed in 1396, and the Ottoman conquering of Serbia in 1459, Serbia saw an influx of educated refugee-scribes trained in the Bulgarian dialect in that period, which re-introduced a more classical form.

Russian dialect

The Russian dialect was developed after the 10th century on the basis of the earlier Bulgarian dialects, from which it differed slightly. Its main features are:

• substitution of the nasal sound /õ/ with [u]
• merging of letters ě and ja^[48]

(Middle) Bulgarian dialect

The line between OCS and post-OCS manuscripts is arbitrary and terminology is varied. The common term "Middle Bulgarian" is usually contrasted to "Old Bulgarian" (= OCS), and loosely used for manuscripts whose language demonstrates a broad spectrum of regional and temporal dialect featers after the 11th century.^[49]

Croatian dialect

The Croatian dialect of Old Church Slavonic is one of the earliest known today. It only used the Glagolitic alphabet of angular Croatian type. It is characterized by the following developments:

• de-nasalisation of PSl. *ę > e, PSl. *ǫ > u, e.g. Cr. ruka : OCS rǫka ("hand"), Cr. jezik : OCS językъ ("tongue, language")
• PSl. *y > i, e.g. Cr. biti : OCS byti ("to be")
• PSl. weak-positioned yers *ъ and *ь in merged, probably representing some schwa-like sound, and only one of the letters was used (usually 'ъ'). Evident in earliest documents like Baška tablet.
• PSl. strong-positioned yers *ъ and *ь were vocalized into a in most Štokavian and Čakavian speeches, e.g. Cr. pas : OCS pьsъ ("dog")
• PSl. hard and soft syllabic liquids *r and r′ retained syllabicity and were written as simply r, as opposed to OCS sequences of mostly rь and rъ, e.g. krstъ and trgъ as opposed to OCS krьstъ and trъgъ ("cross", "market")
• PSl. #vьC and #vъC > #uC, e.g. Cr. udova : OCS. vъdova ("widow")

Canon of Old Church Slavonic

The core corpus of Old Church Slavonic manuscripts is usually referred to as canon. Manuscript must satisfy certain linguistic, chronological and cultural criteria to be incorporated into the canon, i.e. it must not significantly depart from the language and tradition of Constantine and Methodius, usually known as the Cyrillo-Methodian tradition.

For example, the Freising Fragments, dating from the tenth century, do show some linguistic and cultural traits of Old Church Slavonic, but are usually not included in the canon as some of the phonological features of the writings appear to belong to certain Pannonian Slavic dialect of the period. Similarly, the Ostromir Gospels exhibits dialectal features that classify it as East Slavic, rather than South Slavic, so it's not included in the canon either. On the other hand, the Kiev Missal is included in the canon, even though it manifests some West Slavic features and contains Western liturgy, due to the Bulgarian linguistic layer and connection to the Moravian mission.

Manuscripts are usually classified in two groups, depending on the used alphabet, of Cyrillic and Glagolitic. With the exception of Kiev Missal and Glagolita Clozianus which exhibit West-Slavic and Croatian features respectively, all Glagolitic texts are assumed to be of the Macedonian dialect:

• Kiev Missal (Ki, KM), seven folios, late tenth century
• Codex Zographensis, (Zo), 288 folios, tenth or eleventh century
• Codex Marianus (Mar), 173 folios, early eleventh century
• Codex Assemanius (Ass), 158 folios, early eleventh century
• Psalterium Sinaiticum (Pas, Ps. sin.), 177 folios, eleventh century
• Euchologium Sinaiticum (Eu, Euch), 109 folios, eleventh century
• Glagolita Clozianus (Clo, Cloz), 14 folios, eleventh century
• Ohrid Folios (Ohr), 2 folios, eleventh century
• Rila Folios (Ri, Ril), 2 folios and 5 fragments, eleventh century

All Cyrillic manuscripts are of the Bulgarian dialect and date from the eleventh century, except for Zographos Fragments which are of the Macedonian dialect:

• Sava's book (Sa, Sav), 126 folios
• Codex Suprasliensis, (Supr), 284 folios
• Enina Apostle (En, Enin), 39 folios
• Hilandar Folios (Hds, Hil), 2 folios
• Undol'skij's Fragments (Und), 2 folios
• Macedonian Folio (Mac), 1 folio
• Zographos Fragments (Zogr. Fr.), 2 folios
• Sluck Psalter (Ps. Sl., Sl), 5 folios

Authors

The history of Old Church Slavonic writing includes a northern tradition begun by the mission to Great Moravia, including a short mission in the Balaton principality, and a Bulgarian tradition begun by some of the missionaries who relocated to Bulgaria after the expulsion from Great Moravia.

Old Church Slavonic's first writings, translations of Christian liturgical and Biblical texts, were produced by Byzantine missionaries Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius, mostly during their mission to Great Moravia.

The most important authors in Old Church Slavonic after the death of Methodius and the dissolution of the Great Moravian academy were Clement of Ohrid (active also in Great Moravia), Constantine of Preslav, Chernorizetz Hrabar and John Exarch, all of whom worked in medieval Bulgaria at the end of the 9th and the beginning of the 10th century. The Second Book of Enoch was only preserved in Old Church Slavonic, although the original most certainly had been Greek or even Hebrew or Aramaic.

Nomenclature

The name of the language in Old Church Slavonic texts was simply Slavic (словѣ́ньскъ ѩзꙑ́къ, slověnĭskŭ językŭ),^[50] derived from the word for Slavs (словѣ́нє, slověne), the self-designation of the compilers of the texts. This name is preserved in the modern names of the Slovak and Slovene languages. The language is sometimes called Old Slavic, which may be confused with the distinct Proto-Slavic language. The commonly accepted terms in modern English-language Slavic studies are Old Church Slavonic and Old Church Slavic.

Historically, a few now-obsolete^[51] names have also been used:

• Old Bulgarian^[52] is the only designation used by Bulgarian-language writers. Outside of Bulgaria, Old Bulgarian (German: Altbulgarisch) was used in the 19th century by August Schleicher, Martin Hattala, Leopold Geitler and August Leskien^[53][54] who noted similarities between the first literary Slavic works and the modern Bulgarian language. For similar reasons, Russian linguist Aleksandr Vostokov used the term Slav-Bulgarian.
• Old Macedonian^{[55][56][57][58]} is occasionally used by Western scholars for many of the same reasons, but also in a regional context.
• Old Slovenian^{[51][59][60][61]} was used by early 19th century scholars who conjectured that the language was based on the dialect of Pannonia.

Modern Slavic nomenclature

Here are some of the names used by speakers of modern Slavic languages:

• Belarusian: старажытна славянская мова (staražytnasłavianskaja mova), ‘Old Slavic’
• Bosnian: staro(crkveno)slavenski, ‘Old (Church) Slavic’
• Bulgarian: старобългарски (starobălgarski), ‘Old Bulgarian’
• Czech: staroslověnština, ‘Old Slavic’
• Croatian: staro(crkveno)slavenski, ‘Old (Church) Slavic’
• Macedonian: старо(црковно)словенски (staro(crkovno)slovenski), ‘Old (Church) Slavic’
• Polish: staro-cerkiewno-słowiański, ‘Old Church Slavic’
• Russian: старославянский язык (staroslavjánskij jazýk), ‘Old Slavic language’
• Serbian: staro(crkveno)slovenski, ‘Old (Church) Slavic’
• Slovak: (staro)slovienčina, ‘(Old) Slavic’
• Slovene: stara cerkvena slovanščina, ‘Old Church Slavic’
• Ukrainian: старослов’янська мова (staroslovjans'ka mova), ‘Old Slavic’

See also

• Proto-Slavic language
• Church Slavonic language
• Slavoserbian
• Old Bulgarian
• Old Macedonian

References

1. ^ Dmitrij Cizevskij. Comparative History of Slavic Literatures, Vanderbilt University Press (2000) p. 27
2. ^ Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001–05, s.v. "Cyril and Methodius, Saints"; Encyclopedia Britannica, Encyclopedia Britannica Incorporated, Warren E. Preece – 1972, p. 846, s.v., "Cyril and Methodius, Saints" and "Eastern Orthodoxy, Missions ancient and modern"; Encyclopedia of World Cultures, David H. Levinson, 1991, p. 239, s.v., "Social Science"; Eric M. Meyers, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, p. 151, 1997; Lunt, Slavic Review, June, 1964, p. 216; Roman Jakobson, Crucial problems of Cyrillo-Methodian Studies; Leonid Ivan Strakhovsky, A Handbook of Slavic Studies, p. 98; V.Bogdanovich , History of the ancient Serbian literature, Belgrade, 1980, p. 119.
3. ^ The Columbia Encyclopaedia, Sixth Edition. 2001–05, O.Ed. Saints Cyril and Methodius "Cyril and Methodius, Saints) 869 and 884, respectively, “Greek missionaries, brothers, called Apostles to the Slavs and fathers of Slavonic literature."
4. ^ Encyclopedia Britannica, Major alphabets of the world, Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets, 2008, O.Ed. "The two early Slavic alphabets, the Cyrillic and the Glagolitic, were invented by St. Cyril, or Constantine (c. 827–869), and St. Methodius (c. 825–884). These men were Greeks from Thessaloniki who became apostles to the southern Slavs, whom they converted to Christianity."
5. ^ Hastings, Adrian (1997). The construction of nationhood: ethnicity, religion, and nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 126. ISBN 0-521-62544-0. ". the activity of the brothers Constantine (later renamed Cyril) and Methodius, aristocratic Greek priests who were sent from Constantinople." 
6. ^ Fletcher, R. A. (1999). The barbarian conversion: from paganism to Christianity. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. p. 327. ISBN 0-520-21859-0. 
7. ^ Cizevskij, Dmitrij; Zenkovsky, Serge A.; Porter, Richard E.. Comparative History of Slavic Literatures. Vanderbilt University Press. pp. vi. ISBN 0-8265-1371-9. ""Two Greek brothers from Salonika, Constantine who later became a monk and took the name Cyril and Methodius." 
8. ^ The illustrated guide to the Bible. New York: Oxford University Press. 1998. p. 14. ISBN 0-19-521462-5. "In Eastern Europe, the first translations of the Bible into the Slavoruic languages were made by the Greek missionaries Cyril and Methodius in the 860s" 
9. ^ Smalley, William Allen (1991). Translation as mission: Bible translation in the modern missionary movement. Macon, Ga.: Mercer. p. 25. ISBN 978-0-86554-389-8. "The most important instance where translation and the beginning church did coincide closely was in Slavonic under the brothers Cyril, Methodius, with the Bible completed by AD. 880 This was a missionary translation but unusual again (from a modern point of view) because not a translation into the dialect spoken where the missionaries were The brothers were Greeks who had been brought up in Macedonia," 
10. ^ Kazhdan, Alexander P. (1991). The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 507. ISBN 0-19-504652-8. "Constantine (Cyril) and his brother Methodius were the sons of the droungarios Leo and Maria, who may have been a Slav." 
11. ^ after the Slavs invaded it. Florin Curta & Paul Stephenson, Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 500-1250, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p 214: "At the emperor’s request, Constantine and his brother started the translation of religious texts into Old Church Slavonic, a literary language most likely based on the Macedonian dialect allegedly used in the hinterland of their home-town, Thessalonica."
12. ^ Encyclopedia of the languages of Europe, Glanville Price, Wiley-Blackwell, 2000, ISBN 0631220399, pp. 42-43.
13. ^ The Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity, Ken Parry, John Wiley and Sons, 2010, ISBN 1444333615, pp. 50-51.
14. ^ Interaction and isolation in late Byzantine culture, Jan Olof Rosenqvist, I.B.Tauris, 2004, ISBN 1850439443, p. 58.
15. ^ Speech, Memory, and Meaning: Intertextuality in Everyday Language, Studies and Monographs by Boris Gasparov,, Walter de Gruyter, 2010, ISBN 3110219107, p. 185.
16. ^ Horace Gray Lunt, Old Church Slavonic Grammar, Berlin(2001) p.15
17. ^ Toward an Understanding of Europe: A Political Economic Précis of Continental Integration, Alan W. Ertl, Universal-Publishers, 2008, ISBN 1599429837, p. 436.
18. ^ Contested Ethnic Identity: The Case of Macedonian Immigrants in Toronto, 1900-1996, Nationalisms Across the Globe, Chris Kostov, Publisher Peter Lang, ISBN 3034301960, p. 50.
19. ^ The poetics of Slavdom: the mythopoeic foundations of Yugoslavia, Zdenko Zlatar, Peter Lang, 2007, ISBN 0820481351, pp. 532-533.
20. ^ Old Church Slavonic grammar, Horace Gray Lunt, Walter de Gruyter, 2001, ISBN 3110162849, p. 1.
21. ^ The entry of the Slavs into Christendom: an introduction to the medieval history of the Slavs, A. P. Vlasto, CUP Archive, 1970, ISBN 0521074592, pp. 174-176.
22. ^ Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction, Blackwell textbooks in linguistics, Benjamin W. Fortson, John Wiley and Sons, 2009, ISBN 1405188960, p. 431.
23. ^ Ancient Indo-European Dialects, University of California Press, 1966, p. 154.
24. ^ The Slavic languages, Roland Sussex, Paul V. Cubberley, Cambridge University Press, 2006, ISBN 0521223156, pp. 64-65.
25. ^ Македония, проблемы истории и културы, Институт славяноведения, Российская Академия Наук, Москва, 1999, Размышления о македонском "срезе" палеоболгаристики – И. И. Калиганов. (Russian)
26. ^ Initially Lunt (1974:5-6) stated that the differences in the initial OCS were neither great, nor consistent to oppose "Macedonian" dialect to (East) Bulgarian one. However, a decade later Lunt (1985:202) seems to conceive OCS and its "adjustments" in somewhat different terms, that a Macedonian and a (East) Bulgarian variety of OCS existed, illustrating his point with paleographic, phonological and other differences. See: "American contributions to the Tenth International Congress of Slavists", Sofia, September 1988, Alexander M. Schenker, Slavica, 1988, ISBN 0893571903, p. 47.
27. ^ Who are the Macedonians? Hugh Poulton, C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, 2000, ISBN 1850655340, pp. 19-20.
28. ^ Aspects of the Slavic Middle Ages and Slavic Renaissance culture, American University Studies, Henrik Birnbaum, Lang, 1991, ISBN 0820410578, P. 534.
29. ^ Bruce Manning Metzger. The early versions of the New Testament: their origin, transmission, and limitations. P. 409
30. ^ Roland Sussex, Paul V. Cubberley. The Slavic languages. Pp. 64-65
31. ^ Tomasz Kamusella. The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe. Pp. 276-277, 279
32. ^ Jos. Dobrovský, Institutiones linguae slavicae dialecti veteris quae quum apud Russos, Serbos, aliosque ritus graeci tum apud Dalmatas glagolitas ritus latini Slavos in libris sacris obtinet, Vindobonae 1822. Initium translatorum in linguam slavicam ab eo (i.e. Cyril) et fratre Methodio librorum sacrorum, ad officia Missae celebranda maximae necessariorum, in Bulgaria factum fuisse, testatur biographus Clementis Archiepiscopi Bulgariae.
33. ^ Language and literary theory: in honor of Ladislav Matejka, Benjamin A. Stolz, I. R. Titunik, Lubomír Doležel, University of Michigan, 1984, p. 111.
34. ^ Henry R. Cooper. Slavic Scriptures: The Formation of the Church Slavonic Version of the Holy Bible, pg. 86
35. ^ Roomsch-Katholieke Universiteit, et al. Polata Knigopisnaja: An Information Bulletin Devoted to the Study of Early Slavic Books, Texts and Literatures, pg. 70
36. ^ Roman Jakobson, P Weinrich. Slavic languages: Distribution of Slavic languages in present day Europe, pg. 7
37. ^ Yuriy Sherekh, George Y. Shevekov. A prehistory of Slavic: the historical phonology of common Slavic
38. ^ The entry of the Slavs into Christendom: an introduction to the medieval history of the Slavs, A. P. Vlasto, CUP Archive, 1970, ISBN 0521074592, p. 169.
39. ^ ^{a b} Old Church Slavonic, Horace Lunt
40. ^ ^{a b} Macedonian, Victor Friedman, Facts about world's languages, 2001
41. ^ Mazon, Andre. Contes Slaves de la Macédoine Sud-Occidentale: Etude linguistique; textes et traduction; Notes de Folklore, Paris 1923, p. 4.
42. ^ Селищев, Афанасий. Избранные труды, Москва 1968.
43. ^ Die Slaven in Griechenland von Max Vasmer. Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin 1941. Kap. VI: Allgemeines und sprachliche Stellung der Slaven Griechenlands.
44. ^ K. Sandfeld, Balkanfilologien (København, 1926, MCMXXVI).
45. ^ Konstantin Josef Jireček, Die Balkanvölker und ihre kulturellen und politischen Bestrebungen, Urania, II, Jg. 13, 27. März 1909, p. 195.
46. ^ Stefan Verković, Описание быта македонских болгар; Топографическо-этнографический очерк Македонии (Петербург, 1889).
47. ^ Old Church Slavonic grammar
48. ^ Paul Cubberley Russian: A Linguistic IntroductionCambridge University Press (2002), p.44
49. ^ The definite article in contemporary standard Bulgarian, Gerald L. Mayer, Freie Universität Berlin. Osteuropa-Institut, Otto Harrassowitz, 1988, p. 108.
50. ^ Nandris, Grigore (1959). Old Church Slavonic Grammar, p. 2 (London: University of London Athlone Press).
51. ^ ^{a b} Walter de Gruyter. On Medieval and Renaissance Slavic Writing. P. 15
52. ^ Ziffer, Giorgio – On the Historicity of Old Church Slavonic UDK 811.163.1(091)
53. ^ A. Leskien, Handbuch der altbulgarischen (altkirchenslavischen) Sprache, 6. Aufl., Heidelberg 1922.
54. ^ A. Leskien, Grammatik der altbulgarischen (altkirchenslavischen) Sprache, 2.-3. Aufl., Heidelberg 1919.
55. ^ J P Mallory, D Q Adams. Encyclopaedia of Indo-European Culture. Pg 301
56. ^ R. E. Asher, J. M. Y. Simpson. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, pg. 429
57. ^ Dmitrij Cizevskij. Comparative History of Slavic Literatures, pg. 26
58. ^ Benjamin W. Fortson. Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction, pg. 374
59. ^ D. Appleton. The universal cyclopaedia. Pp. 436, 561-562
60. ^ Horace Gray Lunt. Old Church Slavonic grammar. Pg 4
61. ^ Tomasz Kamusella. The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe. Pp. 35, 291, 294

External links

• Old Church Slavonic Online, a comprehensive tutorial at the A. Richard Diebold Center for Indo-European Language and Culture, Linguistics Research Center, University of Texas at Austin
• Medieval Slavic Fonts on AATSEEL
• Corpus Cyrillo-Methodianum Helsingiense: An Electronic Corpus of Old Church Slavonic Texts
• Research Guide to Old Church Slavonic
• Old Church Slavonic and the Macedonian dialect of the Church Slavonic language, Elka Ulchar (Macedonian)