Old East Slavic - General Considerations

General Considerations

The language was a descendant of the Proto-Slavic language and faithfully retained many of its features. A striking innovation in the evolution of this language was the development of so-called pleophony (or polnoglasie 'full vocalisation'), which came to differentiate the newly evolving East Slavic from other Slavic dialects. For instance, Common Slavic *gordъ 'settlement, town' was reflected as OESl. gorodъ, Common Slavic *melko 'milk' > OESl. moloko, and Common Slavic *korva 'cow' > OESl korova. Other Slavic dialects are differed by resolving the closed-syllable clusters *eRC and *aRC as liquid metathesis (South Slavic and Czecho-Slovak), or by no change at all (see the article on Slavic liquid metathesis and pleophony for a detailed account).

Since extant written records of the language are sparse, it is difficult to assess the level of its unity. In consideration of the number of tribes and clans that constituted Kievan Rus, it is probable that there were many dialects of Old East Slavonic. Therefore, today we may speak definitively only of the languages of surviving manuscripts, which, according to some interpretations, show regional divergence from the beginning of the historical records.

With time, it evolved into several more diversified forms, which were the predecessors of the modern Belarusian, Russian, Rusyn and Ukrainian languages. Each of these languages preserves much of the Old East Slavic grammar and vocabulary.

When after the end of the 'Tatar yoke' the territory of former Kievan Rus was divided between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Grand Duchy of Moscow, two separate literary languages emerged in these states, Ruthenian in the west and medieval Russian in the east.