Slavoserbian
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The Slavonic-Serbian language (славяносербскій / slavjanoserbskij or словенскій slovenskij; Serbian: славеносрпски / slavenosrpski) is a form of the Serbian language which was predominantly used at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century by educated Serbian citizens in Vojvodina, and the Serbian diaspora in other parts of the Habsburg Monarchy.
[edit] History and usage
After the Great Migration of Serbs in 1689, led by the patriarch Čarnojević, the largest part of the Serbian people came to Austria. There they came under pressure to become Roman Catholics, and to write using the Latin alphabet instead of their traditional Cyrillic.
Russian emperor Peter the Great sent Cyrillic books from Russia by the requests from the Serbian church,which feared that the Serbs would accept catholic faith. However, those books were in the Russo-Slavonic language, Russian main church language. While that language became the official language of the Serbian Orthodox Church, peasants couldn't understand it,and therefore use it. Serbs spoke the Serbian language or as it was called that time the "pučki" ("пучки") language. But Pucki language was not developed enough to be used as a language for writing, and many peasants were illiterate. Only the rich people and the intellectuals could write with Russo-slavic. Many of the writers like Dositej Obradovic wanted to write by the pučki language, but had to use some of the words from the Russo-Slavonic language because in the pučki language there was no words for the abstract things. It was a total confusion, and a new alternative had to be found. The Serbs had to choose a language so they could write books. They could not make any combinations, they had to choose one, and then to send their choice to the Austro-Hungarian emperor Josif II, so they could write their own books. A new language was created-Slavonic-Serbian. It was a mixture of the Russo-Slavonic and the Pučki (today's Serbian language). So there were three choices:
- Russo-Slavonic
- Pučki (today's Serbian)
- Slavonic-Serbian
The choice was the 3rd option. The intellectuals used it as the official written language of Serbia, but the peasants still could not understand it.
By the middle of the 19th century,after the reforms made by Vuk Karadzic to the Pucki language, Slavonic-Serbian was less used; after 1870, it totally disappeared,and the new official language for writing became the reformed Pucki language or as it is called today the Serbian Language
[edit] Characteristics
Taking a sentence from "The Slavonic-Serbian Magazine" ("Славеносербски магазин") as an example of the language could be useful: "Ves'ma by meni priskorbno bylo, ako bi ja kadgod čuo, čto ty, moj syne, upao u pyanstvo, roskoš', bezčinie, i nepotrebnoe žitie". Even that one sentence shows that the language is full with the Russian words (čto), Russian building forms (roskoš' instead of raskoš), as well as the appearance of the letter –t in the third person plural of the present tense (oni mogut' instead of oni mogu). Furthermore, this language had no defined grammar, and it was used in a form that suited whoever spoke it.
[edit] See also
- Church Slavonic, its ancestor
- Serbian language
| Slavic languages and dialects | |||
| East Slavic | Belarusian | Old East Slavic† | Old Novgorod dialect† | Russian | Rusyn (Carpathians) | Ruthenian† | Ukrainian | ||
| West Slavic | Czech | Kashubian | Knaanic† | Lower Sorbian | Pannonian Rusyn | Polabian† | Polish | Pomeranian† | Slovak | Slovincian† | Upper Sorbian | ||
| South Slavic | Banat Bulgarian | Bulgarian | Church Slavic | Macedonian | Old Church Slavonic† | Serbo-Croatian (Bosnian, Bunjevac, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian, Šokac) | Slavic (Greece) | Slovenian | ||
| Other | Proto-Slavic† | Russenorsk† | Slavoserbian† | Slovio | ||
| †Extinct | |||
