ÐÂÏã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê¿ª½±½á¹û

The module is designed with the aim of familiarising students with the history of the oldest documented Slavonic language, Old Church Slavonic, and of introducing them to the basics of its phonetic, phonological, and morphological structure. Students will gain knowledge of the two early Slavonic alphabets, the Glagolitic and the Cyrillic. They will learn to read and translate, analyse and discuss a wide range of phonetic and phonological changes, word sets, phrases and grammatical structures in Old Church Slavonic. While examining Old Church Slavonic texts, students will also acquire some knowledge and understanding of Old Church Slavonic literature and its distinctive features.

The module will also introduce students to the different branches of modern Slavonic languages. By analysing individual words and grammatical features of various Slavonic languages from the Old Church Slavonic perspective, students will learn how to compare and contrast these languages and critically examine the level of linguistic proximity and distance within the Slavonic branch of Indo-European languages. For example, we will explore how and why certain Old Church Slavonic vowels evolved into qualitatively different vowels in modern Slavonic languages which explains why certain Slavonic words have similar phonetic content and only differ in the root vowel: e.g. ‘tooth’ is зуб in Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian and zub in Serbo-Croatian and Czech; zob in Slovene; ząb in Polish, зъб in Bulgarian, etc. Moreover, we will learn how to use the basics of Old Church Slavonic and comparative Slavonic grammar as a strategy in learning efficiently a new Slavonic language in addition to the one you already have been learning.