I don’t have a Church Slavonic dictionary and could not find one online. I will do some random scheme using the scripture link you gave me, later.
If I were to guess, I’d say 80% are guessable, and 40% are the same. But as we’ve seen, most difficulty is in grammar and auxiliary words, which are not close. On occasion, you might run into changed semantics as well.
Alex, look at the bottom of post #62. I gave you a link to a Church Slavonic/Old Russian dictionary: Полный церковнославянский словарь
If I were to guess, I’d say 80% are guessable, and 40% are the same
That adds up to 120%! :)
But as we’ve seen, most difficulty is in grammar and auxiliary words, which are not close. On occasion, you might run into changed semantics as well.
All of that is true. I am compiling a list of words for each letter just to see how many words actually made it unchanged.
Some interesting semantics changes I noticed are in words like держава, which in Church Slavonic means power, authority, in Serbian држава (as in Bulgarian държава) now means "state" (Russian: штат, государство, страна). The Serbian word for "power" or "authority" is власт as in Russian (власть). Note that in Czech, the word for "country" is vlast.
Interestingly in Serbian the word foreign is инострани and foreign lands инострансто although Serbian doesn't use the word "strana" for country.
Simialr but related semantic differences occurred in other words such as правда. In Serbian it means justice (in an ideal Platonic sense), period. There is also правосуђе (pron. праосудъе), but this is a legal term. In Russian, it also means truth (which is sort of related, i.e. justice establishes truth). Of course, in Serbian, truth is истина (which is also truth in Russian in addition to правда).
Another interesting difference is in the word гроб (Russian могила). In Serbian it came to mean grave, tomb (there is also the word јама, which means an actual whole in the ground, a pit). The casket in Serbian (and in Bulgarian) is ковчег.
Also words like љубити (Russian любить) lost its original meaning to love and morphed to mean to kiss (the more archaic form is целивати).
Most Serbs, when asked, will tell you that љубити is never used for love, but the word for fans still remains љубитељи!
It will be interesting to see what these words meant in Church Slavonic. But many of the altered semantics are really not altered in any radical way. They are actually related conceptually. These are the word that I call "intuitive" because they exist in our languages in a related sense.
There are, of course, words that evolved locally and are completely unrelated to Church Slavonic or other Slavic languages.