The Church Slavonic language reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Church Slavonic language

The Church Slavonic language (ru: церковнославя́нский язы́к) is the liturgical language of the Russian Orthodox Church. Historically, this language is derived from the Old Church Slavonic language by adapting pronunciation and orthography and replacing some old and obscure words and expressions by their vernacular counterparts, from the Old Russian language.

Before the 18th century, the Church Slavonic language was in wide use as a general literary language in Russia. However, it was never spoken except by a small educated elite. During the 18th century it was gradually replaced by the Russian language and retained its use only in church.

Many words have been borrowed from Church Slavonic into Russian. However, as both languages are Slavic, the borrowings are usually thought of as variants of Russian words, e.g.: золото/злато, город/град, горячий/горящий, рожать/рождать (the first word in each pair is Russian, the second Church Slavonic).

The Church Slavonic language is written with Cyrillic alphabet while using a lot of diacritical signs. Currently the computer support for this language is very poor, so people have to use some ad hoc solutions.

Pronunciation

The Church Slavonic language is pronounced in the same way as Russian, with some exceptions:

• There is no vowel reduction in unstressed wovels (i.e. о and е in unstressed positions are always read as [o] and [je] respectively (like in Northern Russian dialects), whereas in standard Russian pronunciation they then become [a] and [i]).

• The letter е [je] is never pronounced as ё [jo] (the letter ё does not exist in Church Slavonic writing at all). This is also reflected in borrowings from Church Slavonic into Russian: in the following pairs the first word is Church Slavonic in origin, and the second is purely Russian: небо/нёбо, одежда/одёжа, надежда/надёжный.

• The letter "g" is read as voiced fricative velar sound [ɣ] (just as in Southern Russian dialects), not as occlusive [ɡ] in standard Russian pronunciation. When unvoiced, it becomes [x] (this has influenced the Russian pronunciation of Бог as Бох).

External links

• Bible in Church Slavonic language (PDF)
• Problems of computer implementation (in Russian)

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