So i have several questions about the development of Slavic languages. I'm hoping for Fraggle Rocker to respond but anyone else who has input i'd love to hear from you aswell. Fraggle, you seem to really knowledgeable and when i read that you were also Czech it made me think that you'd be the man to shed some light. 1) I'd love to get your take on the debate as to what language/dialects were spoken during Kievan Rus. There are several theories about how old/early versions of Ukrainian, Russian, & Belarusian were being spoken, when this started to take place & when languages between Eastern Slavs started to diverge. There are a few who claim that there was one shared spoken dialect during the entire Kievan Rus era but given how large Kievan Rus was geographically i personally find this hard to believe. Lets say around 1000-1100 AD, after 200-300 years of existing, i find it rather improbable that a Rusych from Kiev would be speaking the same dialect as citizen from Vladimir. I'v read different accounts where they claim that different dialects were being spoken anywhere from 800 AD to Soviet histories who tried to claim that it wasn't until the 1300's. 2) I remember reading you mention in one of your posts the Old Church Slavonic & Polish continuum which pertains to my above questions to an extent. During Kievan Rus the written language was completely different from the spoken language(s), as was the case in alot of places. Old Church Slavonic when it was first brought there was in it's original Bulgarian form, it did eventually take on local Rusych characteristics but i don't see how studying Old Slavonic writings is very helpful when trying to ascertain what spoken language existed at the time? Is it because they know what the original Bulgarian Slavonic looked like so then when they look at Slavonic circa 11th century (for example) they can take note of the differences that had developed from the original. Those differences in the writing were a result of the spoken dialect influncing change? Something like that? 3) Which Slavic language is the most 'central', i'v heard that it is Slovak. If a person could chose only one Slavic language to know, which one would allow them to be able to understand all other Slavic languages the most? e.g. If you only spoke Slovak would you understand Ukrainian, Russian, Serbian better than if you only spoken Polish? Is it Slovak and which ever one it is, is it because that particular language has undergone the least amount of change from the original Proto-Slavic? Seems logical. 4) Did writing exist in Slavic lands prior to Cyril and Methodius? Below is a link that gives some brief mention of a couple historical account that seem to contradict the common belief that they had no form of writing prior to Cyril and Methodius. (my post count is under 20 so just remove the 7's to get the link) htt77p://indoeuro.bizla77777nd. com/project/script/slavi .html 5) Are there any books in English about the Great Moravian Empire that you know of? I'd be very interested to have a detailed account and learn more about it but it's difficult to find information. 5) Do you consider Slavic languages dialects or languages? Specifically Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, & Slovak in relation to eachother.
You seem to know as much or more than I do about this stuff, so I don't know how much help I can be. I'm only an amateur scholar. I've picked up information here and there, but by now, a couple of decades into the internet era, most of what I know is probably from tertiary sources like museum magazines and quarternary sources like Wikipedia. My mother was Czech, or "Bohemian" as the people called themselves in those days. I was raised pure American, and she even shielded me from picking up the language. It wasn't until I was older and developed an interest in languages and linguistics, and took a course in Russian, that I learned anything about the Slavic branch or any of the other Eastern Indo-European languages. I have several Esperanto pen-pals in what is now the Czech Republic and visited them in 1973 in what was then Czechoslovakia. I once had pen pals in other Slavic countries and visited several of them, but they seem to have all died or simply lost contact. As I said, I'm no expert, but I find no compelling evidence to challenge the assertion that there was only a single East Slavic language, Old Russian, up through at least 1200CE. Proto-Slavic is the youngest branch-progenitor (around 500CE) in the entire Indo-European family, so it's not remarkable that a mere 700 years later it would not yet have diverged into a plethora of offspring. Not one shared dialect, one shared language. There were presumably a number of intercomprehensible dialects. Again, not the same dialect, but the same language, Old Russian. People throughout a huge area of China, surely half of the modern country's area and probably larger than Kievan Rus', have been speaking intercomprehensible dialects of Mandarin for more than a thousand years. At the very least, Old Russian must have been the lingua franca of the empire. Transregional tongues whose specific purpose is to maintain intercomprehensibility among regions change slowly and sturdily resist disintegration into dialects. Look at how long Aramaic lasted as one language: it's still spoken today and there are even Aramaic websites. What I've read is that when the Slavic tribes first arrived around 500CE, they had no strong central leadership, like all Neolithic cultures, and their dialects steadily diverged. But as they established their own outpost of Greco-Roman civilization (itself an outpost of Mesopotamian civilization) with greater organization, central leadership, and more trade and contact among the tribes, the dialects began to converge. So by the second millennium CE they could be counted as dialects of a single language, rather than a dialect continuum with mutually unintelligible speech at the far ends. It's a continuum from Old Church Slavonic to the modern languages of all the Orthodox peoples, and it was a mistake to include the Catholic Poles in that statement. The influence of the church and OCS put a damper on any efforts to write in any vernacular language. This makes it very difficult for us to trace the histories of the Eastern Slavic languages and of the Southern Slavic languages of Orthodox populations. The Bulgars were not an Indo-European people. They intermarried with the people they found there and gradually assimilated to Slavic culture, but began speaking a Slavic language as recently as 900CE. So it would arguably be proper to say that the Bulgarians spoke Old Church Slavonic, the vernacular of the day, rather than that Old Church Slavonic was derived from Bulgarian. Agreed. As I said, the influence of the church shields us from good evidence of the evolution of the languages of the Orthodox Slavs. Slovaks can understand Czech rather easily, and Belarus and Ukrainian with a little more difficulty. There's a geographical discontinuity between the Western Slavic language region and the Southern Slavic region, because of the intrusion of German- and Hungarian-speaking peoples. Nonetheless, as I noted in another thread, I observed a Czech woman managing basic communication with a Croatian restaurant owner in 1973, and most of the Czech people I've met claim they could understand Polish after listening to it on the radio for a few years. I also heard a Bulgarian and a Pole making themselves understood. The Slavic languages have not diverged from each other as much as any of the other Western Indo-European branches, because they simply have not had as much time to diverge, nor have they been subject to as many external influences. Sorbian, Russian and Macedonian are much more similar than English, German and Icelandic, or Portuguese, French and Romanian. Slovak is one language about which I know virtually nothing, so I'm not qualified to comment. Nonetheless it seems like a reasonable hypothesis since Slovakia is more-or-less the geographical center of "modern Slavonia." A decent job has probably been done of reconstructing Proto-Slavic, because that's the one area in which Old Church Slavonic can help us.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! OCS had only had a few centuries to diverge from the original language. I'm sure linguists have traced the evolution of all the attested Slavic languages and can say which one had diverged the most from the ancestral language. However, we can expect that there might have been a drift from the ancestral tongue, in which all the descendants participated. Given that starting point, it's difficult to speculate which of the modern languages would now be the closest to Proto-Slavic. Assuming, for the sake of the argument, that Slovak is indeed the center of a Slavic dialect continuum, the reason would be only that it is near the geographical center of the region, so the distance to the farthest outliers in any direction is approximately the same. I don't know any more about this than you do. One contemporary writer claims that an earlier writing system was in use when Cyril arrived, others doubt it. I am extremely skeptical about the scholarhip in any source that takes the Nostratus hypothesis seriously, so I would not regard this website as authoritative. I have no knowledge of that empire. They qualify under the standard definition: Two forms of speech that are not mutually comprehensible. What we may have is a dialect continuum. If you travel from Moscow to Warsaw or Skopje and stop at hundred mile intervals, it may be that at every stop you find people who can understand the speech of the people a hundred miles to their right and also of the people a hundred miles to their left. But they can't understand the people a thousand miles away. But since the people at the ends of the continuum can't understand each other, it's correct to call them languages instead of dialects. Do we call the speech of the people in the Slovak-Ukraine border region a dialect of Slovak or a dialect of Ukrainian? That decision is usually made by politicians, not linguists. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
