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

medieval west were recognised as two different languages; Church Slavonic and vernacular
were not: “unlike Latin among west and central Europeans, it was not sensed by its users as
“other” [...] This would have astonished an early Russian, who did not even have the term
Church Slavonic at his disposal. Far from being linguistically alien to him, what we call
Church Slavonic was perceived as the time-hallowed, lofty register of Russian” (Milner-
Galland 1998: 5). A further reason why the Latin / Church Slavonic comparison does not sit
well for Slavists is that Church Slavonic, unlike Latin, was a specifically created literary
language primarily for liturgical reasons. In the earliest periods, much of its literature
therefore comprised literal translations of Byzantine religious texts, and autochthonous
literature does not appear until the eleventh century.
However, whilst a comparison to the relationship between vernacular and later
Medieval Latin may be unwise, there are reasons to compare it with the situation of spoken
and written Latin in the early medieval period. First, both Latin and Church Slavonic in the
early middle Ages were liturgical languages, meaning that they were both the first language
of liturgy, but not necessarily the same as those native vernacular speakers who attended
church. As such, they are notable for certain characteristics that are peculiar to these kinds of
languages (Keane 1997; Sawyer 1999). Second, both are in a large way representative of an
archaic and codified form of a regionalised version of the spoken dialects that functioned
within a model of classic diglossia over a large geographical area that was made up of
speakers of related, yet distanced, vernaculars (Worth 1978). 579 In the case of Latin, this was
579 The exception to this is in areas such as modern-day Romania, which used Church Slavonic up
until the eighteenth century. Its loss was concomitant with the incorporation of the Latin alphabet,
replacing the Cyrillic one, and the promotion of Latin rather than Slavic vocabulary (Berend 2003:
279