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Old Russian language

Old East Slavic
рѹсьскъ ѩзыкъ
rusĭskŭ językŭ
Region Eastern Europe
Era 10th–15th centuries; posteriorly developed into the East Slavic languages
Language codes
ISO 639-3
Linguist list
orv
Glottolog oldr1238
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Old East Slavic, Old Ruthenian, 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.

The most neutral, supranational terms for Old East Slavonic can be translated to English as "Old Rus’ian" (including Belarusian: старажытнаруская мова, staražytnaruskaja mova; Russian: Древнерусский язык, drevnerusskij jazyk; and Ukrainian: давньоруська мова, davn’orus’ka mova. The term "Rusian" is similarly used by western scholars such as Horace Lunt.

However, because many linguists from Belarus, Russia and Ukraine tend to discuss Old East Slavic only in the sense of it being a direct predecessor of their own language, they give it names such as:

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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