Middle Russian language

In the history of the Russian language, three main periods are distinguished: Old Russian (Old East Slavic; древнерусский), common to proper Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian languages (6th-14th centuries), Old Russian/Middle Russian (старорусский; 14th-17th centuries) and the period of the national Russian language (from the middle of the 17th century).^[3][6]

During this period, phonetic, morphological and syntactic systems, close to the systems of the modern Russian language, begin to form; such linguistic changes occur as:^[8][9][10]

• change of е to о ^[ru] after soft consonants before hard ones: [н’ес] > [н’ос];
• the final formation of the system of oppositions of hard/soft and voiceless/voiced consonants;
• replacement of the consonants ц, з, с in declension forms with к, г, х (рукѣ, ногѣ, сохѣ instead of руцѣ, нозѣ, сосѣ); in the Ukrainian and Belarusian languages, such case alternations are preserved: Ukrainian: на руці, на нозі; Belarusian: на руцэ, на назе;
• loss of the category of dual number;
• the loss of the vocative case, which began to be replaced by the nominative case (брат!, сын!), the vocative case is preserved in the Ukrainian language and partly in Belarusian: ukr. брате!, сыну!; bel. браце!;
• The emergence and widespread use of the -а inflection in nouns in the nominative plural (города, дома, учителя) in contrast to its absence in similar forms in Ukrainian and Belarusian: ukr. доми, вчителі; bel. гарады, дамы, вучыцелі;
• unification of declension types;
• change of adjectival endings [-ыи̯], [-ии̯] в [-ои̯], [-еи̯] (простый, сам третий changes into простой, сам трете́й);
• the appearance of imperative mood forms with к, г instead of ц, з (пеки instead of пеци, помоги instead of помози) and -ите instead of -ѣте (несите instead of несѣте);
• the consolidation in living speech of one form of the past tense of verbs - the former participle ending in -л, which was part of the perfect forms;
• the emergence of such common Great Russian words as крестьянин, мельник, пашня, деревня and many others.

Among the dialects that developed in the future Great Russian territory in the second half of the 12th – first half of the 13th century (Novgorod, Pskov, Smolensk ^[ru], Rostov-Suzdal ^[ru], and the Akanye dialect ^[ru] of the upper and middle Oka and the Oka-Seym interfluve), Rostov-Suzdal became the leading one, primarily its Moscow dialects.^[9] From the second quarter of the 14th century, Moscow became the political and cultural center of the Great Russian lands, and in the 15th century, vast Russian lands, included in the Grand Principality of Moscow, were united under the rule of Moscow. Based primarily on Moscow dialects, as well as some linguistic elements from other Russian dialects (Ryazan, Novgorod, etc.), the norms of Moscow colloquial speech gradually developed by the 16th century. They combined northern Russian (the explosive consonant г, the hard т in third-person verb endings, etc.) and southern Russian features (akanye, etc.). Moscow koine became exemplary, spreading to other Russian cities and exerting a strong influence on the Old Russian written language. The emergence of book printing ^[ru] in the 15th and 16th centuries, which led to the publication of church and civil books in the semi-charter script ^[ru], also contributed to the unification of the language. Many official documents and works from the 15th to 17th centuries were written in a language with a Muscovite colloquial basis (Afanasy Nikitin's A Journey Beyond the Three Seas, the works of Ivan IV the Terrible, The Tale of Peter and Fevronia of Murom, The Tale of the Capture of Pskov, satirical literature, etc.).^[11]

During the Old Russian period, the dialectal division of the Russian language changed; by the 17th century, two large dialectal groupings had formed—Northern Russian and Southern Russian group of dialects, as well as the transitional Central Russian dialects between them.^[12]

In the 14th–17th centuries, literary bilingualism gradually emerged, replacing diglossia: Church Slavonic, a language derived from the Russian language ^[ru], continued to coexist with the Russian literary language proper, based on vernacular speech.^[13] Between these idioms, various transitional types emerged. Contradictory tendencies were observed in literary and linguistic processes: on the one hand, from the end of the 14th century, literature of various genres emerged, based on vernacular speech, accessible to broad strata of Russian society; on the other hand, under the influence of the so-called second South Slavic influence ^[ru], the language of many works became increasingly archaic; the resulting bookish "weaving of words" increasingly diverged from the vernacular speech of the time.^[8]

The German philologist Heinrich Ludolf wrote: “But just as no Russian can write or discuss scientific matters without using the Slavic language, so, conversely, no one can get by with the Slavic language alone in domestic and intimate conversations, because the names of most ordinary things used in everyday life are not found in the books from which the Slavic language is learned. So they say that one must speak Russian and write in Slavic.” Innovative in this sense was the “Life of Archpriest Avvakum ^[ru],” written by Avvakum in “natural Russian,” that is, in many ways, in the vernacular.^[14][15] This is clearly evident from a comparison of the following examples:

Then they brought me to Bratsk ostrog, threw me in jail, and gave me straw... I lay like a dog in straw: sometimes they fed me, sometimes they didn't. There were so many mice, I beat them with a skufia, the fools wouldn't even give me a bat! I lay on my belly all the time: my back was rotting. There were lots of fleas and lice... And my wife and children were exiled twenty verst away from me. That woman Ksenia tormented her all that winter, barking and reproaching.

Likewise, in this time of ours, the Lord God, in his anger at the people, has deigned to remove our strong autocrat, our benevolent and merciful Tsar, who was kind to all. He, through his wise foresight and great mercy, had he not fallen ill, would have been able to alleviate the people's distress in every way. For already in the imperial city, the wrath of God has begun to flare up from the rulers' taxes and unjust judgments, and the people's thoughts have also begun to degenerate.

The 16th century saw the grammatical normalization of the Muscovite written language, which became the single, national language of the Russian Tsardom. Due to the Muscovite Tsardom's ambitions to become the Third Rome, Muscovite business language from the late 15th to early 16th centuries was deliberately archaized and regulated along the lines of literary Slavic-Russian (compare, for example, the prevalence of the pronoun forms тебѣ, себѣ in the 16th century, compared to the prevalence of the vernacular forms тобѣ, собѣ in the 15th century). In a high, literary, rhetorical style, artificial neologisms were formed based on archaic models, as were compound words (such asвеликозлобство, зверообразство, властодержавец, женочревство, and the like).

Church Slavonic orthography was codified in the grammars of Lavrentiy Zizaniy (1596) and Meletius Smotrytsky (1619). A century later, Vasily Trediakovsky, while still studying at the Slavic Greek Latin Academy, noted that Smotritsky's desire to base Russian grammar on formal Greek models contradicted the nature of Slavic speech. Then, in his 1648 edition, Maximus the Greek imbued Smotritsky's grammar with sacred significance, which a hundred years later required a rethinking. Before Trediakovsky, Vasily Adodurov ^[ru] began doing this in his Grammar, written in the late 1740s, and Vasily Kirillovich mentions him, although without naming him, as "such a man who was once at the Academy…".^[16]

The Moscow official language, virtually free of Church Slavonicisms, had reached a high level of development by the early 17th century. It was used not only in government and legal documents and contracts, but also in almost all correspondence between the Moscow government and the Moscow intelligentsia. Articles and books of a wide variety of content were written in it: legal codes, memoirs, economic, political, geographical, and historical works, medical books, and cookbooks.

The southwestern influence emanating from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth brought a flood of Europeanisms into Russian literary speech. In the 17th century, the influence of Latin, the international language of science and culture, grew (cf. Latinisms in 17th-century Russian—in terms of mathematics: вертикальный, нумерация, мультипликация, фигура, пункт; in geography: глобус, градус etc.; in astronomy: деклинация, минута etc.; in military affairs: дистанция, фортеция; in civil sciences: инструкция, сентенция, апелляция). The influence of Latin was also reflected in the syntactic system of Russian—in the construction of the book period. Polish also served as a supplier of European scientific, legal, administrative, technical, and secular words and concepts.

• Ruthenian language