How much was Old Church Slavonic edited by Constantine and Methodius? And what modified more: The Old Church Slavonic when people in Bohemia started to write with it, or the slavic dialect they used before?
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By which may we assume you mean Old Church Slavonic, i.e. словѣ́нє?– user6726Commented Apr 2, 2016 at 16:03
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@user6726 Oh yes, sorry (edited)– ProbablyCommented Apr 2, 2016 at 17:59
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Your use of terminology is incorrect, or could be more accurate. An artificial language refers to topics surrounding computer simulations and the like. What you mean to say is a planned or constructed language.– Dr. ParadiseCommented Apr 23, 2016 at 15:52
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1 Answer
Yes, Old Church Slavonic (OCS) was an artificial language, but just in a way.
Firstly, in the 9th century, when Cyrill and Methodius devised the OCS, all the Slavic languages and dialects were so close, that they were closer to one another than the modern English dialects inside England. Secondly, Cyrill and Methodius did not create any new phonological system, they used their native Pannonian one, with all its tendencies.
What Cyrill and Methodius added to their contemporary Bulgarian-Macedonian dialect spoken in Thessaloniki was the Greek-Bible-style syntax and the Greek-style lexicon (lots of Greek words were borrowed, lots of Greek words were calqued). That's all, the job of Cyrill and Methodius was just to shape the Slavic lexicon and syntax to fit the Christian literature standards, nothing else.
And naturally, OCS had nothing to do with the then dialects of Bohemia or Moravia which were Western Slavic dialects, OSC has always been a South Slavic language.
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1But OCS was still intelligible to the people in Moravia, so "nothing to do with" seems an exaggeration. Commented Apr 26, 2016 at 20:02
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2Also I wouldn't call it "their contemporary Pannonian dialect". It was the Thessaloniki dialect. Commented Apr 26, 2016 at 20:02
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@A.M.Bittlingmayer - It was definitely intelligible to the people in Moravia, because in the times of Cyrill and Methodius the Slavic languages had but minor differences, mostly phonetic ones. As for the Thessaloniki dialect, thank you, I corrected that. Commented Apr 26, 2016 at 20:52
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1@A.M.Bittlingmayer - Come on, everybody understands that I mean it's all about slightly different dialects, not unrelated languages, and this is not an Encyclopaedia Britannica article which has to be brought to a shiningly precise formulation. Objection overruled. )) Commented Apr 27, 2016 at 12:35
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2Well, up to you, but SE is known to far exceed EB in pedantry. ;-) Commented Apr 27, 2016 at 13:28