medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Actually, Old Church Slav(on)ic had not been the "mother tongue" in the
sense of a 'spoken", living language even at the time of Cyril and
Methodius, it was based on a local idiom but was intended to be
"international" in order to be understood by many Slavic peoples. (I am
simplifying, of course) Therefore there is a comparison to Latin.
On Fri, 15 Feb 2002, Dennis Martin wrote:
> medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
>
> Is Old Church Slavonic the "mother tongue" of any of the Slavic peoples today? Are the liturgies in Bulgaria, Slovakia, Belorus etc. in Old Church Slavonic or in modernized vernaculars? If in Old Church Slavonic, then the situation is closer (not identical) to that of the liturgy in Latin in the West after the rise of the vernaculars as literary languages in the Middle Ages. Indeed, would not the relation of modern Italian and perhaps Spanish to Latin be fairly close to the relation between some of the modern Slavic languages and Old Church Slavonic? I am ready to be corrected by those who know better.
>
> At what point did the language of liturgy in Slavic lands begin to require some effort to understand comparable to the effort that would have been required in the West to understand Latin in, say, the 12th century? Or did it never become that? I would think that the gap in the West was and is greater, but how much greater and when? I could imagine that the situation in Bulgaria, for instance, could be quite different from that in Russia or Ukraine. How much was the language of liturgy revised in the various Slavic nations during medieval or modern times? Or does the present Old Church Slavonic liturgy's language essentially go back to the 9th century (I'm sure the form goes back to the first few centuries of the Christian era; my concern here is the "vernacular dress" it was given in Slavic regions)?
>
> Dennis Martin
>
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