The Russian Literary Language: A Comparative View

Abstract

The first written language the Russians learned was not their vernacular, but the so-called Old Church Slavonic, brought to them as a Church language when they were Christianized, at the very end of the tenth century. At the origin, this Old Church Slavonic was an obscure Macedonian dialect, of Bulgarian type, spoken by Slavonic peasants and shepherds on the outskirts of a great Greek city, Salonica. It had, however, the unexpected luck of being known and spoken by two Greeks, natives of Salonica, two brothers, one a learned theologian and a linguist, another a monk and a former high administrator of the Byzantine Empire. Later the two brothers were canonized and are now known as Saints Cyril and Methodius. With the help of their native Greek, they succeeded in elevating the Macedonian vernacular of Salonica to the dignity of the first Slavonic written language, even more than that to the status of a fully-fledged liturgical language. The birth certificate of this language bears the date of 863. Phonetically and morphologically it was purely Slavonic, but in its syntax, principles of word-formation, and vocabulary, it was strongly influenced by Byzantine Greek. This Old Church Slavonic was imported to Kiev and Novgorod, as the language of the Church, at the end of the tenth century. At that time the non-divided Common Slavonic language, which still existed in the middle of the first millennium A.D., had already been split into individual Slavonic languages, but the young scions were still so close one to another that Old Church Slavonic could be accepted and understood without any difficulty by the Eastern, as well as by the Southern and the Western Slavs. Everywhere it was welcomed as a form of the local vernacular, but of a higher, and sacred, nature. Nowhere was the need felt to translate it into the vernacular. It was but natural that in the Middle Ages the language of the Church should become the language of theology, of philosophy, of science, and of literature (almost exclusively religious), briefly a 'literary language' in the broad sense of the word. And Old Church Slavonic became all that in ancient Russia, as well as in