Славян тілдері: тарихы, жіктелуі және таралуы

Subfamily of Indo European languages

The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto language called Proto Slavic, spoken during the Early Middle Ages, which in turn is thought to have descended from the earlier Proto Balto Slavic language, linking the Slavic languages to the Baltic languages in a Balto Slavic group within the Indo European family. The Slavic languages are conventionally (that is, also on the basis of extralinguistic features) divided into three subgroups: East, South, and West, which together constitute more than 20 languages. Of these, 10 have at least one million speakers and official status as the national languages of the countries in which they are predominantly spoken: Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian (of the East group), Polish, Czech and Slovak (of the West group) and Bulgarian and Macedonian (eastern members of the South group), and Serbo Croatian and Slovene (western members of the South group). In addition, Aleksandr Dulichenko recognizes a number of Slavic microlanguages: both isolated ethnolects and peripheral dialects of more well established Slavic languages. Slavic languages are highly fusional and, with some exceptions, have richly developed inflection and cases. The word order of the Slavic languages is mostly free. The current geographical distribution of natively spoken Slavic languages includes the Balkans, Central and Eastern Europe, and all the way from Western Siberia to the Russian Far East. Furthermore, the diasporas of many Slavic peoples have established isolated minorities of speakers of their languages all over the world. The number of speakers of all Slavic languages together was estimated to be 315 million at the turn of the twenty first century. It is the largest ethno linguistic group in Europe.

Slavic languages descend from Proto Slavic, their immediate parent language, ultimately deriving from Proto Indo European, the ancestor language of all Indo European languages, via a Proto Balto Slavic stage. During the Proto Balto Slavic period a number of exclusive isoglosses in phonology, morphology, lexis, and syntax developed, which makes Slavic and Baltic the closest related of all the Indo European branches. The secession of the Balto Slavic dialect ancestral to Proto Slavic is estimated on archaeological and glottochronological criteria to have occurred sometime in the period 1500–1000 BCE. A minority of Baltists maintain the view that the Slavic group of languages differs so radically from the neighboring Baltic group (Lithuanian, Latvian, and the now extinct Old Prussian), that they could not have shared a parent language after the breakup of the Proto Indo European continuum about five millennia ago. Substantial advances in Balto Slavic accentology that occurred in the last three decades, however, make this view very hard to maintain nowadays, especially when one considers that there was most likely no "Proto Baltic" language and that West Baltic and East Baltic differ from each other as much as each of them does from Proto Slavic.

The imposition of Old Church Slavonic on Orthodox Slavs was often at the expense of the vernacular. Says WB Lockwood, a prominent Indo European linguist, "It (O. C. S) remained in use to modern times but was more and more influenced by the living, evolving languages, so that one distinguishes Bulgarian, Serbian, and Russian varieties. The use of such media hampered the development of the local languages for literary purposes, and when they do appear the first attempts are usually in an artificially mixed style." (148)

Lockwood also notes that these languages have "enriched" themselves by drawing on Church Slavonic for the vocabulary of abstract concepts. The situation in the Catholic countries, where Latin was more important, was different. The Polish Renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski and the Croatian Baroque writers of the 16th century all wrote in their respective vernaculars (though Polish itself had drawn amply on Latin in the same way Russian would eventually draw on Church Slavonic). Although Church Slavonic hampered vernacular literatures, it fostered Slavonic literary activity and abetted linguistic independence from external influences. Only the Croatian vernacular literary tradition nearly matches Church Slavonic in age. It began with the Vinodol Codex (1288) and continued through the Renaissance until the codifications of Croatian in 1830, though much of the literature between 1300 and 1500 was written in much the same mixture of the vernacular and Church Slavonic as prevailed in Russia and elsewhere. The most important early monument of Croatian literacy is the Baška tablet from the late 11th century. It is a large stone tablet found in the small Church of St. Lucy, Jurandvor on the Croatian island of Krk, containing text written mostly in Čakavian dialect in angular Croatian Glagolitic script. The independence of Dubrovnik facilitated the continuity of the tradition. More recent foreign influences follow the same general pattern in Slavic languages as elsewhere and are governed by the political relationships of the Slavs. In the 17th century, bourgeois Russian (delovoi jazyk) absorbed German words through direct contacts between Russians and communities of German settlers in Russia. In the era of Peter the Great, close contacts with France invited countless loan words and calques from French, many of which not only survived but also replaced older Slavonic loans. In the 19th century, Russian influenced most literary Slavic languages by one means or another.

The Proto Slavic language existed until around AD 500. By the 7th century, it had broken apart into large dialectal zones. There are no reliable hypotheses about the nature of the subsequent breakups of West and South Slavic. East Slavic is generally thought to converge to one Old East Slavic language, which existed until at least the 12th century. Linguistic differentiation was accelerated by the dispersion of the Slavic peoples over a large territory, which in Central Europe exceeded the current extent of Slavic speaking majorities. Written documents of the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries already display some local linguistic features. For example, the Freising manuscripts show a language that contains some phonetic and lexical elements peculiar to Slovene dialects (e. g. rhotacism, the word krilatec). The Freising manuscripts are the first Latin script continuous text in a Slavic language. The migration of Slavic speakers into the Balkans in the declining centuries of the Byzantine Empire expanded the area of Slavic speech, but the pre existing writing (notably Greek) survived in this area. The arrival of the Hungarians in Pannonia in the 9th century interposed non Slavic speakers between South and West Slavs. Frankish conquests completed the geographical separation between these two groups, also severing the connection between Slavs in Moravia and Lower Austria (Moravians) and those in present day Styria, Carinthia, East Tyrol in Austria, and in the provinces of modern Slovenia, where the ancestors of the Slovenes settled during first colonisation. In September 2015, Alexei Kassian and Anna Dybo published, as a part of interdisciplinary study of Slavic ethnogenesis, a lexicostatistical classification of Slavic languages. It was built using qualitative 110 word Swadesh lists that were compiled according to the standards of the Global Lexicostatistical Database project and processed using modern phylogenetic algorithms. The resulting dated tree complies with the traditional expert views on the Slavic group structure. Kassian Dybo's tree suggests that Proto Slavic first diverged into three branches: Eastern, Western and Southern. The Proto Slavic break up is dated to around 100 A. D., which correlates with the archaeological assessment of Slavic population in the early 1st millennium A. D. being spread on a large territory and already not being monolithic. Then, in the 5th and 6th centuries A. D., these three Slavic branches almost simultaneously divided into sub branches, which corresponds to the fast spread of the Slavs through Eastern Europe and the Balkans during the second half of the 1st millennium A. D. (the so called Slavicization of Europe). The Slovenian language was excluded from the analysis, as both Ljubljana koine and Literary Slovenian show mixed lexical features of Southern and Western Slavic languages (which could possibly indicate the Western Slavic origin of Slovenian, which for a long time was being influenced on the part of the neighboring Serbo Croatian dialects), and the quality Swadesh lists were not yet collected for Slovenian dialects. Because of scarcity or unreliability of data, the study also did not cover the so called Old Novgordian dialect, the Polabian language and some other Slavic lects. The above Kassian Dybo's research did not take into account the findings by Russian linguist Andrey Zaliznyak who stated that, until the 14th or 15th century, major language differences were not between the regions occupied by modern Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, but rather between the north west (around modern Velikiy Novgorod and Pskov) and the center (around modern Kyiv, Suzdal, Rostov, Moscow as well as Belarus) of the East Slavic territories. The Old Novgorodian dialect of that time differed from the central East Slavic dialects as well as from all other Slavic languages much more than in later centuries. According to Zaliznyak, the Russian language developed as a convergence of that dialect and the central ones, whereas Ukrainian and Belarusian were continuation of development of the central dialects of East Slavs. Also Russian linguist Sergey Nikolaev, analysing historical development of Slavic dialects' accent system, concluded that a number of other tribes in Kievan Rus came from different Slavic branches and spoke distant Slavic dialects. Zaliznyak and Nikolaev's points mean that there was a convergence stage before the divergence or simultaneously, which was not taken into consideration by Kassian Dybo's research. Ukrainian linguists (Stepan Smal Stotsky, Ivan Ohienko, George Shevelov, Yevhen Tymchenko, Vsevolod Hantsov, Olena Kurylo) deny the existence of a common Old East Slavic language at any time in the past. According to them, the dialects of East Slavic tribes evolved gradually from the common Proto Slavic language without any intermediate stages.

The Slavic languages are a relatively homogeneous family, compared with other families of Indo European languages (e. g. Germanic, Romance, and Indo Iranian). As late as the 10th century AD, the entire Slavic speaking area still functioned as a single, dialectally differentiated language, termed Common Slavic. Compared with most other Indo European languages, the Slavic languages are quite conservative, particularly in terms of morphology (the means of inflecting nouns and verbs to indicate grammatical differences). Most Slavic languages have a rich, fusional morphology that conserves much of the inflectional morphology of Proto Indo European. The vocabulary of the Slavic languages is also of Indo European origin. Many of its elements, which do not find exact matches in the ancient Indo European languages, are associated with the Balto Slavic community.

An area of great difference among Slavic languages is that of prosody (i. e. syllabic distinctions such as vowel length, accent, and tone). Common Slavic had a complex system of prosody, inherited with little change from Proto Indo European. This consisted of phonemic vowel length and a free, mobile pitch accent:
All vowels could occur either short or long, and this was phonemic (it could not automatically be predicted from other properties of the word). There was (at most) a single accented syllable per word, distinguished by higher pitch (as in modern Japanese) rather than greater dynamic stress (as in English). Vowels in accented syllables could be pronounced with either a rising or falling tone (i. e. there was pitch accent), and this was phonemic. The accent was free in that it could occur on any syllable and was phonemic. The accent was mobile in that its position could potentially vary among closely related words within a single paradigm (e. g. the accent might land on a different syllable between the nominative and genitive singular of a given word). Even within a given inflectional class (e. g. masculine i stem nouns), there were multiple accent patterns in which a given word could be inflected. For example, most nouns in a particular inflectional class could follow one of three possible patterns: Either there was a consistent accent on the root (pattern A), predominant accent on the ending (pattern B), or accent that moved between the root and ending (pattern C). In patterns B and C, the accent in different parts of the paradigm shifted not only in location but also type (rising vs. falling). Each inflectional class had its own version of patterns B and C, which might differ significantly from one inflectional class to another. The modern languages vary greatly in the extent to which they preserve this system. On one extreme, Serbo Croatian preserves the system nearly unchanged (even more so in the conservative Chakavian dialect); on the other, Macedonian has basically lost the system in its entirety. Between them are found numerous variations:
Slovenian preserves most of the system but has shortened all unaccented syllables and lengthened non final accented syllables so that vowel length and accent position largely co occur. Russian and Bulgarian have eliminated distinctive vowel length and tone and converted the accent into a stress accent (as in English) but preserved its position. As a result, the complexity of the mobile accent and the multiple accent patterns still exists (particularly in Russian because it has preserved the Common Slavic noun inflections, while Bulgarian has lost them). Czech and Slovak have preserved phonemic vowel length and converted the distinctive tone of accented syllables into length distinctions. The phonemic accent is otherwise lost, but the former accent patterns are echoed to some extent in corresponding patterns of vowel length/shortness in the root. Paradigms with mobile vowel length/shortness do exist but only in a limited fashion, usually only with the zero ending forms (nom. sg., acc. sg., and/or gen. pl., depending on inflectional class) having a different length from the other forms. (Czech has a couple of other "mobile" patterns, but they are rare and can usually be substituted with one of the "normal" mobile patterns or a non mobile pattern.) Old Polish had a system very much like Czech. Modern Polish has lost vowel length, but some former short long pairs have become distinguished by quality (e. g. > ), with the result that some words have vowel quality changes that exactly mirror the mobile length patterns in Czech and Slovak.

Similarly, Slavic languages have extensive morphophonemic alternations in their derivational and inflectional morphology, including between velar and postalveolar consonants, front and back vowels, and a vowel and no vowel.

The following is a very brief selection of cognates in basic vocabulary across the Slavic language family, which may serve to give an idea of the sound changes involved. This is not a list of translations: cognates have a common origin, but their meaning may be shifted and loanwords may have replaced them. Proto Slavic Russian Ukrainian Belarusian Rusyn Polish Czech Slovak Slovene Serbo Croatian Bulgarian Macedonian uxo (ear) ухо вухо вуха ухо ucho ucho ucho uho уво / (Serbia only)ухо / (Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia) ухо уво ognь (fire) огонь вогонь агонь огинь (ohénʹ) ogień oheň oheň ogenj огањ / огън оган/огин (/) ryba (fish) рыба риба рыба рыба ryba ryba ryba riba риба / риба риба gnězdo (nest) гнездо гнiздо гняздо гнïздо gniazdo hnízdo hniezdo gnezdo гнездо / (ek. )гнијездо / (ijek. )гниздо / (ik.) гнездо гнездо oko (eye) око (dated, poetic or in set expressions)modern: глаз око вока око oko oko oko oko око / око око golva (head) голова глава "chapter or chief, leader, head" голова галава голова głowa hlava hlava glava глава / глава глава rǫka (hand) рука рука рука рука ręka ruka ruka roka рука / ръка рака noktь (night) ночь ніч ноч нуч noc noc noc noč ноћ / нощ ноќ

Most languages of the former Soviet Union and of some neighbouring countries (for example, Mongolian) are significantly influenced by Russian, especially in vocabulary. The Romanian, Albanian, and Hungarian languages show the influence of the neighboring Slavic nations, especially in vocabulary pertaining to urban life, agriculture, and crafts and trade—the major cultural innovations at times of limited long range cultural contact. In each one of these languages, Slavic lexical borrowings represent at least 15% of the total vocabulary. This is potentially because Slavic tribes crossed and partially settled the territories inhabited by ancient Illyrians and Vlachs on their way to the Balkans.

Finnic and Slavic languages have many words in common. According to Petri Kallio, this suggests Slavic words being borrowed into Finnish languages, as early as Proto Finnic. Many loanwords have acquired a Finnicized form, making it difficult to say whether such a word is natively Finnic or Slavic.

The Czech word [[wikt:robot is now found in most languages worldwide, and the word pistol, probably also from Czech, is found in many European languages. A well known Slavic word in almost all European languages is vodka, a borrowing from Russian водка – which itself was borrowed from Polish wódka (lit. "little water"), from common Slavic voda ("water", cognate to the English word) with the diminutive ending " ka". Owing to the medieval fur trade with Northern Russia, Pan European loans from Russian include such familiar words as sable. The English word "vampire" was borrowed (perhaps via French vampire) from German Vampir, in turn derived from Serbo Croatian вампир , continuing Proto Slavic ǫpyrь, although Polish scholar K. Stachowski has argued that the origin of the word is early Slavic vąpěrь, going back to Turkic oobyr. Several European languages, including English, have borrowed the word polje (meaning "large, flat plain") directly from the former Yugoslav languages (i. e. Slovene and Serbo Croatian). During the heyday of the USSR in the 20th century, many more Russian words became known worldwide: , Soviet, , , , , etc. Another borrowed Russian term is (lit. "self boiling").

Lockwood, W. B. A Panorama of Indo European Languages. Hutchinson University Library, 1972. hardback, paperback. Marko Jesensek, The Slovene Language in the Alpine and Pannonian Language Area, 2005.