Book Description

This book provides a chapter-length description of each of the modern Slavonic languages and the attested extinct Slavonic languages. Individual chapters discuss the various alphabets that have been used to write Slavonic languages, in particular the Roman, Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets; the relationship of the Slavonic languages to other Indo-European languages; their relationship to one another through their common ancestor, Proto-Slavonic; and the extent to what various Slavonic languages have survived in emigration. Each chapter on an individual language is written according to the same general scheme and incorporates the following elements: an introductory section describing the language's social context and, appropriate, the development of the standard language; a discussion of the phonology of the language, including a phonemic inventory and morphophonemic alterations from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives; a detailed presentation of the synchronic morphology of the language, with notes on the major historical developments; an extensive discussion of the syntactic properties of the language; a discussion of vocabulary, including the relation between inherited Slavonic and borrowed vocabulary, with lists of basic lexical items in selected semantic fields colour terms, names of parts of the body and kinship terms; an outline of the main dialects, with an accompanying map; and a bibliography with sources in English and other languages. The book is made particularly accessible by the inclusion of (1) a parallel transliteration of all examples cited from Slavonic languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet and (2) English translations of all Slavonic language examples.