Introduction into the History of Church Slavonic

Modern Church Slavonic is the result of a long historical development which started as early as the first works appeared in Slavonic. If this is true, and it has been subject to a constant growth and decay characteristic of "living" languages, we cannot think of it as a "dead" language. The situation, however, is more complicated, because some changes in it were carried out by "a posteriori" language planning, and, in the last centuries, indeed, no changes took place in it (except for the Croatian Glagolitic variant). The present selection of the material intends to illustrate this development both through time and space.