Customer Reviews

Old Church Slavonic Grammar

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This is the standard classic grammar in English for Old Church Slavonic. The work is short (143 pages) but well organized and nicely setup. The charts of declensions and conjugations are clean and well done. The discussion of points is brief, but all are illustrated with specific examples.

This is designed to be a short reference grammar for the Old Church Slavonic language itself, not a comparative study or tool. This is a helpful tool for those studying Old Church Slavonic. If your interest is liturgical, the better choice in English is Father Shaw's translation of Gamanovich's Grammar of liturgical Church Slavonic.

Lunt's book is exactly what he described it to be. He never said it's a study in comparative linguistic or a "how to" textbook, but a reference grammar. And a pretty good one. His tables and charts are well organized and provide a nice summary and reference to OCS grammar. I also like the fact that he included a section on syntax, something badly missing in most grammar books. I do wish he included more examples of actual text beyond just a simple phrase, but that's just my personal preference. His examples are sufficient to illustrate the principle discussed.

This is a classic in its field. There is no other work in English which I'm aware of which is as exhaustive as Lunt. There is at least one written in pre-1917 Russian which may be better, but none in English. Although used, which I knew before I ordered the book, the copy sent to me is in good shape and I am very satisfied.

Horace G. Lunt's OLD CHURCH SLAVONIC GRAMMAR (7th ed.) is the easiest to find of the several OCS grammars in English. For this student of comparative Indo-European linguistics, however, it proved quite disappointing and nearly unusable for anyone looking for a diachronic view of OCS.

Though he gives a brief description of the Cyrillic and Glagolitic writing systems, Lunt proceeds to use transliteration everywhere (though he continues to use the yer symbols). He is also entirely unconcerned with describing variant spellings, feeling it would distract from pedagogical efficiency. The great failing of this work, however, is that Lunt attempts to analyse Old Church Slavonic as a meaningful system in itself. That means that the language is neither linked to its parent Proto-Indo-European nor compared to the modern Slavonic languages which are either descended from OCS or owe a large part of their vocabulary to it. Considering that most students of Old Church Slavonic study it in order to see its place in a grander scheme of things, Lunt's grammar is entirely unhelpful. The seventh edition does contain a new sketch of OCS' development from PIE and Proto-Baltic-Slavonic, but it is too brief and not integrated with the grammar.

There are several grammars of OCS in English which are quite usable for students of IE linguistics, though they are less easy to find than Lunt's. My personal favourite is Nandris' HANDBOOK OF OLD CHURCH SLAVONIC, which predates widespread acceptance of laryngeal theory but which is supremely readable and which has a second volume (edited by Auty) of OCS readings. There's also Schmalstieg's OLD CHURCH SLAVIC, which is pretty good once one gets past its idiosyncratic introduction. For people who have a good grasp of Russian, Voylova's STAROSLAVJANSKIJ JAZYK is also worth obtaining.

Except as a curiosity, for rarely are dead IE languages analysed as meaningful in isolation, I cannot recommend Lunt's grammar. Old Church Slavonic is my favourite archaic language in the IE family, and I encourage its study, but pick up one of the better grammars.

Mr. Culver sums up the primary advantage of this text quite succinctly. As a Slavic philologist I specialized in literature, but I am not without background in fundamnetal linguistics and proficiency in multiple Slavic, Germanic, and Latin languages. Perhaps I overestimated my background, but I did not expect Old Church Slavonic to strangle and drown me, especially having already done work with original 16th-18th century Russian texts. To my credit, I do recall holding on for the first 15-20pp or so before giving up in overt frustration at the sudden (apparently justified) appearance of vowels with strange names and assorted other "green ideas emoting furiously" on the page with neither discussion nor explanation.

The cost of the book alone still makes me recoil with horror, almost as much as if I were still being expected to infer some kind of intelligence from it. I think Lunt and Derrida would make a great team for spades-- Both- I've been told- make a point somewhere within their meanderings. However they both successfully manage to bury that nugget of theory under so much verbal. . . kudzu as to effectively kill off the last bit of interest in all but the most masochistic of readers.

An excellent update to the original. Lunt never goes out of style!