Old East Slavic
| Old East Slavic | |
|---|---|
| рѹсьскъ ѩзыкъ | |
| rusĭskŭ językŭ | |
| Region | Eastern Europe |
| Era | 10th–15th centuries; posteriorly developed into the East Slavic languages |
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Indo-European
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| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
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Linguist list
|
orv |
| Glottolog | oldr1238 |
Old East Slavic, Old Russian, Old Rusian was a language used in the 10th–15th centuries by East Slavs in Kievan Rus' and states which evolved after the collapse of Kievan Rus'. Dialects of it were spoken, though not exclusively, in the area today occupied by Belarus, central and northern Ukraine, and parts of western Russia.
Linguists from each of the three East Slavic countries tend to treat Old East Slavic as the direct predecessor of their own language, so they name it accordingly.
In Belarusian and Ukrainian there are also more neutral supranational terms that can be roughly translated to English as "Old Rus’ian language" (Belarusian: старажытнаруская мова, staražytnaruskaja mova, Ukrainian: давньоруська мова, davn’orus’ka mova). The Russian drevnerusskij jazyk means Old Rus’ian as well. Rusian is similarly used by some western scholars such as Horace Lunt.
The language was a descendant of the Proto-Slavic language and faithfully retained many of its features. A striking innovation in the evolution of this language was the development of so-called pleophony (or polnoglasie 'full vocalisation'), which came to differentiate the newly evolving East Slavic from other Slavic dialects. For instance, Common Slavic *gordъ 'settlement, town' was reflected as OESl. gorodъ, Common Slavic 'milk' > OESl. moloko, and Common Slavic 'cow' > OESl korova. Other Slavic dialects are differed by resolving the closed-syllable clusters *eRC and *aRC as liquid metathesis (South Slavic and West Slavic), or by no change at all (see the article on Slavic liquid metathesis and pleophony for a detailed account).
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