Church Slavonic is a Slavic language of Christian liturgy and literature, formed from the Old Church Slavonic language. It is the traditional Slavic liturgical language used by the Orthodox Church in Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, as well as partly in Moldova, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic (historically also in Wallachia). In most churches it is used alongside national languages.

The spread of Church Slavonic in different Slavic countries was accompanied by its adaptation to the peculiarities of local Slavic languages. As a result, already from the 9th–10th centuries, territorial varieties of the language emerged — its recensions (variants).

The most widespread form currently in use is the modern Synodal recension of Church Slavonic, used as the liturgical language by the Russian Orthodox Church and some other religious associations. In addition to the Russian Orthodox Church, Church Slavonic is the main liturgical language of the Slavic-Byzantine rite of the Russian Greek Catholic Church, it is used alongside Ukrainian in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and alongside Belarusian in the Belarusian Greek Catholic Church. Until the reforms of the 1960s–1970s, it was used alongside Latin in some places in Croatia within the Catholic Church.

By analogy with Latin, which is actively used in medicine, biology, jurisprudence, and also in the Catholic Church, but is not a spoken language, Church Slavonic is also a dead language, used only in a separate ecclesiastical book-written sphere, in hymnography, and in daily worship in some Orthodox and Greek Catholic churches.

The Old Church Slavonic Cyrillic alphabet forms the basis of the writing systems of many modern languages.

Name

The term “Church Slavonic language” first appeared in “Discourse on the Slavic Language” by A. Kh. Vostokov (1820) and points to the predominantly ecclesiastical sphere of its use. In philological texts of ancient Slavic scribes and philologists of the modern era, the Church Slavonic language was called “Slovenian”, “Slavonic”, “Slavonic speech”. In philological literature, the term “Slavisms” is still used in the sense of “Church Slavonicisms”. Since Church Slavonic developed from Old Church Slavonic and there are no fundamental differences between the language created by Cyril and Methodius and the language it became later, the concept of “Church Slavonic language” often includes Old Church Slavonic as well.

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History

Old Church Slavonic (the early form of Church Slavonic) goes back to the Solun dialect of Old Bulgarian, native to the creators of the written Old Church Slavonic language Cyril and Methodius, although during its existence it underwent grammatical and phonetic simplifications (in particular, nasal and reduced vowels disappeared) and convergence with the living languages of the countries where it was used. It was first introduced into cultural use in Great Moravia.

In Moravia, Cyril and Methodius, together with their disciples, translated church books from Greek into Old Church Slavonic, taught the Slavs to read, write, and conduct worship in Old Church Slavonic. In 869, Cyril died in Rome, and Methodius returned to Moravia the following year already as archbishop. After Methodius’ death, his disciple Gorazd of Ohrid became his successor in Moravia.

Under Gorazd, opponents of Slavic writing in Moravia obtained from Pope Stephen V a ban on the use of the Slavic language in church liturgy, and Methodius’ disciples were expelled from Moravia. Despite this, the spread of writing in Old Church Slavonic in Moravia and Bohemia did not stop immediately. Literary monuments written in these countries in Glagolitic script in Old Church Slavonic in the 10th and 11th centuries are known — Kiev Leaves, Prague Fragments, and others.

Methodius’ disciples, having left Moravia, partly went to the Croats, and partly to Bulgaria, where they continued the development of Slavic writing. It was Bulgaria that became the center of the spread of writing in Old Church Slavonic at the end of the 9th century. Here two major schools were formed — the Ohrid and Preslav schools, where famous Bulgarian scribes worked — Clement of Ohrid, Naum of Ohrid, John the Exarch, Constantine of Preslav, and Chernorizets Hrabar.

In the 10th century, together with the adoption of Christianity, Old Church Slavonic began to be used as a literary language in the Old Russian state, where the Old Russian recension of Church Slavonic was formed.

The first printed book in Church Slavonic was the Croatian Ⰿⰹⱅⰰⰾⱏ ⱂⱁ ⰸⰰⰽⱁⱀⱆ ⱃⰹⰿⱅⰽⱁⰳⰰ ⰴⰲⱁⱃⰰ (Misal po zakonu rimskoga dvora), published in 1483 in Glagolitic script.

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Script

Monuments of Old Church Slavonic and Church Slavonic writing are known both in Glagolitic and in Cyrillic.

In modern writing, Church Slavonic uses the Cyrillic alphabet. The Church Slavonic alphabet contains about 40 letters, some of which are represented by more than one variant of writing (the uncertainty in the number of letters is due to the ambiguity of the boundary between different letters and different variants of the same letter). Numerous superscripts are used (three types of accent, aspiration, three combinations of aspiration with accents, yerok, kendema, breve, simple title, various letter titles). Punctuation marks differ somewhat from Russian: for example, instead of a question mark a semicolon is used, and instead of a semicolon — a colon. Uppercase and lowercase letters are distinguished, the use of which can either be similar to Russian or follow the ancient system, in which only the first word of a paragraph was usually written with a capital letter.

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Typography

Church Slavonic text is traditionally printed in fonts of the same design, dating back to the strict Russian semi-ustav of the 16th century. There is no correspondence to bold and italic fonts. For emphasis, letterspacing, setting in all capitals, or setting in smaller or larger font is used. In liturgical books, printing in two colors is applied: for example, headings and instructions for the reader are printed in red, and what needs to be read aloud — in black.

Even before the revolution, some Church Slavonic texts for laypeople (for example, prayer books) were printed in the civil script, most often with stress marked on all polysyllabic words. Their appearance was associated with the loss of the skill of reading Church Slavonic text in standard notation. After the revolution, in the USSR and abroad, liturgical books (for example, menaia, irmologia) began to appear using modern Russian (in the USSR) or pre-revolutionary (most often abroad) orthography with stress marks. The reason was the lack of Church Slavonic typographic fonts, which were physically destroyed in the Soviet Union.

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Influence on Other Languages

Church Slavonic had a great influence on many literary Slavic languages, especially those of Orthodox culture. Numerous borrowings of Church Slavonic words gave rise in the Russian language to a peculiar phenomenon — a phonetically expressed stylistic difference in pairs of words with the same root, for example: zoloto — zlato, gorod — grad, rozhat’ — rozhdat’ (the first word in each pair is Russian, the second is borrowed from Church Slavonic). In the synonymous pairs formed in this way, the Church Slavonic borrowing usually belongs to a higher style. In some cases, the Russian and Church Slavonic variants of the same word diverged (completely or partially) in semantics and are no longer synonyms: goryachiy — goryashchiy, rovnyy — ravnyy, sbor — sobor, porokh — prakh, sovershennyy — sovershennyy, padezh — padezh, nebo — nebo.

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Linguistic Characteristics

Phonetics and Phonology

Characteristics of the pronunciation of Church Slavonic:

• there is no reduction of vowels in unstressed syllables. For example, “o” and “e” in unstressed position are read as [o] and [e] (as in northern okanye dialects), while in standard Russian pronunciation they turn into [a], [ʌ] or [ъ] and into [i] or [ь] respectively;
• the letter “e” is never read as yo (in fact, there is no letter ё in Church Slavonic writing at all), which is also reflected in borrowings from Church Slavonic into Russian: nebo — nyobo, odezhda — odyozha, nadezhda — nadyozha (the first word in each pair is borrowed from Church Slavonic, the second is originally Russian);
• the letter “g” was read as a voiced fricative consonant [ɣ] (as in South Russian dialects or approximately as in Ukrainian), and not as a plosive [ɡ] in standard Russian pronunciation; in the position of devoicing [ɣ] turns into [x] (this influenced the Russian pronunciation of the word Bog as [Bokh]). Currently, fricative pronunciation can be heard in the patriarchal church as well as among Old Believers.
• the endings of adjectives “‑ago” (“‑ѧgo”) and pronouns “‑ogo” (“‑ego”) (with omega in the genitive case, with the letter “o” — in the accusative) are pronounced as written, while in Russian ‑ogo is pronounced as [‑ʌvó] in stressed position and as [‑ъvъ] in unstressed position.
• if the prefix ends in a hard consonant and the root begins with “i”, for example: ѿimetъ (‘will take away’), then “i” is read as [ɨ].
• the letters “sh”, “zh”, “shch”, “ch”, “ts” are pronounced as in Russian, and, just as in Russian, only “ꙋ” is written after them and almost never “yu”, although all these consonants are etymologically soft.

However, Church Slavonic orthography is not fully phonetic: for example, after sibilants the change of letters “i” — “y” and “a” — “ѧ” does not affect pronunciation and serves only to avoid homonymy; the use of the soft sign between consonants (“tma” — “t’ma”, etc.) is in some cases optional (in Russian pronunciation softening is possible here, while Serbian Church Slavonic primers write that “ь” does not denote anything here and is written only by tradition). In general, Church Slavonic pronunciation allows a more or less strong accent of the local language (Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian, etc.). In modern Russian Church Slavonic pronunciation even akanye is used, although at the beginning of the 20th century it was never used and is still considered incorrect.

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Morphology

Church Slavonic, like Russian, is predominantly synthetic. This means that grammatical categories are expressed mainly by inflection (declension, conjugation), and not by function words.

Noun

In Church Slavonic there are 7 cases:

• nominative,
• accusative,
• genitive,
• dative,
• instrumental,
• locative,
• vocative.

Case meanings are expressed by endings and prepositional-case constructions, as well as by agreement in case of attributive parts of speech.

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Verb

In Church Slavonic the verb has categories of mood, tense, person, number, and voice (nominal forms of the verb also have gender). There are 6 tenses in total: pluperfect, perfect, imperfect, aorist (I and II), present, and future. Below are the conjugation tables of the verb “byti”.

The negative form of the verb “byti” in the present tense is formed by merging the particle “ne” and the verbal form into one word: “ne” + “esm’” = “nѣsm’”, “ne” + “esi” = “nѣsi”, “ne” + “estъ” = “nѣstъ”, etc., except for the 3rd person plural form — “ne sutъ”. The infinitive is formed with the suffix “-ti”: “ѡbrѣzati” (‘to circumcise’), “napisati” (‘to write’). The aorist of the 1st person singular is formed with the ending “‑khъ”: “Azъ pisakhъ” (‘I wrote’); “Azъ usnukhъ, i spakhъ, vostakhъ”. Also in the past tense of the 3rd person plural there is the ending “‑sha”: “Onѝ priidosha, slyshasha, polozhisha” (‘They came, heard, placed’). The perfect is formed with the ending “‑lъ” and the verb “byti” in the present tense: “ѡbrѣla estъ” (‘[she] acquired’). The pluperfect is formed with the ending “-lъ” and the verb “byti” in the aorist (from the stem “‑bѣ-”) or imperfect: “Onѝ otshli byakhъ” (‘They had departed’).

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Recording Numbers and Numerals

In Church Slavonic, a Cyrillic numeral system, or tsifir’, is used to record numbers. It is partly similar to the Roman system: letters of the alphabet with numerical values are used to record numbers. The sign titlo (҃) is used to indicate a number.

Letters with numerical value are presented in the table.

 

Numbers not listed above are obtained by combining letters. To obtain numbers from 11 to 19, the lower digit is placed first, then the higher one, for example: а҃і — 11, є҃і — 15, ѕ҃і — 16; for numbers from 21 onward — on the contrary, recording proceeds from the higher digit to the lower one, for example: к҃д — 24, ѻ҃в — 72, ун҃г — 453.

A thousand is indicated by the sign ҂ placed below the line. The numerical value of the letter following this sign is increased a thousand times, for example: ҂а҃ — 1000, ҂вє҃і — 2015, ҂і҂єл҃г — 15 033.

To facilitate the recording of larger numbers, the following symbols are used at the author’s discretion: а⃝ — t’ma, means a 10,000-fold increase in the value of the enclosed letter, for example: а⃝ — 10,000; а҈ — legion, means a 100,000-fold increase in the value of the enclosed letter, for example: г҈ — 300,000; а҉ — leodr, means a 1,000,000-fold increase in the value of the enclosed letter, for example: в҉ — 2,000,000, — and others.

Thus, there are variants for recording larger numbers: for example, the number 5,913,769 can be written either as ҂҂є҂ц҂і҂гѱѯ҃ѳ or as є҉ ѳ҈ а⃝ ҂гѱѯ҃ѳ.

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Syntax

As in Russian, a simple sentence most often consists of a subject and a predicate, with the subject in the nominative case. The predicate can be expressed by a verb, a nominal part of speech, or a nominal part of speech with an auxiliary verb.

In the field of syntax, Greek influence is noticeable in the use of a number of constructions:

• nominative case as an apposition with the vocative case;
• genitive case with a preposition denoting the agent in a passive construction;
• neuter plural of defining words in the function of substantivized generalization;
• accusative case with the infinitive with verbs of speech and perception.

There is much in common in the syntax of participles in Greek and Church Slavonic: most of these convergences were based on phenomena of the living Slavic language; Greek influence contributed to the spread of some constructions (the verb “byti” with a participle, participles after phasal verbs, etc.), led to the relatively frequent use of the independent dative case in place of the Greek independent genitive case; in some cases, calquing of Greek participial constructions is recorded, but it did not become established and remained within the framework of isolated usage, not a system of the language.