Proto-Slavic language

Rapid development of Slavic speech occurred during the Proto-Slavic period, coinciding with the massive expansion of the Slavic-speaking area.

This makes it inconvenient to maintain the traditional definition of a proto-language as the latest reconstructable common ancestor of a language group, with no dialectal differentiation.

(This would necessitate treating all pan-Slavic changes after the 6th century or so as part of the separate histories of the various daughter languages.)

Instead, Slavicists typically handle the entire period of dialectally differentiated linguistic unity as Common Slavic.

This language remains largely unattested, but a late-period variant, representing the late 9th-century dialect spoken around Thessaloniki (Solun) in Macedonia, is attested in Old Church Slavonic manuscripts.

Proto-Slavic gradually evolved into the various Slavic languages during the latter half of the first millennium AD, concurrent with the explosive growth of the Slavic-speaking area.

There is no scholarly consensus concerning either the number of stages involved in the development of the language (its periodization) or the terms used to describe them.

For Middle and Late Common Slavic, the following marks are used to indicate tone and length distinctions on vowels, based on the standard notation in Serbo-Croatian: There are multiple competing systems used to indicate prosody in different Balto-Slavic languages.

The vowels described as "short" and "long" were simultaneously distinguished by length and quality in Middle Common Slavic, although some authors prefer the terms "lax" and "tense" instead.

Some notes and exceptions: In most dialects, non-distinctive palatalization was probably present on all consonants that occurred before front vowels.

In the process, the palatal sonorants *ľ *ň *ř merged with alveolar *l *n *r before front vowels, with both becoming *lʲ *nʲ *rʲ.

As in its ancestors, Proto-Balto-Slavic and Proto-Indo-European, one syllable of each Common Slavic word was accented (carried more prominence).

By the beginning of the Late Common Slavic period, all or nearly all syllables had become open as a result of developments in the liquid diphthongs.

The main exception are the Northern Lechitic languages (Kashubian, extinct Slovincian and Polabian) only with lengthening of the syllable and no metathesis (*TarT, e.g. PSl.

In East Slavic, the liquid diphthongs in *ь or *ъ may have likewise become syllabic sonorants, but if so, the change was soon reversed, suggesting that it may never have happened in the first place.

Seven of the eight Indo-European cases had been retained (nominative, accusative, locative, genitive, dative, instrumental, vocative).

It also retained full use of the singular, dual and plural numbers, and still maintained a distinction between masculine, feminine and neuter gender.

Hard stems displayed consonant alternations before endings with front vowels as a result of the two regressive palatalizations and iotation.

As part of its Indo-European heritage, Proto-Slavic also retained ablaut alternations, although these had been reduced to unproductive relics.

This created two new alternation patterns, which did not exist in PIE: short *e, *o, *ь, *ъ versus long *ě, *a, *i, *y.

However, the situation is somewhat more complicated due to the large number of verb stem classes and the numerous forms in verbal paradigms.

Single-syllable short and non-acute long syllables became AP b nouns in Common Slavic through the operation of Dybo's law.

Only a single paradigm (in both hard and soft form) existed, descending from the PIE o- and a-stem inflection.

Both the adjective and the suffixed pronoun were presumably declined as separate words originally, but already within Proto-Slavic they had become contracted and fused to some extent.

In all three cases, the likely trigger was the phonological reduction of clusters like *-ss- and *-st- that arose when the original athematic endings were attached to the sigmatic *-s- affix.)

A new synthetic imperfect was created by attaching a combination of the root and productive aorist endings to a stem suffix *-ěa- or *-aa-, of disputed origin.

A major exception, however, is Bulgarian (and also Macedonian to a fair extent), which has maintained both old and new systems and combined them to express fine shades of aspectual meaning.

[10] Proto-Slavic also had paired motion verbs (e.g. "run", "walk", "swim", "fly", but also "ride", "carry", "lead", "chase", etc.).

Such verbs historically had acute stems ending in a long vowel or diphthong, and should have belonged to AP a.

The short vowel in turn was subject to Dybo's law, while the original long vowel/diphthong remained acuted and thus resisted the change.