Old Slavonic Language – Intermediate

About

This intensive course, spanning 40 hours over 2 weeks (i.e. 4 hours per day, from Monday to Friday), will have two intertwined components: first of all, it will provide a description of the changes that took place in each recension compared to Old Slavonic, with great attention being given to phonetics and morphology, so as to aid the students to adapt to the relative lack of dedicated dictionaries for each variety of Church Slavonic and to be make use of classical Old Slavonic dictionaries in their endeavours.
On the other hand, this theoretical element will be balanced out by a practical side, as the students will be given the chance to work on a selection of texts from each recension, which will allow them to apply their newly acquired skills and to consolidate their understanding of Old Slavonic. While some of these texts will be from the various transcriptions of religious texts (which allow for better parallels), many will be from medieval historical sources and documents, which better illustrate some of the local traits of the recensions.

Course leader

Mihail-George Hancu

Target group

This course is designed for those who are familiar with the fundamentals of Old Slavonic and wish to become accustomed to the particularities of the five main Slavonic recensions: Czecho-Moravian, Serbo-Croatian, Middle Bulgarian, Russo-Ukrainian and Romanian.

Course aim

Finally, the students will also be provided with the occasion to read some of these texts in manuscript form by means of digital copies and scans, which will serve as a minor introduction to palaeography.

Fee info