Old Church Slavonic

Old Church Slavonic belongs to the Eastern South Slavic subgroup of the South Slavic branch of the Slavic languages. It is generally held to have been standardised by two Byzantine missionaries from Thessaloniki, Cyril and his brother Methodius, for a mission to Great Moravia, roughly today’s eastern Czech Republic and western Slovakia, sent in answer to a request by its ruler, Duke Rastislav, for a Slavonic liturgy. In 862/863, preparing for the mission, they developed the Glagolitic alphabet and translated the most important prayers and liturgical books, among them the Aprakos Evangeliar, the Psalter and the Acts of the Apostles.

They are said to have based the language on the Slavic dialect of the hinterland of their home town. Old features kept until the early 20th century around Thessaloniki, Castoria, Razlog and the Rhodopes suggest that this dialect was part of a macrodialect stretching from the Adriatic to the Black Sea, across southern Albania, northern Greece and the south of Bulgaria. Because so little time passed between Rastislav’s request and the mission, it has been widely suggested that the alphabet and the translations had been in the works for some time, probably for a planned mission to Bulgaria.

Its writers simply called it Slavic, slověnĭskŭ językŭ, from slověne, their name for themselves, a name kept in Slovak and Slovene. Bulgarian, Croatian, Macedonian, Serbian, Slovene and Slovak linguists have all claimed it, and most Bulgarian writers call it Old Bulgarian.

The language was first written in Glagolitic, the alphabet devised for the mission; later Cyrillic, developed in the First Bulgarian Empire, replaced it, though about two-thirds of the surviving canon is in Glagolitic. Its sounds included two very short vowels, the yers ь and ъ, often called ‘ultrashort’, which later disappeared in weak positions or merged with other vowels; two nasal vowels, ę and ǫ; and yat, ě, in Bulgaria probably an open vowel like æ. Under the law of open syllables no syllable ended in a consonant, and accents and vowel lengths went unmarked, except perhaps in the Kiev Missal.

As an ancient Indo-European language it was highly inflected. Nouns, adjectives and pronouns had three genders, three numbers (singular, plural and dual, a form for two) and seven cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, instrumental, dative, genitive and locative. Long, definite adjectives were made by adding the pronoun jь to the short forms. Verbs had a present, an aorist and an imperfect, while the perfect, future and conditional were built with auxiliary verbs; a future could be made with ‘to want’, as in xoštǫ pisati, ‘I will write’.

South Slavic in its sounds and forms, the language followed Byzantine Greek in syntax and style, with complex subordinate clauses and participles. Cyril and his students coined many compound words for abstract and religious ideas, a significant part calqued directly from Greek, such as zъlodějanьje, ‘evil deed’, from ‘evil’ and ‘do’.

Old Church Slavonic was a written language of church and state, and at first it was widely intelligible across the Slavic world. In Great Moravia, taught at the Great Moravian Academy, it served for government and religious documents and books between 863 and 885, and texts of this phase show features of the local West Slavic speech. In 885 Pope Stephen V prohibited it in favour of Latin, and in 886 King Svatopluk I expelled the Byzantine missionaries.

Their exiled students, at least some of them Bulgarians, carried the alphabet to the Bulgarian Empire, where Boris I (r. 852–889) received them and founded the Preslav and Ohrid Literary Schools. In 893 the First Bulgarian Empire adopted Old Church Slavonic as its state and liturgical language, taught and refined in Preslav, the capital from 893 to 972, and Ohrid, the capital from 991/997 to 1015. This literacy kept the South Slavs from being absorbed into neighbouring cultures and promoted a distinct Bulgarian identity.

From there it spread to Croatia, Serbia, Bohemia, Lesser Poland and the principalities of Kievan Rus’, which received it with Orthodox Christianity in 988. It also served as the liturgical language of the Romanian Orthodox Church and as a literary and official language of Wallachia and Moldavia, until Romanian gradually replaced it in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The first texts in Old Church Slavonic were the translations of the Gospels and Byzantine liturgical books begun by Cyril and Methodius, mostly during the Moravian mission. Written evidence survives in a relatively small body of manuscripts, most of them made in the First Bulgarian Empire in the late 10th and early 11th centuries. Their core is called the canon: manuscripts that do not depart far from the language and tradition of Cyril and Methodius.

The Glagolitic canon includes the Kiev Missal, seven folios of the late 10th century and the only well-preserved manuscript of the Moravian form; the Codex Zographensis, of 288 folios; the Codex Marianus and the Codex Assemanius of the early 11th century; and the Psalterium Sinaiticum and Euchologium Sinaiticum. The Cyrillic manuscripts, of the 11th century, include Sava’s book and the Codex Suprasliensis of 284 folios. The 10th-century Freising fragments, in Latin script, and the Ostromir Gospel are usually left out of the canon, as their language belongs to other dialects.

After Methodius died and the Moravian academy was dissolved, the leading writers worked in Bulgaria at the end of the 9th and the start of the 10th century: Clement of Ohrid, who had also worked in Moravia and most likely founded the Ohrid school, Constantine of Preslav, Chernorizets Hrabar and John Exarch, with Naum of Preslav. The full text of the Second Book of Enoch survives only in Old Church Slavonic.

Over time the language took on more and more features of local Slavic speech, producing variants called recensions. The name Old Church Slavonic is kept for the classical form found in manuscripts of the 9th to 11th centuries from Great Moravia and the First Bulgarian Empire; by the mid-11th century it had diversified into regional varieties known together as Church Slavonic. Even in Bulgaria two recensions grew up around the two schools: an Eastern one at Preslav, where Cyrillic arose, and a Western one at Ohrid, which kept Glagolitic and is represented by the Codex Zographensis and the Codex Marianus. Their treatment of the yers still divides Eastern Bulgarian from Western Bulgarian and Macedonian.

Later recensions took shape across the Slavic lands. The Bohemian was used in the Czech lands until 1097; the Croatian kept the angular Glagolitic; the Serbian, whose Miroslav Gospel dates to 1180, used Cyrillic alone from the 1200s; and the Russian emerged in the 1000s from the Eastern Bulgarian. In most of them the nasal vowels were lost, so that rǫka ‘hand’ became ruka. In the early 1370s Patriarch Euthymius of Tarnovo reformed Bulgarian spelling on older models, and after the fall of Bulgaria to the Ottomans in 1396 its men of letters carried his recension to Wallachia, Moldova, Lithuania, Moscow and Serbia.

Russian Church Slavonic, briefly ‘re-Bulgarised’ by these prelates, finally became the de facto standard for all Orthodox Slavs, Serbs and Bulgarians included, by the early 1800s.

As the oldest attested Slavic language, Old Church Slavonic is important evidence for Proto-Slavic, the reconstructed ancestor of all Slavic languages: it keeps the yers, the nasal vowels, the dual, and old forms of the aorist and imperfect, features once common to the whole family. The Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian and Macedonian Orthodox Churches, among others, and several Eastern Catholic churches still use Church Slavonic in their services and chants.

Among the eastern Slavs it held a place like that of Latin in Western Europe, with the advantage of being much closer to everyday speech, and Orthodox Slavs came to live in diglossia, with one Slavic language for worship and another for daily life. In 1755 Mikhail Lomonosov defined three styles for Russian, from a high one full of Church Slavonic to a low one close to speech; the middle prevailed, and Russian keeps a whole layer of Church Slavonic words, usually higher and more abstract than their native twins, as poetic grad beside neutral gorod, ‘town’.

Other nations chose differently. Bulgarian, codified on the vernacular a century later, re-imported many Church Slavonic forms as a legacy of Old Bulgarian. Serbian broke cleanly with it in the first half of the 1800s through Vuk Karadžić’s reform; Ukrainian and Belarusian followed in the 19th century, partly because it was associated with stifling Russian imperial control, and Macedonian in the late 1940s.