grass@uiucdcsb.Uiuc.ARPA (07/14/85)
<> >Somebody mentioned earlier that the Slavic languages developed >an aspect system at some time he/she was able to state. >What system of tenses was there before that? > >Vallath Nandakumar >Dept. of EECS, UC Berkeley. The earliest written Slavic texts date back to about 900-1100 AD. The language contained in them is generally called "Old Church Slavonic". It is believed that they reflect the spoken "Common Slavic" which was beginning to break up into distinct dialects at about that time (evidence for this is visible in the various redactions of the OCS texts that come mostly from: Bohemia, Kiev and Bulgaria reflecting the three major slavic sub families). It would take a different kind of scholarship to identify any earlier tense system, as there are no texts. The OCS tense system looked a lot more like modern Bulgarian and Macedonian than any of the West or East tense systems. The West and East slavic languages lost the simple and imperfect past tenses (I think that their inflection is the basis of the Russian verb participles). In Bulgarian, Macedonian and somewhat archaic Serbian these forms hung on. The Bulgarian witnessed/ not witnessed meanings seem to be newer. The OCS texts don't use the forms that way. (OCS is not the same as the language used in various Orthodox churches {Russian Orthodox, Bulgarian Orthodox, Serbian Orthodox, etc.}. There are various church languages that are to the modern languages an earlier stage than the King James bible English is to Modern English. Russian Church Slavic probably reflects 17th century literary Russian and sometimes uses the lost past tenses). - Judy Grass, University of Illinois - Urbana {ihnp4,pur-ee,convex}!uiucdcs!grass grass%uiuc.arpa