The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.)

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/29/99 2:09:37 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

<<And Old Church Slavonic was comprehensible to "all Slavia", at the time. >>

I've been looking for the historical source for that idea for awhile,
specifically with regard to the northwestern Slavs (the Wends), Czechs and
Poles, etc.  But I haven't found it.

The problem with this assertion about OCS and that group is that it is
difficult to find instances where many western Slavic speakers would have been
even exposed to OCS.  Developed in the mid 9th century, OCS and Greek
Orthodoxy were pretty much one and the same.  The Wilczi, Obrodorites,
Pomeranians, etc. were fundamentally abject pagans circled on all sides by
Latin-speaking Christians from the 600's to the late 1100's and would have had
little contact, much less need for OCS.  The Poles and Czechs were also Latin
Christians from very shortly after or before the beginnings of OCS.

In another post, I quoted a historian who seems to say that OCS consolidated
the languages of the Serbs, Bulgars and Russians - so I'm not sure that the
comprehensibility didn't to some degree come from OCS rather than being a
reflection of it.

<<Not surprising, given the fairly high degree of mutual comprehensibility
among Slavic languages now, more than a millennium later.>>

Well, in the meantime, there has been a high degree of mutual contact too.
The teaching of Polish was banned for example for a time under the Tsarist
occupation and Polish speakers would have been exposed to Russian as the
dominant language.  Czechs also have heard a fair amount of Russian in the
last 50 years.  Some western Slavic speakers do nevertheless have a bit of
difficulty with Serbian except on the basic level.

The standardizing function of OCS is nevertheless something worth considering:

"During... the ninth century, two educated Byzantines from
Salonica, the brothers Constantine (later known as Cyril from his
monastic life) and Methodius, with their knowledge of the Slavonic
language spoken [in Thessaly], translated the most important Orthodox
religious books into Slavonic by order of the Byzantine emperor Michael.
By the end of the tenth century, the language of those translations had
become the liturgical and literary language of most Slavs in the area
encompassing the Adriatic and Aegean seas and all the way to northern
Russia... Old Church Slavonic... thus entered the family of great universal
languages of Christian Europe, parallel to Greek and Latin. Beyond the borders
of the Christian world, similar roles were played by Hebrew, classical Arabic
and Sanskrit.>> - Pavle Ivic, STANDARD LANGUAGE AS AN INSTRUMENT OF
CULTURE AND THE PRODUCT OF NATIONAL HISTORY (Porthill Publ 1995)

Regards,
Steve Long