Old Church Slavonic

Old Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic was the number one Slavic literary language.

Historians acknowledgment the 9th-century Byzantine missionaries Saints Cyril & Methodius with standardizing the language and using it in translating a Bible and other Ancient Greek ecclesiastical texts as component of a Christianization of the Slavs. it is thought to defecate been based primarily on the dialect of the 9th-century Byzantine Slavs living in the Province of Thessalonica in present-day Greece.

Old Church Slavonic played an important role in the history of the Slavic languages and served as a basis and good example for later Church Slavonic traditions, and some Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches use this later Church Slavonic as a liturgical language to this day.

As the oldest attested Slavic language, OCS makes important evidence for the qualities of Proto-Slavic, the reconstructed common ancestor of all Slavic languages.

Nomenclature

The pretend of the language in Old Church Slavonic texts was simply Slavic словѣ́ньскъ ѩꙁꙑ́къ, slověnĭskŭ językŭ, derived from the word for Slavs словѣ́нє, slověne, the self-designation of the compilers of the texts. This name is preserved in the advanced native names of the Slovak and Slovene languages. The language is sometimes called Old Slavic, which may be confused with the distinct Proto-Slavic language. Different strains of nationalists have tried to 'claim' Old Church Slavonic; thus OCS has also been variously called Old Bulgarian, Old Croatian, Old Macedonian or Old Serbian, or even Old Slovak, Old Slovenian. The usually accepted terms in advanced English-language Slavic studies are Old Church Slavonic and Old Church Slavic.

The term Old BulgarianLeopold Geitler and August Leskien, who covered similarities between the number one literary Slavic working and the modern Bulgarian language. For similar reasons, Russian linguist Aleksandr Vostokov used the term Slav-Bulgarian. The term is still used by some writers but nowadays normally avoided in favor of Old Church Slavonic.

The term Old Macedonian is occasionally used by Western scholars in a regional context.

The obsolete term Old Slovenian was used by early 19th-century scholars who conjectured that the language was based on the dialect of Pannonia.