Wiktionary:About Old East Slavic

This is a Wiktionary policy, guideline or common practices page. Specifically it is a policy think tank, working to develop a formal policy. Policies – Entries: CFI - EL - NORM - NPOV - QUOTE - REDIR - DELETE. Languages: LT - AXX. Others: BLOCK - BOTS - VOTES.

Periodization

Old East Slavic is defined in Wiktionary as being between the early 9th century (c. 800) to the mid-15th century (c. 1450).

Spelling normalization

Old East Slavic words were often written in a wide variety of spellings. This is a result of the phonological changes that were occuring at the time, in its evolution from its ancestral Common Slavic language. The main changes that took place during the Old East Slavic times are the merging of the nasal vowels ѧ (ję) and ѫ (ǫ) into ꙗ (ja) and у (u), and the changes to the "yer" vowels ь (ĭ) and ъ (ŭ), which either disappeared or became е (e) and о (o). These changes resulted in inconsistent spellings where different letters were confused as the distinction between the sounds they represented disappeared in the spoken language.

In order to make things more consistent and easier to find, a standard normalisation is followed on Wiktionary. In general, the principle that is followed is "favour the older/more original forms", unless these forms are so old that they are rare even in the older texts.

Concerning spelling, the following practices are followed:

• Use у instead of оу or ꙋ.
• Use е instead of є, ѥ or э.
• Use и instead of і.
• Use ѧ instead of я or ѩ
• Use ꙑ instead of ы.
• Use з instead of ꙁ.

The following practices concerning phonology are followed:

• Use ꙗ and ѧ as etymologically expected.
• Use у and ѫ as etymologically expected.
• Use ю and ѭ as etymologically expected.
• Use ь and ъ for both weak and strong yers, rather than leaving them out or writing them as е and о.
• Use и and ꙑ for tense yers (before an iotated vowel), rather than using yers or writing them as е and о.

Finally, proper nouns are written with a capital letter.

All other spellings are, of course, permitted as alternative spellings if attested. The normalised spelling doesn't need to be attested, as long as the word is attested in any spelling. For example, if both роусьскаꙗ (rusĭskaja) and русьскаѧ (rusĭskaję) are attested, we would put the lemma at русьскаꙗ (rusĭskaja) even if that particular spelling variation is not attested. Most other dictionaries of old languages also work this way.

Pronunciation

Please use the template {{orv-IPA}} to generate Old East Slavic IPA pronunciations. The following vowel phonemes that are not usually designated in writing by separate characters have been added:

• /oː/ (often designated in literature as ⟨ô⟩): The reflex of a Proto-Slavic *o with an acute or neoacute accent. In most daughter languages this phoneme has merged with /ɔ/, except for a few primarily northern dialects, where it is still found as a separate phoneme.
• /ɔː/ (often designated in literature as ⟨ō⟩: The reflex of a Proto-Slavic *o originally followed by a yer that was lost. This vowel later developed into the Ukrainian /i/ (cf. дім (dim), кінь (kinʹ)).
• /ɛː/: The reflex of a Proto-Slavic *e or *ě originally followed by a yer that was lost. This vowel later developed into the Ukrainian /i/ (cf. піч (pič), звір (zvir)).

It is not clear if all these phonemes were actually ever present together in one variety of Old East Slavic. It was however decided to give both these phonemes in one transcription, since their exact geographic distribution is unclear. The following table can be used as reference:

OES	Ukrainian Rusyn	Belarusian Russian	Northern Russian	Mixed (Merilo Pravednoye)
/ɔː/	/i/ ~ /y/ ~ /u/	/o/	/o/	/uo̯/
/ɔ/	/o/			/o/
/oː/			/uo̯/	/uo̯/
/ɛː/	/i/ ~ /e/	/e/	/e/
/ɛ/	/e/
/eː/	/i/		/ie̯/

References

• N. N. Nizametdinova (2010) Историческая грамматика русского языка: учебное пособие (in Old East Slavic), →ISBN
• V. V. Kolesov (2010) Историческая грамматика русского языка: Учебник для высших учебных заведений Российской Федерации (in Old East Slavic), →ISBN
• M. V. Shamanova, A. A. Talickaya (2018) Фонетика русского языка: исторический и синхронический аспекты (in Old East Slavic), →ISBN
• A. A. Kurulyonok (2020) “К вопросу описания фонологической системы древнерусского языка раннего периода”, in Studia Humanitatis (in Old East Slavic), number 4, →ISSN

Lemma forms

For adjectives, the short nominative singular should be taken as the citation form.

For nouns, the nominative singular (or, in the case of pluralia tantum, plural) should be taken as the citation form.

For verbs, the infinitive (ending in -(т)и) should be taken as the citation form.

Transliteration

Transliteration of Old East Slavic words into the Latin alphabet is handled automatically by Module:Cyrs-translit. This module is shared by Old Church Slavonic as the transliteration schemes are more or less identical between the two languages. The only real difference concerns the letter Щ: it is transliterated as šč in Old East Slavic words, while it is read as št in Old Chuch Slavonic.

References

see Appendix:Old East Slavic bibliography