The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.)

[Jim Rader]

I don't know what encyclopedias or general references Mr. Long is
taking this information from, but either he or his sources have some
basic distinctions muddled--either that or Slavic historical
linguistics has changed a lot since I was first exposed to it 20-odd
years ago.  What I learned was that the basic texts in Glagolitic or
Cyrillic that define Old Church Slavic all originated in the
Balkans--with the important exception of the oldest text, the Kiev
Fragments (Russian <Kievskie listki>), which has some Czech phonetic
features and is a translation of part of the Roman missal.  The
oldest Old Russian text, the Ostromir Gospels (Ostromirovo
evangelie), dated by a colophon to 1056, is coincident in age with
the canonical Old Church Slavic texts, but has distinctive East
Slavic phonetic features--in particular, the relatively early loss of
the nasal vowels, so that the letter for the back nasal and the
digraph for [u] are sometimes mixed up. (On the other hand, it
doesn't mix the jers up.) There is never any confusion about which
texts are OCS and which are Old Russian.  It is NOT the case that
"the first Russian appears of course in OCS texts, so that it is
arguable that it is in fact Russian."

I'm writing this from memory because I'm in my office and most of my
Slavic books are home, so if I'm wrong, may someone correct me.

Jim Rader

> Actually, the first sentence in Polish shows up in the late 13th Century and
> real text comes from middle 14th Century.  Before that there are only proper
> names written with little system so that many sounds are "almost impossible
> to distinguish."  The evidence therefore is some 500 years after OCS
> originates.  The first Russian appears of course in OCS texts, so that it is
> arguable that it is in fact Russian.  At the time of a valid direct
> comparison between Polish and Russian however there are fairly significant
> "differences in how words are stressed, vocabulary and numerous syntactic and
> morphological developments," perhaps more than would be expected "given the
> extreme instabilities of the borders between the two languages."

> Regards,
> Steve Long