Common Slavic into East Slavic

The field of East Slavic historical linguistics has undergone dramatic change over the past 50 years. Progress in dialectology and accentology, along with the steady accretion of new primary materials (Novgorod birchbark texts), has rendered obsolete many of the formulas that have traveled from handbook to handbook. The teacher of the history of East Slavic faces the problem of how to combine the facts established and insights gained by recent scholarship with what remains valuable in traditional work. That is the task the author set himself in this book. Starting from Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Slavic, he analyzes the Common Slavic developments that led to the dialect state reflected in the earliest monuments, with particular attention to Early East Slavic. The author then shows how the Common Slavic loss of reduced vowels (jers) in the 12th -13th cc. led to the formation of three distinct dialect complexes, Ukrainian, Belorusian and Russian, within the relatively uniform eastern branch of Late Common Slavic. While other recent surveys have been content to set out the ascertainable facts and illustrate change via diachronic correspondences and sets of cognates, the focus throughout is on successive synchronic states. The book is designed for students with a solid foundation in at least one modern Slavic language – ideally, familiar with Old Church Slavonic as well.