The Slavic Languages (Cambridge Language Surveys)
Roland Sussex
Language: English
Pages: 660
ISBN: 0521294487
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Including Bosnian, Russian, Polish and Slovak, the Slavic group of languages is the fourth largest Indo-European sub-group. Spoken by 297 million people, it is one of the major language families of the modern world. This book presents a survey of all aspects of the linguistic structure of the Slavic languages. Roland Sussex and Paul Cubberley cover Slavic dialects and sociolinguistic issues, and the socio-historical evolution of the Slavic languages, in addition to general linguistic topics.
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They are also, to different extents, mutually intelligible. Speakers of the three languages within East Slavic – Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian – communicate with reasonable ease. So, too, do speakers of Czech and Slovak; Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian; Bulgarian and Macedonian; and to some extent Polish and Kashubian. All of these sets of languages also show dialect continua which act as transitional variants between the standard languages (10.5). Communication between Polish and Sorbian, and
especially in the sphere of poetry, it was not used for any official purpose and was almost entirely absent from schools of any but the elementary grade, and it must be remembered that the number of educated Slovaks who used the written language was very small indeed. (Auty, 1953: 157) Even after the formation of the new Czechoslovak state in 1918, the constitution’s definition of the ‘‘single Czechoslovak state’’ and a ‘‘single Czechoslovak language’’ gave Slovak an equivocal position with
snu; den $ dne; desˇt’ $ desˇteˇ; mech $ mechu; pes $ psa; len $ lnu /e o a/ /e/ sen $ sna; denˇ $ dnˇa; da´zˇ $ dazˇd’a; mach $ machu; pes $ psa; l’an $ l’anu (Central dialects and standard; West and East dialects as in Czech) 114 3. Phonology From table 3.1 we can see that most of West and South Slavic probably first merged the jers into [ ]. West Slavic at first retained the hard or soft quality of the preceding consonant, a feature which thereby became phonemic, but was later lost in
its weakness. This does make the actual range of shifts easier to understand. The phonetic nature of /eˇ/ at the end of Proto-Slavic is open to debate, and the phonemic scenario described in the preceding paragraph can equally well account for its subsequent fate, since the end point of push–pull activity is not necessarily phonetically predictable. So we shall simply note the fact of its weakness and observe its reflexes, which must also be related to the rest of each given vocalic system
of voice in /v/ in Polish and Macedonian following voiceless obstruents (in Macedonian only after /s/): (77) ‘candle’: Pol s´wieca [¨þf j ft sa] Mac svek´a [¨sfeca/¨sfekj a] or the loss of voice in /rˇ / in Czech: (78) Cz trˇi ‘three’ [tr ôi] ˚ or of /zˇ/ in Polish (when it comes from Proto-Slavic /r’/ (spelt rz), as does Czech /rˇ /): (79) Upper Sorbian also has the letter rˇ, pronounced /sˇ / after /p k/, and /s0 / after /t/ (thus, trˇi ¼ [tsj i] ); Lower Sorbian has /s´ / in all