Overview of the Case System in Old Church Slavonic

Jan 27, 2015 by

Overview of the Case System in Old Church Slavonic

Old Church Slavonic (OCS) had six cases, plus the vocative form. For the endings in the various cases, declensions, genders, stem types and parts-of-speech, consult “OCS Declension Tables” or Lunt (2001: 52-80). When is each case...

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Dative Absolute Demystified

Jan 23, 2015 by

Dative Absolute Demystified

The Old Church Slavonic (OCS) passage from Matthew 14:6, contains a phrase whose structure may not be immediately clear: dьni že byvъšu roždьstva irodova, translated in the King James Version as “But when Herod’s birthday was...

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Expressing Possession in Old Church Slavonic—and Related Issues

Jan 21, 2015 by

Expressing Possession in Old Church Slavonic—and Related Issues

In Old Church Slavonic (OCS), there were two ways to express possession (loosely defined)—and modern Russian, as we shall see in the following post, is not very different. The first way of expressing possession in OCS involved the...

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Is There a Vocative Case in Russian?

Jan 15, 2015 by

Is There a Vocative Case in Russian?

As we’ve discussed in class, Old Church Slavonic (OCS) had seven cases (cf. Lunt 2001: 52-54): the six cases familiar from modern Russian and the vocative, used to address someone. As noted in Lunt (2001: 52), “a separate vocative...

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Influence of Old Novgorod Dialect on the Russian Literary Language

Jan 12, 2015 by

Influence of Old Novgorod Dialect on the Russian Literary Language

[This post is based largely on the work on Andrei Zaliznjak, particularly his lecture available here.] In my earlier post, I noted that the Russian literary language (aka modern standard Russian) differs from its closest relatives,...

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The Story of Jers

Jan 11, 2015 by

The Story of Jers

Let’s start with a puzzle that concerns not OCS directly but modern Russian. Consider the following nominative and genitive forms of nouns; in addition to the suffix –a for the genitive, something else happens here: kov’or...

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