Simple Verb Tenses in Old Church Slavonic

Feb 4, 2015 by

Verbs in Old Church Slavonic (OCS) are inflected for person (1st, 2nd, or 3rd) and number (singular, dual, or plural). There are three simple tenses (present, imperfect, and aorist) and three compound tenses (perfect, pluperfect, and...

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Introduction to Old Church Slavonic Conjugation

Feb 4, 2015 by

While nominal parts-of-speech, such as nouns and adjectives, decline, verbs conjugate. Each verb has a number of different forms, both tensed and non-tensed. There are three tenses in OCS: present, imperfect, and aorist. Note that...

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Palatalization in Old Church Slavonic

Jan 30, 2015 by

[For a discussion of the image, see the post in the LanguageHat blog.] In our examination of the Old Church Slavonic (OCS) declension system, we have noticed some peculiar consonant alternations, for example: člověkъ ‘man’...

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As Easy as ‘One’, ‘Two’, ‘Three’?—The Morphology and Syntax of “Numera...

Jan 29, 2015 by

“Numerals”, that is words designating cardinal numbers, in Old Church Slavonic (OCS) and Old Russian (OR) were nouns or pronouns rather than a separate morphosyntactic category, as they are in modern Russian. Hence, for OCS and OR, I...

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Dual in Old Church Slavonic—and in modern Hebrew

Jan 28, 2015 by

Unlike (modern) Russian and English, Old Church Slavonic (OCS) had not a two-way but a three-way grammatical number distinction: singular, dual, and plural. The dual was used for ‘two’, whereas the plural was used for ‘three or...

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