Old-slavonic Sentence Examples
It belongs to the group of old Slavonic states which have preserved their nationality while losing their political independence.
On the other hand, we learn from Herodotus of the great serpent which defended the citadel of Athens; the Roman genius loci took the form of a serpent; a snake was kept and fed with milk in the temple of Potrimpos, an old Slavonic god.
The old Slavonic lists of forbidden books of the i 5th and 16th centuries also give us a clue to the discovery of this heretical literature and of the means the Bogomils employed to carry on their propaganda.
The origin of Pest proper is obscure, but the name, apparently derived from the old Slavonic pestj, a stove (like Ofen, the German name of Buda), seems to point to an early Slavonic settlement.
The Latin alphabet is used, with special signs to represent sounds borrowed from Slavonic, &c. All the unaccented vowels except e are pronounced as in Italian; e has the same phonetic value as in Old Slavonic (=French e) and is often similarly preiotized (= ye in yet), notably at the beginning of all words except neologisms. The accented vowels é and ó are pronounced as ea and oa (petra, rock, = peatra; morte, death, = moarte); they are written in full, as diphthongs, at the end of a word and sometimes in other positions.
Both are still in MS. The Old Slavonic annals were later on translated and new notes were added, each subsequent writer annexing the work of his predecessor, and prefixing his name to the entire compilation.
If, however, they could be induced to discard the old Slavonic alphabet and substitute for it the Latin, and could be brought to recognize their national and ethnical unity with ancient Rome, it was hoped that then they would be more easily induced to enter into the unity of faith.
The Russian and Bulgarian languages undoubtedly stand nearer to Old Slavonic than the Servian.
Practically, however, there are only three principal dialects, which are differentiated by the manner in which the Old Slavonic double vocal ye (the so-called yach) is pronounced.
The Old Slavonic church books had naturally to be copied from time to time, and the Servian, Bulgarian and Russian copyists were unable to resist the influences of their respective living languages.
AdvertisementThus comparatively soon there appeared church books no longer written in pure Old Slavonic (of which the so-called " Asseman's Gospel " in the Vatican is the best type), but in Old Slavonic modified by Servian, Bulgarian, Russian influences, or in the languages which could be called Servian-Slavonic, Bulgarian-Slavonic, Russian-Slavonic. The best extant specimen of the Servian-Slavonic is " Miroslav's Gospel," written in the second half of the 12th century for the Servian prince Miroslav; a facsimile edition was published in 1897 in Belgrade.
The Old Slavonic words lyepo, byelo, are pronounced by the Servians of Herzegovina, Bosnia, Montenegro, Dalmatia, Croatia and south-western Servia as leeyepo, beeyelo; by the Servians of Syrmia the same vowel is pronounced sometimes as e (lepo, belo), sometimes as ee (videeti, leteeti); by the Servians of the Morava valley and its accessory Ressava valley, always only as e (lepo, belo, videti, leteti).