Unit 3: Literary language of Kievan Rus

This theme is dealt with in a lot of historical sources. The following citation is to illustrate this:

“The political unification of the region into the state called Rus', from which modern Belarus, Russia and Ukraine trace their origins, occurred approximately a century before the adoption of Christianity in 988 and the establishment of the South Slavic Old Church Slavonic as the liturgical and literary language. The Old Church Slavonic language, also known as Old Bulgarian Language, as it was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire's Preslav Academy, was introduced through the Bulgarian Empire. Documentation of the language of this period is scanty, making it difficult at best fully to determine the relationship between the literary language and its spoken dialects.

There are references in Arab and Byzantine sources to pre-Christian Slavs in European Russia using some form of writing. Despite some suggestive archaeological finds and a corroboration by the tenth-century monk Khrabr that ancient Slavs wrote in "strokes and incisions", the exact nature of this system is unknown.

Although the Glagolitic alphabet was briefly introduced, as witnessed by church inscriptions in Novgorod, it was soon entirely superseded by the Cyrillic. The samples of birch-bark writing excavated in Novgorod have provided crucial information about the pure tenth-century vernacular in North-West Russia, almost entirely free of Church Slavonic influence. It is also known that borrowings and calques from Byzantine Greek began to enter the vernacular at this time, and that simultaneously the literary language in its turn began to be modified towards Eastern Slavic. …”

The complete version of this text is at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27

Assignments

1) Give Ukrainian equivalents to the following:

Unification, origins, adoption, approximately, sources, suggestive, corroboration, inscription, superseded, influence, vernacular

2) Give definitions to the following:

Adoption of Christianity, spoken dialects, archaeological finds, literary language

3) Answer the questions on the text:

1. What was the motivation of establishing the Old Church Slavonic language?

2. Where was it developed?

3. What was said by Khrabr about the ancient Slavonic writing?

4. What kind of Slavonic alphabet was used before the Cyrillic?

5. What do you know about Cyril and Mefodiyt?

4) Speak on this issue adding extra information from other sources.

5)What do you know about the origin of the Cyrillic alphabet?

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 1031