The Dawn of Slavic: An Introduction to Slavic Philology (Yale Language Series) [Hardcover]

Alexander M. Schenker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 26, 1996 | ISBN-10: 0300058462 | ISBN-13: 978-0300058468

This work uses linguistic, cultural and historical themes to provide an account of the development of the Slavic languages. The book contends, among other things, that an understanding of early Slavic writing is incomplete outside the context of medieval culture.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (June 26, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300058462
• ISBN-13: 978-0300058468
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 7.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,240,217 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fine companion to any Old Church Slavonic primer and more, March 12, 2006

By 

Christopher Culver - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Dawn of Slavic: An Introduction to Slavic Philology (Yale Language Series) (Hardcover)

Alexander M. Schenker's THE DAWN OF SLAVIC: An Introduction to Slavic Philology is a comprehensive historical background to the first Slavic writings. For anyone learning Old Church Slavonic from a primer like Nandiris & Auty's HANDBOOK OF OLD CHURCH SLAVONIC or Schmalstieg's INTRODUCTION TO OLD CHURCH SLAVIC Schenker's book is a vital overview of archaeology, comparative Indo-European linguistics, and manuscript studies to serve as accompaniment.

THE DAWN OF SLAVIC opens with the historical setting: a hitherto unknown tribe makes it existence known by sweeping into central Europe. Schenker lists the various theories for the Slavic homeland, along with the possibility that peoples reported earlier by ancient historians may be identified with the Slavs. The Slavic expansion is carefully tracked, as well as the intercultural contact of the Slavs in the Balkans. Schenker's history goes up through the Moravian mission--which also tackles the problem of the exact location of Rastislav's kingdom--and the arrival of Slavs in the northwest, and finally ends with Kyiv Rus. This portion of the book contains a rich bibliography, and has spurred this reader onto countless interesting sources.

The section portion of the book is is a brief (100-page) diachronic grammar of Proto-Slavonic, expanded from the author's prior presentation in Routledge's THE SLAVONIC LANGUAGES, ed. Bernard Comrie (1993). While it doesn't compare at all to a real primer, it has some interesting perspectives on several matters, most notably phonology. And the grammar goes all the way back to the beginning: Proto-Indo-European, introducing the reader to concepts like laryngeal theory through a Slavic lense. The final portion of the book deals with Slavic philology in its most limited sense: writing. The two alphabets Glagolitic and Cyrillic, their functioning, and their evolution, along with all the debate over their order of invention is described. Major literary figures like Clement of Ochrid are sketched. The most fascinating part for me, however, was Schenker's description of each of the major manuscripts from the OCS period and their contents. Most OCS primers just give a single selection from any given manuscript, it is nice to know what else is out there.

If you are interested in any topic having to with early Slavs, from comparative Indo-European linguistics to the history of the modern Slavic states, THE DAWN OF SLAVIC is highly recommended. Very rarely do I encounter such an entertaining book.

14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but lacking, June 26, 2005

By 

V. Quero - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Dawn of Slavic: An Introduction to Slavic Philology (Yale Language Series) (Hardcover)

The part about the history of the Early Slavs is very interesting and gives very useful data which I didn't know before. About the samples of early Slavic writing, I was simply delighted with the idea of having such valuable historical monuments before my eyes.

The part about language is also very interesting, but there are some negative points which I feel obliged to comment:

As usual in studies about general Slavic philology made by western scholars, some major languages (first Russian and then Polish and Czech, followed by Bulgarian) seem to receive more attention than others (with western South-Slavic usually in the last place). I believe this is due to the mere fact that most western scholars, for diverse reasons, simply know more about Russian, Polish and Czech than about Serbian/Croatian and Slovene. Of course it seems impossible to master all major Slavic languages, but at least some scholars could be more humble and not pretend that they know everything about them all.

For instance, in the chapter "Early writing", part "3.10 The origin of the terms Glagolitic and Cyrillic", note 201, Schenker says that "The stem glagol- does not occur in South Slavic outside of (Old) Church Slavonic". Well, this is completely wrong! As any Serbian, Montenegrin, Bosnian or Croatian kid knows, when they learn grammar at school they have to cope with terms such as "glagolski pridjev" (verbal adjective, ie participle), "glagolski prilog" (gerund), "glagolski vid" (verbal aspect), etc., because, in fact, the word for 'verb' in Serbian/Croatian is just "glagol".

One has to wonder what would have happened if the eventful circumstances of history had not led the easternmost Slavic dialects (Russian) but, for instance, the westernmost (Polabian) to the position of the most spoken and 'famous' Slavic language. Probably, Slavic philology and even the reconstructed Proto-Slavic forms would look quite different of how they look today.

For example, in the reconstructed verbal conjugation of Proto-Slavic, the 1st person plural ("we") takes the ending -m plus the "hard" jer, which is such a straightforward way of making a "step back" from Russian. Of course, Russian forms end in -m. The posited reconstructed ending could be also suitable (though less clearly) for Polish, whose forms end in -my. But Slovene and Serbian/Croatian end in -mo, while Czech, Slovak and Bulgarian end in -me, and therefore none of them agree with the posited proto-form. Schenker 'resolves' the problem with one simple and short note: "[...]The ending -mo, which appears in some Slavic languages is probably derived from -mos, which is the more common variant of this ending in Proto-Indo-European[...]".

To me, this "some Slavic languages" doesn't look accurate at all, because it seems as if the endings -mo/-me were the exception, while in fact they are more common than the specifically Eastern Slavic -m.

Another point is the posited form *edin (+ "hard" jer) for the numeral 'one'. Only East Slavic and Bulgarian have a form ending in -in (plus Upper Sorbian, ending in -yn). All the other languages (that is, the majority of them) show forms ending in a mobile 'schwa' (jeden or jedan), thus suggesting a Proto-Slavic form like *ed+soft jer+n+hard jer. This would be the most logical and easy conclusion, explaining the -in forms as a (mostly Eastern Slav) "anomaly" caused by the assimilation of the adjective meaning 'only'. But again, the mighty influence of Russian seems to be overwhelming.

In my oppinion, several other Russian influences can be detected in Schenker's (and others) posited reconstruction of the Slavic proto-language. But, quite ironically, there is another big mistake in this book which could have been avoided just by listening to colloquial Russian speech. When talking about the pronoun "c^to" (what), Schenker says that the genitive form "c^'so" replaced the nominative and accusative in West Slavic. Perhaps he didn't find another reason for Polish and Czech "co" (and he forgot Slovak "c^o"), but in fact the explanation is much simpler. The original form "c^to" was metathesized to "tc^o" > "c^o", for easier pronounciation and by analogy to oblique forms, as it often happens in Russian informal conversation. The fact that "c^o" yielded "co" in Czech and Polish involves just a small phonetic change and it shows analogy with other cases in which East/South Slavic "c^" > West Slavic "c". Amazing that Schenker didn't see all that.

Moreover, in the survey of Slavic languages, when talking about the Croatian and Serbian diasystem, Schenker says that "Croatian and Serbian were standardized in the first half of the nineteenth century, chiefly through the efforts of the Hercegovinian Vuk Karadzic and the Croat Ljudevit Gaj". Well, it's true that Vuk Karadzic was born in eastern Hercegovina, which at that time was under the Ottoman rule. But everybody knows that Vuk Karadzic was Serbian, that he was the great reformer of the Serbian literary language and the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet, so I don't understand the use of the term "Hercegovinian" in that context... Ljudevit Gaj, for instance, is correctly called Croat, and not "Zagorjan", even he was born in the Zagorje region. It smells like some kind of intrussion of politics into linguistic and historical topics, and personally I found the aforementioned paragraph quite unfortunate.

Vuk Karadzic, despite his enormous importance in the development of modern day Serbian literary language, is only mentioned (and now correctly as Serb) on a footnote (308) in the section "Linguistic investigations", which mentions several of the most remarkable scholars and investigators of Slavic languages and philology. Karadzic's mentor, the Slovene Jernej Kopitar, is thoroughly commented, and so he receives the good treatment that his figure deserves. But again, I can't understand why Karadzic's figure is treated in such different (I would dare to say nearly offensive) way.

I don't intend to be harsh; the book gives valuable data, but it clearly has some important gaps.