Proto-Slavic (abbreviated PSl., PS.; also called Common Slavic or Common Slavonic) is the
unattested,
reconstructed proto-language
In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unatte ...
of all
Slavic languages
The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavs, Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic language, Proto ...
. It represents Slavic speech approximately from the 2nd millennium B.C. through the 6th century A.D.
As with most other proto-languages, no attested writings have been found; scholars have reconstructed the language by applying the
comparative method
In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor and then extrapolating backwards ...
to all the attested Slavic languages and by taking into account other
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, ...
.
Rapid development of Slavic speech occurred during the Proto-Slavic period, coinciding with the massive expansion of the Slavic-speaking area. Dialectal differentiation occurred early on during this period, but overall linguistic unity and
mutual intelligibility
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as a ...
continued for several centuries, into the 10th century or later. During this period, many sound changes diffused across the entire area, often uniformly. This makes it inconvenient to maintain the traditional definition of a
proto-language
In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unatte ...
as the ''latest reconstructable common ancestor'' of a language group, with no dialectal differentiation. (This would necessitate treating all pan-Slavic changes after the 6th century or so as part of the separate histories of the various daughter languages.) Instead,
Slavicists typically handle the entire period of dialectally differentiated linguistic unity as Common Slavic.
One can divide the Proto-Slavic/Common Slavic time of linguistic unity roughly into three periods:
* an early period with little or no dialectal variation
* a middle period of slight-to-moderate dialectal variation
* a late period of significant variation
Authorities differ as to which periods should be included in Proto-Slavic and in Common Slavic. The language described in this article generally reflects the middle period, usually termed ''Late Proto-Slavic'' (sometimes ''Middle Common Slavic'') and often dated to around the 7th to 8th centuries. This language remains largely unattested, but a late-period variant, representing the late 9th-century dialect spoken around
Thessaloniki
Thessaloniki (; el, Θεσσαλονίκη, , also known as Thessalonica (), Saloniki, or Salonica (), is the second-largest city in Greece, with over one million inhabitants in its Thessaloniki metropolitan area, metropolitan area, and the capi ...
(
Solun) in
Macedonia
Macedonia most commonly refers to:
* North Macedonia, a country in southeastern Europe, known until 2019 as the Republic of Macedonia
* Macedonia (ancient kingdom), a kingdom in Greek antiquity
* Macedonia (Greece), a traditional geographic reg ...
, is attested in
Old Church Slavonic
Old Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic () was the first Slavic literary language.
Historians credit the 9th-century Byzantine missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius with standardizing the language and using it in translating the Bible and other ...
manuscripts.
Introduction
The ancestor of Proto-Slavic is
Proto-Balto-Slavic, which is also the ancestor of the
Baltic languages
The Baltic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 4.5 million people mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. Together with the Slavic lan ...
, e.g.
Lithuanian
Lithuanian may refer to:
* Lithuanians
* Lithuanian language
* The country of Lithuania
* Grand Duchy of Lithuania
* Culture of Lithuania
* Lithuanian cuisine
* Lithuanian Jews as often called "Lithuanians" (''Lita'im'' or ''Litvaks'') by other Jew ...
and
Latvian. This language in turn is descended from
Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo- ...
, the parent language of the vast majority of
European languages
Most languages of Europe belong to the Indo-European language family. Out of a total European population of 744 million as of 2018, some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language. Within Indo-European, the three largest phyla are Ro ...
(including
English,
Irish,
Spanish,
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
, etc.). Proto-Slavic gradually evolved into the various Slavic languages during the latter half of the first millennium AD, concurrent with the explosive growth of the Slavic-speaking area.
There is no scholarly consensus concerning either the number of stages involved in the development of the language (its
periodization
In historiography, periodization is the process or study of categorizing the past into discrete, quantified, and named blocks of time for the purpose of study or analysis.Adam Rabinowitz. It's about time: historical periodization and Linked Ancie ...
) or the terms used to describe them.
Proto-Slavic is divided into periods. One division is made up of three periods:
*Early Proto-Slavic (until 1000 BC)
*Middle Proto-Slavic (1000 BC – 1 AD)
*Late Proto-Slavic (1–600 AD)
Another division is made up of four periods:
# Pre-Slavic ( 1500 BC – 300 AD): A long, stable period of gradual development. The most significant phonological developments during this period involved the
prosodic system, e.g.
tonal and other
register distinctions on syllables.
# Early Common Slavic or simply Early Slavic (c. 300–600): The early, uniform stage of Common Slavic, but also the beginning of a longer period of rapid phonological change. As there are no dialectal distinctions reconstructible from this period or earlier, this is the period for which a single common ancestor (that is, "Proto-Slavic proper") can be reconstructed.
# Middle Common Slavic (c. 600–800): The stage with the earliest identifiable dialectal distinctions. Rapid phonological change continued, alongside the massive expansion of the Slavic-speaking area. Although some dialectal variation did exist, most sound changes were still uniform and consistent in their application. By the end of this stage, the vowel and consonant phonemes of the language were largely the same as those still found in the modern languages. For this reason, reconstructed "Proto-Slavic" forms commonly found in scholarly works and etymological dictionaries normally correspond to this period.
# Late Common Slavic (c. 800–1000, although perhaps through c. 1150 in
Kyivan Rus'
Kievan Rusʹ, also known as Kyivan Rusʹ ( orv, , Rusĭ, or , , ; Old Norse: ''Garðaríki''), was a state in Eastern and Northern Europe from the late 9th to the mid-13th century.John Channon & Robert Hudson, ''Penguin Historical Atlas o ...
, in the far northeast): The last stage in which the whole Slavic-speaking area still functioned as a single language, with sound changes normally propagating throughout the entire area, although often with significant dialectal variation in the details.
This article considers primarily Middle Common Slavic, noting when there is slight dialectal variation. It also covers Late Common Slavic when there are significant developments that are shared (more or less) identically among all Slavic languages.
Notation
Vowel notation
Two different and conflicting systems for denoting vowels are commonly in use in Indo-European and Balto-Slavic linguistics on the one hand, and Slavic linguistics on the other. In the first, vowel length is consistently distinguished with a macron above the letter, while in the latter it is not clearly indicated. The following table explains these differences:
For consistency, all discussions of words in Early Slavic and before (the boundary corresponding roughly to the
monophthongization of diphthongs, and the
Slavic second palatalization) use the common Balto-Slavic notation of vowels. Discussions of Middle and Late Common Slavic, as well as later dialects, use the Slavic notation.
Other vowel and consonant diacritics
* The
caron
A caron (), háček or haček (, or ; plural ''háčeks'' or ''háčky'') also known as a hachek, wedge, check, kvačica, strešica, mäkčeň, varnelė, inverted circumflex, inverted hat, flying bird, inverted chevron, is a diacritic mark ( ...
on consonants is used in this article to denote the consonants that result from ''iotation'' (coalescence with a that previously followed the consonant) and the
Slavic first palatalization. This use is based on the
Czech alphabet
Czech orthography is a system of rules for proper formal writing (orthography) in Czech. The earliest form of separate Latin script specifically designed to suit Czech was devised by Czech theologian and church reformist Jan Hus, the namesake o ...
, and is shared by most Slavic languages and linguistic explanations about Slavic.
* The acute accent on the consonant indicates a special, more frontal "hissing" sound. The acute is used in several other Slavic languages (such as Polish, Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian) to denote a similar "frontal" quality to a consonant.
* The
ogonek
The (; Polish: , "little tail", diminutive of ) is a diacritic hook placed under the lower right corner of a vowel in the Latin alphabet used in several European languages, and directly under a vowel in several Native American languages. It i ...
, indicates vowel
nasalization
In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is .
In the Internation ...
.
Prosodic notation
For Middle and Late Common Slavic, the following marks are used to indicate tone and length distinctions on vowels, based on the standard notation in
Serbo-Croatian
Serbo-Croatian () – also called Serbo-Croat (), Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia an ...
:
* Acute accent : A long rising accent, originating from the Balto-Slavic "acute" accent. This occurred in the Middle Common Slavic period and earlier.
* Grave accent : A short rising accent. It occurred from Late Common Slavic onwards, and developed from the shortening of the original acute (long rising) tone.
* Inverted breve : A long falling accent, originating from the Balto-Slavic "circumflex" accent. In Late Common Slavic, originally short (falling) vowels were lengthened in monosyllables under some circumstances, and are also written with this mark. This secondary circumflex occurs only on the original short vowels ''e, o, ь, ъ'' in an
open syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological " ...
(i.e. when not forming part of a liquid diphthong).
* Double grave accent : A short falling accent. It corresponds to the Balto-Slavic "short" accent. All short vowels that were not followed by a sonorant consonant originally carried this accent, until some were lengthened (see preceding item).
* Tilde : Usually a long rising accent. This indicates the Late Common Slavic "neoacute" accent, which was usually long, but short when occurring on some syllables types in certain languages. It resulted from retraction of the accent (movement towards an earlier syllable) under certain circumstances, often when the Middle Common Slavic accent fell on a word-final final
yer
A yer is either of two letters in Cyrillic alphabets, ъ (ѥръ, ''jerŭ'') and ь (ѥрь, ''jerĭ''). The Glagolitic alphabet used, as respective counterparts, the letters (Ⱏ) and (Ⱐ). They originally represented phonemically the "u ...
(*ь/ĭ or *ъ/ŭ).
* Macron : A long vowel with no distinctive tone. In Middle Common Slavic, vowel length was an implicit part of the vowel (*e, *o, *ь, *ъ are inherently short, all others are inherently long), so this is usually redundant for Middle Common Slavic words. However, it became distinctive in Late Common Slavic after several shortenings and lengthenings had occurred.
Other prosodic diacritics
There are unfortunately multiple competing systems used to indicate prosody in different Balto-Slavic languages (see
Proto-Balto-Slavic language#Notation for more details). The most important for this article are:
# Three-way system of Proto-Slavic, Proto-Balto-Slavic, modern Lithuanian: Acute tone vs. circumflex tone or vs. short accent .
# Four-way Serbo-Croatian system, also used in Slovenian and often in Slavic reconstructions: long rising , short rising , long falling , short falling . In the
Chakavian
Chakavian or Čakavian (, , , sh-Latn, čakavski proper name: or own name: ''čokovski, čakavski, čekavski'') is a South Slavic regiolect or language spoken primarily by Croats along the Adriatic coast, in the historical regions of Dalma ...
dialect and other archaic dialects, the long rising accent is notated with a tilde , indicating its normal origin in the Late Common Slavic neoacute accent (see above).
# Length only, as in Czech and Slovak: long vs. short .
# Stress only, as in Ukrainian, Russian and Bulgarian: stressed vs. unstressed .
History
Phonology
The following is an overview of the
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...
s that are reconstructible for Middle Common Slavic.
Vowels
Middle Common Slavic had the following vowel system (
IPA symbol where different):
The columns marked "central" and "back" may alternatively be interpreted as "back unrounded" and "back rounded" respectively, but rounding of back vowels was distinctive only between the vowels *y and *u. The other back vowels had optional non-distinctive rounding. Thus:
The vowels described as "short" and "long" were simultaneously distinguished by length and quality in Middle Common Slavic. Vowel length evolved as follows:
#In the Early Slavic period, length was the primary distinction (as indicated, for example, by Greek transcriptions of Slavic words, or early loanwords from Slavic into the
Finnic languages
The Finnic (''Fennic'') or more precisely Balto-Finnic (Balto-Fennic, Baltic Finnic, Baltic Fennic) languages constitute a branch of the Uralic language family spoken around the Baltic Sea by the Baltic Finnic peoples. There are around 7  ...
).
#In the Middle Common Slavic period, all long/short vowel pairs also assumed distinct qualities, as indicated above.
#During the Late Common Slavic period, various lengthenings and shortenings occurred, creating new long counterparts of originally short vowels, and short counterparts of originally long vowels (e.g. long *o, short *a). The short close vowels *ь/ĭ and *ъ/ŭ were either lost or lowered to mid vowels, leaving the originally long high vowels *i, *y and *u with non-distinctive length. As a result, vowel quality became the primary distinction among the vowels, while length became conditioned by accent and other properties and was not a lexical property inherent in each vowel.
#Many modern Slavic languages have since lost all length distinctions.
Some authors avoid the terms "short" and "long", using "lax" and "tense" instead.
Consonants
Middle Common Slavic had the following consonants (IPA symbols where different):
The phonetic value (IPA symbol) of most consonants is the same as their traditional spelling. Some notes and exceptions:
* *c denotes a voiceless alveolar affricate . *dz was its voiced counterpart .
* *š and *ž were postalveolar and .
* *č and *dž were postalveolar affricates, and , although the latter only occurred in the combination *ždž and had developed into *ž elsewhere.
* The pronunciation of *ť and *ď is not precisely known, though it is likely that they were held longer (geminate). They may have been palatalized dentals , or perhaps true palatal as in modern Macedonian.
* The exact value of *ś is also unknown but usually presumed to be or . It was rare, only occurring before front vowels from the second palatalization of *x, and it merged with *š in West Slavic and *s in the other branches.
* *v was a labial approximant originating from an earlier . It may have had bilabial as an allophone in certain positions (as in modern Slovene and Ukrainian).
* *l was . Before back vowels, it was probably fairly strongly velarized in many dialects.
* The sonorants *ľ *ň could have been either palatalized or true palatal .
* The pronunciation of *ř is not precisely known, but it was approximately a palatalized trill . In all daughter languages except Slovenian it either merged with *r (Southwest Slavic) or with the palatalized *rʲ resulting from *r before front vowels (elsewhere). The resulting *rʲ merged back into *r in some languages, but remained distinct in Czech (becoming a
fricative trill
In phonetics, a trill is a consonantal sound produced by vibrations between the active articulator and passive articulator. Standard Spanish as in , for example, is an alveolar trill.
A trill is made by the articulator being held in place an ...
, denoted in spelling), in
Old Polish
The Old Polish language ( pl, język staropolski, staropolszczyzna) was a period in the history of the Polish language between the 10th and the 16th centuries. It was followed by the Middle Polish language.
The sources for the study of the Old ...
(it subsequently merged with *ž but continues to be spelled , although some dialects have kept a distinction to this day, specially among the elderly
), in Russian (except when preceding a consonant), and in Bulgarian (when preceding a vowel).
In most dialects, non-distinctive palatalization was probably present on all consonants that occurred before front vowels. When the high front yer *ь/ĭ was lost in many words, it left this palatalization as a "residue", which then became distinctive, producing a phonemic distinction between palatalized and non-palatalized alveolars and labials. In the process, the palatal sonorants *ľ *ň *ř merged with alveolar *l *n *r before front vowels, with both becoming *lʲ *nʲ *rʲ. Subsequently, some palatalized consonants lost their palatalization in some environments, merging with their non-palatal counterparts. This happened the least in Russian and the most in Czech. Palatalized consonants never developed in Southwest Slavic (modern Croatian, Serbian, and Slovenian), and the merger of *ľ *ň *ř with *l *n *r did not happen before front vowels (although Serbian and Croatian later merged *ř with *r).
Pitch accent
As in its ancestors, Proto-Balto-Slavic and Proto-Indo-European, one syllable of each Common Slavic word was accented (carried more prominence). The placement of the accent was free and thus phonemic; it could occur on any syllable and its placement was inherently part of the word. The accent could also be either mobile or fixed, meaning that inflected forms of a word could have the accent on different syllables depending on the ending, or always on the same syllable.
Common Slavic vowels also had a
pitch accent
A pitch-accent language, when spoken, has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch ( linguistic tone) rather than by loudness ...
. In Middle Common Slavic, all accented long vowels, nasal vowels and liquid diphthongs had a distinction between two pitch accents, traditionally called "acute" and "circumflex" accent. The acute accent was pronounced with rising intonation, while the circumflex accent had a falling intonation. Short vowels (*e *o *ь *ъ) had no pitch distinction, and were always pronounced with falling intonation. Unaccented (unstressed) vowels never had tonal distinctions, but could still have length distinctions. These rules are similar to the restrictions that apply to the pitch accent in
Slovene.
In the Late Common Slavic period, several sound changes occurred. Long vowels bearing the acute (long rising) accent were usually shortened, resulting in a short rising intonation. Some short vowels were lengthened, creating new long falling vowels. A third type of pitch accent developed, known as the "neoacute", as a result of
sound laws that retracted the accent (moved it to the preceding syllable). This occurred at a time when the Slavic-speaking area was already dialectally differentiated, and usually syllables with the acute and/or circumflex accent were shortened around the same time. Hence it is unclear whether there was ever a period in any dialect when there were three phonemically distinct pitch accents on long vowels. Nevertheless, taken together, these changes significantly altered the distribution of the pitch accents and vowel length, to the point that by the end of the Late Common Slavic period almost any vowel could be short or long, and almost any accented vowel could have falling or rising pitch.
Phonotactics
Most syllables in Middle Common Slavic were
open
Open or OPEN may refer to:
Music
* Open (band), Australian pop/rock band
* The Open (band), English indie rock band
* ''Open'' (Blues Image album), 1969
* ''Open'' (Gotthard album), 1999
* ''Open'' (Cowboy Junkies album), 2001
* ''Open'' (Y ...
. The only closed syllables were those that ended in a liquid (*l or *r), forming liquid diphthongs, and in such syllables, the preceding vowel had to be short.
Consonant cluster
In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound, is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word ''splits''. In the education f ...
s were permitted, but only at the beginning of a syllable. Such a cluster was syllabified with the cluster entirely in the following syllable, contrary to the syllabification rules that are known to apply to most languages. For example, "wealth" was divided into syllables as , with the whole cluster at the beginning of the syllable.
By the beginning of the Late Common Slavic period, all or nearly all syllables had become open as a result of
developments in the liquid diphthongs. Syllables with liquid diphthongs beginning with *o or *e had been converted into open syllables, for example *TorT became *TroT, *TraT or *ToroT in the various daughter languages. The main exception are the Northern
Lechitic languages (
Kashubian Kashubian can refer to:
* Pertaining to Kashubia, a region of north-central Poland
* Kashubians, an ethnic group of north-central Poland
* Kashubian language
See also
*Kashubian alphabet
The Kashubian or Cassubian alphabet (''kaszëbsczi alf ...
, extinct
Slovincian and
Polabian) only with lengthening of the syllable and no metathesis (*TarT, e.g. PSl. > Kashubian ; > Polabian > ). In West Slavic and South Slavic, liquid diphthongs beginning with *ь or *ъ had likewise been converted into open syllables by converting the following liquid into a
syllabic sonorant
A syllabic consonant or vocalic consonant is a consonant that forms a syllable on its own, like the ''m'', ''n'' and ''l'' in some pronunciations of the English words ''rhythm'', ''button'' and ''bottle''. To represent it, the understroke diacr ...
(palatal or non-palatal according to whether *ь or *ъ preceded respectively). This left no closed syllables at all in these languages. Most of the South Slavic languages, as well as Czech and Slovak, tended to preserve the syllabic sonorants, but in the Lechitic languages (such as Polish) and Bulgarian, they fell apart again into vowel-consonant or consonant-vowel combinations. In East Slavic, the liquid diphthongs in *ь or *ъ may have likewise become syllabic sonorants, but if so, the change was soon reversed, suggesting that it may never have happened in the first place.
Grammar
Proto-Slavic retained several of the grammatical categories inherited from Proto-Indo-European, especially in nominals (nouns and adjectives). Seven of the eight Indo-European cases had been retained (nominative, accusative, locative, genitive, dative, instrumental, vocative). The ablative had merged with the genitive. It also retained full use of the singular,
dual
Dual or Duals may refer to:
Paired/two things
* Dual (mathematics), a notion of paired concepts that mirror one another
** Dual (category theory), a formalization of mathematical duality
*** see more cases in :Duality theories
* Dual (grammatical ...
and plural numbers, and still maintained a distinction between masculine, feminine and neuter gender. However, verbs had become much more simplified, but displayed their own unique innovations.
Alternations
As a result of the three palatalizations and the fronting of vowels before palatal consonants, both consonant and vowel alternations were frequent in paradigms, as well as in word derivation.
The following table lists various consonant alternations that occurred in Proto-Slavic, as a result of various suffixes or endings being attached to stems:
* Originally formed a diphthong with the preceding vowel, which then became a long monophthong.
* Forms a nasal vowel.
* Forms a liquid diphthong.
Vowels were fronted when following a palatal or "soft" consonant (*j, any iotated consonant, or a consonant that had been affected by the progressive palatalization). Because of this, most vowels occurred in pairs, depending on the preceding consonant.
* The distinction between *ě₁ and *ě₂ is based on etymology and have different effects on a preceding consonant: *ě₁ triggers the first palatalization and then becomes *a, while *ě₂ triggers the second palatalization and does not change.
* Word-final *-un and *-in lost nasal and became *-u and *-i rather than forming a nasal vowel, so that nasal vowels formed medially only. This explains the double reflex.
* *ā and *an apparently did not take part in the fronting of back vowels, or in any case the effect was not visible. Both have the same reflex regardless of the preceding consonant.
Most word stems therefore became classed as either "soft" or "hard", depending on whether their endings used soft (fronted) vowels or the original hard vowels. Hard stems displayed consonant alternations before endings with front vowels as a result of the two regressive palatalizations and iotation.
As part of its Indo-European heritage, Proto-Slavic also retained
ablaut
In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut (, from German '' Ablaut'' ) is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE).
An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb ''sing, sang, sung'' and i ...
alternations, although these had been reduced to unproductive relics. The following table lists the combinations (vowel softening may alter the outcomes).
Although qualitative alternations (e-grade versus o-grade versus zero grade) were no longer productive, the Balto-Slavic languages had innovated a new kind of ablaut, in which length was the primary distinction. This created two new alternation patterns, which did not exist in PIE: short *e, *o, *ь, *ъ versus long *ě, *a, *i, *y. This type of alternation may have still been productive in Proto-Slavic, as a way to form imperfective verbs from perfective ones.
Accent classes
Originally in Balto-Slavic, there were only two accent classes, ''fixed'' (with fixed stem accent) and ''mobile'' (with accent alternating between stem and ending). There was no class with fixed accent on the ending. Both classes originally had both acute and circumflex stems in them. Two sound changes acted to modify this basic system:
*
Meillet's law, which removed any stem acutes in mobile-accent words.
*
Dybo's law, which advanced the accent in non-acute fixed-accent words.
As a result, three basic accent paradigms emerged:
* Accent paradigm ''a'', with a fixed accent on the stem (either on the root or on a morphological suffix).
* Accent paradigm ''b'', with largely fixed accent on the first syllable of the ending, sometimes retracted back onto the stem by
Ivšić's law.
* Accent paradigm ''c'' ("mobile"), with alternation of the accent between the first syllable of the stem and the ending, depending on the paradigmatic form.
For this purpose, the "stem" includes any morphological suffixes (e.g. a
diminutive
A diminutive is a root word that has been modified to convey a slighter degree of its root meaning, either to convey the smallness of the object or quality named, or to convey a sense of intimacy or endearment. A ( abbreviated ) is a word-form ...
suffix), but not generally on the inflectional suffix that indicates the word class (e.g. the ''-ā-'' of feminine ''ā''-stem nouns), which is considered part of the ending. Verbs also had three accent paradigms, with similar characteristics to the corresponding noun classes. However, the situation is somewhat more complicated due to the large number of verb stem classes and the numerous forms in verbal paradigms.
Due to the way in which the accent classes arose, there are certain restrictions:
* In ''a'', the accented syllable always had the acute tone, and therefore was always long, because short syllables did not have tonal distinctions. Thus, single-syllable words with an originally short vowel (*''e'', *''o'', *''ь'', *''ъ'') in the stem could not belong to accent AP ''a''. If the stem was multisyllabic, the accent could potentially fall on any stem syllable (e.g. "tongue"). These restrictions were caused by Dybo's law, which moved the accent one syllable to the right, but only in originally barytonic (stem-accented) nominals that did not have acute accent in the stem. AP ''a'' thus consists of the "leftover" words that Dybo's law did not affect.
* In AP ''b'', the stem syllable(s) could be either short or long.
* In AP ''c'', in forms where the accent fell on the stem and not the ending, that syllable was either circumflex or short accented, never acute accented. This is due to
Meillet's law, which converted an acute accent to a circumflex accent if it fell on the stem in AP ''c'' nominals. Thus, Dybo's law did not affect nouns with a mobile accent paradigm. This is unlike Lithuanian, where
Leskien's law (a law similar to Dybo's law) split both fixed and mobile paradigms in the same way, creating four classes.
* Consequently, circumflex or short accent on the first syllable could only occur in AP ''c''. In AP ''a'', it did not occur by definition, while in AP ''b'', the accent always shifted forward by Dybo's law.
Some nouns (especially ''jā''-stem nouns) fit into the AP ''a'' pattern but have neoacute accent on the stem, which can have either a short or a long syllable. A standard example is "will", with neoacute accent on a short syllable. These nouns earlier belonged to AP ''b''; as a result, grammars may treat them as belonging either to AP ''a'' or ''b''.
During the Late Common Slavic period, the AP ''b'' paradigm became mobile as a result of a complex series of changes that moved the accent leftward in certain circumstances, producing a neoacute accent on the newly stressed syllable. The paradigms below reflect these changes. All languages subsequently simplified the AP ''b'' paradigms to varying degrees; the older situation can often only be seen in certain nouns in certain languages, or indirectly by way of features such as the Slovene neo-circumflex tone that carry echoes of the time when this tone developed. See
History of Proto-Slavic#Accentual developments for more details.
Nouns
Most of the Proto-Indo-European declensional classes were retained. Some, such as u-stems and masculine i-stems, were gradually falling out of use and being replaced by other, more productive classes.
The following tables are examples of Proto-Slavic noun-class paradigms, based on . There were many changes in accentuation during the Common Slavic period, and there are significant differences in the views of different scholars on how these changes proceeded. As a result, these paradigms do not necessarily reflect a consensus. The view expressed below is that of the Leiden school, following
Frederik Kortlandt, whose views are somewhat controversial and not accepted by all scholars.
AP ''a'' nouns
All single-syllable AP ''a'' stems are long. This is because all such stems had Balto-Slavic acute register in the root, which can only occur on long syllables. Single-syllable short and non-acute long syllables became AP ''b'' nouns in Common Slavic through the operation of Dybo's law. In stems of multiple syllables, there are also cases of short or neoacute accents in accent AP ''a'', such as ''*osnòvā''. These arose through advancement of the accent by Dybo's law onto a non-acute stem syllable (as opposed to onto an ending). When the accent was advanced onto a long non-acute syllable, it was retracted again by Ivšić's law to give a neoacute accent, in the same position as the inherited Balto-Slavic short or circumflex accent.
The distribution of short and long vowels in the stems without /j/ reflects the original vowel lengths, prior to the operation of Van Wijk's law,
Dybo's law and
Stang's law, which led to AP ''b'' nouns and the differing lengths in /j/ stems.
AP ''b'' nouns
AP ''b'' ''jā''-stem nouns are not listed here. The combination of Van Wijk's law and Stang's law would have originally produced a complex mobile paradigm in these nouns, different from the mobile paradigm of ''ā''-stem and other nouns, but this was apparently simplified in Common Slavic times with a consistent neoacute accent on the stem, as if they were AP ''a'' nouns. The AP ''b'' ''jo''-stem nouns were also simplified, but less dramatically, with consistent ending stress in the singular but consistent root stress in the plural, as shown. AP ''b'' ''s''-stem noun are not listed here, because there may not have been any.
AP ''c'' nouns
The accent pattern for the strong singular cases (nominative and accusative) and all plural cases is straightforward:
#All weak cases (genitive, dative, instrumental, locative) in the plural are ending-stressed.
#The *-à ending that marks the nominative singular of the (j)ā-stems and nominative–accusative plural of the neuter -stems is ending-stressed.
#All other strong cases (singular and plural) are stem-stressed.
For the weak singular cases, it can be observed:
#All such cases in the -stems are stem-stressed.
#All such cases in the - and i-stems are end-stressed except the dative. (However, the masculine i-stem instrumental singular is stem-stressed because it is borrowed directly from the jo-stem.)
The long-rising versus short-rising accent on ending-accented forms with Middle Common Slavic long vowels reflects original circumflex versus acute register, respectively.
Adjectives
Adjective inflection had become more simplified compared to Proto-Indo-European. Only a single paradigm (in both hard and soft form) existed, descending from the PIE o- and a-stem inflection. I-stem and u-stem adjectives no longer existed. The present participle (from PIE *-nt-) still retained consonant stem endings.
Proto-Slavic had developed a distinction between "indefinite" and "definite" adjective inflection, much like Germanic strong and weak inflection. The definite inflection was used to refer to specific or known entities, similar to the use of the definite article "the" in English, while the indefinite inflection was unspecific or referred to unknown or arbitrary entities, like the English indefinite article "a". The indefinite inflection was identical to the inflection of o- and a-stem nouns, while the definite inflection was formed by suffixing the relative/anaphoric pronoun to the end of the normal inflectional endings. Both the adjective and the suffixed pronoun were presumably declined as separate words originally, but already within Proto-Slavic they had become contracted and fused to some extent.
Verbs
The Proto-Slavic system of verbal inflection was somewhat simplified from the verbal system of Proto-Indo-European (PIE), although it was still rich in tenses, conjugations and verb-forming suffixes.
Grammatical categories
The PIE mediopassive voice disappeared entirely except for the isolated form ''vědě'' "I know" in Old Church Slavonic (< Late PIE *woid-ai, a perfect mediopassive formation). However, a new analytic mediopassive was formed using the reflexive particle , much as in the
Romance languages
The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language f ...
. The imperative and subjunctive moods disappeared, while the old optative came to be used as the imperative instead.
In terms of PIE tense/aspect forms, the PIE imperfect was lost or merged with the PIE thematic aorist, and the PIE perfect was lost other than in the stem of the irregular verb "to know" (from PIE ). The aorist was retained, preserving the PIE thematic and sigmatic aorist types (the former is generally termed the ''root aorist'' in Slavic studies), and a new ''productive aorist'' arose from the sigmatic aorist by various analogical changes, e.g. replacing some of the original endings with thematic endings. (A similar development is observed in Greek and Sanskrit. In all three cases, the likely trigger was the phonological reduction of clusters like *-ss-, *-st- that arose when the original athematic endings were attached to the sigmatic *-s- affix.) A new synthetic imperfect was created by attaching a combination of the root and productive aorist endings to a stem suffix *-ěa- or *-aa-, of disputed origin. Various compound tenses were created, e.g. to express the future, conditional, perfect and pluperfect.
The three numbers (singular, dual and plural) were all maintained, as were the different athematic and thematic endings. Only five athematic verbs exist: "to know", "to be", "to give", "to eat" and "to have". (*dati has a finite stem *dad-, suggesting derivation by some sort of reduplication.) A new set of "semi-thematic" endings were formed by analogy (corresponding to modern conjugation class II), combining the thematic first singular ending with otherwise athematic endings. Proto-Slavic also maintained a large number of non-finite formations, including the infinitive, the supine, a verbal noun, and five participles (present active, present passive, past active, past passive and resultative). In large measure these directly continue PIE formations.
Aspect
Proto-Indo-European had an extensive system of aspectual distinctions ("present" vs. "aorist" vs. "perfect" in traditional terminology), found throughout the system. Proto-Slavic maintained part of this, distinguishing between aorist and imperfect in the past tense. In addition, Proto-Slavic evolved a means of forming
lexical aspect (verbs inherently marked with a particular aspect) using various prefixes and suffixes, which was eventually extended into a systematic means of specifying grammatical aspect using pairs of related lexical verbs, each with the same meaning as the other but inherently marked as either imperfective (denoting an ongoing action) or perfective (denoting a completed action). The two sets of verbs interrelate in three primary ways:
#A suffix is added to a more basic perfective verb to form an imperfective verb.
#A prefix is added to a more basic imperfective verb (possibly the output of the previous step) to form a perfective verb. Often, multiple perfective verbs can be formed this way using different prefixes, one of which echoes the basic meaning of the source verb while the others add various shades of meaning (cf. English "write" vs. "write down" vs. "write up" vs. "write out").
#The two verbs are suppletive — either based on two entirely different roots, or derived from different PIE verb classes of the same root, often with root-vowel changes going back to PIE
ablaut
In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut (, from German '' Ablaut'' ) is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE).
An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb ''sing, sang, sung'' and i ...
formations.
In Proto-Slavic and Old Church Slavonic, the old and new aspect systems coexisted, but the new aspect has gradually displaced the old one, and as a result most modern Slavic languages have lost the old imperfect, aorist, and most participles. A major exception, however, is Bulgarian (and also Macedonian to a fair extent), which has maintained both old and new systems and combined them to express fine shades of aspectual meaning. For example, in addition to imperfective imperfect forms and perfective aorist forms, Bulgarian can form a perfective imperfect (usually expressing a repeated series of completed actions considered subordinate to the "major" past actions) and an imperfective aorist (for "major" past events whose completion is not relevant to the narration).
Proto-Slavic also had paired motion verbs (e.g. "run", "walk", "swim", "fly", but also "ride", "carry", "lead", "chase", etc.). One of the pair expresses ''determinate'' action (motion to a specified place, e.g. "I walked to my friend's house") and the other expressing ''indeterminate'' action (motion to and then back, and motion without a specified goal). These pairs are generally related using either the suffixing or suppletive strategies of forming aspectual verbs. Each of the pair is also in fact a pair of perfective vs. imperfective verbs, where the perfective variant often uses a prefix ''*po-''.
Conjugation
Many different PIE verb classes were retained in Proto-Slavic, including (among others) simple thematic presents, presents in *-n- and *-y-,
stative verbs in *-ē- (cf. similar verbs in the Latin ''-ēre'' conjugation), factitive verbs in *-ā- (cf. the Latin ''-āre'' conjugation), and o-grade causatives in *-éye-.
The forms of each verb were based on two basic stems, one for the present and one for the infinitive/past. The present stem was used before endings beginning in a vowel, the infinitive/past stem before endings beginning in a consonant. In Old Church Slavonic grammars, verbs are traditionally divided into four (or five) conjugation classes, depending on the present stem, known as
Leskien's verb classes. However, this division ignores the formation of the infinitive stem. The following table shows the main classes of verbs in Proto-Slavic, along with their traditional OCS conjugation classes. The "present" column shows the ending of the third person singular present.
Accent
The same three classes occurred in verbs as well. However, different parts of a verb's conjugation could have different accent classes, due to differences in syllable structure and sometimes also due to historical anomalies. Generally, when verbs as a whole are classified according to accent paradigm, the present tense paradigm is taken as the base.
=AP ''a'' verbs
=
Verbs in accent paradigm ''a'' are the most straightforward, with acute accent on the stem throughout the paradigm.
=AP ''b'' verbs
=
Verbs with a present stem in ''*-e-'' have short ''*-è-'' in the present tense and acute ''*-ě̀-'' or ''*-ì-'' in the imperative. Verbs with a present stem in ''*-i-'' have acute ''*-ì-'' in the imperative, but a historical long circumflex in the present tense, and therefore retract it into a neoacute on the stem in all forms with a multisyllabic ending. The infinitive is normally accented on the first syllable of the ending, which may be a suffixal vowel (''*-àti'', ''*-ìti'') or the infinitive ending itself (''*-tì'').
In a subset of verbs with the basic ''*-ti'' ending, known as AP ''a/b'' verbs, the infinitive has a stem acute accent instead, ''*mèlti'', present ''*meľètь''. Such verbs historically had acute stems ending in a long vowel or diphthong, and should have belonged to AP ''a''. However, the stem was followed by a consonant in some forms (e.g. the infinitive) and by a vowel in others (the present tense). The forms with a following vowel were resyllabified into a short vowel + sonorant, which also caused the loss of the acute in these forms, because the short vowel could not be acuted. The short vowel in turn was subject to Dybo's law, while the original long vowel/diphthong remained acuted and thus resisted the change.
=AP ''c'' verbs
=
Verbs in accent paradigm ''c'' have the accent on the final syllable in the present tense, except in the first-person singular, which has a short or long falling accent on the stem. Where the final syllable contains a yer, the accent is retracted onto the thematic vowel and becomes neoacute (short on ''*e'', long on ''*i''). In the imperative, the accent is on the syllable after the stem, with acute ''*-ě̀-'' or ''*-ì-''.
In verbs with a vowel suffix between stem and ending, the accent in the infinitive falls on the vowel suffix (''*-àti'', ''*-ě̀ti'', ''*-ìti''). In verbs with the basic ending ''*-ti'', the accentuation is unpredictable. Most verbs have the accent on the ''*-tì'', but if the infinitive was historically affected by
Hirt's law, the accent is acute on the stem instead. Meillet's law did not apply in these cases.
Sample text
Article 1 of the ''
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is an international document adopted by the United Nations General Assembly that enshrines the rights and freedoms of all human beings. Drafted by a UN committee chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, ...
'' in reconstructed Proto-Slavic language, written in
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the ...
:
:''Vьśi ľudьje rodętь sę svobodьni i orvьni vъ dostojьnьstvě i zakoně. Oni sǫtь odařeni orzumomь i sъvěstьjǫ i dъlžьni vesti sę drugъ kъ drugu vъ duśě bratrьstva.''
Article 1 of the ''Universal Declaration of Human Rights'' in English:
:''All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.''
See also
*
History of the Slavic languages
*
Old Church Slavonic
Old Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic () was the first Slavic literary language.
Historians credit the 9th-century Byzantine missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius with standardizing the language and using it in translating the Bible and other ...
*
Slavic liquid metathesis and pleophony
*
Slavic languages
The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavs, Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic language, Proto ...
*
Balto-Slavic languages
The Balto-Slavic languages form a branch of the Indo-European family of languages, traditionally comprising the Baltic and Slavic languages. Baltic and Slavic languages share several linguistic traits not found in any other Indo-European bran ...
*
Language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in his ...
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Interslavic
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Proto-Slavic borrowings
Notes
References
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*Olander, Thomas. ''Proto-Slavic Inflectional Morphology: A Comparative Handbook''. Leiden: Brill, 2015.
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Further reading
;In English
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;In other languages
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* Boryś, Wiesław.
Warstwy chronologiczne leksyki prasłowiańskiej na przykładzie słownictwa anatomicznego hronological layers of Proto-Slavic lexis on the example of anatomical vocabulary In:
Rocznik Slawistyczny' LXIX (2020): 3-28. DOI: 10.24425/rslaw.2020.134706.
* .
Prasłowiańska leksyka topograficzna i hydrograficzna roto‑Slavic topographic and hydrographic lexis In:
Rocznik Slawistyczny' LXX (2021): 13-54. DOI: 10.24425/rslaw.2021.138337.
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* Tolstaya, Svetlana M.
Two-Part Personal Names in the Proto-Slavic Language. In: ''ВОПРОСЫ ОНОМАСТИКИ'' Vol. 18, no. 2 (JUL 2021). pp. 9–32. https://doi.org/10.15826/vopr_onom.2021.18.2.016 (In Russian).
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Toporov, V. N.Sulla ricostruzione dello stadio più antico del protoslavo. In: ''Res Balticae'' Nr. 04, 1998. pp. 9–38.
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Slavic