Old Church Slavonic Online

Selected Annotated Bibliography

Todd B. Krause

Texts

Given the small size of the OCS corpus, it will come as no surprise that there are few editions of texts. The grammars listed below have more extensive lists:

• Quattuor Evangeliorum Codex Glagoliticus olim Zogaphensis nunc Petropolitanus, ed. V. Jagic; Berlin 1879. Edited version of the oldest OCS manuscript, containing almost the entirety of the four Gospels. The original is written in Glagolitic, but Jagic has transcribed it using Cyrillic. The introduction and critical apparatus are in Latin.
• A Reader in Old Church Slavonic and Old Russian, N.P. Vakar; Massachussetts. A short selection of texts. Useful for illustrating the similarities of OCS and Old Russian, as well as giving a few nice examples of handwriting. A very brief glossary at the end provides the Greek and modern Russian equivalents.

Grammars

Below are listed only grammars written in English. In the bibliographies of these, one may find references to works in other languages:

• Old Church Slavonic Grammar, Horace G. Lunt; Walter de Gruyter 2001. This is the pioneering work that spurred OCS studies in the United States. Highly detailed. Best used as a reference grammar.
• Handbook of Old Church Slavonic: Vol. I Grammar, Vol II Texts and Glossary, Grigore Nandris and Robert Auty; Athlone Press 1965. A less comprehensive grammar. The texts, with glossary keyed to the grammar, make the volumes extremely useful.
• An Introduction to Old Church Slavic, William R. Schmalstieg; Slavica 1982. More concerned with relation of OCS to PIE; consequently there is a more in-depth account of how proto-forms come down into OCS. Contains short texts with glossary.

Dictionaries

There are no published dictionaries in English except for the glossary in the Handbook by Nandris and Auty. For those with some training in the classics, the following is useful:

• Lexicon Palaeoslovenico-Graeco-Latinum, Franz von Miklosich; Vienna 1865. Translates from OCS into Greek and Latin. An invaluable resource by virtue of its comprehending the entire vocabulary of OCS, as well as other old Slavic languages, e.g. Old Russian.

Linguistic History

A few works in English are of use in determining the relation of OCS to the other Slavic languages and to PIE:

• Russian and the Slavonic Languages, W.J. Entwistle and W.A. Morison; Faber and Faber. A very detailed account of the history of the Slavic languages. A good reference.
• Common and Comparative Slavic: Phonology and Inflection, Charles E. Townsend and Laura A. Janda; Slavica 1996. Intended for the mature student, but engagingly written. A very up-to-date account of comparative Slavic studies, starting with a brief description of PIE and giving a good general picture of LCS. Unifies many of the changes within LCS under the principles of Rising Sonority and Synharmony.