# Church Slavonic influence in (Standard) Russian



## CitizenEmpty

I always wonder about this. How much Church Slavonic influence does (Standard) Russian have? All I can find (that I can at least understand) is this link

http://languagesoftheworld.info/language-contact-2/influence-old-church-slavonic-russian.html

And that the verbal prefix пре- is a direct Church Slavonic loanword. And that there are some "haute" Russian words that are directly from Church Slavonic. And lastly the poly Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov who "sort of" standardized literary Russian had a background education in Church Slavonic. (Strangely, his sound theory looks like an skewered version of Altaic vowel harmony to me.)

What else do we know about this?


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## ahvalj

Old Church Slavonic is the language of the first Slavic Christian literature, based on the speech of Slavs of what is now North Greece (Thessaloniki), Bulgaria and Macedonia (Ohrid) of the 9–10th centuries. It was brought to the East Slavic lands in the 10th century with the spread of Christianity. It is important to realize that the Common Slavic language had finally split only around the 8–10th centuries, and that even in the early 12th century the author of the "Primary chronicle" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_Chronicle) regarded all the Slavic idioms of the recent past as the single Slavic language (_bě bo jedinъ językъ slověnьskъ_ "for there was a common Slavic language"; _a slověnьskъ językъ i rusьskъjь odinъ _"and Slavic language and Russian are the same" — http://izbornyk.org.ua/ipatlet/ipat01.htm). The difference between the Old Church Slavonic and most East Slavic dialects was originally quite minor, the greatest problem for the East Slavic speaker was the massive of new words created to translate the Christian texts. 

The spread of Old Church Slavonic made the creation of a separate East Slavic written language redundant, and all the preserved official texts of the 11–13th centuries represent various degrees of penetration of vernacular elements into the learned Old Church Slavonic core. I would say, this situation can be compared to the fate of any standard language in a dialectal environment: one learns the written language at school, speaks in his everyday life a dialect or a kind of koine, and uses the standard language for all the serious writing, making inevitably a certain amount of mistakes. Thus, since the very beginning, the Old Church Slavonic became just a higher register for the East Slavic language — which was facilitated by the fact that the Balkanic origin of the original texts was soon forgotten.

In the next centuries this system was evolving, the phonetics and grammar changed and so changed the written language, new words were being created, and the result of this evolution is modern Standard Russian, where elements of Old Church Slavonic and East Slavic origin are completely twisted to the extent that it is impossible to calculate the share of each. You may find in the literature that the Church Slavonic is responsible for the higher register in the modern language, but this true only in the sense that archaic or elevated elements are likely to be found in the old texts, which are all more or less Church Slavonic — there are, however, cases when the South-East Slavic word is stylistically neutral (e. g. _шлем_ "helmet"), whereas the East Slavic is elevated (_шелом_). There are also numerous cases when words of South-East and East Slavic origin are perceived as elements of the same word-formational chain, e. g. _польза_ is Church Slavonic and _льгота_ and _нельзя_ are East Slavic from different dialects (without and with the Third palatalization).


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## CitizenEmpty

Interesting. I would assume that the Mongolian invasion and its later impact would make Church Slavonic more prominent among the Russians ruling class members.


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## ahvalj

CitizenEmpty said:


> Interesting. I would assume that the Mongolian invasion and its later impact would make Church Slavonic more prominent among the Russians ruling class members.


Which way? I am only aware of the so called "Second Church Slavonic influence" (http://www.philol.msu.ru/~tezaurus/library.php?view=d&course=1&raz=4&pod=2&par=1), which took part around the 15th century, when, during the last decades of the Byzantine Empire, many South Slavic ecclesiastical figures moved to the north and left profound impact on the written language and theology of the aboriginals. Russia, when left alone, has the tendency to stagnate, and such perturbations caused by prestigious foreign cultural influences occurred several times in her history, cp. the church life of the 17th century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raskol).


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## yezik

"", _when left alone, has the tendency to stagnate, and such perturbations caused by prestigious foreign cultural influences occurred several times in her history, """""_
************
 What? Greeks? Mongolians? Normans? Such beautiful tales...   Realy, Gabovich was right,- "Historians are the patients, that hate their doctors..."


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## ahvalj

Speakig of Church Slavonic, the next time the major changes caused by foreign influence occurred in the 17th century, when, after the acquisition of Kiev, the Ukrainian clergy, regarded as more educated, brought to Russia the southern pronunciation of _g_ as _h_ (that lasted until the middle 19th century, and in the word _бог_ survives up to now) and _ě_ as _i_ (lasted until the first half of the 18th century).


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## ahvalj

Concerning the latter pronunciation, cp. the rhymes in Feofan Prokopovich's (Kiev, 1661 – St. Petersburg, 1736) verses, e. g.:

_Ему ни въ народѣ мятежъ бѣдный,
ни страшенъ мучитель звѣровидный…

О боже, крѣпкая наша сило,
твое единого сіе дѣло…
_
(http://az.lib.ru/p/prokopowich_f/text_0080.shtml)


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## CitizenEmpty

ahvalj said:


> and _ě_ as _i_ (lasted until the first half of the 18th century).



Exactly what is this _ě_ pronunciation? I'm not familiar with this kind Romanization-based letter.


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## ahvalj

CitizenEmpty said:


> Exactly what is this _ě_ pronunciation? I'm not familiar with this kind Romanization-based letter.


Late Common Slavic and its descendants had three main kinds of _e_: the short _e_, the long _ě_ and the nasalized _ę_. Acoustically, _ě_ was more open than _e_ in future Bulgarian (e. g. _měra_>_мяра/m'ara_), Polish (_měra_>_miara_) and north-western East Slavic (*_mērā_> Finnish _määrä_) and more closed elsewhere. In most parts of the Russian language area _ě _was pronounced for a long time as a kind of diphthong, _ie_, so that in the first half of the 18th century the French borrowing _pièce_ was occasionally rendered as _пѣса_.


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## CitizenEmpty

I see. But what about the Russian numbers and nouns in nominal cases? Russian and Serbo-Croatian use "cardinal numbers 2, 3, 4 + *genitive singular case*" for indicating nominative case. Belorussian and Ukrainian instead use "cardinal numbers "2, 3, 4 + *nominative plural case*" in this case. Could this indicate a Church Slavonic influence?


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## ahvalj

CitizenEmpty said:


> I see. But what about the Russian numbers and nouns in nominal cases? Russian and Serbo-Croatian use "cardinal numbers 2, 3, 4 + *genitive singular case*" for indicating nominative case. Belorussian and Ukrainian instead use "cardinal numbers "2, 3, 4 + *nominative plural case*" in this case. Could this indicate a Church Slavonic influence?


This usage postdates the Old Church Slavonic stage (i. e. OCS didn't know this phenomenon for numerals ending on 2). What is perceived now as the Gen. Sg. is, in the _o_-declension, the former Nominative Dual, which was confused with the Gen. Sg. after they merged phonetically (until Late Common Slavic, they had different prosodic features: the Gen. Sg. -_a_ had a non-acute intonation, whereas Nom. Du. -_a_ was acute; these vowels also probably differed in length — the Gen. Sg. ending is of contractional origin, from IE *-_oed_, and was probably longer, trimoraic, whereas the Nom. Du. length is of laryngeal origin, from IE *-_ohₑ_, and was bimoraic). I had described the evolution of this system of agreement in numerals a couple of times on the Russian forum: unfortunately I am unable to give you the exact links since I am boycotting its moderator.

*Update. *Briefly speaking, OCS and Old East Slavic, which had a functioning Dual, used the following system:
_jedinъ/odinъ stolъ_ (Nom. Sg.)
_dъva stola_ (Nom. Du.)
_trьje stoli_ (Nom. Pl.)

Russian has generalized the Nom. Du. form for numerals ending on 2–4 (_dva stola, tri stola_) (and Bulgarian — for all numerals above 1), whereas Ukrainian and Belarusian have extended the Nom. Pl. form for the numerals ending on 2 (Ukr. _dva stoly, try stoly_). In Russian masculine _o_- and masculine and feminine _i_-declensions this form continues the old Nom. Du (-_a_ and -_i_), whereas in the _a_-declension this form is analogous after Gen. Sg. (etymological ending would have been -_e_, cp. _dve, obe_), and so is the neuter form of the _o_-declension (again, the etymological ending must have been -_e, _cp. the only preserved form _mude _"balls (anatom.)").


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## CitizenEmpty

So, it's an independent development. I also found this.

http://languagesoftheworld.info/his...vgorod-dialect-russian-literary-language.html

It gives me an impression that (Standard) Russian is a mix of many influences over 1000 years around Moscow.


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## CitizenEmpty

Sorry for asking a lot of questions. But are the two verbal prefixes пре- and пере- different in usage? All I know is that пре- is a direct Church Slavonic loanword.


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## ahvalj

CitizenEmpty said:


> So, it's an independent development. I also found this.
> 
> http://languagesoftheworld.info/his...vgorod-dialect-russian-literary-language.html
> 
> It gives me an impression that (Standard) Russian is a mix of many influences over 1000 years around Moscow.


I don't agree with the point of view in that link for the very simple reason: the Old Novgorod dialect is the only one attested old East Slavic idiom. We have absolutely no idea how exactly people spoke anywhere else in the Rus lands. In particular, virtually no traits that later would characterize the Ukrainian language can be found in texts compiled in old Kiev (the most numerous ones): of course, most of these traits are of later origin, but especially striking are lexical differences, including elements of the basic vocabulary (see these texts here: http://izbornyk.org.ua/oldukr2/oldukr2.htm). As I had written, the differences with Old Church Slavonic must have been minor, judging from the character of mistakes and East Slavic elements in the texts, yet we have no pure East Slavic records outside Novgorod, where the birch bark letters have preserved due to the special kind of local soils. Moscow is an interesting area in its own, since it was slavicized quite late, and immediately west of it 1000 years ago people still spoke a Baltic language (East Galindian: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galindians), whereas the territory of later Moscow and the lands to the east were Finnic-speaking (see the three first maps here: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balts). The accentological traits suggest that the old Moscow speech didn't belong to either one of the major East Slavic tribal groups and might continue the dialect of some early Slavic settlers of East Europe displaced to the east by the later Slavic newcomers (_Николаев СЛ · 1994 · Раннее диалектное членение и внешние связи восточнославянских диалектов:_ 43–47 — https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_7IkEzr9hyJVEUtNk5BVF94YkU&authuser=0). In this sense it may have exhibited many special characters at some period, not less than in old Novgorod, yet there are no records of any kind.


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## ahvalj

CitizenEmpty said:


> Sorry for asking a lot of questions. But are the two verbal prefixes пре- and пере- different in usage? All I know is that пре- is a direct Church Slavonic loanword.


The meaning is the same, simply _пре_- doesn't form new words anymore.


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## CitizenEmpty

THen what is the relationship between the Old Novogorod Dialect and Russian? I know that the northern dialectal varieties of Russian is somewhat conservative than their southern counterparts.


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## ahvalj

I wouldn't say the northern dialects are more conservative (don't know if they are still spoken: I have never heard them). People writing so simply look at the entire East Slavic dialectal map (http://scisne.net/ax/d1/1/a1490/Dialektologicheskaia_Karta_1914_goda.jpg) and find that, yes, the shared innovations most often were spreading from the south-west to the north-east, and since many of them stopped before having reached that north-eastern half, the respective dialects must be considered more archaic. This concept forgets that those dialects possess their own innovations, which may be pretty far-reaching (e. g. many of these dialects lack(ed) hushing consonants, which had merged with sibilants to the time of the first records, i. e. before the 11th century).

I can't comment the relationships between the Old Novgorod dialect and the standard language. If one assumes (like Zaliznyak does in his works and lectures, cp. your link above) that the Old Novgorod speech (or more precisely, the north Krivichian dialect that occupied the lands west of Novgorod) was opposed in the beginning of the last millennium to a more or less homogeneous rest of the East Slavic continuum, then we can simply analyze the modern language and calculate which feature comes from which source: Zaliznyak told once that it will be about 50:50 and that "this is a good proportion". However, since we don't know the details of the linguistic situation in other East Slavic lands, this comparison is not especially scientific (which is strange, since Zaliznyak is otherwise probably the most thorough and clear-headed Russian linguist). In the paper by Nikolayev cited above we can see that remnants of some features that characterized the Old Novgorod dialect (and which, by the way, largely disappeared during the next centuries), can be found in old texts and recent records of other dialects descendant from the speech of Krivichi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krivichs), so one can only guess how the coeval texts from Pskov, Smolensk or Vitebsk looked like. The old Moscow speech could have been not less peculiar as well (see #14). Recent field investigations by Nikolayev seem to have found villages that preserve remnants of tonal distinctions and even unmerged reflexes of the Common Slavic *_ī_ and *_eı̯_ (in the south, by the way), so 1000 years ago the picture could have been considerably more patchy than thought before.

Two more things. First, these differences are large from a linguistic perspective but they were probably quite transparent to the speakers and didn't cause troubles in interdialectal communication: in most cases the person just had to substitute certain sounds and put the stress differently in some paradigms. Second, there is no evidence that the ancient dialectal boundaries (reconstructed from tribal boundaries and from studies of later dialects) had anything to do with the modern ethnic boundaries, e. g. the descendants of the abovementioned Krivichi have become both Belarusians, north and central Russians, and those of Severians (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severians) became eastern Ukrainians and south-western Russians. There is also not a slightest evidence that the dialects in what is now Belarus, Russia and Ukraine were 1000 years ago closer to each other within the boundaries of these later countries, i. e. that there existed some kind of proto-Belarusian, proto-Russian or proto-Ukrainian language.


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## CitizenEmpty

Most of the people in the West has the impression that the northern dialect of Russian is much conservative. I guess they (including me) were wrong.

So, I think I got the general background as of now.


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## Erkattäññe

CitizenEmpty said:


> Most of the people in the West has the impression that the northern dialect of Russian is much conservative. I guess they (including me) were wrong.
> 
> So, I think I got the general background as of now.



With the limited knowledge I have in slavic languages, I can say that Russian (as a whole) is on the conservative side of the branch, but by no means the most conservative, take ino account vowel mergers in unstresed positions, the loss of the vocative case which stands in Ukranian and many other slavic languages and finally, shared with almost all the slavic languages but slovenian, the loss of the dual number.


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## Ben Jamin

Erkattäññe said:


> With the limited knowledge I have in slavic languages, I can say that Russian (as a whole) is on the conservative side of the branch, but by no means the most conservative, take ino account vowel mergers in unstresed positions, the loss of the vocative case which stands in Ukranian and many other slavic languages and finally, shared with almost all the slavic languages but slovenian, the loss of the dual number.


I think that it is rather impossible to point out "the most conservative" of the Slavic languages, as every language has retained something old and at the same time shows also innovations in other features. The conservative and innovative features will balance each other to yield the same result in the end.


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