(15 credits)

General description
This course is taught over two semesters and involves 30 contact hours. It is concerned with the reconstruction of the lost Common Slavonic language, with an examination of the earliest recorded Slavonic language, Old Church Slavonic and with a historical-comparative study of certain aspects of the individual Slavonic languages.

Aims
This course is intended to acquaint students with the development of Common Slavonic from Indo-European to the division into individual languages, with aspects of the history and structure of Old Church Slavonic and with some of the principal issues relating to the historical phonology and morphology of the individual Slavonic languages.

Objectives
By the end of the course students will:

1. have gained insights into the difference between the linguistic and the pedagogical approaches to language study;
2. have a knowledge and understanding of the processes by which the sound system of Common Slavonic developed from that of Indo-European;
3. have a knowledge and understanding of the origins and history of Old Church Slavonic and its alphabets;
4. have an awareness of the principal features of the structure of Old Church Slavonic;
5. possess a knowledge and understanding of selected processes relating to the historical phonology and morphology of the Slavonic languages;
6. be able to write analytical essays on the subject matter of the course;
7. where appropriate, be able to analyse Slavonic texts of linguistic interest.

1. Slavonic and Indo-European
2. How many Slavonic languages are there?

II The Development of the Common Slavonic sound system from Indo-European (Hours 3-12)

1. The sound system of late Indo-European
2. The simplification of the triple system of plosives
3. The simplification of the velars
4. The origin of /x/
5. The simplification of consonant clusters
6. Palatalisation by Jod<
7. The fronting of back vowels after Jod
8. The break-up of the system of long and short vowels
9. The law of rising sonority
10. The loss of final consonants
11. The loss of -u and -i diphthongs
12. The loss of -m and -n diphthongs
13. The loss of -r and -l diphthongs
14. Prothetic consonants
15. The palatalisations of velars
16. Stress, tone and quantity

III Old Church Slavonic (Hours 13-20)

1. The origin of Old Church Slavonic
2. The Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets
3. The surviving Old Church Slavonic texts
4. The sound system of Old Church Slavonic
5. Examination of extracts from selected texts

IV The principal issues relating to the historical phonology and morphology of the Slavonic languages (Hours 21-30)

1. The vowel system (nasal vowels, the Jers, Jat' etc.)
2. The consonant system (palatalisation etc.)
3. Declension
4. Conjugation

Assessment
1 x 2,000 essay (33.33%); 1 x 4,000 word essay (66.67%). Assessed work must be handed in by the deadline set, with a maximum of fourteen days of extension available to those students who have made a formal request in advance. Work handed in late without good cause will not be marked. Marks awarded for each piece of work will be provisional. The final mark for the individual pieces of work and for the whole paper will be decided by the relevant Board of Examiners in the usual way and will be confidential.

Taught by Dr John Dunn