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:The greatest disparities within the Slavic language family are between South Slavic tongues and the rest of the Slavonic languages.<ref name="palgrave" />{{pn|date=June 2022}}<ref name="CPotSN">{{cite web|url=https://www.academia.edu/32675557|title=Cultural Proximity of the Slavic Nations|last=Serafin|first=Mikołaj|format=PDF|date=January 2015|accessdate=April 28, 2017}}</ref>{{pn|date=June 2022}} Moreover, there are many exceptions and whole dialects that break the division of East and West Slavic languages; thus the Slavs are clearly divided into two main linguistic groups: the North Slavs and the South Slavs, which can then be further categorised as the Northwest tongues ([[Czech language|Czech]], [[Kashubian language|Kashubian]], [[Polish language|Polish]], [[Silesian language|Silesian]], [[Slovak language|Slovak]], and [[Sorbian languages|Sorbian]]) and the Northeast ones ([[Belarusian language|Belarusian]], [[Russian language|Russian]], [[Rusyn language|Rusyn]], and [[Ukrainian language|Ukrainian]]) – whereas the Southern branch is split into the widely accepted groups of the Southwest languages ([[Serbo-Croatian language|Serbo-Croatian]] and [[Slovene language|Slovene]]) and the Southeast tongues ([[Bulgarian language|Bulgarian]] and [[Macedonian language|Macedonian]]).<ref name="CPotSN" />{{pn|date=June 2022}}<br />
:The greatest disparities within the Slavic language family are between South Slavic tongues and the rest of the Slavonic languages.<ref name="palgrave" />{{pn|date=June 2022}}<ref name="CPotSN">{{cite web|url=https://www.academia.edu/32675557|title=Cultural Proximity of the Slavic Nations|last=Serafin|first=Mikołaj|format=PDF|date=January 2015|accessdate=April 28, 2017}}</ref>{{pn|date=June 2022}} Moreover, there are many exceptions and whole dialects that break the division of East and West Slavic languages; thus the Slavs are clearly divided into two main linguistic groups: the North Slavs and the South Slavs, which can then be further categorised as the Northwest tongues ([[Czech language|Czech]], [[Kashubian language|Kashubian]], [[Polish language|Polish]], [[Silesian language|Silesian]], [[Slovak language|Slovak]], and [[Sorbian languages|Sorbian]]) and the Northeast ones ([[Belarusian language|Belarusian]], [[Russian language|Russian]], [[Rusyn language|Rusyn]], and [[Ukrainian language|Ukrainian]]) – whereas the Southern branch is split into the widely accepted groups of the Southwest languages ([[Serbo-Croatian language|Serbo-Croatian]] and [[Slovene language|Slovene]]) and the Southeast tongues ([[Bulgarian language|Bulgarian]] and [[Macedonian language|Macedonian]]).<ref name="CPotSN" />{{pn|date=June 2022}}<br />
:Ukrainian and Belarusian have both been hugely influenced by Polish in the past centuries due to their geographic and cultural proximity, as well as some efforts at Polonising the Ruthenian population of the [[Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth|Polish Commonwealth]].<ref name="CPotSN" />{{pn|date=June 2022}} Professor Michał Łesiów once said that "there are no two languages in the Slavic area that were as equally close to each other as Polish and Ruthenian".<ref>Łesiów, M. (2011). In: Łabowicz, L. (ed.) Gdzie "sicz", a gdzie "porohy"?!. In: Над Бугом і Нарвою, Iss. 117, p. 15.</ref>{{clarification needed|date=June 2022|reason=What does that mean, and why is it relevant to the concept of North Slavic languages?}} According to [[Kostiantyn Tyshchenko]], Ukrainian shares 70% common vocabulary with Polish and 66% with Slovak, which puts them both ahead of Russian (at 62%) in their lexical proximity to Ukrainian.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://langs.com.ua/movy/zapoz/2.htm|title=Мови Європи: відстані між мовами за словниковим складом|last=Tyschenko|first=Kostiantyn|accessdate=April 29, 2017|url-status=dead|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20150501234649/http://langs.com.ua/movy/zapoz/2.htm|archivedate=May 1, 2015}}</ref>{{clarification needed|date=June 2022|reason=What does that mean, and why is it relevant to the concept of North Slavic languages?}} Furthermore, Tyschenko identified 82 grammatical and phonetic features of the Ukrainian tongue – Polish, Czech and Slovak share upwards of 20 of these characteristics with Ukrainian, whereas Russian apparently only 11.<ref>Tyshchenko, K. (2012). Правда про походження української мови. In: Lytvynenko, S (ed.) Український тиждень, Iss. 39, p. 35.</ref>{{clarification needed|date=June 2022|reason=What does that mean, and why is it relevant to the concept of North Slavic languages?}} In contrast to other dialects of Slovak, Eastern dialects (sometimes called [[Slovjak]]) are less intelligible with Czech and more with Polish and Rusyn.<ref>{{cite book|last=Štolc|first=Jozef|title=Slovenská dialektológia [Slovak dialectology]|year=1994|publisher=Ed. I. Ripka.|location=Bratislava: Veda.}}</ref>{{clarification needed|date=June 2022|reason=What does that mean, and why is it relevant to the concept of North Slavic languages?}}
:Ukrainian and Belarusian have both been hugely influenced by Polish in the past centuries due to their geographic and cultural proximity, as well as some efforts at Polonising the Ruthenian population of the [[Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth|Polish Commonwealth]].<ref name="CPotSN" />{{pn|date=June 2022}} Professor Michał Łesiów once said that "there are no two languages in the Slavic area that were as equally close to each other as Polish and Ruthenian".<ref>Łesiów, M. (2011). In: Łabowicz, L. (ed.) Gdzie "sicz", a gdzie "porohy"?!. In: Над Бугом і Нарвою, Iss. 117, p. 15.</ref>{{clarification needed|date=June 2022|reason=What does that mean, and why is it relevant to the concept of North Slavic languages?}} According to [[Kostiantyn Tyshchenko]], Ukrainian shares 70% common vocabulary with Polish and 66% with Slovak, which puts them both ahead of Russian (at 62%) in their lexical proximity to Ukrainian.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://langs.com.ua/movy/zapoz/2.htm|title=Мови Європи: відстані між мовами за словниковим складом|last=Tyschenko|first=Kostiantyn|accessdate=April 29, 2017|url-status=dead|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20150501234649/http://langs.com.ua/movy/zapoz/2.htm|archivedate=May 1, 2015}}</ref>{{clarification needed|date=June 2022|reason=What does that mean, and why is it relevant to the concept of North Slavic languages?}} Furthermore, Tyschenko identified 82 grammatical and phonetic features of the Ukrainian tongue – Polish, Czech and Slovak share upwards of 20 of these characteristics with Ukrainian, whereas Russian apparently only 11.<ref>Tyshchenko, K. (2012). Правда про походження української мови. In: Lytvynenko, S (ed.) Український тиждень, Iss. 39, p. 35.</ref>{{clarification needed|date=June 2022|reason=What does that mean, and why is it relevant to the concept of North Slavic languages?}} In contrast to other dialects of Slovak, Eastern dialects (sometimes called [[Slovjak]]) are less intelligible with Czech and more with Polish and Rusyn.<ref>{{cite book|last=Štolc|first=Jozef|title=Slovenská dialektológia [Slovak dialectology]|year=1994|publisher=Ed. I. Ripka.|location=Bratislava: Veda.}}</ref>{{clarification needed|date=June 2022|reason=What does that mean, and why is it relevant to the concept of North Slavic languages?}}

Tracing back to the [[Greek East and Latin West]] split in Late Antiquity, there are cultural divisions within the North Slavonic language family with regard to writing systems and religions: the [[West Slavic languages]] mostly use versions of the [[Latin script]] and have or historically had a Catholic-majority population, while the [[East Slavic languages]] are usually written in the [[Cyrillic script]] and have or historically had an Orthodox-majority population.<ref name="O.T. Ford" /> A similar east-west split exists for people speaking South Slavic languages in the Balkans, although [[spread of the Latin script|the Latin script is spreading]] in countries where Serbo-Croatian is frequently spoken and the majority population is Orthodox, such as Montenegro.<ref name="O.T. Ford" /> The North Slavic and South Slavic-speaking territories are thus both generally geographically divided between [[Eastern Christianity|Eastern]] and [[Western Christianity]], and the great majority of all [[Eastern Orthodoxy|Eastern Orthodox believers]] in the world are found in the eastern parts of both the North Slavic and South Slavic areas, while a minority are [[Eastern Catholic Churches|Eastern-rite Catholics]].<ref name="O.T. Ford" />


== Constructed languages ==
== Constructed languages ==

Revision as of 09:12, 25 June 2022

Not to be confused with North Slavey language.

The term North Slavic languages is used in two main senses:

  • for a number of proposed groupings or subdivisions of the Slavic languages. However, "North Slavic" is not widely used in this sense, and has no agreed definition. Modern scholars usually divide the Slavic languages into West Slavic, East Slavic, and South Slavic.[1]
  • for a number of constructed languages that were created in the 20th and 21st century, and have been derived from existing Slavic languages.

Proposed subdivisions

Historically, the term "North Slav" has been used in academia since at least the first half of the 19th century.[2]

The following uses of the term "North Slavs" or "North Slavic" are found:

In this map of Austria-Hungary from Meyers Konversations-Lexikon (1890), Czechs, Moravians, Slovaks, Poles, and "Ruthenians" are marked as "North-Slavs", while other Slavic groups are marked as "South-Slavs".
  • 'North Slavs', 'Northslavs' or 'North Hungarian Slavs' were used as synonyms for the combination of Slovaks and Rusyns living in the northern parts of the Kingdom of Hungary (1526–1867) within the Austrian Empire by several Slavic authors and politicians writing between 1848 and 1861. They imagined Slovaks and Rusyns to be one nation or ethnic group consisting of two equal tribes (although Moravčík 1861 regarded Rusyns as a subordinate tribe to the Slovak nation) that inhabited a shared ethno-territory (Slovakia and Subcarpathia/Transcarpathia) and was entitled to political representation in the Imperial Council of Austria.[3]
  • 'North Slavs', 'Czechoslavs' and 'Slovaks' were used as synonyms for the combination of Czechs, Slovaks and Rusniaks/Rustines (Rusyns) by Ján Thomášek (1841). The ethno-territory that he imagined corresponds with that of the later First Czechoslovak Republic (1918–1938).[2]
  • As a synonym for the combination of Czechs, Slovaks, and Poles (nowadays more commonly known as 'West Slavs').[4]
  • As an extinct branch of Slavic. Anatoli Zhuravlyov [ru] suggested that a separate, now extinct, branch of North Slavic languages once existed, different from both South, West, and East Slavic. The dialect formerly spoken in the vicinity of Novgorod (the Old Novgorod dialect) contains several Proto-Slavic archaisms that did not survive in any other Slavic language, and may be considered a remnant of an ancient North Slavic branch.[5]
  • An as alternative to or combination of the West Slavic and East Slavic languages into one group, due to the fact that the South Slavic dialects were geographically cut off by the Hungarian settlement of the Pannonian plain in the 9th century along with Austria and Romania being geographical barriers, in addition to the Black Sea.[6][7] Due to this geographical separation, the North Slavs and South Slavs developed independently of each other with noteworthy cultural differences; as such, various theorists claim that the language communities often grouped into West and East Slavic sub-branches share enough linguistic characteristics to be categorised together as North Slavs.[8][page needed] North Slavonic peoples today include the Belarusians, Czechs, Poles, Rusyns, Russians, Slovaks, Sorbs, and Ukrainians.[6]
The greatest disparities within the Slavic language family are between South Slavic tongues and the rest of the Slavonic languages.[8][page needed][9][page needed] Moreover, there are many exceptions and whole dialects that break the division of East and West Slavic languages; thus the Slavs are clearly divided into two main linguistic groups: the North Slavs and the South Slavs, which can then be further categorised as the Northwest tongues (Czech, Kashubian, Polish, Silesian, Slovak, and Sorbian) and the Northeast ones (Belarusian, Russian, Rusyn, and Ukrainian) – whereas the Southern branch is split into the widely accepted groups of the Southwest languages (Serbo-Croatian and Slovene) and the Southeast tongues (Bulgarian and Macedonian).[9][page needed]
Ukrainian and Belarusian have both been hugely influenced by Polish in the past centuries due to their geographic and cultural proximity, as well as some efforts at Polonising the Ruthenian population of the Polish Commonwealth.[9][page needed] Professor Michał Łesiów once said that "there are no two languages in the Slavic area that were as equally close to each other as Polish and Ruthenian".[10][clarification needed] According to Kostiantyn Tyshchenko, Ukrainian shares 70% common vocabulary with Polish and 66% with Slovak, which puts them both ahead of Russian (at 62%) in their lexical proximity to Ukrainian.[11][clarification needed] Furthermore, Tyschenko identified 82 grammatical and phonetic features of the Ukrainian tongue – Polish, Czech and Slovak share upwards of 20 of these characteristics with Ukrainian, whereas Russian apparently only 11.[12][clarification needed] In contrast to other dialects of Slovak, Eastern dialects (sometimes called Slovjak) are less intelligible with Czech and more with Polish and Rusyn.[13][clarification needed]

Tracing back to the Greek East and Latin West split in Late Antiquity, there are cultural divisions within the North Slavonic language family with regard to writing systems and religions: the West Slavic languages mostly use versions of the Latin script and have or historically had a Catholic-majority population, while the East Slavic languages are usually written in the Cyrillic script and have or historically had an Orthodox-majority population.[6] A similar east-west split exists for people speaking South Slavic languages in the Balkans, although the Latin script is spreading in countries where Serbo-Croatian is frequently spoken and the majority population is Orthodox, such as Montenegro.[6] The North Slavic and South Slavic-speaking territories are thus both generally geographically divided between Eastern and Western Christianity, and the great majority of all Eastern Orthodox believers in the world are found in the eastern parts of both the North Slavic and South Slavic areas, while a minority are Eastern-rite Catholics.[6]

Constructed languages

"North Slavic" has been used as a name for several 20th- and 21st-century constructed languages forming a fictional North Slavic branch of the Slavic languages.[14] Their main inspiration is the lack of a North Slavic branch vis-à-vis the traditional West, East and South Slavic branches. Usually, they are part of a larger alternative history scheme and may be based on elements from Old Novgorodian or North Russian dialects, historical pidgins like Russenorsk or interference from non-Slavic languages such as the Uralic languages, the Baltic languages or the North Germanic languages.[15] The best-known examples of constructed North Slavic languages are:

  • Sevorian (Sievrøsku, 1992), the language of a fictional island in the Baltic Sea;
  • three Uralic-inspired languages from the alternative history project Ill Bethisad:
    • Vozgian (Vŭozgašchai, 1996),
    • Nassian (Naŝica/Nasika, 2001) and
    • Skuodian (2002); and
  • Novegradian (Новеградескей лизике, 2006), a project embedded in a highly elaborated fictional context.[16]

Also included in the group of fictional North Slavic languages are five interrelated language projects (Seversk, Slavëni, Slavisk, Lydnevi, Mrezian) created around 2001 by Libor Sztemon, although they lack a fictional background and an explanation what exactly qualifies them as North Slavic.[17]

See also

References

  1. ^ Gołąb, Zbigniew (1992). The Origins of the Slavs: A Linguist's View. Columbus, Ohio: Slavica Publishers. pp. 12–13. The present-day Slavic peoples are usually divided into the three following groups: West Slavic, East Slavic, and South Slavic. This division has both linguistic and historico-geographical justification, in the sense that on the one hand the respective Slavic languages show some old features which unite them into the above three groups, and on the other hand the pre- and early historical migrations of the respective Slavic peoples distributed them geographically in just this way.
  2. ^ a b Kamusella, Nomachi & Gibson, p. 239.
  3. ^ Kamusella, Nomachi & Gibson, p. 238–239.
  4. ^ The Living Age, Volume 313. Living Age Company. 1922. pp. 194–195, 199.
  5. ^ А. Ф. Журавлев, "Лексико-статистическое моделирование системы славянского языкового родства", Moscow, 1994, p. 63.
  6. ^ a b c d e O.T. Ford. "Slavs". the-stewardship.org. The Stewardship. Retrieved 2022-01-27.
  7. ^ Lunt, Horace G. (2001). Old Church Slavonic Grammar. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. p. 183. ISBN 3110162849.
  8. ^ a b Kamusella, Tomasz; Nomachi, Motoki; Gibson, Catherine (2016). The Palgrave Handbook of Slavic Languages, Identities and Borders. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781137348395.
  9. ^ a b c Serafin, Mikołaj (January 2015). "Cultural Proximity of the Slavic Nations" (PDF). Retrieved April 28, 2017.
  10. ^ Łesiów, M. (2011). In: Łabowicz, L. (ed.) Gdzie "sicz", a gdzie "porohy"?!. In: Над Бугом і Нарвою, Iss. 117, p. 15.
  11. ^ Tyschenko, Kostiantyn. "Мови Європи: відстані між мовами за словниковим складом". Archived from the original on May 1, 2015. Retrieved April 29, 2017.
  12. ^ Tyshchenko, K. (2012). Правда про походження української мови. In: Lytvynenko, S (ed.) Український тиждень, Iss. 39, p. 35.
  13. ^ Štolc, Jozef (1994). Slovenská dialektológia [Slovak dialectology]. Bratislava: Veda.: Ed. I. Ripka.
  14. ^ Berger, Tilman (2004). "Vom Erfinden Slavischer Sprachen". In M. Okoka; U. Schweier (eds.). Germano-Slavistische Beiträge. Festschrift für P. Rehder zum 65. Geburtstag (PDF) (in German). München. pp. 19–28.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  15. ^ Mannewitz, Cornelia (2011). "Nordslawisch". In Cyril Brosch; Sabine Fiedler (eds.). Florilegium Interlinguisticum. Festschrift für Detlev Blanke zum 70. Geburtstag (in German). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften. pp. 237–238. ISBN 978-3-631-61328-3.
  16. ^ Barandovská-Frank, Věra (2020). Interlingvistiko. Enkonduko en la sciencon pri planlingvoj (PDF) (in Esperanto). Poznań: Wydawnictwo Rys. p. 309. ISBN 978-83-65483-88-1.
  17. ^ Mannewitz, pp. 239-241.

Bibliography

  • Comrie, Bernard; Corbett, Greville G., The Slavonic languages (London, 2003), pp. 75 & 114–120.
  • Danylenko, Andrii, 2006, "The 'Greek Accusative' vs. the 'New Slavic Accusative' in the Impersonal Environment: an Areal or Structural Discrepancy?", in: Andrii Danylenko, "Slavica et Islamica. Ukrainian in Context". München: Otto Sagner Verlag, 243-265.
  • Hult, Arne, "On the verbal morphology of the South Slavic languages (in comparison with the North Slavic languages, especially Russian", Papers from First Conference on Formal Approaches to South Slavic Languages. Plovdiv October 1995. Dragvoll, University of Trondheim, Linguistics Department (= University of Trondheim. Working Papers in Linguistics 28), ss. 105-35. (23)
  • Kamusella, Tomasz; Nomachi, Motoki; Gibson, Catherine (2016). The Palgrave Handbook of Slavic Languages, Identities and Borders. London: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 561. ISBN 9781137348395.
  • Timberlake, Alan, 1978, "On the History of the Velar Phonemes in North Slavic" [in Russian with English synopsis]. In Henrik Birnbaum, ed., American Contributions to the Eighth International Congress of Slavists, vol. 1, Linguistics and Poetics. Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers.
  • Tommola, Hannu, 2000, "On the Perfect in North Slavic." Östen Dahl (ed.), Tense and Aspect in the Languages of Europe. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 441-478.
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