The theme is the Proto-Slavic language. Proto-Slavic

All Slavic languages ​​show great similarities among themselves, but Belarusian and Ukrainian are closest to the Russian language. Together, these languages ​​form the East Slavic subgroup, which is part of the Slavic group of the Indo-European family.

Slavic branches grow from a powerful trunk - the Indo-European language family. This family also includes Indian (or Indo-Aryan), Iranian Greek, Italic, Romance, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic language groups, Armenian, Albanian and other languages. Of all the Indo-European languages, the Baltic languages ​​are closest to Slavic: Lithuanian, Latvian and the dead Prussian language, which finally disappeared by the first decades of the 18th century. The collapse of the Indo-European linguistic unity is usually attributed to the end of the III - the beginning of the II millennium BC. Apparently, at the same time, processes took place that led to the emergence of the Proto-Slavic language, to its separation from the Indo-European.

Proto-Slavic is the ancestral language of all Slavic languages. It had no written language and was not fixed in writing. However, it can be restored by comparing the Slavic languages ​​among themselves, as well as by comparing them with other related Indo-European languages. Sometimes the less successful term common Slavic is used to refer to Proto-Slavic: it seems that it is better to call common Slavic language features or processes characteristic of all Slavic languages ​​even after the collapse of Proto-Slavic.

A common source - the Proto-Slavic language - makes all Slavic languages ​​related, endowing them with many similar features, meanings, sounds ... The consciousness of Slavic linguistic and ethnic unity was already reflected in the ancient self-name of all Slavs. According to Academician O.N. Trubachev, it is etymologically something like "clearly speaking, understandable to each other." This consciousness was preserved even in the era of the formation of the ancient Slavic states and peoples. In The Tale of Bygone Years, an ancient Russian chronicle early XII century, it is said: “But the Slovenian language and Russian are one ...”. The word language is used here not only in ancient meaning"people", but also in the meaning of "speech".

The ancestral home of the Slavs, that is, the territory where they developed as a special people with their own language and where they lived until their separation and resettlement to new lands, has not yet been precisely determined due to the lack of reliable data. And yet, with relative certainty, it can be argued that it was located in the east Central Europe, north of the foothills of the Carpathians. Many scientists believe that the northern border of the ancestral home of the Slavs ran along the Pripyat River (the right tributary of the Dnieper), the western border - along the middle course of the Vistula River, and in the east the Slavs settled the Ukrainian Polesie to the Dnieper.

The Slavs constantly expanded the lands they occupied. They also participated in the great migration of peoples in the 4th-7th centuries. The Gothic historian Jordanes wrote in his essay “On the Origin and Deeds of the Getae” (chronologically brought to 551) that “a populous tribe of Venets settled in the boundless spaces” from the Middle Danube to the lower Dnieper. During the 6th and 7th centuries, waves of Slavic settlement poured into most of the Balkan Peninsula, including modern Greece, and including her southern part- Peloponnese.

By the end of the Proto-Slavic period, the Slavs occupied vast lands in Central and Eastern Europe stretching from the coast of the Baltic Sea in the north to the Mediterranean in the south, from the Elbe River in the west to the headwaters of the Dnieper, Volga and Oka in the east.

Years passed, centuries slowly changed centuries. And following the changes in the interests, habits, manners of a person, following the evolution of his spiritual world, his speech, his language, inevitably changed. For my long history The Proto-Slavic language has gone through many changes. AT early period of its existence, it developed relatively slowly, was highly uniform, although even then there were dialectal differences, a dialect, otherwise a dialect, the smallest territorial variety of a language. In the late period, approximately from the 4th to the 6th century AD, the Proto-Slavic language underwent diverse and intense changes, which led to its disintegration around the 6th century AD and the emergence of separate Slavic languages.

According to the degree of their proximity to each other, Slavic languages ​​are usually divided into three groups:

• 1) East Slavic - Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian;
• 2) West Slavic - Polish with a Kashubian dialect that retained a certain genetic independence, Lusatian Serbo languages ​​(Upper and Lower Lusatian languages), Czech, Slovak and a dead Polabian language, which completely disappeared by the end of the 18th century;
• 3) South Slavic - Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian. South Slavic in origin is the Old Church Slavonic language - the first common Slavic literary language.

The ancestor of modern Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian languages ​​was Old Russian (or East Slavic) language. Two main eras can be distinguished in its history: pre-literate - from the collapse of the Proto-Slavic language to the end of the 10th century, and written. What this language was like before the emergence of writing can be known only through a comparative historical study of the Slavic and Indo-European languages, since no ancient Russian writing existed at that time.

The collapse of the Old Russian language led to the emergence of the Russian or Great Russian language, which is different from Ukrainian and Belarusian. This happened in the 14th century, although already in the 15th-12th centuries in the Old Russian language there were phenomena that distinguished the dialects of the ancestors of the Great Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians from each other. The modern Russian language is based on northern and northeastern dialects Ancient Russia By the way, the Russian literary language also has a dialect basis: it was made up of the central Middle Great Russian akaya dialects of Moscow and the villages surrounding the capital.

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 it necessary beginnings in a brief "familiarization-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 from closed syllables to open ones. Among the vowels there were diphthongs. Diphthongic vowel combinations still exist 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. new basis diphthongs developed later in Slovak and Czech.

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". (Its other name is Old Church Slavonic.) Constantine created 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 - Kiev 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 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”). Nasals are preserved, for example, in Polish, 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 both in animate and in 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?)

Characteristic 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.

The 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, including 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 of the Church Slavonic language, the Russian literary language is the only direct successor to the common Slavic literary and linguistic tradition, which originates from the holy first teachers of the Slavic, i.e. 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, of course, necessary, in addition to the peculiarities of the language, to draw on the spiritual culture created by the Russian people. Since this is a huge complex problem, we will limit 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 is 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 is that the Russians already in the 10th 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 the 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-old pressure on it from Latin, explained by the fact that the direction of development of Polish culture has long been set 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. At about the same time, the German pastor H. Hennig, a native of the historic Polabian settlements, 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 denotes: 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 the Ukrainian and Belarusian languages, which are qualitatively different from Russian, are already 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 declared, then with pathos stating: “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 bourgeois-NEP and intellectual sentiments on the working class ... But the will Soviet power is unshakable, and it knows how, as nearly a decade of experience has already shown, to carry through to the end any deed deemed useful for the revolution, and will overcome any resistance against its measures. So it will be with the national policy, which the vanguard of the proletariat, its spokesman and leader, the All-Union Communist Party, 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 being close to 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: “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 for "helping the people to enlightenment" based on phonetic principle spelling system, since then commonly referred to as "kulishivka". 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 in the form of a rebuff to such attempts, from now on he would “print with etymological old-world orthography” ( 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”, 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, there is a 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), 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 with each other, 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.

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Let's take a quick look at these languages ​​once again so as not to get confused: what is what?

Old Russian - language, the immediate predecessor of the modern Russian language. And not only Russian, but also the current Ukrainian and Belarusian. This language was spoken from approximately the 6th to the 14th centuries AD. It was not called, of course, at that time "Old Russian" - this is the definition of modern linguists, but then it was simply "Russian". This is a living, colloquial language, which is also recorded in written sources, such as: "The Tale of Igor's Campaign", Novgorod birch bark letters ... In grammatical terms, the Old Russian language, in a number of characteristics, was quite different from the modern Russian language, but in lexical terms, the difference is not so significant.

Old Slavonic language It is a South Slavic language in origin. Writing based on this language was developed in the middle of the 8th century AD. in what was then Byzantium. For Russia, this is the language of church and book writing. Nobody ever spoke this language in everyday life, it was not used in live speech. The influence of the Old Church Slavonic language on Old Russian and, in general, on culture Old Russian state huge. At the time of its origin, this language was simply called "Slavic" or "Slovenian". It was into this language that the brothers Cyril and Methodius translated church books. This language is also called Church Slavonic. The difference is that the term "Old Church Slavonic" is used for early written monuments in this language, and "Church Slavonic" for later ones. The Old Church Slavonic language came to Russia in the 10th century, along with the adoption of Christianity, and gradually begins to seriously change under the influence of the spoken Russian language. The Ostromir Gospel, Svyatoslav's Izborniks, and many other literary monuments are written in Church Slavonic.

Proto-Slavic and Common Slavic are two names for the same language. It is an ancient language - the basis for all Slavic languages. This language was spoken by the ancestors of the current Russians, Bulgarians, Poles, Ukrainians and other Slavic peoples in those days when the Slavs were a single whole before their division into eastern, western and southern. No written monuments of this language have yet been found, so linguists reconstructed it by comparing modern and ancient Slavic languages, as well as other languages ​​​​of the Indo-European family. However, this language is quite well studied. Scientists agree that the time of existence Common Slavonic the period from the middle of the 2nd millennium BC should be considered. (c. 1500 BC) until about the 5th century AD, when the period of migration of the Slavs begins and their division into three large language branches: eastern, western and southern. Thus, this language has existed for at least two millennia. However, one should not imagine that the common Slavic language arises from nowhere and disappears into nowhere. This is one of the stages of development. It develops with the collapse of the Balto-Slavic linguistic community, and later continues in a different form in the Slavic languages. One thing is clear: it is absurd to repeat the delusions of some historians that the Slavs, they say, appear on the world map in the 5th-6th century AD. along with the first mention of them among the Greeks and Romans. Obviously, no language can exist without a people who speak this language, and since there was a Slavic linguistic community in the 2nd millennium BC, which linguists do not doubt, then we can confidently speak about the existence of Slavic people, no matter what name he had at that time. By the way, it is the data of the common Slavic language that allow us to learn something about this people: where and how they lived, how they ran the household, what animals they bred, what they believed in. Of course, we are talking about a language that is far removed from us. Even if you read in Old Russian or Church Slavonic without pre-training it is quite difficult what to talk about common Slavic. Nevertheless, many words of this language are understandable to modern speakers of Slavic languages ​​without translation: *vьlkъ - "wolf", *kon'ь - "horse", *synъ - "son", *gostь - "guest", *kamy - " stone", *lěto - "summer, year", *pol'e - "field", *jьmę - "name", *telę - "calf", *slovo - "word", *žena - "woman, wife" , *duša - "soul", *kost - "bone", *svekry - "mother-in-law", *mati - "mother". The system of numerals, as well as pronouns, is very close to modern Slavic. In general, up to a quarter of all modern Slavic words are the legacy of the common Slavic language that has survived to this day.

Slavic languages ​​go back to one source. This common Slavic ancestor language is conditionally called Proto-Slavic; conditionally because it is not known how the people who spoke this language called themselves in ancient times.

Although the Proto-Slavic language existed for a very long time and no written texts remained of it, nevertheless, we have a fairly complete picture of it. We know how its sound structure developed, we know its morphology and the main fund of the vocabulary, which is inherited from the Proto-Slavic by all Slavic languages. Our knowledge is based on the results of a comparative historical study of the Slavic languages: it allows us to restore the original appearance (protoform) of each studied linguistic fact. The reality of the restored (original) Proto-Slavic form can be verified and refined by the testimony of other Indo-European languages. Especially often correspondences to Slavic words and forms are found in the Baltic languages, for example, in Lithuanian. This can be illustrated by the roots, which include combinations of sounds that changed in different ways in different Slavic languages ​​after the collapse of Proto-Slavic, but remained unchanged in the Lithuanian language.

Many words are common to all Slavic languages, therefore, they were already known to the Proto-Slavic language. The common protoform for them has undergone unequal changes in different Slavic languages; and the design of these words in Lithuanian (and in other Indo-European languages) suggests that the original vowel was in all roots before I or r. lt- "a ° n, * golv-a, * kolt-iti, * vort-a, * gord-b, * korva. The established relations allow us to formulate a historical phonetic law, according to which it is possible in all other similar cases reconstruct (presumably restore) the original proto-form: Russian norov, Bulgarian temper, etc. provide a basis for the reconstruction of the Proto-Slavic *pogu-b (compare the Lithuanian narv-ytis - "stubborn"), peas, grahs and etc. - Proto-Slavic * gorx-b (compare Lithuanian garb "a - a type of grass), etc. It is in this way that the appearance of the decayed Proto-Slavic language is restored.

One can speak of Proto-Slavic as a kind of Indo-European language insofar as it is characterized by a complex of features inherent only to it and combined with a series of features known to one degree or another to other languages ​​of Europe and South Asia.

At some stage in their lives, a group of European tribes who spoke dialects close to the ancient Baltic, Iranian, Balkan, German, united into a fairly strong alliance, within which for a long time there was a rapprochement (leveling, alignment) of dialects, necessary for the development of mutual understanding between members of the tribal union. It can be assumed that in the I millennium BC. e. an Indo-European language already existed, characterized by features later known only to the Slavic languages, which allows us, modern researchers, to call it Proto-Slavic.

The originality of the Proto-Slavic language is largely due to the fact that its historical changes were determined by development trends inherent only to it. The most common of these was the tendency to syllabic articulation of speech. At a late stage in the development of the Proto-Slavic language, a single-type structure of syllables was formed, leading to the restructuring of former syllables in such a way that they all ended in vowels.

The Proto-Slavic language existed until the middle of the 1st millennium AD. e., when the tribes who spoke it, having settled in the vast territories of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, begin to lose ties with each other. The language of each of the isolated groups of tribes continued to develop in isolation from others, acquiring new sound, grammatical and lexical features. This is the usual way of forming “related” languages ​​from a single source language (proto-language), noticed by F. Engels, who wrote: “Tribes, dismembering, turn into peoples, into whole groups of tribes ... languages ​​change becoming not only mutually incomprehensible, but also losing almost every trace of the original unity. Cit. based on the book: Kodukhov V.I. Introduction to linguistics. M., 1987, S. 98.

From school years, we all know that the Russian language belongs to the eastern branch of the Slavic group of the Indo-European language family. And what place do the Proto-Slavic, Old Slavonic and Old Russian languages ​​occupy in the genealogical classification?

1. Proto-Slavic(aka common Slavic, Proto-Slavic language-base) is the oldest in this series. It was formed as a result of the unification and development of a group of dialects Proto-Indo-European language approximately in the second - the middle of the first millennium BC. Proto-Slavic is the ancestor of all Slavic languages and is hypothetically restored on the basis of their comparative historical study. Modern Slavic languages ​​have a lot in common with each other; by comparing them and other related languages, linguists restore the appearance of the words of the ancestor language. At the same time, all reconstructed words are of a conjectural nature, since the Proto-Slavic language is not recorded in written monuments. Not a single book or inscription has been preserved in which it would be reflected.

Restored Proto-Slavic words are usually written down with Latin letters and put in front of the asterisk. This asterisk indicates that the word has been reconstructed. Examples:

*golva- head, *zemja- Earth, *mogti- to be able (verb).

The Proto-Slavic language was spoken by the tribes named in the works European historians 6th century Antes, Wends and Sclavins.

The fact that all Slavs once had a single language is also said in the oldest Russian chronicle - "The Tale of Bygone Years".

Specialists in the field of comparative historical linguistics have long drawn attention to the significant similarities between Slavic and Baltic languages ​​(to this day, Latvian and Lithuanian languages ​​have survived from this group). The fact of similarity is explained in different ways, and scientists have not yet come to a consensus. One of the hypotheses suggests that from the Proto-Indo-European language first stood out Proto-Balto-Slavonic (Proto-Slavonic) language, which later split into Proto-Baltic and Proto-Slavic. Other researchers believe that Proto-Slavic was formed directly from Proto-Indo-European, but for a long time developed in close proximity to the Proto-Baltic language.

The Proto-Slavic language existed for a long time (according to various estimates, from one to two thousand years). As a result of the extensive settlement of Slavic tribes and the increasing isolation of their dialects, it broke up into separate languages, and the formation of the eastern, western and southern branches of the Slavic language group began. The collapse of the Proto-Slavic language, according to most scholars, occurred in the 5th-7th centuries AD.

2. Old Russian language, he East Slavic formed as a result of this decay. The language of the East Slavic tribes, the language of Kievan Rus ... It existed until the XIV century and became the immediate "parent" Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian languages, i.e. the entire eastern branch of the Slavic language group.

Sometimes people who have just begun to study the history of the Russian language confuse Old Russian with Old Slavonic, consider these terms to be synonymous. But such an opinion is erroneous. Old Russian and Old Slavonic - different languages , although related to each other.

3. Old Church Slavonic language refers to the southern branch, not the eastern; it is closer to Bulgarian and Macedonian than to Russian. It is a bookish language, dead from the very beginning of its history.

Old Church Slavonic was created in the middle of the 9th century as a language into which Greek liturgical books were translated for the Slavs. It is based on one of the Macedonian dialects of the ancient Bulgarian language. This dialect was spoken by the Slavic population in the vicinity of Thessalonica, the hometown of Cyril and Methodius. As we all remember, these brothers were preachers, inventors of the Slavic alphabet and translators of Greek church books into the Slavic language. Cyril knew the Thessalonica dialect well, so he used it for translation. But it cannot be said that the Old Church Slavonic language is a simple record of this dialect. No, as a result of the activities of Cyril, Methodius and their followers, in fact, a new Slavic language arose. Bookish, literary processed, reflecting many achievements of a highly developed Greek. Thanks to this, Old Church Slavonic already in the earliest texts known to us has a very rich vocabulary, developed syntax, and well-developed style.

It was used as the language of the church by various Slavic peoples and inevitably absorbed some features of their native, living languages. These local varieties of Old Church Slavonic are called Church Slavonic language in one way or another exhausted. So, we can talk about Church Slavonic texts written in Russian, Serbian, Moravian-Czech and other versions.

Over time, secular texts in Old Church Slavonic also began to appear, but still its main sphere is liturgical.

Old Church Slavonic has had a significant influence on many Slavic languages. In addition, it is of particular value to researchers in the field of comparative historical linguistics, since it is the earliest Slavic language recorded in written monuments.

A simplified diagram of the origin of the Slavic languages ​​is shown in the figure.