One of the fun aspects of reading Old Church Slavonic texts is encountering vocabulary that has disappeared from most modern Slavonic languages, but which persists as a loanword into Romanian even in the everyday conversational language. I thought I had found another example in Matthew 20:30–34: и сє дъва слѣпьса сѣдѧшта при пѫти слъішавъша ꙗко [...]
As discussed here before, Unicode so far supports the Old Church Slavonic Cyrillic script only partially, with notable gaps such as the ligature /ja/. In October, an international conference ‘The Standardization of the Old Church Slavonic Cyrillic Script and its Registration in Unicode’ was held in Belgrade. Its conclusions are now available on the web.
Many of the reading selections in Robert Auty’s Handbook of Old Church Slavonic: Part II Texts and Glossary (London: The Athlone Press, 1960) present little challenge as they are from the OCS translation of the New Testament and so are already familiar to the student. However, one selection sure to be unknown to readers is [...]
A quick remark about two books I’ve discovered recently. Alexander M. Schenker’s The Dawn of Slavic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) is concerned with the historical and cultural events of Slavic ethnogenesis, but it also has such an extensive presentation of Old Church Slavonic that it may be fairly counted among OCS primers, comparing [...]
Coming from a little-known European academic publisher, LINCOM EUROPA, and unavailable for sale in the U.S., Boris Gasparov’s 2001 primer Old Church Slavonic (ISBN 3895868892) was a pleasant surprise. The book is generally a synchronic treatment of the artificial language that we find in the manuscripts, with few references to Proto-Indo-European. Still, Prof Gasparov does [...]
Using Unicode to digitise an Old Church Slavonic document requires some truly unpleasant compromises, as anyone who has attempted to do so has sorely found out. For example, I’m perpetually irked by the fact that the Unicode Consortium refuses to assign a position for iotified Cyrillic A, telling people to use U+044F CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER [...]
Continuing from the last post on the sigmatic aorist in Latin, I turn to Bridget Drinka’s examination of this matter in Old Church Slavonic. This will be brief, due to being occupied by other matters at university. While Drinka shows that the sigmatic aorist in Latin is in general a very late innovation, her goal [...]
The various Old Church Slavonic primers that have been written over the past hundred years are of varying quality. Among the worst for this student of historical linguistics are Lunt’s Old Church Slavonic Grammar, which is purely synchronic and written from the viewpoint of structual linguistics, and Gardiner’s Old Church Slavonic : An Elementary Grammar, [...]
I have updated my article Typesetting Old Church Slavonic with LaTeX. Additions include a section on how to typeset OCS in the common Latin transliteration schemes.
I have updated my short article Typesetting Old Church Slavonic with LaTeX to explain how to get variant appearances of Cyrillic characters which are more suitable for OCS texts than the modern Cyrillic appearances. However, I am becoming increasingly disappointed in the quality of the Cyrillic fonts that come with LaTeX, and would like to [...]