Old Church Slavonic (OCS) or Old Slavonic ( ) is the first Slavic literary language and the oldest extant written Slavonic language attested in literary sources. It belongs to the Eastern South Slavic subgroup of the South Slavic branch of the Slavic language family and is the ancestor of Church Slavonic, which remains the liturgical language of many Christian Orthodox churches.
Historians credit the 9th-century Byzantine missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius with standardizing the language and undertaking the task of translating the Gospels and necessary liturgical books into it as part of the Christianization of the Slavs. It is thought to have been based primarily on the dialect of the 9th-century Slavs living in the Byzantine theme of Thessalonica. The oldest manuscript is usually thought to be the Kiev Missal.
Old Church Slavonic became the official language of the First Bulgarian Empire and played an important role in the history of the Slavic languages serving as a basis and model for later Church Slavonic traditions. Some Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches use these Church Slavonic recensions as a liturgical language to this day.
As the oldest attested Slavic language, Old Church Slavonic provides important evidence for the features of Proto-Slavic, the reconstructed common ancestor of all Slavic languages.
Nomenclature The name of the language in Old Church Slavonic texts was simply Slavic (, ),. derived from the word for Slavs (, ), the self-designation of the compilers of the texts. This name is preserved in the modern native names of the Slovak and Slovene languages. The terms Slavic and Slavonic are interchangeable in English. The language is sometimes called Old Slavic, which may be confused with the distinct Proto-Slavic language. Bulgarian, Croatian, Macedonian, Serbian, Slovene and Slovak linguists have claimed Old Church Slavonic; thus OCS has also been variously called Old Bulgarian, Old Macedonian, Old Slovenian, Old Croatian, or Old Serbian, or even Old Slovak. The commonly accepted terms in modern English-language Slavic studies are Old Church Slavonic and Old Church Slavic.
The term Old BulgarianZiffer, Giorgio – On the Historicity of Old Church Slavonic UDK 811.163.1(091) (, ) is the designation used by most Bulgarian-language writers. It was used in numerous 19th-century sources, e.g. by August Schleicher, Martin Hattala, Leopold Geitler and August Leskien,A. Leskien, Handbuch der altbulgarischen (altkirchenslavischen) Sprache, 6. Aufl., Heidelberg 1922.A. Leskien, Grammatik der altbulgarischen (altkirchenslavischen) Sprache, 2.-3. Aufl., Heidelberg 1919."American contributions to the Tenth International Congress of Slavists", Sofia, September 1988, Alexander M. Schenker, Slavica, 1988, , pp. 46–47. who noted similarities between the first literary Slavic works and the modern Bulgarian language. For similar reasons, Russian linguist Aleksandr Vostokov used the term Slav-Bulgarian. The term is still used by some writers but nowadays normally avoided in favor of Old Church Slavonic. The term Old MacedonianJ P Mallory, D Q Adams. Encyclopaedia of Indo-European Culture. Pg 301 "Old Church Slavonic, the liturgical language of the Eastern Orthodox Church, is based on the Thessalonican dialect of Old Macedonian, one of the South Slavic languages."R. E. Asher, J. M. Y. Simpson. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Introduction "Macedonian is descended from the dialects of Slavic speakers who settled in the Balkan peninsula during the 6th and 7th centuries CE. The oldest attested Slavic language, Old Church Slavonic, was based on dialects spoken around Salonica, in what is today Greek Macedonia. As it came to be defined in the 19th century, geographic Macedonia is the region bounded by Mount Olympus, the Pindus range, Mount Shar and Osogovo, the western Rhodopes, the lower course of the river Mesta (Greek Nestos), and the Aegean Sea. Many languages are spoken in the region but it is the Slavic dialects to which the glossonym Macedonian is applied."R. E. Asher, J. M. Y. Simpson. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, History, "Modern Macedonian literary activity began in the early 19th century among intellectuals attempt to write their Slavic vernacular instead of Church Slavonic. Two centers of Balkan Slavic literary arose, one in what is now northeastern Bulgaria, the other in what is now southwestern Macedonia. In the early 19th century, all these intellectuals called their language Bulgarian, but a struggled emerged between those who favored northeastern Bulgarian dialects and those who favored western Macedonian dialects as the basis for what would become the standard language. Northeastern Bulgarian became the basis of standard Bulgarian, and Macedonian intellectuals began to work for a separate Macedonian literary language. "Tschizewskij, Dmitrij (2000) . Comparative History of Slavic Literatures. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. . "The brothers knew the Old Bulgarian or Old Macedonian dialect spoken around Thessalonica."Benjamin W. Fortson. Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction, pg. 431 "Macedonian was not distinguished from Bulgarian for most of its history. Constantine and Methodius came from Macedonian Thessaloniki; their old Bulgarian is therefore at the same time 'Old Macedonian'. No Macedonian literature dates from earlier than the nineteenth century, when a nationalist movement came to the fore and a literacy language was established, first written with Greek letters, then in Cyrillic"Benjamin W. Fortson. Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction, p. 427 "The Old Church Slavonic of Bulgaria, regarded as something of a standard, is often called Old Bulgarian (or Old Macedonian)"Henry R. Cooper. Slavic Scriptures: The Formation of the Church Slavonic Version of the Holy Bible, p. 86 "We do not know what portions of the Bible in Church Slavonic, let alone a full one, were available in Macedonia by Clement's death. And although we might wish to make Clement and Naum patron saints of such as glagolitic-script, Macedonian-recension Church Slavonic Bible, their precise contributions to it we will have to take largely on faith." is occasionally used by Western scholars in a regional context. According to Slavist Henrik Birnbaum, the term was introduced mostly by Macedonian scholars and it is anachronistic because there was no separate Macedonian language, distinguished from early Bulgarian, in the 9th century. The obsolete term Old Slovenian. was used by early 19th-century scholars who conjectured that the language was based on the dialect of Pannonia.
Modern Slavic nomenclature The names for the language in the modern Slavic languages are the following: (staraslavjanskaja mova), 'Old Slavic language' Bosnian and (starobӑlgarski), 'Old Bulgarian' and старославянски,Иванова-Мирчева 1969: Д. Иванова-Мнрчева. Старобългарски, старославянски и средно-българска редакция на старославянски. Константин Кирил Философ. В Юбилеен сборник по случай 1100 годишнината от смъртта му, стр. 45–62. (staroslavjanski), 'Old Slavic' , 'Old Slavic' (staroslovenski), 'Old Slavic' , 'Old Church Slavic' (staroslavjanskij jazyk), 'Old Slavic language' , 'Old Slavic' , 'Old Slavic' , 'Old Church Slavic' (staroslov"jans'ka mova), 'Old Slavic language'
History It is generally held that the language was standardized by two Byzantine missionaries, Cyril and his brother Methodius, for a mission to Great Moravia (the territory of today's eastern Czech Republic and western Slovakia; for details, see Glagolitic alphabet). The mission took place in response to a request by Great Moravia's ruler, Duke Rastislav for the development of Slavonic liturgy.
As part of preparations for the mission, in 862/863, the missionaries developed the Glagolitic alphabet and translated the most important prayers and liturgical books, including the Aprakos Evangeliar, the Psalter, and the Acts of the Apostles, allegedly basing the language on the Slavic dialect spoken in the hinterland of their hometown, Thessaloniki, in present-day Greece.
Based on a number of archaicisms preserved until the early 20th century (the articulation of yat as in Boboshticë, Drenovë, around Thessaloniki, Razlog, the Rhodopes and Thrace and of yery as around Castoria and the Rhodopes, the presence of decomposed nasalisms around Castoria and Thessaloniki, etc.), the dialect is posited to have been part of a macrodialect extending from the Adriatic to the Black Sea, and covering southern Albania, northern Greece and the southernmost parts of Bulgaria.
Because of the very short time between Rastislav's request and the actual mission, it has been widely suggested that both the Glagolitic alphabet and the translations had been "in the works" for some time, probably for a planned mission to Bulgaria.
The language and the Glagolitic alphabet, as taught at the Great Moravian Academy (), were used for government and religious documents and books in Great Moravia between 863 and 885. The texts written during this phase contain characteristics of the West Slavic vernaculars in Great Moravia.
In 885, Pope Stephen V prohibited the use of Old Church Slavonic in Great Moravia in favour of Latin. King Svatopluk I of Great Moravia expelled the Byzantine missionary contingent in 886.
Exiled students of the two apostles then brought the Glagolitic alphabet to the Bulgarian Empire, being at least some of them Bulgarians themselves.Kiril Petkov, The Voices of Medieval Bulgaria, Seventh-Fifteenth Century: The Records of a Bygone Culture, Volume 5, BRILL, 2008, , p. 161.("This great father of ours and light of Bulgaria was by origin of the European Moesians whom the people commonly known as Bulgarians…"-Kosev, Dimitŭr; et al. (1969), Documents and Materials on the History of the Bulgarian People, Sofia: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, p. 54)(The Voices of Medieval Bulgaria, Seventh-Fifteenth Century, East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450-1450, Kiril Petkov, BRILL, 2008, ISBN 9047433750, p. 153.) Boris I of Bulgaria () received and officially accepted them; he established the Preslav Literary School and the Ohrid Literary School. Both schools originally used the Glagolitic alphabet, though the Cyrillic script developed early on at the Preslav Literary School, where it superseded Glagolitic as official in Bulgaria in 893.Silent Communication: Graffiti from the Monastery of Ravna, Bulgaria. Studien Dokumentationen. Mitteilungen der ANISA. Verein für die Erforschung und Erhaltung der Altertümer, im speziellen der Felsbilder in den österreichischen Alpen (Verein ANISA: Grömbing, 1996) 17. Jahrgang/Heft 1, 57–78."The scriptorium of the Ravna monastery: once again on the decoration of the Old Bulgarian manuscripts 9th–10th c." In: Medieval Christian Europe: East and West. Traditions, Values, Communications. Eds. Gjuzelev, V. and Miltenova, A. (Sofia: Gutenberg Publishing House, 2002), 719–26 (with K. Popkonstantinov).Popkonstantinov, Kazimir, "Die Inschriften des Felsklosters Murfatlar". In: Die slawischen Sprachen 10, 1986, S. 77–106.
The texts written during this era exhibit certain linguistic features of the vernaculars of the First Bulgarian Empire. Old Church Slavonic spread to other South-Eastern, Central, and Eastern European Slavic territories, most notably Croatia, Serbia, Bohemia, Lesser Poland, and principalities of the Kievan Rus' – while retaining characteristically Eastern South Slavic linguistic features.Later texts written in each of those territories began to take on characteristics of the local Slavic vernaculars, and by the mid-11th century Old Church Slavonic had diversified into a number of regional varieties (known as recensions). These local varieties are collectively known as the Church Slavonic language.