Old East Slavic

• 1. Introduction

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  Old East Slavic was the language, or perhaps the family of related dialects, spoken across the East Slavic lands. Its era ran from the 7th or 8th century to the 13th or 14th century. One of its oldest surviving lines reads, in translation, 'these are the narratives of bygone years regarding the origin of the land of Rus.' Copied into the Laurentian Codex of 1377, that sentence opens the Primary Chronicle. It is nearly the closest thing this vanished language left behind as an origin story of its own. Old East Slavic eventually diverged into Russian and Ruthenian, and Ruthenian itself later evolved into Belarusian, Rusyn and Ukrainian. Scholars still cannot agree on what to call the language or how unified its speakers really were. They also disagree on how its sounds shifted before it disappeared into its descendants. What survives is a scattering of birch bark, chronicles, sermons, and one strange epic about a prince named Igor. Each fragment tells a slightly different story about how this language lived and split apart.

• 2. What to Call It

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  Old Russian described the written language used in Russia until the 18th century. After that point, it became known as Modern Russian. Alexander M. Schenker, an American Slavist, argued that terms for the medieval language shifted along with politics. He proposed the neutral label East Slavic instead. Other scholars split the difference. Old East Slavic names the earliest stage, while Middle Russian or Great Russian names the period once the common tongue began fracturing. Rarer names circulate too, including Old Rus'ian, Old Rusan, Rusian, and simply Rus, though these see little use. George Shevelov, a Ukrainian-American linguist, instead used Common Russian or Common Eastern Slavic for this same hypothetical unified speech of the East Slavs. Every one of these labels carries an argument buried inside it about whether this language was ever a single, unified thing to begin with.

• 3. Sounds of a Vanished Tongue

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  By the 13th century, the vowels written ь and ъ had gone silent or merged into е and о. That merger marked one of the language's last major sound shifts. Old East Slavic kept most of the sound system it inherited from Proto-Slavic. One exception: the consonants ť and ď merged into č and ž along the way. After the 11th century, every consonant became palatalized whenever it stood before a front vowel. The language also developed a feature called pleophony, or polnoglasie, meaning full vocalisation. This set it apart from other Slavic dialects. Common Slavic's word for settlement or town became gorodъ in Old East Slavic. Its word for milk became moloko, and its word for cow became korova. South Slavic and West Slavic dialects handled the same consonant clusters differently, through a process called liquid metathesis. Other Slavic dialects left those clusters unchanged entirely. A pair of nasal vowels, written ѧ and ѫ, survived into the late period of the language before merging with ѧ sounds like я and у.

• 4. How Many Dialects

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  By around 1150, Old East Slavic had the weakest local variation of any of the four regional macrodialects that Common Slavic had split into by roughly 800. Kievan Rus' held together many different tribes and clans. Because of that, most researchers assume the spoken language was never fully uniform. After Kievan Rus' fragmented following 1100, regional differentiation sped up considerably. Distinct regional languages become identifiable starting in the 12th or 13th century. Separate strands of Russian took shape in Novgorod, Moscow and South Russia, while Ukrainian formed alongside them. Modern Russian ended up borrowing more vocabulary from Church Slavonic than Ukrainian did. Linguist Andrey Zaliznyak's research complicates this picture. He found that until the 14th or 15th century, the sharpest divide was not among the ancestors of modern Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Instead, it ran between the north-west, around Novgorod and Pskov, and the center, around Kyiv, Suzdal, Rostov, Moscow and Belarus. The Old Novgorodian dialect of that era diverged sharply from its central neighbors. It also differed more from every other Slavic language than it would in later centuries. According to Zaliznyak, Russian formed from a convergence of that Novgorodian dialect with the central ones. Ukrainian and Belarusian, by contrast, simply continued developing out of the central dialects. Separately, linguist Sergey Nikolaev studied the accent systems of Slavic dialects. He concluded that other tribes within Kievan Rus' descended from entirely different Slavic branches, speaking dialects that were far apart from one another.

• 5. Did It Ever Exist

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  G. A. Khaburgaev, a Russian linguist, denied that a common Old East Slavic language ever existed at all. He was joined by a number of Ukrainian linguists, including Stepan Smal-Stotsky, Ivan Ohienko, George Shevelov, Yevhen Tymchenko, Vsevolod Hantsov and Olena Kurylo. Their argument holds that dialects spoken by the East Slavic tribes evolved gradually straight from Proto-Slavic. In their view, there was never a shared intermediate stage at all. That argument about origins later found a political echo. After the end of what is called the Tatar yoke, the territory of the former Kievan Rus' split apart. It divided between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Grand Duchy of Moscow. Two separate literary traditions grew out of that split. Ruthenian took hold in the west, while medieval Russian developed in the east. Long before that political split, though, the East Slavs had already begun adopting a writing system of their own.

• 6. Alphabets and Birch Bark

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  Kievan Rus' unified politically roughly a century before it adopted Christianity in 988. That conversion also installed the South Slavic Old Church Slavonic as its liturgical and literary language. Written records from this period are scarce. That scarcity makes it hard to separate the literary language from what people actually spoke at home. Byzantine sources mention pre-Christian Slavs in European Russia already using some form of writing. The tenth-century monk Chernorizets Hrabar corroborated this. He described how the ancient Slavs wrote in what he called 'strokes and incisions,' though the exact system remains unknown. Church inscriptions in Novgorod show that the Glagolitic alphabet was briefly adopted there. Cyrillic soon replaced it entirely. Birch-bark writing dug up in Novgorod preserved something rarer: the pure, tenth-century vernacular of North-West Russia, almost untouched by Church Slavonic influence. Byzantine Greek was already lending words and calques to that vernacular at the same time. Even as this happened, the literary language itself bent increasingly toward Eastern Slavic forms. Those two currents, a Church Slavonic literary register and a Greek-inflected spoken one, would go on to shape everything written in Old East Slavic afterward.

• 7. Preachers, Princes and Chroniclers

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  Hilarion, metropolitan of Kiev, wrote the Sermon on Law and Grace, considered the earliest dated specimen of the language, though heavily blended with Church Slavonic. Inside it sits a panegyric to Prince Vladimir of Kiev, already a hero of East Slavic popular poetry. A decade later, Yakov the Monk wrote a rival panegyric to the same prince. Theodosius, a monk at the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, wrote against the Latin faith and produced instructional works called Pouchenia. He also criticized ordinary people, and even fellow monks, for drunkenness and lingering pagan habits. Luka Zhidiata, bishop of Novgorod, left behind a Discourse to the Brethren. He wrote in a plainer, more vernacular style than most of his contemporaries, avoiding the declamatory Byzantine tone.

  The late eleventh century also produced the two Lives of Saints Boris and Gleb, attributed to Jacob the Monk and to Nestor the Chronicler. Nestor is also credited with the Primary Chronicle, which opened a long, continuous line of Russian annalists, broken only twice before the seventeenth century. Chroniclers worked in Novgorod, Kiev and Volhynia among other towns. Pskov and Suzdal both kept their own local annals as well. In the 12th century, Bishop Cyril of Turov wrote sermons that imitated the ornate Byzantine style. One, written for Holy Week, cast Christianity as spring, paganism and Judaism as winter, and evil thoughts as violent winds.

  Travel writing survives too. The igumen Daniel visited the Holy Land at the turn of the twelfth century. The Tver merchant Afanasiy Nikitin traveled to India in 1470, leaving behind an account later translated into English for the Hakluyt Society. Vladimir Monomakh wrote a Pouchenie, or Instruction, for his sons, later inserted into Nestor's Chronicle. It offers a rare picture of daily life for a Slavonic prince. The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery rounds out this body of work with stories of monks encountering devils, angels, ghosts and miraculous resurrections. One text from this same world would go on to puzzle scholars more than any other document in the language.

• 8. What the Fragments Reveal

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  The Primary Chronicle text, dated to around 1110, shows the language's grammar already shifting mid-stream. Certain words end in a bare consonant, such as кнѣжит, meaning 'to rule.' That is evidence that the so-called fall of the yers was underway or nearly finished. The chronicle also preserves a South Slavic feature in the word времѣнънъіх, meaning 'bygone.' Alongside it sits correct use of the perfect and aorist verb tenses, as in єсть пошла, meaning 'is or has come,' and нача, meaning 'began.'

  The Tale of Igor's Campaign survives only in a Pskov manuscript from the fifteenth century, copied from a text dated to around 1200. It describes the poet Boyan, moved to compose a song for someone. In the poem, he would 'fly like a squirrel in the trees, like a grey wolf over land, like a bluish eagle beneath the clouds.' One phrase from the poem, describing thought running over wood, became proverbial in modern Russian for speaking at excessive length. Some scholars suspect it is a misreading of an original word akin to 'mouse,' implying the poet ran like a squirrel up a tree instead. That alternate reading appears in no known copy, though. The version we have now already stood in a manuscript copy from 1790 and in the first printed edition of 1800.

  The Zadonshchina, a prose poem written in a similar style, recounts the Battle of Kulikovo, where Dmitry Donskoy defeated the Mongols in 1380. Three separate versions of this account survive today. Russkaya Pravda, a legal code issued by Yaroslav the Wise and preserved in the Novgorod chronicle, dates to somewhere between 1018 and 1072.

  Piecing together what all of this actually meant took generations of scholars. Alexander Vostokov and Izmail Sreznevsky attempted the first comprehensive lexicons of the language in the nineteenth century. Sreznevsky's Materials for the Dictionary of the Old Russian Language on the Basis of Written Records, published between 1893 and 1903, stayed the standard reference despite being unfinished. It held that position until a 24-volume academic dictionary finally appeared between 1975 and 1999, nearly a century after Sreznevsky first began his work.