It doesn't have to be striking in all possible aspects and respects, and I only mentioned its Slavic core, that is strikingly outdated as compared to the Modern Russian which is, as suggested above, one of the closest picks already.
I can refer you to Wikipedia in English:
I agree. Russian is the most conservative Slavic language in most departments, including vocabulary, tenses, cases, pronunciation, etc. The only important way in which it's not as conservative as some other languages is that it has a lot of loanwords, but there are many synonyms for almost every loan word, so that's something to consider as well. Overall, though, I think Russian has the fewest innovations and is duly the most conservative Slavic language.
I think this excerpt should be fully intelligible to Russians. The grammar is slightly strange but doesn't hinder understanding that much. The only word that can pose some problems is "nasǫštĭnyi", although I think that may mean "nourished" (nasysćennyi in Russian), in which case it should be deducible.
Ah, I see. Thanks for the info. I don't think it would be realistic to expect Russians to know what this word means, then, but the rest is very close to modern Russian (vocabulary-wise).
1. Russian is comparatively conservative regarding the consonant system, but is probably most innovative regarding the vowel system, at least if we exclude some peripheral northern dialects. The vowel system is the main factor which makes the spoken Russian language particularly poorly intelligible to most other Slavic speakers which weren't subjected to it beforehand (that and swallowing whole syllables in particularly frequent words when the context gets only slightly less formal
).I must note that it wouldn't directly indicate conservativeness of the language; it would only indicate how well its speakers understand Old Slavonic, which isn't the same thing at all. For example, Russian would have some advantage here because of its comparatively archaic orthography and pervasive loanwords from Church Slavonic; however, neither can really count as a sign of conservativeness.
They simply would have a very hard time recognizing the Russian /nasuɕnyi/ in the Old Bulgarian /nasǫštĭnyi/. I doubt it would be easier for any other Slavic speakers anyway.
Ukrainian, of course. The rest - is just derivated from ... (including polish and russian). )))
"Насущный" is artificial church's word and is not Russian.
It doesn't matter how "artificial" it is (is nébo "sky" artificial as well, I wonder?.. After all, its native Russian counterpart is nyóbo "palate"). The fact is it's an integral part of modern Russian and 99% of Russian adults undoubtedly know it.
"Нёбо (небо)" is Russian, but "небеса" (dual indeed) is artificial church's word not Russian. "Насущный" is also artificial church's word and 99% (or even more) of Russians don't understand its meaning.
be closer to people (more mundane) - none knows anything (after USSR decaying), well, maybe 0.99%.
NO, DEFINITELY YOU ARE WRONG !!!
"Nebesa" (sky; Heaven) is originally plural. The dual nominative form was "nebesi" ("nebesě" in Church Slavonic) - the word has an s-stem. Such form existed in Old Russian from the start, although, of course, its conservation must be attributed to Church Slavonic as well.
Russian has just singular "нёбо" ("sky"). Plural "heaven" ("небеса") is from Semitic plural ("shamaym") through Biblical Greek. Today the plural word "heaven" is false friend.
You wanted to say, most likely, in the language of Kievan Rus. )))
Нёбо does NOT mean "sky" (it might have - around the XIV century, when the rounding was still automatic; there was no "ё" letter back then, though).
Russian had and has ё-sound ("берёза", "берёста") but church's language don't have that sound at all (and Ukrainian too). This fact I heard from a scientist Andrey Zaliznyak - Wikipedia
This is because You do not want to realize that the Russian language was long before the appearance of Moscow... But this is normal )))
This sound is exist, but another writings -йо.
You didn't heard "the fact" from A.Zaliznyak (R.I.P., this loss to the Russian science is difficult to underestimate
). You heard something, and made your own interpretations of that.In the language of Kiev-Rus? - I agree.
Any specific arguments to support this claim?
...Which is pronounced just identically to *renka. Polish nasal vowels have specific realizations (nasalized diphthongs) only before fricatives and word-finally. However, even in those /ę/ is actually lost in normal everyday pronunciation, merging with the pure /e/.
Indeed, my voice teacher was very strict about pronuncing "się" as [ɕɛ] rather than [ɕɛ̃w̃].
How does [ɕɛ̃w̃] sound? Can you give a link to a recording?Indeed, my voice teacher was very strict about pronuncing "się" as [ɕɛ] rather than [ɕɛ̃w̃].
During a normal speech this pronunciation prevails, even though personally I still perceive it somewhat careless and avoid it in a solemn register.
I don't have a normative description at hand, but you may look at Fonetyka języka polskiego – Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia.
Listen to e_o_l here.
It depends on whom you ask about it.renka and ręka have diffrent pronunciation belive me , and it's all about clear , elegant and ( literary) correct polish language ..
In my opinion the situation of "ręka" is quite clear, and most Poles pronounce it the same way. It is neither "rę-ka" nor "ren-ka", but "reŋka" (the correctness of using this IPA symbol may be disputable, but i didn't find a better approximation in my IPA-table). The 'ŋ' sound being pronounced similar to English 'ng' in 'sing'. The sound is pronounced by touching the back part of the tongue to the soft palate.
As far as I know, in Polish /n/ automatically turns into [ŋ] before velar plosives as well, much like in German or English (but unlike in Russian). Is it wrong?
Well, in that case Warsaw speech must indeed consistently oppose /en/, /on/ and /ę/, /ą/ before velar plosives, the latter ones having unique phonetic realizations.
Difficult to say.
Moreover, your approach to phonetics is kind of simplistic. For example, Russian doesn't have automatic palatalization before /e/ and /i/ at the moment, but it most certainly had it once (when /i/ still wasn't phonemically merged with /y/, that is - if you don't interpret /y/ as a phoneme in modern Russian in the first place). All words where /e/ follows a hard consonant either come from fundamental hardening of certain consonants (which eliminated the contrast by hardness for them, so /e/ simply has no choice but to follow these hard consonants - e.g. /še/, /ce/) or are comparatively recent loanwords. So what may seem as a conservative feature is more like a double innovation. Of course, that also ignores the different origins of /i/ and /e/.
Inserted where?
The -ti infinitive inflection perfectly exists in Russian - but as a marginal one (a stressed infinitive inflection, which is rare - nesti, bresti, plesti, gresti, some more verbs). I wonder how you counted that.
But no language has preserved the original system.
Bulgarian has preserved /ъ/ as a separate phoneme (let's forget the loss of length distinction for a moment), but has lost /ь/ anyway. No language aside from some marginal Russian dialects (to my knowledge) has preserved /ě/ as a phoneme. So even the basic list of vowels will be unavoidably different from proto-Slavic in all the languages.
It's a bit strange to me, because I once read that Slovak, due to its central position, has tighter bonds with the other Slavic languages than any other language, so everybody else can catch some similarities. Indeed, we, Poles, can - and a lot of them. Besides Slovak is based on a collection of rural dialects (no offence intended), under foreign rule of non-Slavic and even non indeuropean speakers - Hungarian. So naively, I would expect it to be more conservative than Polish or Russian - or, perhaps, even Czech - which have a much longer tradition of the standard language and much stronger foreign influences. I did not make a systematic study, but Slovak sometimes even sounds to me closer to the old Polish than the modern Polish - perhaps because of the vocabulary and some syntactic elements.
Yes, but Slovak being intelligible to most people doesn’t necessarily make it the most archaic. In many ways, archaisms can actually hinder intelligibility.
Moreover, your approach to phonetics is kind of simplistic. For example, Russian doesn't have automatic palatalization before /e/ and /i/ at the moment, but it most certainly had it once (when /i/ still wasn't phonemically merged with /y/, that is - if you don't interpret /y/ as a phoneme in modern Russian in the first place). All words where /e/ follows a hard consonant either come from fundamental hardening of certain consonants (which eliminated the contrast by hardness for them, so /e/ simply has no choice but to follow these hard consonants - e.g. /še/, /ce/) or are comparatively recent loanwords. So what may seem as a conservative feature is more like a double innovation. Of course, that also ignores the different origins of /i/ and /e/.
Inserted where?
The -ti infinitive inflection perfectly exists in Russian - but as a marginal one (a stressed infinitive inflection, which is rare - nesti, bresti, plesti, gresti, some more verbs). I wonder how you counted that.
But no language has preserved the original system.
Except "golova" is not a result of development of "glava". Both of them developed from Proto-Slavic *gɑlvɑ̄. No modern Slavic language can be called archaic in this case.
Such as?
Well, the written language uses Old Church Slavonic, not Old Russian, as its original base for one lol
Could you explain how did č emerge before l?
Could you list some of those Church Slavonic elements you consider archaic?
