Re: Archaic Slavic languages (was: dialects vs separate languages)

From: Fr. O'Malley (omalley_at_priest.com)
Date: 08/27/04 

Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2004 07:55:24 -0400

Arpad wrote in message ...
>Can anybody help me to understand what is the most archaic of Slavic
>languages? I guess Slovene, because it conserves neutral gender.
>
>I understand that all Slavic languages were mutually comrehensible
>about a millenium ago. Some still are (e.g., Russian and Ukrainian,
>Serbian and Bulgarian).
>
>I recall an episode from the Russian Primary Chronicle for 1018 when
>the Russians and the Poles cried to each other from both sides of the
>Dnieper for several days and perfectly understood each other.

What they were calling each other is likely still mutually intelligible in
Polish and Russian today. ;-)

Some metrics that you might consider (some already mentioned):
preservation of dual (productive or petrified as in Russian), retention of
older nasals (or their consistent reflexes in the modern languages (*)),
retention of tonality (and its reflex as mobile stress(*)), modification of
palatals in flexions (*), preservation of imperfect and aorist tenses,
retention of participles, use of auxiliary verb est' with the adjectival to
form the past tense, preservation of full conjugation of est', syntactic
innovations such as use of an article, morphological innovations such
as the pronominal affixes to the Russian adjective, decay of the case
system, simplification of the adverbs of position and direction.

Traditional vocabulary is a trickier question. Large numbers of
foreign words might be borrowed in cultural areas such as religion,
politics, law, cuisine, engineering, finance, etc. but the language still
remain conservative in morphology and syntax. Those words
might nevertheless constitute but a relatively small part of
the lexicon.

No one language exhibits all these characteristics. So you have
to decide what criteria you wish to establish for archaicness and
their relative weight.

(*) cf. Russian jazyk (pron jizyk) vs Polish je,zyk but Ru. chitaja vs
Pl. czytaja,c. Ru. ruká rúku rúki ruk vs Pl. re,ka re,ke, re,ce ra,k.

At first glance, my vote would be for Russian or maybe
Serbo-Croatian. (I will not discuss the aptness of that
potentially polemic-inducing hyphen. ;-))

Fr. O'Malley

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