The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.)

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/27/99 11:46:34 PM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu wrote:

<<I've heard/read that Old Macedonian/Bulgarian was the Slavic
dialect in closest proximity to Byzantium and therefore, the most
convenient Slavic language for Byzantine monks to learn. So in that sense,
standardization was really serendipitous.>>

Not serendipitous by a long shot.  The fact that they were using a local
Slavic dialect in no way changes the strong historical evidence that Church
Slavonic was developed as a missionary tool for converting Slavs to eastern
Christianity and thereby bringing them within its sphere of political
influence.  Emperor Micheal says as much.  The creation of a uniform Slavic
liturgical language also permitted a uniform language of mission and
diplomacy.  This use of the vernacular for liturgy however ran right up
against the German and Italian bishops who were introducing the same
vernacular in Latin, and would get Cyril and Methodius's Greek clergy kicked
out of Bohemia.

Also, the Greeks may not have realized that assuming a uniform Slavic dialect
would already create difficulty in the far northwest - Richard Fletcher
mentions this in The Barbarian Conversions.  The tradition that the Serbs were
orginally from the Sorbs who lived on the Elbe presumed a common language that
may not exactly have been there.  And this may have accounted for why the
German bishops were able to prevail against the Greeks in the Slavic west,
despite the Greek trump card of being able to transmit the religion in the
vernacular.

BTW, the story is that when Emperor Micheal III sends Cyril and Methodius to
Moravia (the lower Moravia), he says "You two are from Thesslonica, and all
Thessalonians speak the [Slavic] tongue well."  This mission is in evidence
and tradition the first appearance of Glagolitic (before the adoption of
Cyrillic) and Old Church Slavonic.  Cyril preaches and trains other
missionaries in OCS and these will be successful in Serbia, Bulgaria and
Russia.  But the Slavs of Thessaly end up worshiping in and speaking Greek.

In STANDARD LANGUAGE AS AN INSTRUMENT OF CULTURE AND THE PRODUCT OF NATIONAL
HISTORY by Pavle Ivic (Porthill Publ 1995)
the author write:
<<Those slight [local] changes [in Church Slavonic] had no effect on whether a
text could be understood or not, nor did they undermine the enormous advantage
in the extensive exchange in culture. The mutual literary language of the
Serbs, Bulgarians and Russians consolidated their participation in the
cultural milieu of Orthodoxy, which had always been open to influence from
Greek. Many texts were translated from Greek, and once translated the texts
circulated throughout the Orthodox Slavic world,...>>.

In reading pieces of the above, one gets an unshakeable impression that the
old saw that Slavic was pretty much a unitary language in 500ace is partly an
artifact of the subsequent standardization accomplished by OCS (as well as the
rise of the western Slavic states.)  Southern and eastern Slavic may have in
fact been more fractured before that, though we have no direct evidence either
way before OCS.

Regards,
Steve Long