Posted on 01/21/2006 6:14:44 AM PST by x5452
The comprehension level of Church Slavonic by modern Russians, in no small part as a result of the effects of a Soviet education that ignored and disparaged their own literary and cultural heritage, is far, far lower than is the comprehension the average American has of traditional liturgical English (i.e. KJV/BCP English).
Testing has indicated that the comprehension rate of the former is about 50%, and of the latter, well into the mid 90% range.
I say this not to disparage the use of Church Slavonic -- far from it -- I think that the preservation of traditional liturgical languages (when they are closely linguistically related to the vernacular, that is) is vital. The sad thing about the Slavic world today is that this task will involve the expenditure of a great deal of energy, since the recovery of a language is self-evidently more difficult than is its preservation.
My main point is, however, that those here in America who want to use modern English rather than traditional liturgical English don't have a leg to stand on, at least as far as precedent in the Orthodox world goes.
There's an OCA priest I know who always tries to include at least one litany in Church Slavonic into his otherwise all English Divine Liturgy. He's even used a Greek litany as well.
I think the idea is to serve as a reminder to his American parish that the Church is something older and farther reaching than anything else that they know.
Oddly enough, he also is big advocate of inserting contemporary English into the Liturgy instead of the older Liturgical English. I really don't care for that one bit.
The Serbian Orthodox Church is expressly traditional and ascetic, which is why ROCOR maintains communion only with that church in America, or maybe that's why other Orthodox churches don't share communion with ROCOR (but they do with the SOC -- go figure!).
The problem is the influx of various "Orthodox" Serbs who have not seen the inside of a church for five or more decades and now, abroad, as refugees, depend on various church organizations for help. Their lack of interest, knowledge, and reverence for the Church is an manifest of their communist past. That's why it is a real miracle the Orthodox Church even survived in 70 or more years of communism.
This would be the equivalent of scrapping Queen's English and replacing it with Cockney, or even worse. What is today a modern Serbian language is a chewed up and regurgitated garbage that has ingredients of all the languages of all the hordes that passed through the Balkans, especially Turkish (I would estimate good 20-30% of the modern "Serbian" words are Turkish), and a grammar that has reversed all rules. It is a real miracle that Serbs actually do understand Church Slavonic (modern Serbian vernacular contains about 240 Church Slavonic words out of necessity because it is so deficient in terminology, and grammatic construct, that it has to borrow from foreign languages). To add insult to injury, the Cyrillic alphabet used by the Serbs until 1860's has been replaced by a new alphabet (Cyrillic and Latin, although they are not equivalent) that had more political correctness than linguistic excuse and is a perfect compliment to the barbaric language otherwise known as modern Serbian.
Russian, on the other hand, has maintained the same grammatical structure as the Church Slavonic and most of the vocabulary as well. That is evident from the modern Russian prayers such as the Lord's Prayer next to the Old Church Slavonic version. Clearly, a Russian can perfectly understand it, so I don't know who made those surveys but they are incorrect when they say that an average Russian doe snot understand it. An average Serb, definitely not, but an average Russian yes.
My wife says she understands around 70% of church slavonic.
There are two big dangers to Orthodoxy in this country. First is old country peasants who came here to get rich and succeeded, (and their spoiled kids and grandkids who are driven to "pass for white") and the hierarchs they control with their money and second, 100% or nearly 100% convert parishes lead by convert priests...the blind leading the blind.
*In the Serbian reduction of the Church Slavonic the Kingdom (Tsarstvo) appear in earlier manuscripts (16th century) and represent an early Serbian departure from the original Church Slavonic Tsarstviye.
Clearly, the Russian grammatical form is almost identical to the Church Slavonic, and clearly Serbian posseses root form, such as the verb "to be," as well as archaic endings similar to Church Slavonic more than Russian. But it is clear that these thre e languges are extremely close and I think ti takes an active effort on the part of the laity to not understand Church Slavonic.
In fact, here is a brief comparison between Slavonic and Serbian (at random): the English word is followed by a Salvoni word in parenthesis, separated from a Serbian word by a comma; existence of another word or archaic origin withing the same language is shown by a slash):
Prepositions: without (bez, bez); in (v, u); for (dlya, za); as far as (do, do); behind (iza, iza); from under (izpod, ispod); between (mezhdu, medju); in the mids of (posredye, posredi); at (u, u/kod); across (cherez, kroz), etc.
General words and verbs:
to give thanks (blagodariti, blagodariti); God (Bog, Bog); to be (byti, biti); to bring in (v vesti, u vesti); everywhere (vezd, vazda); to see (videti, videti); master (vladyka, vladika); to move in, to dwell (vselitsya, useliti se); every, each (vsyakiy, svaki); to deprive (lishiti, lishiti)
Hopefully this will shed some light on the differences and difficulties. This doe snot eman that there are no differences and unintelligible words and grammatical forms, but the basic languages are very, very close and -- again -- it take an active effort claim that Church Slavnic is unitinelligible to 50% of Russians or Serbs for that matter.
Ping post #22 re: Russian/Serbian and Salvonic
I think this is true with some Russian immigrants as well. We can only hope that 70 years of communism however hasn't completely erased centuries of Orthodoxy. I know I don't feel it has.
Also I think the best way all of us can contribute to this is to make sure our children learn all the ways of orthodoxy early and completely.
In some ways though the similarities and differences between old Russian and Russian are the blame of the soviets who had a big hand in what grammer was and wasn't acceptable for the last 70 years.
I'm a convert but frankly am more interested to verify that what we do in church is pravoslavni than my wife who is born and raised in Russia. :)
A lot of Americans don't get shakesperean english either.
Not because of differences in words but differences in grammar and accent.
Interestingly while Russian is my second language I was able to understand many more czech parallels than my wife (who just spoke Russian to czechs in prague).
Sometimes folks just can't pick up on things that are subtly different, I think that's what happenes here. Some people go right with the flow when there are subtle changes and some get hopelessly lost. (Still my wife had an avantage over me in Czechia; more Czechs actually speak Russian than do English :)
"I'm a convert but frankly am more interested to verify that what we do in church is pravoslavni than my wife who is born and raised in Russia. :)"
And you know what "pravoslavni" is because other converts taught you?
Well I wouldn't say I was taught by converts. :)
(I taught myself Russian, though I had help, and what I've amassed with regard to pravoslavni i ne pravoslavni has come from a variety of definitivly non convert sources. ROCOR to me most closely resembles what I saw in Russian churches and monastaries, also I really like that they do not join tainted eccumenical and political groups)
I rest my case! :)
Hey! Smile when you say that! :)
Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go carve a walking stick for my favorite blind man so he won't trip over stuff between homilies.
I wonder if you have ever read Metropolitan Philaret's sorrowful epistles? They speak to the trend modernism of the Orthodox world.
" Hey! Smile when you say that! :)"
I promise you, I was! :)
I got quite a lecture on this very matter from a group of converts just yesterday; in fact the "blind leading the blind" comment was from them. Now of course, they converted 30+ years ago and are in a rather "ethnic" parish, but they had stories to tell of what they had seen in their travels!
Orthodoxy/Byzantine Catholicism offers a sort of spirituality that I never found anywhere else. It truly is out of this world.
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