The Monastic Rules of Visigothic Iberia - eTheses Repository ...

6.14 “Loquendum est Russice et scribendum est Slavonicae” 577
Some important questions have been raised in this thesis concerning language. These
include, importantly, questions about how written texts were used in a society where the
spoken language was not necessarily similar to, and perhaps even increasingly divergent
from, the written language. These are such important questions that those who study them
cannot afford to do so without an interdisciplinary approach. It therefore seems fitting to
conclude this section with a suggestion for further study.
Church Slavonic, also sometimes called Old Church Slavonic or Old Bulgarian
(Matthews 1950: 466-467), is the name given to the language created by the ninth-century
missionaries Cyril and Methodius based on an old Macedonian dialect 578 that is still used
today in the Orthodox Church. Following the acceptance of Christianity by Prince Vladimir
in 988, the use of Church Slavonic spread throughout both Kievan and Muscovite Rus‟, and
subsequently played a large role in the standardisation of various Eastern Slavonic literary
languages (primarily Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian and Ruthenian).
To date, scholars generally have not made the comparison between Latin and Church
Slavonic. Part of the reason why is that Slavists consistently warn against it. For example:
“The role of Church Slavonic in Russia and other Orthodox Slav lands looks similar to that of
Latin in the parts of Europe dominated by the patriarchate of Rome; but the resemblance is
superficial” (Milner-Gulland 1997: 140). This is because Latin and vernacular in the
577 A famous dictum taken from the preface of Wilhelm Ludolf‟s (1690) Grammatica Russica.
578 It has recently been argued by Orłoś (2005) that Church Slavonic was also heavily influenced by
Moravian dialects, where it was initially used as a preaching tool.
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