OLD SLAVONIC. By the language called Old Bulgarian or Old (Church) Slavonic, and here abbreviated as O.B., is meant that first fixed in writing towards the end of the 9th century, when, at the request of the Moravian prince Rostislav, the Byzan tine emperor, Michael III., decided to send emissaries (Constan tine, afterwards called Cyril—d. 869—and Methodius, his brother —d. 887) to convert the population of Moravia to Christianity.
The term, Old Slavonic, frequently used by French and Czech scholars, is liable to misinterpretation as it may be confused with Common Slavonic, the postulated ancestral form of all the Slav languages, or be taken to refer to the earlier form of any particular Slavonic language. The expression Old Church Slavonic, used by many authorities, has the disadvantage of giving no clue to the area where the language was spoken. Almost all the early manuscripts which are held to represent most accurately the language of the Slavonic apostles or that of their disciples show the phonetic features which we should expect in an earlier form of Bulgarian, more particularly in Macedonian Bulgarian.
The more important of these features are: (I) The Common Slav groups tj and dj appear as it and id respectively, a develop ment which exists in Bulgarian only; (2) the sound transcribed as e (derived from I.E. a or a diphthong ending in i) was a palatal a (probably like that in English "sand"), and it still occurs in the dialects of precisely that neighbourhood from which the brothers came; (3) the affricate dz, which in most Slavonic languages has become z, was characteristic of O.B. and is still found in Mace donian dialects.
We do not possess the actual translations made by Cyril and Methodius, but only copies, the earliest dating from the end of the loth century, the work of those disciples who were engaged in spreading the Gospel in the Balkans. Although dialectical modifications betray the linguistic usage of the various scribes, modern research has been able to restore in great part the exact language of the brothers.
This ideal Old Bulgarian has preserved most of the archaic features of the Slavonic spoken a few hundred years earlier, before the differentiation into several languages had occurred. It offers, however, such characteristically South Slav features as: (I) the change of or, ol and er, el between consonants, to ra, la and re, le respectively, (2) the simplification of tl and dl to 1, and (3) the change of kv and gv before front vowels (still preserved in the Western group) to cv and day. The language is of the synthetic type and contains few foreign elements in its vocabu lary. The Christian terminology is mainly Greek; the Latin words which occasionally occur are concessions to the Moravians and Pannonians, to whom they had become known through the prose lytizing activity of the Western clergy.
O.B. underwent in course of time considerable modifications, both phonetic and structural, in the various countries in which it had become the liturgical language, and the various mss. are consequently classified as Serbian-Slavonic, Croatian-Slavonic, Russian-Slavonic and Bulgarian-Slavonic, according to the dif ferent recensions.
The mss. are preserved in two alphabets. In the older, Glago litic, alphabet we have: I. The so-called Kiev Leaves—a fragment of a missal—pub lished in Cyrillic transcription by Jagie, under the title of Glago litica: Wurdigung neuentdeckter Fragmente (Vienna, 1900). Linguistically and historically, this monument is of great impor tance and may go back to the end of the ioth century.
2. Codex Zographensis, published by Jagie under a Latin title (Berlin, 1879).
3. Codex Marianus. The edition by Jagie, Berlin, 1883, con tains a full critical apparatus.
Codex Assemanianus, published in a Latin transcription by J. Crnie (Rome, 1878).
5. Psalterium Sinaiticum, published by L. Geitler (Zagreb, 1883).
6. Euchologium Sinaiticum, published by Geitler (Zagreb, 1882).