Milosevic trial identifies secret witness

Reuters via IOL ^ | December 6, 2002 | Paul Gallagher

[kosta50]

Serbian is close to the Old Church Slavonic in grammar and vocabulary. The inifitvie form of verbs ends on "-i" as in modern Serbian; the accents are almost identical to Serbian; various grammatical forms, such as aorist, and so on may not be used but are understood.

Church Slavonic was, after all, the written language of Soputhern Slavs, so it was closer to Serbian vernacular.

In time, three versions of the Church Slavonic developed -- Bulgarian, Russian and Serbian. The three were perfectly intelligible and remain so to this day. IN the 18th century, because of scarcity of Serbian books, Serbs in Austria began importing Russian/Ukraininan teachers and their books. Under their influence, Serb Orthodoxy started to use the Russian version of Church Slavonic, which is still the official language of the Russian as well as the Serbian Orthodox Churches. It's not a different language, but a different version of the same written language.