78-810: Church Slavonic is the conservative Slavic liturgical language used by the Eastern Orthodox Church in Belarus , Bulgaria , North Macedonia , Montenegro , Poland , Ukraine , Russia , Serbia , the Czech Republic and Slovakia , Slovenia and Croatia . The language appears also in the services of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia , the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese , and occasionally in
156-518: A diaeresis was sometimes used to indicate the start of a new syllable within a sequence of letters that could otherwise be misinterpreted as being a single vowel (e.g., "coöperative", "reëlect"), but modern writing styles either omit such marks or use a hyphen to indicate a syllable break (e.g. "co-operative", "re-elect"). Some modified letters, such as the symbols ⟨ å ⟩ , ⟨ ä ⟩ , and ⟨ ö ⟩ , may be regarded as new individual letters in themselves, and assigned
234-652: A lingua franca , but Latin was widely spoken in the western half, and as the western Romance languages evolved out of Latin, they continued to use and adapt the Latin alphabet. With the spread of Western Christianity during the Middle Ages , the Latin alphabet was gradually adopted by the peoples of Northern Europe who spoke Celtic languages (displacing the Ogham alphabet) or Germanic languages (displacing earlier Runic alphabets ) or Baltic languages , as well as by
312-571: A word or sound feature, is one that remains closer to an older form from which it evolved, relative to cognate forms from the same source. For example, the Spanish word caro /'kaɾo/ and the French word cher /ʃɛʁ/, both adjectives meaning dear or beloved , similarly evolved from the Latin word cārum /'ka:rum/ [ˈkaːɾũː] ( Proto-Romance /ˈka.ru/). The Spanish word, which is more similar to
390-475: A ⟩ , ⟨ e ⟩ , ⟨ i ⟩ , ⟨ o ⟩ , ⟨ u ⟩ . The languages that use the Latin script today generally use capital letters to begin paragraphs and sentences and proper nouns . The rules for capitalization have changed over time, and different languages have varied in their rules for capitalization. Old English , for example, was rarely written with even proper nouns capitalized; whereas Modern English of
468-500: A European CEN standard. In the course of its use, the Latin alphabet was adapted for use in new languages, sometimes representing phonemes not found in languages that were already written with the Roman characters. To represent these new sounds, extensions were therefore created, be it by adding diacritics to existing letters , by joining multiple letters together to make ligatures , by creating completely new forms, or by assigning
546-511: A greater or lesser extent. The Russian Orthodox Church, which contains around half of all Orthodox believers, still holds its liturgies almost entirely in Church Slavonic. However, there exist parishes which use other languages (where the main problem has been a lack of good translations). Examples include: What follows is a list of modern recensions or dialects of Church Slavonic. For a list and descriptions of extinct recensions, see
624-614: 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 in Romania ). In recent centuries, however, Church Slavonic was fully replaced by local languages in the non-Slavic countries. Even in some of the Slavic Orthodox countries, the modern national language is now used for liturgical purposes to
702-700: A proposal endorsed by the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People to switch the Crimean Tatar language to Latin by 2025. In July 2020, 2.6 billion people (36% of the world population) use the Latin alphabet. By the 1960s, it became apparent to the computer and telecommunications industries in the First World that a non-proprietary method of encoding characters was needed. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) encapsulated
780-492: 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
858-458: A single language. For example, in Spanish, the character ⟨ ñ ⟩ is considered a letter, and sorted between ⟨ n ⟩ and ⟨ o ⟩ in dictionaries, but the accented vowels ⟨ á ⟩ , ⟨ é ⟩ , ⟨ í ⟩ , ⟨ ó ⟩ , ⟨ ú ⟩ , ⟨ ü ⟩ are not separated from the unaccented vowels ⟨
SECTION 10
#1732772996131936-532: A small symbol that can appear above or below a letter, or in some other position, such as the umlaut sign used in the German characters ⟨ ä ⟩ , ⟨ ö ⟩ , ⟨ ü ⟩ or the Romanian characters ă , â , î , ș , ț . Its main function is to change the phonetic value of the letter to which it is added, but it may also modify the pronunciation of a whole syllable or word, indicate
1014-470: A special function to pairs or triplets of letters. These new forms are given a place in the alphabet by defining an alphabetical order or collation sequence, which can vary with the particular language. Some examples of new letters to the standard Latin alphabet are the Runic letters wynn ⟨Ƿ ƿ⟩ and thorn ⟨Þ þ⟩ , and the letter eth ⟨Ð/ð⟩ , which were added to
1092-504: A specific place in the alphabet for collation purposes, separate from that of the letter on which they are based, as is done in Swedish . In other cases, such as with ⟨ ä ⟩ , ⟨ ö ⟩ , ⟨ ü ⟩ in German, this is not done; letter-diacritic combinations being identified with their base letter. The same applies to digraphs and trigraphs. Different diacritics may be treated differently in collation within
1170-624: A unified writing system for the Inuit languages in the country. The writing system is based on the Latin alphabet and is modeled after the one used in the Greenlandic language . On 12 February 2021 the government of Uzbekistan announced it will finalize the transition from Cyrillic to Latin for the Uzbek language by 2023. Plans to switch to Latin originally began in 1993 but subsequently stalled and Cyrillic remained in widespread use. At present
1248-504: Is living fossil . In the context of whole language families, Lithuanian and Finnish are the most conservative within modern Indo-European languages and Uralic languages respectively. Latin script The Latin script , also known as the Roman script , is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet , derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which
1326-408: Is actually a set of at least four different dialects (recensions or redactions; Russian : извод , izvod), with essential distinctions between them in dictionary, spelling (even in writing systems), phonetics, and other aspects. The most widespread recension, Russian, has several local sub-dialects in turn, with slightly different pronunciations. These various Church Slavonic recensions were used as
1404-640: Is also used by the Faroese alphabet . Some West, Central and Southern African languages use a few additional letters that have sound values similar to those of their equivalents in the IPA. For example, Adangme uses the letters ⟨Ɛ ɛ⟩ and ⟨Ɔ ɔ⟩ , and Ga uses ⟨Ɛ ɛ⟩ , ⟨Ŋ ŋ⟩ and ⟨Ɔ ɔ⟩ . Hausa uses ⟨Ɓ ɓ⟩ and ⟨Ɗ ɗ⟩ for implosives , and ⟨Ƙ ƙ⟩ for an ejective . Africanists have standardized these into
1482-613: Is archaic and characteristic of written high style, while the other is found in common speech. In Russia, Church Slavonic is pronounced in the same way as Russian , with some exceptions: The Old Moscow recension is in use among Old Believers and Co-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
1560-460: Is called the Roman numeral system, and the collection of the elements is known as the Roman numerals . The numbers 1, 2, 3 ... are Latin/Roman script numbers for the Hindu–Arabic numeral system . The use of the letters I and V for both consonants and vowels proved inconvenient as the Latin alphabet was adapted to Germanic and Romance languages. W originated as a doubled V (VV) used to represent
1638-534: Is generally said to be more conservative than speech since written forms generally change more slowly than spoken language does. That helps explain inconsistencies in writing systems such as that of English ; since the spoken language has changed relatively more than has the written language, the match between spelling and pronunciation is inconsistent. A language may be conservative in one respect while simultaneously innovative in another. Bulgarian and Macedonian , closely related Slavic languages , are innovative in
SECTION 20
#17327729961311716-476: Is language-dependent, as only the first letter may be capitalized, or all component letters simultaneously (even for words written in title case, where letters after the digraph or trigraph are left in lowercase). A ligature is a fusion of two or more ordinary letters into a new glyph or character. Examples are ⟨ Æ æ⟩ (from ⟨AE⟩ , called ash ), ⟨ Œ œ⟩ (from ⟨OE⟩ , sometimes called oethel or eðel ),
1794-411: Is not only chronologically old (and often conservative) but also rarely used anymore in the modern language, and an obsolete form has fallen out of use altogether. An archaic language stage is chronologically old, compared to a more recent language stage, while the terms conservative and innovative typically compare contemporary forms, varieties or features. A conservative linguistic form, such as
1872-668: Is the continuation of the liturgical tradition introduced by two Thessalonian brothers, Saints Cyril and Methodius , in the late 9th century in Nitra , a principal town and religious and scholarly center of Great Moravia (located in present-day Slovakia ). There the first Slavic translations of the Scripture and liturgy from Koine Greek were made. After the Christianization of Bulgaria in 864, Saint Clement of Ohrid and Saint Naum of Preslav were of great importance to
1950-645: Is the use of Ґ in the Rusyn variant. Г is pronounced as h and Ґ is pronounced as G. For example, Blagosloveno is Blahosloveno in Rusyn variants. Typographically, Serbian and Ukrainian editions (when printed in traditional Cyrillic) are almost identical to the Russian ones. Certain visible distinctions may include: The variant differences 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
2028-540: The African reference alphabet . Dotted and dotless I — ⟨İ i⟩ and ⟨I ı⟩ — are two forms of the letter I used by the Turkish , Azerbaijani , and Kazakh alphabets. The Azerbaijani language also has ⟨Ə ə⟩ , which represents the near-open front unrounded vowel . A digraph is a pair of letters used to write one sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to
2106-556: The Crimean Tatar language uses both Cyrillic and Latin. The use of Latin was originally approved by Crimean Tatar representatives after the Soviet Union's collapse but was never implemented by the regional government. After Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 the Latin script was dropped entirely. Nevertheless, Crimean Tatars outside of Crimea continue to use Latin and on 22 October 2021 the government of Ukraine approved
2184-730: The Croatian , Slovak and Ruthenian Greek Catholics, as well as by the Roman Catholic Church (Croatian and Czech recensions). In the past, Church Slavonic was also used by the Orthodox Churches in the Romanian lands until the late 17th and early 18th centuries, as well as by Roman Catholic Croats in the Early Middle Ages . Church Slavonic represents a later stage of Old Church Slavonic , and
2262-1045: The Eastern Orthodox faith and the Old Church Slavonic liturgy in the First Bulgarian Empire . The success of the conversion of the Bulgarians facilitated the conversion of the East Slavs . A major event was the development of the Cyrillic script in Bulgaria at the Preslav Literary School in the 9th century. The Cyrillic script and the liturgy in Old Church Slavonic, also called Old Bulgarian , were declared official in Bulgaria in 893. By
2340-563: The English alphabet . Later standards issued by the ISO, for example ISO/IEC 10646 ( Unicode Latin ), have continued to define the 26 × 2 letters of the English alphabet as the basic Latin alphabet with extensions to handle other letters in other languages. The DIN standard DIN 91379 specifies a subset of Unicode letters, special characters, and sequences of letters and diacritic signs to allow
2418-533: The Hadiyya and Kambaata languages. On 15 September 1999 the authorities of Tatarstan , Russia, passed a law to make the Latin script a co-official writing system alongside Cyrillic for the Tatar language by 2011. A year later, however, the Russian government overruled the law and banned Latinization on its territory. In 2015, the government of Kazakhstan announced that a Kazakh Latin alphabet would replace
Church Slavonic - Misplaced Pages Continue
2496-659: The Iranians , Indonesians , Malays , and Turkic peoples . Most of the rest of Asia used a variety of Brahmic alphabets or the Chinese script . Through European colonization the Latin script has spread to the Americas , Oceania , parts of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, in forms based on the Spanish , Portuguese , English , French , German and Dutch alphabets. It is used for many Austronesian languages , including
2574-788: The Kazakh Cyrillic alphabet as the official writing system for the Kazakh language by 2025. There are also talks about switching from the Cyrillic script to Latin in Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan , and Mongolia . Mongolia, however, has since opted to revive the Mongolian script instead of switching to Latin. In October 2019, the organization National Representational Organization for Inuit in Canada (ITK) announced that they will introduce
2652-558: 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 the Ukrainian one), different pronunciation of letters ⟨г⟩ and ⟨щ⟩ , etc. Another major difference
2730-597: The Nuorese dialects ) and Italian are regarded as being the most conservative Romance languages . A 2008 study regarding the stability of modern Icelandic appears to confirm its status as "stable". Therefore, Icelandic and Sardinian are considered relatively conservative languages. Likewise, some dialects of a language may be more conservative than others. Standard varieties , for example, tend to be more conservative than nonstandard varieties, since education and codification in writing tend to retard change. Writing
2808-775: The Ostrog Bible of Ivan Fedorov (1580/1581) and as въ началѣ бѣ слово in the Elizabethan Bible of 1751, still in use in the Russian Orthodox Church. Conservative (language) In linguistics , a conservative form, variety, or feature of a language is one that has changed relatively little across the language's history, or which is relatively resistant to change. It is the opposite of innovative , innovating , or advanced forms, varieties, or features, which have undergone relatively larger or more recent changes. Furthermore, an archaic form
2886-576: The People's Republic of China introduced a script reform to the Zhuang language , changing its orthography from Sawndip , a writing system based on Chinese, to a Latin script alphabet that used a mixture of Latin, Cyrillic, and IPA letters to represent both the phonemes and tones of the Zhuang language, without the use of diacritics. In 1982 this was further standardised to use only Latin script letters. With
2964-700: The Turkic -speaking peoples of the former USSR , including Tatars , Bashkirs , Azeri , Kazakh , Kyrgyz and others, had their writing systems replaced by the Latin-based Uniform Turkic alphabet in the 1930s; but, in the 1940s, all were replaced by Cyrillic. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, three of the newly independent Turkic-speaking republics, Azerbaijan , Uzbekistan , Turkmenistan , as well as Romanian-speaking Moldova , officially adopted Latin alphabets for their languages. Kyrgyzstan , Iranian -speaking Tajikistan , and
3042-399: The abbreviation ⟨ & ⟩ (from Latin : et , lit. 'and', called ampersand ), and ⟨ ẞ ß ⟩ (from ⟨ſʒ⟩ or ⟨ſs⟩ , the archaic medial form of ⟨s⟩ , followed by an ⟨ ʒ ⟩ or ⟨s⟩ , called sharp S or eszett ). A diacritic, in some cases also called an accent, is
3120-708: The languages of the Philippines and the Malaysian and Indonesian languages , replacing earlier Arabic and indigenous Brahmic alphabets. Latin letters served as the basis for the forms of the Cherokee syllabary developed by Sequoyah ; however, the sound values are completely different. Under Portuguese missionary influence, a Latin alphabet was devised for the Vietnamese language , which had previously used Chinese characters . The Latin-based alphabet replaced
3198-436: The 1650s). The most easily observable peculiarities of books in this recension are: A main difference between Russian and Ukrainian recension of Church Slavonic as well as the Russian " Civil Script " lies in the pronunciation of the letter yat (ѣ). The Russian pronunciation is the same as е [je] ~ [ʲe] whereas the Ukrainian is the same as и [i] . Greek Catholic variants of Church Slavonic books printed in variants of
Church Slavonic - Misplaced Pages Continue
3276-649: The 1760s, Lomonosov argued 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 the Old Believers after the late-seventeenth century schism in the Russian Orthodox Church. Russian has 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
3354-665: The 18th century had frequently all nouns capitalized, in the same way that Modern German is written today, e.g. German : Alle Schwestern der alten Stadt hatten die Vögel gesehen , lit. 'All of the Sisters of the old City had seen the Birds';. Words from languages natively written with other scripts , such as Arabic or Chinese , are usually transliterated or transcribed when embedded in Latin-script text or in multilingual international communication,
3432-400: The 19th century. By the 1960s, it became apparent to the computer and telecommunications industries in the First World that a non-proprietary method of encoding characters was needed. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) encapsulated the Latin alphabet in their ( ISO/IEC 646 ) standard. To achieve widespread acceptance, this encapsulation was based on popular usage. As
3510-709: The 26 × 2 letters of the English alphabet as the basic Latin alphabet with extensions to handle other letters in other languages. The Latin alphabet spread, along with Latin , from the Italian Peninsula to the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea with the expansion of the Roman Empire . The eastern half of the Empire, including Greece, Turkey, the Levant , and Egypt, continued to use Greek as
3588-434: The Chinese characters in administration in the 19th century with French rule. In the late 19th century, the Romanians switched to using the Latin alphabet, dropping the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet . Romanian is one of the Romance languages . In 1928, as part of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 's reforms, the new Republic of Turkey adopted a Latin alphabet for the Turkish language , replacing a modified Arabic alphabet. Most of
3666-441: The Germanic languages of English, Icelandic and Scots, with /ð/ also remaining in the endangered Elfdalian language. Sardinian, the most conservative Romance language both lexically and phonetically, has a verbal morphology that is somewhat simpler than that of other Romance languages such as Spanish or Italian . In the 6th century AD, Classical Arabic was a conservative Semitic language compared with Classical Syriac , which
3744-434: The Latin alphabet in their ( ISO/IEC 646 ) standard. To achieve widespread acceptance, this encapsulation was based on popular usage. As the United States held a preeminent position in both industries during the 1960s, the standard was based on the already published American Standard Code for Information Interchange , better known as ASCII , which included in the character set the 26 × 2 (uppercase and lowercase) letters of
3822-456: The Law on Official Use of the Language and Alphabet. As late as 1500, the Latin script was limited primarily to the languages spoken in Western , Northern , and Central Europe . The Orthodox Christian Slavs of Eastern and Southeastern Europe mostly used Cyrillic , and the Greek alphabet was in use by Greek speakers around the eastern Mediterranean. The Arabic script was widespread within Islam, both among Arabs and non-Arab nations like
3900-422: 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 as "искони бѣ слово" in
3978-425: The United States held a preeminent position in both industries during the 1960s, the standard was based on the already published American Standard Code for Information Interchange , better known as ASCII , which included in the character set the 26 × 2 (uppercase and lowercase) letters of the English alphabet . Later standards issued by the ISO, for example ISO/IEC 10646 ( Unicode Latin ), have continued to define
SECTION 50
#17327729961314056-417: The Voiced labial–velar approximant / w / found in Old English as early as the 7th century. It came into common use in the later 11th century, replacing the letter wynn ⟨Ƿ ƿ⟩ , which had been used for the same sound. In the Romance languages, the minuscule form of V was a rounded u ; from this was derived a rounded capital U for the vowel in the 16th century, while a new, pointed minuscule v
4134-407: The addition of letter ⟨ě⟩ for yat ) or in Glagolitic script. Sample editions include: Church Slavonic is in very limited use among Czech Catholics. The recension was developed by Vojtěch Tkadlčík in his editions of the Roman missal: Although the various recensions of Church Slavonic differ in some points, they share the tendency of approximating the original Old Church Slavonic to
4212-435: The alphabet of Old English . Another Irish letter, the insular g , developed into yogh ⟨Ȝ ȝ⟩ , used in Middle English . Wynn was later replaced with the new letter ⟨w⟩ , eth and thorn with ⟨ th ⟩ , and yogh with ⟨ gh ⟩ . Although the four are no longer part of the English or Irish alphabets, eth and thorn are still used in the modern Icelandic alphabet , while eth
4290-460: The appearance of a ligature ⟨ij⟩ very similar to the letter ⟨ÿ⟩ in handwriting . A trigraph is made up of three letters, like the German ⟨ sch ⟩ , the Breton ⟨ c'h ⟩ or the Milanese ⟨oeu⟩ . In the orthographies of some languages, digraphs and trigraphs are regarded as independent letters of the alphabet in their own right. The capitalization of digraphs and trigraphs
4368-464: The article on the Old Church Slavonic language. The 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) are 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
4446-427: The breakaway region of Transnistria kept the Cyrillic alphabet, chiefly due to their close ties with Russia. In the 1930s and 1940s, the majority of Kurds replaced the Arabic script with two Latin alphabets. Although only the official Kurdish government uses an Arabic alphabet for public documents, the Latin Kurdish alphabet remains widely used throughout the region by the majority of Kurdish -speakers. In 1957,
4524-405: The collapse of the Derg and subsequent end of decades of Amharic assimilation in 1991, various ethnic groups in Ethiopia dropped the Geʽez script , which was deemed unsuitable for languages outside of the Semitic branch . In the following years the Kafa , Oromo , Sidama , Somali , and Wolaitta languages switched to Latin while there is continued debate on whether to follow suit for
4602-428: The common ancestor, is more conservative than its French cognate, which is more innovative. A language or language variety is said to be conservative if it has fewer new developments or changes than related varieties do. For example, Icelandic is, in some aspects, more similar to Old Norse than other languages that evolved from Old Norse, including Danish , Norwegian , or Swedish , while Sardinian (especially
4680-401: The corpus of work of the great Russian authors (from Gogol to Chekhov , Tolstoy , and Dostoevsky ), 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
4758-531: The correct representation of names and to simplify data exchange in Europe. This specification supports all official languages of European Union and European Free Trade Association countries (thus also the Greek and Cyrillic scripts), plus the German minority languages . To allow the transliteration of names in other writing systems to the Latin script according to the relevant ISO standards all necessary combinations of base letters and diacritic signs are provided. Efforts are being made to further develop it into
SECTION 60
#17327729961314836-662: 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 (e.g. Serbian Church Slavonic, Russian Church Slavonic , Ukrainian Church Slavonic in Early Cyrillic script, Croatian Church Slavonic in Croatian angular Glagolitic and later in Latin script , Czech Church Slavonic, Slovak Church Slavonic in Latin script, Bulgarian Church Slavonic in Early Cyrillic and Bulgarian Glagolitic scripts, etc.) eventually stabilized and their regularized forms were used by
4914-450: The eighteenth century, Church Slavonic was in wide use as a general literary language in Russia . Although it was never spoken per se outside 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 the Russian language in secular literature and was retained for use only in church. Although as late as
4992-438: 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
5070-519: The grammar of their nouns, having dropped nearly all vestiges of the complex Slavic case system ; at the same time, they are highly conservative in their verbal system, which has been greatly simplified in most other Slavic languages. English, which is one of the more innovative Germanic languages in most respects (vocabulary, inflection, vowel phonology, syntax), is nevertheless conservative in its consonant phonology, retaining sounds such as (most notably) / θ / and / ð / ( th ), which remain only in
5148-435: 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
5226-460: The letters contained in the ISO basic Latin alphabet , which are the same letters as the English alphabet . Latin script is the basis for the largest number of alphabets of any writing system and is the most widely adopted writing system in the world. Latin script is used as the standard method of writing the languages of Western and Central Europe, most of sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, and Oceania, as well as many languages in other parts of
5304-444: 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,
5382-409: The palatalization is impossible to observe, e.g. ть is pronounced as т etc.). The medieval Serbian recension of Church Slavonic was gradually replaced by the Russian recension since the early 18th century. Nowadays in Serbia, Church Slavonic is generally pronounced according to the Russian model. This is in limited use among Croatian Catholics. Texts are printed in the Croatian Latin alphabet (with
5460-560: The scribes to produce new translations of liturgical material from Koine Greek , or Latin in the 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. The Church Slavonic language
5538-445: The services of the Orthodox Church in America . 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 Montenegrin Orthodox Church and the Russian True Orthodox Church . The Russian Old Believers and the Co-Believers also use Church Slavonic. Church Slavonic is also used by Greek Catholic Churches in Slavic countries , for example
5616-567: The speakers of several Uralic languages , most notably Hungarian , Finnish and Estonian . The Latin script also came into use for writing the West Slavic languages and several South Slavic languages , as the people who spoke them adopted Roman Catholicism . The speakers of East Slavic languages generally adopted Cyrillic along with Orthodox Christianity . The Serbian language uses both scripts, with Cyrillic predominating in official communication and Latin elsewhere, as determined by
5694-496: The start of a new syllable, or distinguish between homographs such as the Dutch words een ( pronounced [ən] ) meaning "a" or "an", and één , ( pronounced [e:n] ) meaning "one". As with the pronunciation of letters, the effect of diacritics is language-dependent. English is the only major modern European language that requires no diacritics for its native vocabulary . Historically, in formal writing,
5772-492: The world. The script is either called Latin script or Roman script, in reference to its origin in ancient Rome (though some of the capital letters are Greek in origin). In the context of transliteration , the term " romanization " ( British English : "romanisation") is often found. Unicode uses the term "Latin" as does the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The numeral system
5850-527: The written letters in sequence. Examples are ⟨ ch ⟩ , ⟨ ng ⟩ , ⟨ rh ⟩ , ⟨ sh ⟩ , ⟨ ph ⟩ , ⟨ th ⟩ in English, and ⟨ ij ⟩ , ⟨ee⟩ , ⟨ ch ⟩ and ⟨ei⟩ in Dutch. In Dutch the ⟨ij⟩ is capitalized as ⟨IJ⟩ or the ligature ⟨IJ⟩ , but never as ⟨Ij⟩ , and it often takes
5928-402: Was derived from V for the consonant. In the case of I, a word-final swash form, j , came to be used for the consonant, with the un-swashed form restricted to vowel use. Such conventions were erratic for centuries. J was introduced into English for the consonant in the 17th century (it had been rare as a vowel), but it was not universally considered a distinct letter in the alphabetic order until
6006-699: Was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia . The Greek alphabet was altered by the Etruscans , and subsequently their alphabet was altered by the Ancient Romans . Several Latin-script alphabets exist, which differ in graphemes, collation and phonetic values from the classical Latin alphabet. The Latin script is the basis of the International Phonetic Alphabet , and the 26 most widespread letters are
6084-543: Was spoken at the same time; Classical Arabic strongly resembles reconstructed Proto-Semitic , and Syriac has changed much more. Compared to closely related modern Northeastern Neo-Aramaic , which is not necessarily directly descended from it, Classical Syriac is still a highly archaic language form because it is also chronologically old. Georgian has changed remarkably little since the Old Georgian period (the 4th/5th century AD). A roughly analogous concept in biology
#130869