Old East Slavic (traditionally also Old Russian) was a language (or a group of dialects) used by the East Slavs from the 7th or 8th century to the 13th or 14th century, until it diverged into the Russian and Ruthenian languages. Ruthenian eventually evolved into the Belarusian, Rusyn, and Ukrainian languages.
Terminology The term Old East Slavic is used in reference to the common ancestor of the modern family of East Slavic languages. However, it is not universally applied. The language is also traditionally known as Old Russian; however, the term may be viewed as anachronistic. In English, the adjective Russian historically translates both русский (pertaining to modern Russia) and русьский (pertaining to medieval Rus'), which can conflate the common ancestor of all East Slavic languages with modern Russian. Because the initial stages of the language which it denotes predate the dialectal divisions marking the nascent distinction between modern East Slavic languages, a number of authors have proposed using Old East Slavic as a more appropriate and neutral term. While Old Russian is sometimes used for the written language in Russia up to the 18th century, linguists usually divide this span into two periods: the early common stage (often called Old East Slavic) and the later period after the split, known as Middle Russian.
Some scholars have also called the language Old Rus'ian or Old Rusan, Rusian, or simply Rus, although these are the least commonly used forms.
Ukrainian-American linguist George Shevelov used the term Common Russian or Common Eastern Slavic to refer to the hypothetical uniform language of the East Slavs.
American Slavist Alexander M. Schenker pointed out that modern terms for the medieval language of the East Slavs varied depending on the political context. He suggested using the neutral term East Slavic for that language. However, this view has recently been challenged. Based on a comprehensive linguistic analysis of the corpus identified by Schenker, the Polish Slavist Joanna Getka and the Ukrainian linguist and dialectologist Viktor Moisiienko have argued that there was, in fact, no single Old East Slavic language. Instead, they demonstrate that from as early as the eleventh century distinct written traditions were already developing within the lands of Rus', reflecting the emergence of separate linguistic and cultural communities rather than a unified East Slavic linguistic continuumJoanna Getka, Viktor Moisiienko, Na początku było Słowo… Od standardu mówionego do normy literackiej (Zarys genezy ukraińskiego języka literackiego), // Спочатку було Слово... Від мовного узусу – до літературної норми (Нарис генези української літературної мови) Warszawa 2024, Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, ss. 504, ISBN 978-83-235-6703-5, https://doi.org/10.31338/uw.9788323567011 23. Joanna Getka, Viktor Moisiienko, Origins of the ukrainian literary language in the context of the polish hypothesis on genesis polish literary language „Українська полоністика”, 17/2020 DOI: https://doi.org/10.35433/2220-4555.17.2020.fil-4 .
Phonology
Vowels + Early Old East Slavic Oral vowelsFrontBack Unrounded RoundedCloseTense и ꙑ у Lax ь ъ OpenLax е о Tense ѣ a
+ Nasal vowels Front Back ѧ ѫ
Note that there were also iotated variants: ꙗ, ѥ, ю, ѩ, ѭ.
+ Late Old East Slavic Oral vowelsFrontBack Unrounded Rounded Close Tense и ꙑ у Open Lax е о Tense ѣ a
The nasal vowels ѧ and ѫ had merged with ꙗ and у respectively at a very early stage (around the 10th century), prior to the writing of the earliest surviving manuscripts. Later, during the 11th–13th centuries, the yers ь and ъ either became silent (in "weak" positions) or vocalized into е and о (in "strong" positions) under Havlík's law.
Consonants + Old East Slavic consonant phonemesLabialDental/AlveolarPalatalVelarNasal PlosiveAffricate Fricative, LateralApproximant
Old East Slavic retains almost all the consonants of Proto-Slavic, with the exception of the palatal stops *ť and *ď, which merged with the pre-existing phonemes /č/ and /ž/ respectively.
Prior to the fall of the yers (11th–13th centuries), palatalization of consonants was positional (allophonic) before front vowels. The loss of the yers transformed palatalization into a contrastive, phonemic feature of the language.
General considerations
The language was a descendant of the Proto-Slavic language and retained many of its features. It developed so-called pleophony (or polnoglasie 'full vocalisation'), which came to differentiate the newly evolving East Slavic from other Slavic dialects. For instance, Common Slavic 'settlement, town' was reflected as OESl. gorodъ, Common Slavic 'milk' > OESl. moloko, and Common Slavic 'cow' > OESl korova. Other Slavic dialects differed by resolving the closed-syllable clusters *eRC and *aRC as liquid metathesis (South Slavic and West Slavic), or by no change at all (see the article on Slavic liquid metathesis and pleophony for a detailed account).
Since extant written records of the language are sparse, it is difficult to assess the level of its unity. In consideration of the number of tribes and clans that constituted Kievan Rus', it is probable that there were many dialects of Old East Slavic. Therefore, today we may speak definitively only of the languages of surviving manuscripts, which, according to some interpretations, show regional divergence from the beginning of the historical records. By , it had the weakest local variations among the four regional macrodialects of Common Slavic, , which had just begun to differentiate into its branches.
With time, it evolved into several more diversified forms; following the fragmentation of Kievan Rus' after 1100, dialectal differentiation accelerated. The regional languages were distinguishable starting in the 12th or 13th century. Thus different variations evolved of the Russian language in the regions of Novgorod, Moscow, South Russia and meanwhile the Ukrainian language was also formed. Each of these languages preserves much of the Old East Slavic grammar and vocabulary. The Russian language in particular borrows more words from Church Slavonic than does Ukrainian.
However, findings by Russian linguist Andrey Zaliznyak suggest that, until the 14th or 15th century, major language differences were not between the regions occupied by modern Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, but rather between the north-west (around modern Novgorod and Pskov) and the center (around modern Kyiv, Suzdal, Rostov, Moscow as well as Belarus) of the East Slavic territories. The Old Novgorodian dialect of that time differed from the central East Slavic dialects as well as from all other Slavic languages much more than in later centuries. According to Zaliznyak, the Russian language developed as a convergence of that dialect and the central ones, whereas Ukrainian and Belarusian were a continuation of the development of the central dialects of the East Slavs.
Also, Russian linguist Sergey Nikolaev, analysing the historical development of the Slavic dialects' accent system, concluded that a number of other tribes in Kievan Rus' came from different Slavic branches and spoke distant Slavic dialects.
Another Russian linguist, G. A. Khaburgaev, and a number of Ukrainian linguists (Stepan Smal-Stotsky, Ivan Ohienko, George Shevelov, Yevhen Tymchenko, Vsevolod Hantsov, Olena Kurylo), deny the existence of a common Old East Slavic language at any time in the past. According to them, the dialects of East Slavic tribes evolved gradually from the common Proto-Slavic language without any intermediate stages.
Following the end of the "Tatar yoke", the territory of the former Kievan Rus' was divided between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Grand Duchy of Moscow, and two separate literary traditions emerged in these states, Ruthenian in the west and medieval Russian in the east.
Literary language
The political unification of the region into the state called Kievan Rus', from which modern Belarus, Russia and Ukraine trace their origins, occurred approximately a century before the adoption of Christianity in 988 and the establishment of the South Slavic Old Church Slavonic as the liturgical and literary language. Documentation of the Old East Slavic language of this period is scanty, making it difficult at best fully to determine the relationship between the literary language and its spoken dialects.
There are references in Byzantine sources to pre-Christian Slavs in Eastern Europe using some form of writing. Despite some suggestive archaeological finds and a corroboration by the tenth-century monk Chernorizets Hrabar that ancient Slavs wrote in "strokes and incisions", the exact nature of this system is unknown.
Although the Glagolitic alphabet was briefly introduced, as witnessed by church inscriptions in Novgorod, it was soon entirely superseded by Cyrillic. The samples of birch-bark writing excavated in Novgorod have provided crucial information about the pure tenth-century vernacular in vernacular in North-West Russia, almost entirely free of Church Slavonic influence. It is also known that borrowings and calques from Byzantine Greek began to enter the vernacular at this time, and that simultaneously the literary language in its turn began to be modified towards Eastern Slavic.
The following excerpts illustrate two of the most famous literary monuments.
NOTE: The spelling of the original excerpt has been partly modernized. The translations are best attempts at being literal, not literary.
Primary Chronicle
, from the Laurentian Codex, 1377:
Original Transliteration Old East Slavic Russian Ukrainian Belarusian English These are the narratives of bygone years regarding the origin of the land of Rus', the first princes of Kiev, and from what source the land of Rus' had its beginning.
In this usage example of the language, the fall of the yers is in progress or arguably complete: several words end with a consonant, e.g. "to rule" < (modern Uk , R , B ). South Slavic features include "bygone" (modern R , Uk , B ). Correct use of perfect and aorist: "is/has come" (modern B , R , Uk ), "began" (modern Uk , B , R ) as a development of the old perfect. Note the style of punctuation.
The Tale of Igor's Campaign
Слово о пълку Игоревѣ. , from the Pskov manuscript, fifteenth cent. Original TransliterationOld East Slavic English Would it not be meet, o brothers, for us to begin with the old words the martial telling of the host of Igor, of Igor Sviatoslavlich? And to begin this tale in the way of the true tales of this time, and not in the way of Bojan's inventions. For the wise Bojan, if he wished to devote to someone [his] song, would fly like a squirrel in the trees, like a grey wolf over land, like a bluish eagle beneath the clouds.
Illustrates the sung epics, with typical use of metaphor and simile.
It has been suggested that the phrase (, to run in thought upon/over wood), which has become proverbial in modern Russian with the meaning "to speak ornately, at length, excessively," is a misreading of an original (akin to "mouse") from "run like a squirrel/mouse on a tree"; however, the reading is present in both the manuscript copy of 1790 and the first edition of 1800, and in all subsequent scholarly editions.
Old East Slavic literature