# Old Church Slavonic:  to thank / thanks



## Ben Jamin

Hello,
Is there anybody who knows the word for "to thank" or "thanks" in Old Church Slavonic?


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## killevippen

The Old Church Slavonic term for "to thank" is _благодарити_ (blagodariti), 1st person sing. _благодарѭ_ (blagodarjǫ), supposedly a calque from Greek _εὐχᾰριστέω_ with the same meaning.


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## iobyo

killevippen said:


> The Old Church Slavonic term for "to thank" is _благодарити_ (blagodariti), 1st person sing. _благодарѭ_ (blagodarjǫ), supposedly a calque from Greek _εὐχᾰριστέω_ with the same meaning.



And _благодарь__ствити, благодарьствовати, хвалити._


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## Ben Jamin

iobyo said:


> And _благодарь__ствити, благодарьствовати, хвалити._



Thank you (hvala)!
I was looking for a possible Common Old Slavic word for thanks, as the West Slavic words for thanks are a clear loan from German, the Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian use either an Old Church Slavonic Greek loan, or an own much younger construction. It is maybe plausible to presume that the South Slavic hvala is a continuation of the Old Slavic.


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## DarkChild

^^

In Bulgarian "thank you" is благодаря. Hvala is not a word. Хваля means to praise, to give compliment.

And in Macedonian the word for thank you is благодарам, not hvala.


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## iobyo

Ben Jamin said:


> Thank you (hvala)!
> I was looking for a possible Common Old Slavic word for thanks, as the West Slavic words for thanks are a clear loan from German, the Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian use either an Old Church Slavonic Greek loan, or an own much younger construction.



It does not seem as though one has survived.



Ben Jamin said:


> It is maybe plausible to presume that the South Slavic hvala is a continuation of the Old Slavic.



_Хвалити_ has the primary meaning _αἰνέω_ 'to praise', and I believe the neologism _благодар-_ only occurs in the Codex Suprasliensis. The former may indeed have been the one the Slavs used expressed gratitude, but it is also possible that there was no Slavic equivalent.

I suspect _hvala_ derives from liturgical language (CSl. _хвала [Богу]_). Parallels can be found elsewhere; cf. dialectal Macedonian _сполајти,_ Russian _исполать_ (< Gr. _εἰς πολλά ἔτη, [Δέσποτα]_).


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## DarkChild

^^

There is сполай ти in Bulgarian too, it's found in old literature.


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## Ben Jamin

DarkChild said:


> ^^
> 
> In Bulgarian "thank you" is благодаря. Hvala is not a word.


I never claimed that *hvala *is Bulgarian.


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## Ben Jamin

iobyo said:


> It does not seem as though one has survived.
> 
> 
> 
> _Хвалити_ has the primary meaning _αἰνέω_ 'to praise', and I believe the neologism _благодар-_ only occurs in the Codex Suprasliensis. The former may indeed have been the one the Slavs used expressed gratitude, but it is also possible that there was no Slavic equivalent.
> 
> I suspect _hvala_ derives from liturgical language (CSl. _хвала [Богу]_). Parallels can be found elsewhere; cf. dialectal Macedonian _сполајти,_ Russian _исполать_ (< Gr. _εἰς πολλά ἔτη, [Δέσποτα]_).



*Chwalić *means "to praise" in Polish, and there is no Slavic word having a connotation of "thanks". Only relatives of the Germanic *dank *are used, but I suppose that Old Slavic must have had a word to express gratitude.


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## killevippen

_Благодарити/благодарьствовати_ is indeed only attested in Codex Suprasliensis, according to R. M. Cejtlin's OCS dictionary. Its presence in modern Russian, Bulgarian and Macedonian is a result of Church Slavonic influence.

_Hvala tebe/Hvala tebi_ etc. occurs in South Slavic heroic epic poetry, but only as a general greeting (Praise thee! Glory to you!); I agree that there's a high probability the way it's used in modern BCMS is derived from liturgic language. All in all it seems that there was no common word with the specific purpose of expressing gratitude in Common Slavic (or it hasn't survived), judging from the tendency of later Slavic languages to either borrow or calque the word from the neighbouring languages.


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## Ben Jamin

killevippen said:


> _Благодарити/благодарьствовати_ is indeed only attested in Codex Suprasliensis, according to R. M. Cejtlin's OCS dictionary. Its presence in modern Russian, Bulgarian and Macedonian is a result of Church Slavonic influence.
> 
> _Hvala tebe/Hvala tebi_ etc. occurs in South Slavic heroic epic poetry, but only as a general greeting (Praise thee! Glory to you!); I agree that there's a high probability the way it's used in modern BCMS is derived from liturgic language. All in all it seems that there was no common word with the specific purpose of expressing gratitude in Common Slavic (or it hasn't survived), judging from the tendency of later Slavic languages to either borrow or calque the word from the neighbouring languages.



Can we then conclude that our Slavic ancestors were boors, and never thanked each other?


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## killevippen

Ben Jamin said:


> Can we then conclude that our Slavic ancestor were boors, and never thanked each other?



They most certainly did express gratitude in some way, but I think there was no specific term analogous to e.g. Germanic *_thankojan_. I guess there were some ritualised expressions not unlike Bulgarian_ жив и здрав, жив да си _etc. - phrases that simply meant "(be)alive and healthy" and were used in the meaning of "thank you" prior to the introduction of _благодаря_. But we can merely speculate due to the absence of any relevant data.


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## cooldewd

My posts seem to get deleted with monotonous regularity by the Thought Police around here, but for what it is worth, I am one of a handful of people under the age of 70 who speak in the Kostur/Kostenaria dialect that is the direct descendant of Old Church Slavonic.

In our antiquated dialect we do not use Hvala. We use Blagodarem and Spolaiti.

To praise is "Slava"...ie; "Slava Gospo(d)". 

"Hvala" was introduced during the times of Stefan Dushan's empire which also introduced into Macedonia words with the "Kye" sound which gave us words such as "Kukya" (house) which in most places supplanted "K'shcha" etc.


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## Ben Jamin

cooldewd said:


> My posts seem to get deleted with monotonous regularity by the Thought Police around here, but for what it is worth, I am one of a handful of people under the age of 70 who speak in the Kostur/Kostenaria dialect that is the direct descendant of Old Church Slavonic.
> 
> In our antiquated dialect we do not use Hvala. We use Blagodarem and Spolaiti.
> 
> To praise is "Slava"...ie; "Slava Gospo(d)".
> 
> "Hvala" was introduced during the times of Stefan Dushan's empire which also introduced into Macedonia words with the "Kye" sound which gave us words such as "Kukya" (house) which in most places supplanted "K'shcha" etc.


This is interesting, but what is a direct descendant of OCS? Wasn't OCS a bookish language rather than colloquial one?
Besides, as far as i know, words and expressions form OCS texts came into the colloquial langauge of all peoples of the East Orthodox Church.


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## Christo Tamarin

About _*blagodariti *_in Old Slavonic. Most probably, *blagodariti* is a translation of Greek _euxharisteo_. This Greek word can be found in the Septuaginta. Any earlier occurrences of this Greek word? If no, then this Greek word was invented by the 72  translators.


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## rur1920

Ben Jamin said:


> Can we then conclude that our Slavic ancestors were boors, and never thanked each other?


Not of course. Thanking is a social institution, it is more than just a way to be nice, so no wonder that Slavs borrowed foreign terms or introduced new constructions to express specific ways of thanking when their social organisation changed under influence of foreigners.

Expansion (just in case): by "social institution" I mean the following. Whatever we say or express, it is always accompanied by a bunch of ideas. These ideas may be free, depending merely on the current moment; or they may be formal, so their shape whatever it is, i.e. a collection of predefined ideas, accompanies thanking by obligation and by tradition. Those may be the ideas about the God, or the ideas that result from knowledge about modes of doing in foreign tribes, or maybe the ideas that formed in their own society. One is not merely being nice to the giver, one also is referring to the set of ideas he is obliged to recall in such cases by the tradition or by his own acquired understanding of what is good and what is bad; in such case, thanking becomes not just a natural act with immediate spontaneous expression, but a formal ritual, an abstract institution with a given shape.


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## Ben Jamin

rur1920 said:


> Not of course. Thanking is a social institution, it is more than just a way to be nice, so no wonder that Slavs borrowed foreign terms or introduced new constructions to express specific ways of thanking when their social organisation changed under influence of foreigners.
> 
> Expansion (just in case): by "social institution" I mean the following. Whatever we say or express, it is always accompanied by a bunch of ideas. These ideas may be free, depending merely on the current moment; or they may be formal, so their shape whatever it is, i.e. a collection of predefined ideas, accompanies thanking by obligation and by tradition. Those may be the ideas about the God, or the ideas that result from knowledge about modes of doing in foreign tribes, or maybe the ideas that formed in their own society. One is not merely being nice to the giver, one also is referring to the set of ideas he is obliged to recall in such cases by the tradition or by his own acquired understanding of what is good and what is bad; in such case, thanking becomes not just a natural act with immediate spontaneous expression, but a formal ritual, an abstract institution with a given shape.



But we can't find any native word or expression to express gratitude, only loans and calques from other languages (Greek, Germanic). South Slavic hvala is also a relatively new creation, maybe some hundred years old.


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## rur1920

Why should it survive? Besides, if thanking was not a social institution (I obviously cannot know whether it was), then a single and established expression was not needed for expressing gratitude. Maybe they tended to use and taught children to use some expressions without feeling that those are special expressions for a special purpose, afflicted by certain ideas of social law. "Дядя дал тебе игрушку, скажи дяде, что он хороший!.." — "the man gave you a toy, tell him he is good!". We don't need to learn a special expression to ask another passenger to leave the place in front of the door when we need to go out, instead we ask something according to the situation (like, 'please tell me, do you exit now?' or "do you exit too, please?"). But imagine that sometime in the future we learn that there is a God of metro, like there is a God of love, grace and gratitude: then we'll have to use an established expression, like "may the God help us pass the door!", contracted to something with time. In such case the future generations will simply forget that sometime in the past they used something else. Same with expression of the meaning "you did nice, I wish you good, I remember what you did, I think good of you"…


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## Ben Jamin

rur1920 said:


> Why should it survive? Besides, if thanking was not a social institution (I obviously cannot know whether it was), then a single and established expression was not needed for expressing gratitude. Maybe they tended to use and taught children to use some expressions without feeling that those are special expressions for a special purpose, afflicted by certain ideas of social law. "Дядя дал тебе игрушку, скажи дяде, что он хороший!.." — "the man gave you a toy, tell him he is good!". We don't need to learn a special expression to ask another passenger to leave the place in front of the door when we need to go out, instead we ask something according to the situation (like, 'please tell me, do you exit now?' or "do you exit too, please?"). But imagine that sometime in the future we learn that there is a God of metro, like there is a God of love, grace and gratitude: then we'll have to use an established expression, like "may the God help us pass the door!", contracted to something with time. In such case the future generations will simply forget that sometime in the past they used something else. Same with expression of the meaning "you did nice, I wish you good, I remember what you did, I think good of you"…


It would be interesting to find out results of a survey of a large number of languages, especially those that have no written language, how they solve the task of expressing gratitude. In European languages we have: The descendants of Proto-Germanic *thankojan in Germanic and Slavic, the calques of Greek _eucharisto_, the descendants of Slavic praise (hvala), descendants of Latin _grace _and _mercy_, the Russian "_may god save you_", Portuguese "I am obligated". I don't know the etymology of Finnish "kiittaa", Hungarian "köszönöm" (apparently related to Finnish), and Albanian "falemnderit".


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## Sobakus

The Albanian word is almost certainly _falem_ (from BCS faliti~hvaliti) plus _nderit_ – the honour.


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