North Slavic languages
Appearance
The term North Slavic languages is used for a number of proposed groupings of the Slavic languages. However, it is not widely used and has no agreed definition.
Uses
Historically, the term "North Slav" has been used in academia since at least the first half of the 19th century.[1]
The following uses of the term "North Slavs" or "North Slavic" are found:
- '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.[2]
- '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).[1]
- As a synonym for the combination of Czechs, Slovaks, and Poles (nowadays more commonly known as 'West Slavs').[3]
- As an extinct branch of Slavic. Anatoli Zhuravlyov 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.[4]
- As a name for several constructed North Slavic languages. There is a group of artistic languages forming a fictional North Slavic branch of the Slavic languages. The best-known examples of constructed North Slavic languages are: Sevorian (Sievrøsku), Nassian (Nassika), Seversk, Slavëni, and Vozgian.[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]
See also
References
- ^ a b Kamusella, Nomachi & Gibson, p. 239.
- ^ Kamusella, Nomachi & Gibson, p. 238–239.
- ^ The Living Age, Volume 313. Living Age Company. 1922. pp. 194–195, 199.
- ^ А. Ф. Журавлев, "Лексико-статистическое моделирование системы славянского языкового родства", Moscow, 1994, p. 63.
- ^ Tilman Berger, Vom Erfinden Slavischer Sprachen, in: M. Okuka & U. Schweier, eds., Germano-Slavistische Beiträge. Festschrift für P. Rehder zum 65. Geburtstag, München 2004, pp. 19-28 (in German).
- ^ a b O.T. Ford. "Slavs". the-stewardship.org. The Stewardship. Retrieved 2022-01-27.
- ^ Lunt, Horace G. (2001). Old Church Slavonic Grammar. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. p. 183. ISBN 3110162849.
- ^ a b Kamusella, Tomasz; Nomachi, Motoki; Gibson, Catherine (2016). The Palgrave Handbook of Slavic Languages, Identities and Borders. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781137348395.
- ^ a b c Serafin, Mikołaj (January 2015). "Cultural Proximity of the Slavic Nations" (PDF). Retrieved April 28, 2017.
- ^ Łesiów, M. (2011). In: Łabowicz, L. (ed.) Gdzie "sicz", a gdzie "porohy"?!. In: Над Бугом і Нарвою, Iss. 117, p. 15.
- ^ Tyschenko, Kostiantyn. "Мови Європи: відстані між мовами за словниковим складом". Archived from the original on May 1, 2015. Retrieved April 29, 2017.
- ^ Tyshchenko, K. (2012). Правда про походження української мови. In: Lytvynenko, S (ed.) Український тиждень, Iss. 39, p. 35.
- ^ Štolc, Jozef (1994). Slovenská dialektológia [Slovak dialectology]. Bratislava: Veda.: Ed. I. Ripka.
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.