1800s Ortodox Prayer Book Russia Church Slavonic Slavs Christianity Miniature

When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.

1800s Ortodox Prayer Book Russia Church Slavonic Slavs Christianity Miniature:
$260.00

Rare miniature

[Ortodox prayer book]

Russian book of Ortodox Christian prayers, pressumably printed in the time of Alexander I of Russia (1801-1825).

***

In Church Slavonic language.

***

Pp. [464].

Size: 10.3 x 5.7 cm.

Binding: period elaborated leather binding, worn,spine renewed.

Condition: printed on light blue and white paper, first two leaves spotted and worn, a few pages occasionally spotted, some dog ears, small tears and minor traces of use.In general, a nice copy.

***

For condition and details see the scans.

***

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia:

Church Slavonic language

Church Slavonic is the conservative Slavic liturgical language used by the Orthodox Church in Bulgaria, Poland, Russia, Serbia, and Ukraine. The language also occasionally appears in the services of the Orthodox Church in America and the Czech and Slovak lands. It was also used by the Romanians until the 16th century, as well as by Roman Catholic Croatians in the early Middle Ages.

In addition, Church Slavonic is used by some churches which consider themselves Orthodox but are not in communion with the Orthodox Church, such as the Macedonian Orthodox Church, the Montenegrin Orthodox Church, the Russian True Orthodox Church, and others. It is also sometimes used by Greek Catholic Churches, which are under Vatican jurisdiction, in Slavic countries, for example the Croatian and Ruthenian Greek Catholics, as well as by the Roman Catholic Church (Croatian and Czech recensions, see below).

Church Slavonic represents a later stage of Old Church Slavonic, and is the continuation of the liturgical tradition introduced by the Thessaloniki brothers Cyril and Methodius in the late 9th century in Nitra, a principal town and religious and scholarly center of Great Moravia (present-day Slovakia), who produced first translations of the Scripture and liturgy from Ancient Greek. By the early 12th century, individual Slavic languages started to emerge, and the liturgical language was modified in pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and orthography according to the local vernacular usage. These modified varieties or recensions eventually stabilized and their regularized forms were used by the scribes to produce new translations of liturgical material from Ancient Greek, or Latin in case of Croatian Church Slavonic.

Attestation of Church Slavonic traditions appear in Early Cyrillic and Glagolitic script. Glagolitic has nowadays fallen out of use, though both scripts were used from the earliest attested period. The first Church Slavonic printed book was the Missale Romanum Glagolitice (1483) in angular Glagolitic, followed shortly by five Cyrillic liturgical books printed in Kraków in 1491.

Recensions

Various Church Slavonic recensions were used as a liturgical and literary language in all Orthodox countries north of the Mediterranean region during the Middle Ages, even in places where the local population was not Slavic (especially inRomania). In recent centuries, however, Church Slavonic was fully replaced by local languages in the non-Slavic countries. Even in some of theSlavic Orthodoxcountries, the modern national language is now used for liturgical purposes to a greater or lesser extent. Nevertheless, the Russian Orthodox Church, which contains around half of all Orthodox believers, still holds its liturgies almost entirely in Church Slavonic.However, there existparisheswhich use other languages (and the main problem here is the lack of good translations):

according to the decision of All-Russian Church Council of 1917–1918, service in Russian or Ukrainian can be permitted in individual parishes when approved by church authorities;
\"ethnic\" parishes in Russia use (entirely or in part) their (Yakut)etc.;
autonomous parts of the Russian Orthodox Church prepare and partly use translations to the languages of the local population, as Ukrainian, Belarusian, Romanian (in Moldova), Japanese, Chinese;
parishes in the diaspora, including ones ofRussian Orthodox Church Outside Russiaoften use local languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Dutch etc.

Nowadays, Church Slavonic language (also known as New Church Slavonic, the name proposed byF. V. Mareš) is actually a set of at least four different dialects (recensions), with essential distinctions between them in dictionary, spelling (even in writing systems), phonetics etc. The most widespread recension, Russian, has, in order, several local sub-dialects with slightly different pronunciation.

Russian (Synodal) recension

Russian recension of New Church Slavonic is the language of books since the second half of the 17th century. It generally uses traditional Cyrillic script (poluustav); however, certain texts (mostly prayers) can be printed in modern alphabets with the spelling adapted to rules of local languages (for example, in Russian/Ukrainian/Bulgarian/Serbian Cyrillic or in Hungarian/Slovak/Polish Latin).

Before the eighteenth century, Church Slavonic was in wide use as a generalliterary languageinRussia. Although it was never spokenper seoutside church services, members of the priesthood, poets, and the educated tended to slip its expressions into their speech. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was gradually replaced by theRussian languagein secular literature and was retained for use only in church. Although as late as the 1760s,Lomonosovargued that Church Slavonic was the so-called \"high style\" of Russian, during the nineteenth century within Russia, this point of view declined. Elements of Church Slavonic style may have survived longest in speech among theOld Believersafter the late-seventeenth centuryschismin the Russian Orthodox Church.

Russianhas borrowed many words from Church Slavonic. While both Russian and Church Slavonic are Slavic languages, some early Slavic sound combinations evolved differently in each branch. As a result, the borrowings into Russian are similar to native Russian words, but with South Slavic variances, e.g. (the first word in each pair is Russian, the second Church Slavonic): золото / злато (zoloto / zlato), город / град (gorod /grad), горячий / горящий (goryačiy / goryaščiy), рожать / рождать (rožat’ / roždat’). Since the Russian Romantic era and the corpus of work of the great Russian authors (fromGogoltoChekhov,Tolstoy, andDostoevsky), the relationship between words in these pairs has become traditional. Where the abstract meaning has not commandeered the Church Slavonic word completely, the two words are often synonyms related to one another, much as Latin and native English words were related in the nineteenth century: one is archaic and characteristic of written high style, while the other is common and found in speech.

Standard (Russian) variant

In Russia, Church Slavonic is pronounced in the same way asRussian, with some exceptions:

· Church Slavonic featuresokanyeandyekanye, i.e., the absence ofvowel reductionin unstressed syllables. That is,оandеin unstressed positions are always read as[o]and[jɛ]~[ʲɛ]respectively (like in northern Russian dialects), whereas in standard Russian pronunciation they have different allophones when unstressed.

· There should be no de-voicing of final consonants, although in practice there often is.

· The letterе[je]is never read asё[jo]~[ʲo](the letter ё does not exist in Church Slavonic writing at all). This is also reflected in borrowings from Church Slavonic into Russian: in the following pairs the first word is Church Slavonic in origin, and the second is purely Russian: небо / нёбо (nebo / nëbo), надежда / надёжный (nadežda / nadëžnyj).

· The letterΓcan traditionally be read as voiced fricative velar sound[ɣ](just as in Southern Russian dialects); however, occlusive[ɡ](as in standard Russian pronunciation) is also possible and legal since the 20th century. When unvoiced, it becomes[x]; this has influenced the Russian pronunciation of Бог (Bog) asBoh[box].

· The adjective endings -аго/-его/-ого/-яго are pronounced as written ([aɡo],[ʲeɡo],[oɡo],[ʲaɡo]), whereas Russian -его/-ого are pronounced with[v]instead of[ɡ](and with the reduction of unstressed vowels).

Serbian variant

In Serbia, Church Slavonic is generally pronounced according to the Russian model. The medieval Serbian recension of Church Slavonic ceased to be used in the early eighteenth century, when it was replaced by the Russian recension. The differences from the Russian variant are limited to the lack of certain sounds in Serbian phonetics (there are no sounds corresponding to letters ы and щ, and in certain cases the palatalization is impossible to observe, e.g. ть is pronounced as т etc.).

Ukrainian variant

The main difference between Russian and (Western) Ukrainian variants of Church Slavonic lies in the pronunciation of the letteryat(ѣ). The Russian pronunciation is the same asе[je]~[ʲe]whereas the Ukrainian is the same asи[i]. Greek Catholic variants of Church Slavonic books printed in variants of the Latin alphabet (a method used in Austro-Hungary and Czechoslovakia) just contain the letter \"i\" for yat. Other distinctions reflect differences between palatalization rules of Ukrainian and Russian (for example,⟨ч⟩is always \"soft\" (palatalized) in Russian pronunciation and \"hard\" in Ukrainian one), different pronunciation of letters⟨г⟩and⟨щ⟩, etc.

Typographically, Serbian and (western) Ukrainian editions (when printed in traditional Cyrillic) are almost identical to the Russian ones. Certain visible distinctions may include:

· less frequent use of abbreviations in \"nomina sacra\";

· treating digraph⟨оу⟩as a single character rather than two letters (for example, in letter-spacing or in combination with diacritical marks: in Russian editions, they are placed above⟨у⟩, not between⟨о⟩and⟨у⟩; also, when the first letter of a word is printed in different color, it is applied to⟨о⟩in Russian editions and to the entire⟨оу⟩in Serbian and Ukrainian).

Old Moscow recension

The Old Moscow recension is in use amongOld BelieversandCo-Believers. The same traditional Cyrillic alphabet as in Russian Synodal recension; however, there are differences in spelling because the Old Moscow recension reproduces an older state of orthography and grammar in general (before the 1650s). The most easily observable peculiarities of books in this recension are:

· using of digraph⟨оу⟩not only in the initial position,

· hyphenation with no hyphenation sign.

Croatian recension

In limited use among Croatian Catholics (mostly in Dalmatia). Texts printed in Croatian Latin alphabet (with the addition of letter⟨ě⟩foryat) or in Glagolitic script. Sample editions:

· Ioseph Vais, Abecedarivm Palaeoslovenicvm in usum glagolitarum. Veglae, [Krk], 1917 (2 ed.). XXXVI+76 p. (collection of liturgical texts in Glagolitic script, with a brief Church Slavonic grammar written in Latin language and Slavonic-Latin dictionary)

· Rimski misal slavĕnskim jezikom: Čin misi s izbranimi misami..., Zagreb: Kršćanska sadašnjost, 1980 (in Croatian Latin script)

Czech recension

In very limited use among Czech Catholics. The recension is restored (actually, developed) by prof.D. Th.Vojtěch Tkadlčíkin his editions of the Roman missal:

· Rimskyj misal slověnskym jazykem izvoljenijem Apostolskym za Arcibiskupiju Olomuckuju iskusa dělja izdan. Olomouc 1972.

· Rimskyj misal povelěnijem svjataho vselenskaho senma Vatikanskaho druhaho obnovljen... Olomouc 1992.

Grammar and style

Although the various recensions of Church Slavonic differ in some points, they share the tendency of approximating the original Old Church Slavonic to the local Slavic vernacular. Inflection tends to follow the ancient patterns with few simplifications. All original six verbal tenses, seven nominal cases, and three numbers are intact in most frequently used traditional texts (but in the newly composed texts, authors avoid most archaic constructions and prefer variants that are closer to modern Russian syntax and are better understood by the Slavic-speaking people).

In Russian recension, the fall of the yers is fully reflected, more or less to the Russian pattern, although the terminal ъ continues to be written. The yuses are often replaced or altered in usage to the sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Russian pattern. The yat continues to be applied with greater attention to the ancient etymology than it was in nineteenth-century Russian. The letters ksi, psi, omega, ot, and izhitsa are kept, as are the letter-based denotation of numerical values, the use of stress accents, and the abbreviations or titla for nomina sacra.

The vocabulary and syntax, whether in scripture, liturgy, or church missives, are generally somewhat modernised in an attempt to increase comprehension. In particular, some of the ancient pronouns have been eliminated from the scripture (such as етеръ /jeter/ \"a certain (person, etc.)\" → нѣкій in the Russian recension). Many, but not all, occurrences of the imperfect tense have been replaced with the perfect.

Miscellaneous other modernisations of classical formulae have taken place from time to time. For example, the opening of the Gospel of John, by tradition the first words written down by Saints Cyril and Methodius, искони бѣаше слово \"In the beginning was the Word\", were set down as въ началѣ бѣ слово in the Ostrog Bible of Ivan Fedorov (1580/1581) or in the recently used Elizabethan Bible (the first printing in 1751).