Slavic languages

Slavic languages ​​belong to the Indo-European system of languages ​​(see "Indo-European languages"). They are divided into three groups: western, southern and eastern. The western group includes the languages ​​Czech, Slovak, Polish with Kashubian, Lusatian and extinct in the 18th century. Polabian, which was spoken by the Slavic tribes that inhabited the banks of the Elbe (Slav. Laba). The southern group includes the languages ​​Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian and Slovene. To the eastern group - Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian. S. yaz. compared with other languages ​​​​of the Indo-European system, they experienced a number of common specific phenomena both in the field of phonetics and in the grammatical structure. Of the most significant features of S. yaz. one should point out the changes in the back-palatal consonants "k", "g", "x" before the front vowels (palatal). These changes took place in two different eras (an earlier and a later one) and under slightly different conditions in each of them. In living S. languages, including Russian, these original Slavic changes are reflected as an alternation of the sounds “k”, “g”, “x” and “h”, “zh”, “sh” (consequences of the earlier “ mitigation") or "ts", "z", "s" (consequences of a later "mitigation") in words of the same root: cf. for example: milk - milk, friend - to be friends, hearing - we hear. Traces of a later "softening" in Russian. overwritten by subsequent alignments of forms, but still can be shown in examples such as: briefly - in short, friend - friends; in Ukrainian. they were also preserved in declension, cf .: peas - near the city. In the field of grammatical structure, common and specific to all S. languages. is eg. the development of a special declension of adjectives (the so-called "pronominal" - with endings characteristic of pronouns, cf.: good and that) and the use of creates. case in compound predicate("he was a teacher"); the specified features except S. yaz. are observed only in languages ​​of the Baltic group. General lexical experiences S. yaz. are most revealingly attested to by the distribution in all S. languages. original borrowings from other languages. So for example. the words "bread", "goose", "buy", "prince" mark the most ancient Slavic-German ties; "Kolyada", "sedition" - of Romanesque origin; "god", "axe" - Iranian (the last word through the Finno-Ugric medium); "korchaga", "cap" - Turkic-Tatar; "hop", "sleigh" - Finno-Ugric, etc.

Classification S. yaz. into three groups was carried out by the Slavists Ch. arr. according to phonetics. The classification was based on the same or similar processing of sounds and sound combinations (see the attached table). Having mastered the methodological concepts of the parent language and splitting it (according to the theory of the "family tree" of Aug. Schleicher, 1821-1868), the Slavists, in accordance with each group of Slavic languages. reconstructed a separate proto-language. The failure of such conceptions is expressively signaled by the distribution of even the basic facts that serve as material for reconstructions. So for example. the common proto-language of West Slavonic would have assumed the same processing of the original groups "tort", "tolt" in all languages ​​​​of this group, but meanwhile. we have in Polish. "-ro-", "-lo-" with Czech and Slovak "-ra-", "-la-" (see table).

TABLE OF MAIN SOUND CORRESPONDENCES S. Ya.

In the field of morphology S. yaz. represent a greater unity, but its data often do not coincide with a classification based on phonetic features. All S. yaz. retained the declension forms with the exception of the Bulgarian language, which has only pronoun declension. He expresses case relations not by case inflection, but by a combination of a word (in the form of a common case) with a preposition and word order. The number of cases in all S. languages. equally. Some of them (eg Russian) just do not have a special form of the vocative case. S. yaz. lost the form of the dual number; it was preserved only by the Slovenian language. and Lusatian. Others only have archaic remains, which now express the plural (Russian - "ears", "shoulders"; Bulgarian - "ryatse", "kraka"). In the area of ​​the verb S. yaz. diverge: in the South Slavic languages. the verb is characterized by a developed system of tenses (aorist, imperfect, perfect, pluperfect), in West Slavic times it is already less (there is no aorist and imperfect), and in East Slavic these tenses are completely absent, and the verb uses various forms, which, for example. in Russian, play a huge role.

All Slavic languages ​​are closely related lexically. A huge percentage of words are found in all S. languages. Lexical differences are mainly associated with various foreign language influences. Wed e.g. difference in S. yaz. words for the concept of "goods": Russian word represents a borrowing from Tatar, Bulgarian "drain" - of Turkish origin, Serbian "robe" - and Italian, Polish "kram" - German borrowing. West Slavic languages. experienced a strong vocabulary influence from medieval Latin and German. South Slavic languages were influenced by the Greek, Turkish, Albanian, Romanian and Hungarian languages. East Slavic also experienced a strong influence Greek, Tatar, Finnish languages, etc.

The proximity of S. yaz. among themselves is the cause of numerous disputes about the boundaries, about the relationship between individual S. lang. and so on. Behind all these disputes, which at first glance have a purely scientific interest, are hidden various imperialist aspirations of the bourgeoisie of various Slavic states. Polish Slavists argue that the Kashubian language cannot exist separately, that its closeness to Polish puts it in the position of a dialect that must be assimilated by a more culturally strong language. Serbian linguists deny any originality behind the Croatian literary language. They (Belić) refer the Macedonian Slavs to the Serbs, despite the fact that neither the data of the language nor the data of ethnography and history can confirm this. The Bulgarian scholars (Tsonev), for their part, deny the independence of the Macedonians and try to substantiate the claims to Macedonia by Bulgarian imperialism with the data of philology and ethnography.

The great-power Slavic studies of tsarist Russia denied any independence for the Ukrainian and Belarusian languages. and declared them dialects of the common Russian language. Reactionary linguists (Sobolevsky, Florinsky and others) were the ideologists of the denationalizing policy of tsarism towards Ukrainians and Belarusians. On the other hand, it should be noted in the history of Slavic linguistics and the facts of nationalist tendentiousness in the concepts of the relationship of related languages, as for example. reflections of the Ukrainian scholar Smal-Stotsky on the original separation of the Ukrainian language from the languages ​​​​of the East Slavic group or the theory of the Slovak scientist Tsambel about the belonging of the Slovak language. to the South Slavic group. When, after the Great October proletarian revolution as a result of the implementation of the Leninist-Stalinist national policy, the peoples Soviet Union got the opportunity to build their own culture, national in form and socialist in content, and the literal languages ​​of Ukrainians and Belarusians began to develop rapidly, Ukrainian and Belarusian National Democrats tried to direct this development towards separating these languages ​​from Russian, but these attempts met with a resolute rebuff from side of the working masses of Ukraine and Belarus.

S. yaz. occupy a large territory, the boundaries of which have changed greatly over time. In the West, there was a process of assimilation and displacement of S. yaz. Germanic languages. Before the 18th century was the Slavic people of the Polaby, who lived along the Elbe (Laby) River. From the XVII-XVIII centuries. several monuments in the language of these Slavs have come down. The last settlements of the Polabyans were known in the Lyukhovsky district as early as the middle of the 18th century. Lusatians, now numbering about 150,000 people, once occupied vast areas between the Elbe and the Bohemian Forest. Now they live in Saxony and Prussia. In the 19th century a significant number of Western Slavs (Poles and Slovaks) moved to the New World. In America, Polish. was heavily influenced by the Anglo-American dialect. The spread of the Russian language went along with the expansion of Russia's borders. It spread throughout Siberia (ch. arr. North Russian dialects), Far East(Primorye, Sakhalin, Kamchatka). There are also Ukrainian settlements in Siberia and the Far East. The Russian and Ukrainian languages ​​occupied significant territories in the North Caucasus. The Bulgarian language is represented in the colonies in Romania, in Bessarabia, in Ukraine, in the Crimea. There are many Bulgarians in America. Until the 18th century many Bulgarians lived in Semigradia, who in the XIII century. were resettled there from northern Bulgaria. The famous scientist Mikloshich (1813-1891) mistook them for the oldest remains of the original Bulgarian settlements. Serbian is spoken in southern Italy, where there are numerous Serbian colonies in Campobasso. There are many Slovenes in Italy as well.

The formation of national literary languages ​​among the Slavs is associated with the beginning of the creation of national states and national-bourgeois movements for liberation (see articles on individual languages ​​indicated in the text).

Writing among the Slavic peoples arose at the end of the first millennium. It was initiated by the brothers Cyril and Methodius, nobles at the court of the Byzantine emperor Michael III, who carried out the diplomatic mission of the last Moravian prince Rostislav in the lands (in 863). The organization of the church and the liturgical (liturgical) language for the Slavs was part of the tasks of the mission. Coming from Selun (now Thessaloniki), the brothers learned the Selun dialect of the Old Bulgarian language. and this native dialect was used as the basis for Slavic translations of church books. cm. " Old Slavonic language". It is interesting to note that there were fierce disputes in Slavic studies on the question of the language belonging to the Old Slavonic monuments. Slovenians Kopitar and Mikloshich defended the so-called. "Pannonian" theory, according to which the basis of the language of the Old Slavonic monuments was not Bulgarian, but Old Slavonic. This theory arose on the basis of nationalist modifications of pan-Slavic claims: it was important for individual Slavic nationalisms to justify the right of historical continuity to "the language of the Slavic first teachers."

Monuments of ancient Bulgarian writing are written in two alphabets - Cyrillic (eg "Savin's Book") and Glagolitic (eg "Sinai Psalter"). see Cyrillic and Glagolitic. Currently in S. yaz. Slavic ("civilian") and Latin scripts are used. Eastern Slavs, Bulgarians and Serbs use Slavic graphics. Western Slavs, Croats, and Slovenes use the Latin script, adapted to the sound system of one S. or another. by a system of diacritical marks or a combination of letters. In addition to these charts, the Glagolitic alphabet is still used in some places. So, in Dalmatia and on some islands of the Adriatic Sea, it is used in church books by Catholic Croats.

Scientific study of S. yaz. started in the first half of the 19th century. Of the Slavists who left a noticeable mark on the study of the S. language, Dobrovsky, Vostokov, Kopitar, Shafarik, Grigorovich, Mikloshich, Yagich, Leskin, Shakhmatov, and others should be mentioned.

Bibliography

Miklosich F., Vergleichende Grammatik der slavischen Sprachen, Wien, 1852-1875

2 Aufl., ibid., 1876-1883, Bd. 2 and 4, Hdlb., 1926 (Russian translation: Comparative morphology Slavic languages, transl. N. V. Shlyakov, ed. R. F. Brandt, no. 1-3, M., 1884-1891)

Vondrak V., Vergleichende slavische Grammatik, 2 B-de, Göttingen, 1906-1908

Florinsky T. D. Lectures on Slavic linguistics, part 1, Kyiv, 1895, part 2, St. Petersburg, 1896.

Similar abstracts:

In fact, one can speak not of a single Paleo-Asiatic, but of the Kamchatka, Yukagir, Eskimo-Aleut, Gilyak and Ket language groups. In P. yaz. spoken in the USSR by about 30,000 people. and in North America and Greenland about 35,000 people.

The Old Church Slavonic language, otherwise the Old Church Slavonic language, is the most ancient of the written Slavic languages, which spread among the southern, eastern and partly western Slavs in the 9th-10th centuries. n. e. as the language of the Christian church and literature.

The Ukrainian language forms, together with the languages ​​Russian and Belarusian, the eastern group of Slavic languages. On the genesis and connections of the East Slavic languages ​​and their relationship to other Slavic languages.

Slovene is the language of a small Slavic people (about 2 million), occupying mainly the northwestern part of Yugoslavia (Styria, Carinthia, Kraina).

Slavistics, in the sense scientific study history of literature, language and ethnography of the Slavs, arose in Russia only in early XIX century, in connection with the development of international relations and with the growing interest in Old Russian and literature.

Non-Slavic Russia

When starting a conversation about Russian, or more precisely about the Russian language, one should first of all remember that Russia is a non-Slavic country.

The territories inhabited by the ancient near-Slavic peoples include only Smolensk, Kursk, Bryansk - the territories of the ancient Krivichi, Slavicized by the Western Slavs of the Balts.

The rest of the lands are Finnish, where no Slavs have ever lived: Chud, Murom, Mordovians, Perm, Vyatichi and others.

The main toponyms of historical Muscovy themselves are all Finnish: Moscow, Murom, Ryazan (Erzya), Vologda, Kostroma, Suzdal, Tula, etc.

These territories were conquered over several centuries by Rurik's colonists, who sailed from Laba or Elba, but the number of colonists who built Novgorod near Ladoga - as a continuation of the then Polabian Old Town - now Oldenburg, was extremely small in these parts.

In the rare towns-fortresses founded by the encouraged Rusyns and Normans: Danes and Swedes, a handful of colonial rulers with a retinue lived - the network of these colonial fortresses was called "Rus".

And 90-95% of the population of the region were non-Slavic natives who were subordinate to these more civilized invaders.

The language of the colonies was the Slavic Koine, that is, the language used for communication between peoples with different dialects and languages.

Gradually, over many centuries, the local native population adopted this koine, in the Novgorod land, as academician Yanov writes, this process took at least 250 years - judging by the language of birch bark letters, which from the Sami gradually becomes an Indo-European, Slavic analytical language, with inflections taken out for the word, and only then normal Slavic synthetic.

By the way, Nestor writes about this in The Tale of Bygone Years: that the Saami of Ladoga gradually learned the Slavic language of Rurik and after that began to be called “Slovenes” - that is, those who understand the word, as opposed to “Germans”, dumb - that is, they do not understand the language.

“The term “Slavs” has nothing to do with the term “Slovenes”, as it comes from the original “Slavens”.

The second after the Ladoga Saami, the northern Finnish peoples began to adopt the Slavic koine - the Muroma, the whole or the Vepsians, Chud, but the process took them much longer, and for the more southern Finns of Mordovian Moscow and its surroundings, the adoption of the Slavic koine dragged on until the time of Peter the Great, and some - where their original native languages ​​\u200b\u200bare preserved - like the language of the Erzya of Ryazan or the Finnish dialect of the Vyatichi.

The characteristic "okanye" of the population of Central Russia is today mistakenly considered "Old Slavic", although this is a purely Finnish dialect, which just reflects the incompleteness of the Slavicization of the region.

“By the way, bast shoes are also a purely Finnish attribute: the Slavs never wore bast shoes, but only wore leather shoes, while all Finnish peoples wear bast shoes.”

During the Golden Horde, Muscovy for three centuries goes to the ethnically related peoples of the Finno-Ugric peoples, who were gathered under their rule by the Horde kings.

During this period, the language of the region is greatly influenced by the Turkic language, as part of the generally huge influence of Asia.

The book by Athanasius Nikitin, late 15th century, "On the journey beyond the three seas" is indicative.

“In the name of Allah the Gracious and Merciful and Jesus the Spirit of God. Allah is great…”

In the original:

Bismillah Rahman Rahim. Isa Ruh Wallo. Allah Akbar. Allah kerim."

At that time, the common religion for Muscovy and the Horde was a hybrid of Islam and Christianity of the Arian persuasion, Jesus and Mohammed were equally revered, and the division of faith occurred from 1589, when Moscow adopted the Greek canon, and Kazan adopted pure Islam.

Several languages ​​existed simultaneously in medieval Muscovy.

Near-Slavic Koine - as the language of the princely nobility.

The vernacular languages ​​of the natives are Finnish.

Turkic languages ​​as religious during the period of stay in the Horde and after the seizure of power by Ivan the Terrible in the Horde until 1589.

And, finally, the Bulgarian language - as the language of Orthodox texts and religious cults.

All this mixture eventually became the basis for the current Russian language, which coincides in vocabulary only by 30-40% with other Slavic languages, in which (including Belarusian and Ukrainian) this coincidence is disproportionately higher and amounts to 70-80%.

Today, Russian linguists basically reduce the origins of the modern Russian language to only two components: it is the national language of Russia, by no means Slavic, but Slavic-Finnish Koine with a large Turkic and Mongolian influence - and Bulgarian Old Bulgarian, also known as "Church Slavonic".

As the third language of Russia, one can name the modern literary Russian language, which is a completely artificial armchair invention, a kind of “Esperanto” based on the two source languages ​​​​mentioned above; I am writing this article in this Esperanto.

Is Russia a Slavic language?

There are three points that all Russian linguists are hard at work hiding, although, as people say, you cannot hide an awl in a bag.

1. Until the 18th century, the language of Muscovy was not considered by anyone in the world to be the Russian language, but was specifically called the language of Muscovites, Muscovite.


2. Until that time, only the Ukrainian language was called the Russian language.


3. The language of Muscovy - the Muscovite language - was not recognized until that time by European linguists, including Slavic countries, even a Slavic language, but belonged to Finnish dialects.

Of course, today everything is not so: for the sake of imperial interests of conquering the Slavic countries, Russia has had a huge impact on its linguistic science, setting it the task of giving the Russian language a “Slavic status”.

Moreover, if west of Russia the Germanic peoples lived, then in exactly the same way she would prove that the Russian language is from the family Germanic languages: for such would be the order of the Empire.

And the language reforms of the Russian language, begun by Lomonosov, were just aimed at emphasizing its weak Slavic features.

However, as the Polish Slavist Jerzy Leszczynski wrote 150 years ago about the Western Balts related to the Slavs, “the Prussian language has much more reason to be considered Slavic than Great Russian, which has much less in common with Polish and other Slavic languages ​​than even Western Baltic Prussian. language."

Let me remind you that Russia began to be called "Russia" for the first time officially only under Peter I, who considered the former name - Muscovy - dark and obscurantist.

Peter not only began to forcibly shave beards, forbade all women of Muscovy from wearing Asian-style veils and forbade harems, towers, where women were kept locked up, but also, on trips around Europe, he sought from cartographers so that from now on maps his country was called not Muscovy or Muscovite, as before, but Russia.

And so that the Muscovites themselves would be considered Slavs for the first time in history, which was a common strategy for “cutting a window to Europe” - coupled with Peter’s request to move the eastern border of Europe from the border between Muscovy and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania now to the Urals, thereby including, for the first time in history, geographically Muscovy into Europe.

Prior to this, Polish and Czech linguists and the creators of Slavic grammars clearly distinguished between the Russian language - Ukrainian and Muscovite, and this Muscovite language itself was not included in the family of Slavic languages.

For the language of Muscovy was poor in Slavic vocabulary.

As the Russian linguist I.S. Ulukhanov at work Speaking Ancient Russia", "Russian speech", No. 5, 1972, the circle of Slavicisms, regularly repeated in the living speech of the people of Muscovy, expanded very slowly.

Recordings of live oral speech produced by foreigners in Muscovy in the 16th-17th centuries include only some Slavic words against the background of the bulk of the local Finnish and Turkic vocabulary.

In the "Paris Dictionary of Muscovites" (1586) among TOTAL DICTIONARY we find the people of Muscovites, as I.S. Ulukhanov, only the words "lord" and "gold".

In the diary-dictionary of the Englishman Richard James 1618-1619 there are already more of them - TOTAL 16 WORDS : “good”, “bless”, “scold”, “Sunday”, “resurrect”, “enemy”, “time”, “boat”, “weakness”, “cave”, “help”, “holiday”, “ prapor”, “decomposition”, “sweet”, “temple”.

In the book "Grammar of the language of the Muscovites" by the German scientist and traveler V. Ludolph dated 1696 SLAVIC WORDS 41!

Moreover, some with a huge Finnish “okan” in prefixes - such as “discuss”.

The rest of the oral vocabulary of the Muscovites in these phrasebooks is Finnish and Turkic.

The linguists of that era had no reason to attribute the language of the Muscovites to the "Slavic languages", since there were no Slavic words themselves in oral speech, and it is the oral speech of the people that is the criterion here.

And therefore colloquial Muscovy was not considered either Slavic or even near-Russian: the peasants of Muscovy spoke their own Finnish dialects.

A typical example: the Mordvin Ivan Susanin of the Kostroma district did not know the Russian language, and his relatives, giving a petition to the queen, paid the interpreter for the translation from the Finnish Kostroma into the Russian "sovereign" language.

It's funny that today the absolutely Mordovian Kostroma is considered in Russia to be the "standard" of "Russianness" and "Slavism", even a rock group is one that sings Mordovian songs of Kostroma in Russian, passing them off as supposedly "Slavic", although two centuries ago no one I didn't speak Slavonic in Kostroma.

And the fact that the Moscow Church broadcast in Bulgarian, in which the state papers of Muscovy were written, did not mean anything, since all of Europe then spoke Latin in churches and conducted office work in Latin, and it had nothing to do with what kind of peoples live here.

Let me remind you that after the Union of Lublin in 1569, when the Belarusians created a union state with the Poles - the Republic, in Polish - the Commonwealth, the GDL retained its official language Belarusian, that is, Rusyn, and Poland introduced Latin as the state language.

But this does not at all mean that the national language of the Poles is Latin.

In the same way, the Russian language was not then the national language in Muscovy-Russia - until the Russian villages learned it.

Here is another example: today and from time immemorial in the villages of the Smolensk, Kursk and Bryansk regions, which were once part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, they do not speak Russian at all, but Belarusian.

They don’t speak literary Russian there, just as no one “okays” - reflecting the Finnish accent, as in the Ryazan or Moscow regions, but they speak exactly the language spoken by the villagers of the Vitebsk or Minsk regions.

Any linguist should draw one conclusion: the Belarusian population lives in these Russian regions, because they speak the Belarusian language.

But for some reason, this population is ethnically attributed to the “surrounding” eastern neighbors, who at the time of Ludolf knew only 41 Slavic words there.

I.S. Ulukhanov writes that speaking about the existence of two languages ​​among the Muscovites - Slavic or ecclesiastical Bulgarian and his own Muscovite, V. Ludolf reported in the "Grammar of the language of the Muscovites":

“The more learned someone wants to appear, the more he mixes Slavic expressions into his speech or in his writings, although some people laugh at those who abuse the Slavic language in ordinary speech.”

Marvelous!

What kind of “Slavic language” of Moscow is this, which is ridiculed for using Slavic words instead of their Finnish and Turkic words?

This was not the case in Belarus-ON - here no one laughs at people who use Slavic words in their speech.

On the contrary, no one will understand the one who builds phrases using Finnish or Turkic instead of Slavic vocabulary.

This "bilingualism" did not exist anywhere among the Slavs, except in Muscovy alone.

“By the way: the Statutes of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were written in the purest Slavic language - the state language in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Russia, a purely Slavic state, where the Litvins were the Slavs - the current Belarusians.”

This problem of "bilingualism" due to the lack of a folk Slavic basis in Russia has always haunted the creators of the literary Russian language - as in general the main problem Russian language.

It went through the "stages of development of the term", being called first Muscovite, then Russian under Lomonosov - until 1795, then during the occupation by Russia in 1794, formally fixed in 1795, Belarus and Western and Central Ukraine had to change it to the "Great Russian dialect of the Russian language ".

This is how the Russian language appeared in the 1840s in the title of Dahl's dictionary " Dictionary Great Russian Dialect of the Russian Language”, where the Russian language itself was generally understood as Belarusian, Ukrainian and Russian, although today all Russian linguists have unscientifically distorted the name of Dahl’s dictionary to “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Russian Language”, although he never wrote a dictionary with that name.

In 1778, a brochure by the writer and linguist Fyodor Grigorievich Karin “A Letter on the Transformers of the Russian Language” was published in Moscow.

He wrote: “The terrible difference between our language, everywhere in his work he calls it the “Moscow dialect”, and Slavonic often stops our ways of expressing ourselves in it with that liberty that alone enlivens eloquence and which is acquired by nothing more than daily conversation. ... As a skilled gardener renews an old tree with a young graft, cleansing the vines and thorns that have dried on it, growing at its roots, so the great writers acted in the transformation of our language, which in itself was poor, and forged to the Slavic became already ugly.

"Poor" and "ugly" - this, of course, is at odds with his future assessment as "great and mighty."

The justification here is the fact that Pushkin has not yet been born for the young green language, created just by Lomonosov's experiments.

Again, I draw your attention: Belarusians, Poles, Czechs, Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Serbs and other Slavs have never had this problem - where the language of the villagers organically becomes the language of the country and the people.

This is a purely Russian unique problem - how to combine the Finnish language of the villagers with the Slavic language of the state, for example, in Belarus it is ridiculous: to argue about the possible "dominance of Slavicisms in written speech", meaning, as in Russia, the dominance of the Bulgarian vocabulary, when the Belarusian vocabulary itself is such but completely Slavic vocabulary and the same Slavicisms - that is, there is no very subject for such a dispute, because the Slavicisms of the Bulgarian language cannot in any way "spoil" the Belarusian language, which is already based only on Slavicisms - you cannot spoil butter with butter.

As a result, Russian linguists heroically break the "umbilical cord" of the centuries-old connection between the culture of Moscow and the Bulgarian language, which they unanimously find "alien", "pretentious in the conditions of Russia", "inhibiting the formation of the literary Russian language".

And they reject the Bulgarian language, boldly falling into the bosom of the folk language of the "Moscow dialect", which consists of 60-70% of non-Slavic vocabulary.

The great figures who make this linguistic revolution in Russia, F.G. Karin in his work calls Feofan Prokopovich, M.V. Lomonosov and A.P. Sumarokov.

Thus, at the very end of the 18th century, Russia refused to follow the Bulgarian language, which for centuries, like a rope, kept it in the Slavic field and turned it “into Slavdom”, and began to consider itself linguistically free and sovereign, recognizing as its language now not Bulgarian, but that the vernacular language of the Slavicized Finns, which by no means had, like Bulgarian, obvious Slavic features.

Alphabet

A common misconception: in Russia, everyone thinks that they write in Cyrillic, although no one in Russia writes in it.

They write in a completely different alphabet, very little connected with the Cyrillic alphabet - this is the “civil alphabet” introduced by Peter I.

It is not Cyrillic, since it was not created by Cyril and Methodius.

This is the imperial Russian alphabet, which Russia during the tsarist and Soviet period tried to spread among all its neighbors, even the Turks and Finns.

It tries to do this even today: not so long ago, the Duma forbade Karelia and Tatarstan to return to the Latin alphabet, calling it “separatist intrigues,” although it is the Latin alphabet that more successfully reflects the linguistic realities of the Finns and Tatars.

In general, this looks like complete absurdity: it turns out that Cyril and Methodius did not create writing for the Bulgarians and Czechs at all so that they could read Byzantine bibles, but for Tatars who profess Islam.

But why do Muslims need the Orthodox alphabet?

The second misconception is that the Cyrillic alphabet is considered the "Slavic alphabet".

It's actually just a slightly modified Greek alphabet, and the Greeks are not Slavs.

And more than half of the Slavic peoples write in the Latin alphabet, and not in the Cyrillic alphabet.

Finally, this is the alphabet of Church Slavonic - that is, Bulgarian - books, this is the Bulgarian alphabet, and not at all our own Russian, Belarusian or Ukrainian.

It is simply absurd to refer to the religious Orthodox traditions here, because in the Middle Ages the whole of Catholic Europe used Latin in religion - is this the basis for all these countries to abandon their national languages ​​​​and return to Latin?

Of course not.

By the way, the Belarusian alphabet today should be Latin, not Cyrillic, more precisely: the alphabet of Peter I, since Belarusian literary language over the centuries, it was formed as a language based on the Latin alphabet, and all the founders of Belarusian literature wrote in the Latin alphabet.

Let me remind you that after the Russian occupation of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1795, the tsar banned the Belarusian language by his decree in 1839, in 1863 he banned religious literature in the Ukrainian language, in 1876 - all types of literature in the Ukrainian language, except for fiction.

In Ukraine, the literary language was formed on the basis of the Cyrillic alphabet, but in Belarus - on the basis of the Latin alphabet, and in the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century Belarusian periodicals were published in the Latin alphabet - "Bielarus", "Bielaruskaja krynica", "Nasza Niwa" and so on.

Common Slavic or Proto-Slavic the language spoken by the ancestors of the modern Slavic peoples, who lived on the territory of their ancestral homeland, was preserved in the first centuries AD. e. (at least until the middle of the first millennium), but the settlement of the Slavs on ever larger territories naturally led to the development of local dialects, some of which then underwent transformation into independent languages.

Modern philological ideas about this language concern mainly its phonology and morphology; it is unlikely that anyone will undertake to compose a long coherent phrase on it, or even more so to try to “speak in Proto-Slavonic”. The fact is that the Proto-Slavic language was the language preliterate; there are no texts on it, and philologists deduce its word forms, features of its phonology and phonetics by the method of reconstruction. Philology students are introduced to the principles of such a reconstruction in detail, in particular, in the course of the Old Church Slavonic language. The course "Introduction to Slavic Philology", avoiding duplication of such information, nevertheless includes its necessary beginnings in a brief "introductory-reminder" form.

In the Proto-Slavic language, for example, a very peculiar system of verbal conjugation and declension of names developed, the individual disparate features of which are still preserved to one degree or another by modern Slavic languages. A complex system of childbirth (male, female, and even middle) corresponded to several declensions. Sonorant(“smooth”) consonants j, w, r, l, m, n in Proto-Slavic were able to form an independent syllable (without the participation of a vowel phoneme). In the process of historical evolution, the Proto-Slavic language has repeatedly experienced softening ( palatalization) consonants.

In the Proto-Slavic language, among the consonants, some were only hard, but then they softened, and *k, *g, *h before the front vowels turned into hissing k > h’, g > w’, x > w’ (under certain conditions, k, g, x subsequently also turned into soft whistling k > c', g > h', x > c').

In recent centuries, the Proto-Slavic language has experienced a process of transition closed syllables into the open. Among the vowels there were diphthongs. Diphthongic vowel combinations are still found in some other Indo-European languages. As a result of complex processes, they were lost, as a result of which, from the diphthong ei, the Old Slavonic and, from oi, ai - ѣ (yat), etc., diphthongs developed later in the Slovak and Czech languages.

Greek brothers Konstantin(monastic Cyril, c. 827–869) and Methodius(c. 815–885) were natives of Thessalonica (Thessaloniki) and knew the local South Slavic dialect well, which was, apparently, a dialect of the ancient Bulgarian language. The Old Slavonic language was originally based on it, preserved in many ancient texts of the end of the 1st millennium AD. e., written in "Glagolitic" and "Cyrillic". (Another name for it is Old Church Slavonic.) Constantine created the Slavic alphabet, using which the brothers translated the most important Christian sacred books into Old Slavonic. Due to the presence of writing and monuments, Old Slavonic, in contrast to Proto-Slavic, has been well studied by philologists.

The main Glagolitic monuments - Kyiv leaflets, Assemanian Gospel, Zograph Gospel, Sinai Psalter, Mary Gospel and others. The main Cyrillic monuments are Savvin's book, Suprasl manuscript, Hilandar leaflets and etc.

The Old Church Slavonic language is characterized a complex system verb forms that convey various shades of the past tense - aorist (past perfect), perfect (past indefinite), imperfect (past imperfect), pluperfect (long past).

It had reduced vowels ъ and ь, which were subsequently lost at the end of a word and in a weak position (for example, window from Art. - glory. window, house from Art. - glory. dom), and in a strong position they developed into “full-vowels” ( father from Art. - glory. otts). A characteristic Old Slavonic feature was the nasal vowels [he] and [en] - displayed by the letters ѫ (“yus big”) and ѧ (“yus small”). The nasals were preserved, for example, in Polish, while in Russian [he] moved to [y], and [en] to ['a].

The fate of the Proto-Slavic vowels *o and *e in combination with sonorant consonants *r and *l was very interesting. If we conditionally designate all other consonants with the letter t, then it turns out that among the southern Slavs, for example, in the same Old Slavonic language, the vowel lengthened with its subsequent interchange with the consonant *r, *l: *tort > *to: rt > tro: t > trat; *tolt > to: lt > tlo: t > tlat; *tert > te: rt > tre: t > trht; *telt > te: lt > tle: t > tlѣt (that is, the so-called disagreement of the type −ra−, −la−, −rѣ− has developed: hail, head, gold, power, milk, environment, etc.). Among the Western Slavs, this corresponded to a dissonance like −ro−, −lo− (cf. Polish głowa, krowa). Among the Eastern Slavs, full agreement of the type −oro−, −olo−, −ere− (city, head, gold, parish, milk, middle, etc.) developed: *tort > tort > tor°t > torot; *tårt > tert > teret > teret etc. (small uppercase letter denotes the initial faint overtone).

Russian classical poetry actively used Old Slavonic synonyms (familiar to Russian readers through the Church Slavonic language) - for example, to give "height" to the style.

There were seven cases in the Old Slavonic language. Usually the endings of the nominative and accusative cases of the singular coincided in both animate and inanimate nouns (an exception was made to designate persons standing hierarchically high: prophet, prince, father, etc. - here the form of the accusative could coincide with the form of the genitive, as in modern Russian). The modern prepositional case, the sixth in a row, corresponded to the local one. By the way, as for the Old Slavonic words and their declension by cases, we will mention such interesting phenomena as the vocative case of nouns (seventh) lost by the Russian language - goro (from mountain), earth (from earth), synou (from son), etc. , as well as the dual number, also lost by the Slavic languages ​​​​(except for the language of the Lusatian Serbs). The Bulgarian and Macedonian languages ​​have generally lost the declension of nouns - in them, as in other languages ​​of the analytical system (like, for example, French), prepositions and word order indicate the contextual meanings of nouns (they also developed a characteristic postpositive definite article, written together after words - for example, the Bulgarian "book that from "book").

Personal pronouns ja, ty, my, wy, on, etc. are rarely used in Polish speech, although they are provided for by the language system. Instead of the second person pronoun wy, Poles usually use the word "pan" (in relation to a woman or girl pani), transforming the phrase accordingly - so that the address is made in the form of a third person, for example: co pan chce? (i.e. what do you want?)

Feature Slavic languages ​​- a verb form (imperfect and perfect), which allows you to compactly express the semantic nuances associated with an action that lasts or repeats, on the one hand, and finished, on the other.

Slavic languages ​​form a group that is part of the Indo-European language family. Slavic languages ​​are currently spoken by more than 400 million people. The languages ​​of the group under discussion fall apart, in turn, into West Slavic (Czech, Slovak, Polish, Kashubian, Serbolussian, which includes two dialects (Upper Lusatian and Lower Lusatian), and Polabian, which has been dead since the end of the 18th century), South Slavic (Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Macedonian and dead since the beginning of the 20th century Slovinsky) and East Slavic (Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian). As a result of a detailed comparative historical study of the Slavic languages, one of the greatest philologists of the 20th century. prince Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoy(1890–1938) wrote:

“We have seen that in relation to the language, the Russian tribe occupies a completely exceptional position among the Slavs in terms of its historical significance.”

This conclusion of Trubetskoy is based on the unique historical and cultural role of the Russian language, which he understands as follows: “Being a modernized and Russified form Church Slavonic, the Russian literary language is the only direct successor to the all-Slavic literary and linguistic tradition, which originates from the holy first teachers of the Slavic, i.e., from the end of the era of Proto-Slavic unity.

To substantiate the question of the "historical significance" of the "Russian tribe", it is necessary, of course, to draw, in addition to the peculiarities of the language, the spiritual culture created by the Russian people. Because it is huge difficult problem, we confine ourselves here to simply listing the main names: in science - Lomonosov, Lobachevsky, Mendeleev, Pavlov, Korolev; in literature - Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, Bunin, Mayakovsky, Bulgakov, Sholokhov; in music - Glinka, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Sviridov; in painting and sculpture - Bryullov, Surikov, Repin, Vasnetsov, Valentin Serov, Kustodiev, Konenkov, etc.

And M.V. Lomonosov in the "Dedication", prefaced by his "Russian Grammar", states:

“Charles the Fifth, the Roman emperor, used to say that it was decent to speak Spanish with God, French with friends, German with enemies, Italian with women. But if he were skilled in the Russian language, then, of course, he would add to that that it was decent for them to speak with all of them, for he would find in it the splendor of Spanish, the liveliness of French, the strength of German, the tenderness of Italian, moreover, richness and strength in images brevity of Greek and Latin.

As for the understanding of the Russian literary language as a "Russified form" of Church Slavonic, for the sake of objectivity, it is necessary to linger a little on this topic.

Two groups of concepts of the origin of the Russian literary language can be distinguished. Some concepts that go back partly to the academician Izmail Ivanovich Sreznevsky(1812–1880), part of the Academician Alexey Alexandrovich Shakhmatov(1864–1920), one way or another, they see Russified Old Church Slavonic in the Old Russian literary language. Others go back to the work of the academician Sergei Petrovich Obnorsky (1888–1962).

In the work of S. P. Obnorsky " "Russkaya Pravda" as a monument of the Russian literary language"says:

“An analysis of the language of Russkaya Pravda made it possible to clothe in flesh and blood the concept of this literary Russian language of the older period. Its essential features are the well-known artlessness of the structure, i.e., proximity to the colloquial element of speech,<…>the absence of traces of interaction with the Bulgarian, the general - the Bulgarian-Byzantine culture ... ".

The conclusion of the scientist that the Russians already in the X century. it had its own literary language, independent of Old Slavonic, was revolutionary, and they immediately tried to challenge it, emphasizing that Russkaya Pravda was not a literary monument, but a work of “business content”. Then S.P. Obnorsky drew to the analysis “The Tale of Igor's Campaign”, “Instruction” by Vladimir Monomakh, “The Prayer of Daniil the Sharpener” - that is, the artistically most important ancient Russian monuments.

Academician Obnorsky published the famous book " Essays on the history of the Russian literary language of the older period". In it, in particular, he wrote "about the Russian basis of our literary language, and, accordingly, about the later collision of the Church Slavonic language with it and the secondary nature of the process of penetration of Church Slavonic elements into it." The works of S. P. Obnorsky were deservedly awarded Stalin Prize(1947) and the Lenin Prize (1970, posthumously) - that is, the highest creative awards of the Soviet era.

The essence of the conclusions of Academician Obnorsky is that the Russian literary language developed independently - that is, "the Russian literary language is Russian by nature, Church Slavonic elements are secondary in it."

Indeed, all the monuments listed above studied by Obnorsky - both the set of ancient legal norms "Russian Truth", and literary and artistic masterpieces - are typically Russian in terms of language.

(This does not negate the fact that, in parallel, in a number of genres, Russians wrote in Church Slavonic - for example, Metropolitan Hilarion's "Sermon on Law and Grace", the lives of the saints, church teachings, etc. And oral speech in Church Slavonic sounded - during church services.)

For comparison, one can point to, for example, the Polish language, the vocabulary of which tangibly reflected the results of centuries of pressure on it from Latin, explained by the fact that the direction of development of Polish culture has long been set by the Catholic Church. The Poles generally wrote in Latin for centuries, while the Orthodox Slavic peoples created literature in Church Slavonic. But, on the other hand, it was Polish, as already mentioned, that retained the Proto-Slavic nasal vowels [en] and [on] (in Polish they are denoted by the letters ę and ą: for example, księżyc - moon, month; dąb - oak). Separate Proto-Slavic features have been preserved by some other Slavic languages. So, in Czech to this day there are so-called smooth syllables, for example vlk - wolf. Bulgarian still uses such ancient verb tenses as aorist (past perfect), perfect (past indefinite), and imperfect (past imperfect); in Slovenian, the “long-past” (“pre-past”) verb tense pluperfect and such a special non-conjugated verb form (former in Old Church Slavonic) as supin (attainment mood) have been preserved.

The language of the Polabian Slavs (Polabyans), who lived along the western bank of the Laba (Elbe) River, disappeared by the middle of the 18th century. His small dictionary has been preserved, which also included separate phrases in a sloppy way. This text, invaluably useful for philologists, was compiled in the 18th century. literate Polabyanin Jan Parum Schulze, who, apparently, was not a simple peasant, but a village innkeeper. Around the same time, the German pastor H. Hennig, a native of the historic Polabian areas, compiled an extensive German-Polabian dictionary.

The Polabian language, like Polish, retained nasal vowels. It had an aorist and an imperfect, as well as a dual number of nouns. It is very interesting that the stress in this West Slavic language was, judging by a number of data, different places.

The status of some Slavic languages ​​is still philologically debatable.

They consider themselves a separate independent people, for example, Rusyns living now on the territory of Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia and other regions. In the conditions of the USSR, they stubbornly tried to classify them as Ukrainians, which caused constant protests in the Rusyn environment. Based on their self-name, Rusyns usually associate themselves with Russians (according to their folk etymology, Rusyns - " Rus sons"). The question of the degree of real closeness of the Rusyn language to Russian has not yet been clearly resolved. In medieval texts, “Rusyns” often refer to themselves as “Russians”.

In Poland, attempts were repeatedly made to prove that the Kashubian language is not an independent Slavic language, but only an dialect of the Polish language, that is, in other words, its dialect (thus, the Kashubians were denied the status of an independent Slavic people). Something similar can be found in Bulgaria in relation to the Macedonian language.

In Russia, before the October Revolution, philological science was dominated by the point of view according to which the Russian language is divided into three unique huge dialects - Great Russian (Moscow), Little Russian and Belarusian. Its presentation can be found, for example, in the works of such prominent linguists as A. A. Shakhmatov, acad. A. I. Sobolevsky, A. A. Potebnya, T. D. Florinsky and others.

Yes, academic Alexey Alexandrovich Shakhmatov(1864–1920) wrote: “The Russian language is a term used in two senses. It means: 1) the totality of dialects of Great Russian, Belarusian and Little Russian; 2) the modern literary language of Russia, which in its foundation is one of the Great Russian dialects.

Looking ahead, one cannot fail to emphasize that at present Ukrainian and Belarusian languages, qualitatively different from Russian, is already an undoubted reality .

This is, in particular, the result of the fact that during the XX century. after the October Revolution, the artificial alienation of the Little Russians and Belarusians from the Russians and the Russian language was systematically ideologically provoked under the pretext of pursuing the so-called "Leninist" national policy, which consciously and consistently aroused local nationalist mindsets:

“Sometimes, one has to hear talk that, they say, Ukrainization is being carried out too sharply, that the masses do not need it, that the peasantry seems to be well and the Russian language understands that the workers do not want to assimilate Ukrainian culture, because this alienates them from their Russian brothers” , - one of the party leaders of the 1920s frankly stated, then with pathos declaring: “All such conversations - no matter how ultra-revolutionary and“ internationalist ”dresses they dress - the party in the person of its leaders and every individual reasonable party member - is considered a manifestation of anti-worker and anti-revolutionary influence of the bourgeois-NEP and intellectual sentiments on the working class ... But the will of the Soviet government is unshakable, and it knows how, as almost a decade of experience has shown, to carry through to the end any business recognized as useful for the revolution, and will overcome any resistance against its own events. So it will be with the national policy, which the vanguard of the proletariat, its spokesman and leader, the All-Union Communist Party, has decided to put into practice.

M. V. Lomonosov in the XVIII century. not unreasonably believed that before philologists it was not a separate Slavic language, but a “Little Russian dialect”, and “although this dialect is very similar to ours, however, its stress, pronunciation and endings of sayings have been canceled a lot from the neighborhood with the Poles and from long-term being under their rule, or, frankly, spoiled." The belief that the local dialect of the Little Russians is simply "Russian changed into a Polish model" was shared by other philologists.

N. S. Trubetskoy in the 1920s continued to believe that the Ukrainian folk dialect is an offshoot of the Russian language (“There is no need to talk about the depth or antiquity of the differences between the three main Russian (East Slavic) dialects”). At the same time, a well-informed scientist noted the following curious fact:

“The corresponding folk languages ​​– Great Russian and Little Russian – are closely related and similar to each other. But those Ukrainian intellectuals who advocated the creation of an independent Ukrainian literary language did not want this natural resemblance to the Russian literary language. So they gave up on the only natural way to the creation of their own literary language, they completely broke not only with Russian, but also with the Church Slavonic literary and linguistic tradition and decided to create a literary language solely on the basis of the national dialect, while in such a way that this language resembles Russian as little as possible.

“As expected,” N. S. Trubetskoy writes further, “this enterprise in this form turned out to be unfeasible: the dictionary of the folk language was insufficient to express all the shades of thought necessary for the literary language, and the syntactic structure of folk speech is too clumsy to to satisfy at least the elementary requirements of literary style. But out of necessity, one had to join some already existing and well-finished literary-linguistic tradition. And since they did not want to adjoin the Russian literary and linguistic tradition for anything, it remained only to join the tradition of the Polish literary language. Wed also: “And indeed, the modern Ukrainian literary language ... is so full of Polonisms that it gives the impression of just a Polish language, slightly flavored with a Little Russian element and squeezed into a Little Russian grammatical system.”

In the middle of the XIX century. Ukrainian writer Panteleimon Aleksandrovich Kulish(1819-1897) invented a spelling system based on the phonetic principle, which has since been commonly called "kulishivka", to "help the people to enlightenment". She, for example, canceled the letters "s", "e", "b", but instead introduced "є" and "ї".

Later, in his declining years, P. A. Kulish tried to protest against the attempts of political intriguers to present this “phonetic spelling” of his “as a banner of our Russian discord”, even declaring that, as a rebuff to such attempts, from now on he would “print with etymological old-world spelling” ( that is, in Russian. Yu. M.).

After the October Revolution, the kulishivka was actively used to create the modern Ukrainian alphabet. For Belarusians, after the revolution, an alphabet was also invented based on a phonetic, rather than etymological principle (for example, Belarusians write “malako”, and not milk, "naga", not leg etc.).

The vast majority of words are common to the Slavic languages, although their meaning now far from always coincides. For example, the Russian word palace in Polish corresponds to the word "pałac", "dworzec" in Polish is not a palace, but a "station"; rynek in Polish, not a market, but “square”, “beauty” in Polish “uroda” (compare with Russian “freak”). Such words are often referred to as "false friends of the translator".

Sharp differences between the Slavic languages ​​are related to stress. In Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian, as well as in Bulgarian, different (free) stress: it can fall on any syllable, that is, there are words with stress on the first syllable, on the second, on the last, etc. Serbo-Croatian stress already has a restriction : it falls on any syllable except the last one. Fixed stress in Polish (on the penultimate syllable of a word), in Macedonian (on the third syllable from the end of words), as well as in Czech and Slovak (on the first syllable). These differences entail considerable consequences (for example, in the field of versification).

And yet, the Slavs, as a rule, are able to maintain a conversation among themselves, even without knowing each other's languages, which once again reminds both of the close linguistic proximity and ethnic kinship. Even wishing to declare the inability to speak one or another Slavic language, the Slav involuntarily expresses himself understandably for the surrounding native speakers of this language. The Russian phrase “I can’t speak Russian” corresponds to the Bulgarian “Not speaking Bulgarian”, the Serbian “Ja we don’t speak Serbian”, the Polish “Nie muwię po polsku” (Not a move in Polish), etc. Instead of the Russian “Come in!” the Bulgarian says “Get in!”, the Serb “Slobodno!”, the Pole “Proszę!” (usually with a specification of whom he “asks”: pana, pani, państwa). The speech of the Slavs is filled with such mutually recognizable, commonly understood words and expressions.