Considering Academician R. Filipović-s major contributions to contrastive and contact linguistics,
the autor first ponders the possibility of writing an essay to his honor dealing with
Balkan Sprachbund phenomena or with the linguistic contacts of Croatian and German (as
well as Hungarian), or Italian. However, given the present writer\u27s own earlier research in
the area of Greek-Old Church Slavonic language contacts and interference, some hitherto
less explored facts of this subject are briefly discussed. Notably, rather than once again considering
the already much studied syntactic and lexical Hellenisms (Grecisms) of Old
Church Slavonic, attention is focused on the semitisms (which entered via Greek, hence
also referred to as "pseudo-Hellenisms") and the vernacular (non-literary) Byzantinisms of
the earliest liturgical and written language of the Slavs. Yet, the latter do at most qualify
as nascent (incipient) Balkanisms only

Henrik Birnbaum

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UDC 807.5:808.101Original scientific paperAccepted for publication 3. 10. 1996Henrik BirnbaumUniversity of California, Los Angeles	G46G46	G46	G46Considering Academician R. Filipovi}s major contributions to contrastive and contact lin-guistics, the autor first ponders the possibility of writing an essay to his honor dealing withBalkan Sprachbund phenomena or with the linguistic contacts of Croatian and German (aswell as Hungarian), or Italian. However, given the present writers own earlier research inthe area of GreekOld Church Slavonic language contacts and interference, some hithertoless explored facts of this subject are briefly discussed. Notably, rather than once again con-sidering the already much studied syntactic and lexical Hellenisms (Grecisms) of OldChurch Slavonic, attention is focused on the semitisms (which entered via Greek, hencealso referred to as pseudoHellenisms) and the vernacular (nonliterary) Byzantinisms ofthe earliest liturgical and written language of the Slavs. Yet, the latter do at most qualifyas nascent (incipient) Balkanisms only.Academician Rudolf Filipovi}, former incumbent of the Chair of English atZagreb University and, above all, a good friend, has made an internationalname for himself by his contributions to contrastive and contact linguistics,focusing on Croatian and English  notably the English elements in Croatian(Filipovi} 1990) and the impact of (American) English on the (second andthirdgeneration) Croatian speaking communities in the United States  andby his many organizational and editorial efforts in his capacity as longtimesecretary of the philological section of the Yugoslav, later Croatian, Academy ofSciences and Arts and, after his official retirement, as director of the Instituteof Linguistics of the Academy in Zagreb. Prior to that, Filipovi} became widelyknown as the first editor and one of the founders of the journal Suvremenalingvistika (Contemporary Linguistics). He is, moreover, editorinchief of themultivolume series The English Element in European Languages, and a dec-ade ago he summed up his theoretical insights of contact linguistics in hisstudy Teorija jezika u kontaktu: Uvod u lingvistiku jezi~nih dodira, Zagreb,1986. For a brief assessment, see Birnbaum 1987. A second, revised and much39expanded edition is currently in preparation and due to appear within a yearor two.It could have seemed natural, therefore, to write for the volume honoringRudolf Filipovi} an essay on some aspect of Balkan linguistics, i. e., the arealtypological grouping of languages characterized by what has commonly becomeknown as Balkanisms (primarily, though not exclusively, in the morphosyntac-tic component of linguistic structure)  a field of Sprachbund research towhich I myself have previously contributed on several occasions (cf. Birnbaum1965, 1966, 1968a, 1983, 1985). Yet it must be realized that Croatian, especiallyas it is by now evolving as a genuinely independent language (closely relatedto, but no longer merely one of the variants of SerboCroatian or CroatoSerbian), can only be considered marginally a Balkan language in the formalsense, Serbian, and especially its southeastern Torlak dialect, being muchcloser to the core of the Balkan convergence area. Alternatively, I could per-haps have ventured into some facet of CroatianItalian or CroatianGermancontacts and their linguistic fallout. Though it cannot be said, to be sure, thatCroatian forms part of a Sprachbund with either Italian or German, there area number of lexical, phraseological, and even syntactic agreements betweenItalian (or some of its dialects) and the language of the Croats residing on theAdriatic coast (in Dubrovnik and its environs, Dalmatia, the Croatian Littoral,and Istria); similarly, many conformities can be ascertained between Croatian,German (especially its Austrian variety), and Hungarian. Naturally, these con-vergent features have their historical (and geographic) explanation.In this short essay, however, I have instead chosen another, equally intrigu-ing topic, that of the Greek impact on Old Church Slavonic, since here, too,there are as yet insufficiently explored aspects and levels of language contactand interference worthy of being considered and at least briefly touched upon,much previous work in the field notwithstanding.There are two areas of linguistic structure where the impact of the GreekkoinZ of the New Testament, the Psalter (in the Greek rendition of the Sep-tuagint), and the Byzantine Greek of the Church Fathers on the earliest trans-lations into Slavic was massive and therefore immediately felt. These areasare, on the one hand, syntax and, on the other, the lexicon, including wordformation and lexical semantics. To be sure, traces of the Greek originals canalso be found in the components of phonology (and graphics) and inflectionalmorphology, but in comparison to the effect the Greek models had on sentence(and phrase) structure and on the vocabulary, these traces are relatively insig-nificant. By the same token, syntactic phenomena of Old Church Slavonic canindeed not be treated appropriately without constantly considering the under-lying Greek patterns and paradigms; yet it would lead us too far afield here toattempt to illustrate this with any specific concrete examples, say, the use ofparticipial constructions. Let me therefore merely refer the reader to the bestavailable, most authoritative, and very detailed reference work on Old ChurchSlavonic syntax  the monumental, multivolume set by R. Ve~erka (1989,1993, 1996, and forthcoming)  to illustrate the necessity of always fully ac-counting for the Greek equivalent constructions as well as clause and sentencetypes. For a very general, yet incomplete survey of Old Church Slavonic syn-tax, without, however, adducing the Greek counterparts of various Slavic con-H. Birnbaum, Language Contact and Language Interference  SL 41/42, 3944 (1996)40structions, see now also Huntley 1993: 164184. Issues of methodology pertain-ing to the identification of syntactic Hellenisms in Old Church Slavonic, andthus also to the separation of foreign elements from those of the inheritedCommon Slavic sentence structure have long intrigued scholars, among themmyself; cf. Birnbaum 1958a, 1968b, 1968c. Likewise, the model role played inthe coining of new lexical items of Old Church Slavonic and the effect on se-mantic shifts in the new vocabulary created by Sts. ConstantineCyril andMethodius and their associates for the purpose of rendering the large body ofChristian writings into Slavic has duly been recognized. Thus, special studieshave been devoted to the lexical calques of the earliest Slavic literary language(as well as postcanonical Church Slavonic); cf., e. g., Schumann 1958 and Mol-nár 1985.However, as I have noted earlier, not all Hellenisms of Old Church Slavonicqualify, on closer scrutiny, as precisely that, namely, as Hellenisms proper.Some foreign elements of the earliest liturgical and literary language of theSlavs entered it from  or rather via  Greek, to be sure, but the ultimatesource was not the Greek koinZ of the Gospels or the Byzantine language ofthe Eastern Church Fathers. I am referring here to those pseudoHellenismswhich can be traced back to Semitic  Hebrew or Aramaic (Syriac)  origins;cf. Birnbaum 1958a: 246248. Among the syntactic Hellenisms of Old ChurchSlavonic which possibly ultimately go back to Semitic origins, we can mentionthe construction~mnä plus infinitive, corresponding to the Greek phrase  plus infinitive (believed to echo a construction of the Septuagint), to ex-press the ingressive future. More assuredly this applies to the progressiveparaphrase  not entirely unlike that of English  made up of the copulaverb and a present participle (type Greek (	, OCS b\/b\a{e u~b hewas teaching). Of these, particularly the latter was earlier thought to have itsroots in Greek, but subsequent scholarship (notably D. Tabachovitz 1956) hasdemonstrated the direct impact of the language of the Septuagint, with its $hi-dden$ Semitisms, on that of the synoptic Gospels. Here belongs also the use ofthe perfective present in Old Church Slavonic to render future tense forms ofthe Greek New Testament in commands and prohibitions borrowed  or ech-oed in the pronouncements of Jesus  from the language of the law in theOld Testament. The Greek future here corresponds to a Hebrew imperfect ofthe indicative which, like the socalled jussive mood, could have future as wellas imperative connotations. Cf. Mt 5:27 ne pr\ljuby stvori{i   you shall not commit adultery; 5:43 vzljubi{i  you shall love;19:18 ne lesv\d\tel bäde{i   you shall not bear falsewitness; Lk 4: 12 ne iskusi{i   you shall not tempt. Clearly,had the Slavic author here not been influenced by the language of the Septua-gint (and ultimately by that of the Hebrew Old Testament), he would haveused the imperative.Moreover, it is interesting to note that, although Old Church Slavonic wasof course a strictly literary  and initially even more restrictedly, a predomi-nantly liturgical  language, it nonetheless also reflected to some extent theSlavic dialect spoken in the environs of Salonica, ConstantineCyrils andMethodiuss hometown, and later, in the third homeland of Old Church Sla-H. Birnbaum, Language Contact and Language Interference  SL 41/42, 3944 (1996)41vonic, i. e., on the essentially Bulgarian linguistic base of that language. (Toposit a separate Old Macedonian base of Old Church Slavonic I consider, aspointed out elsewhere, anachronistic, fully recognizing of course the separateand autonomous status of presentday Macedonian; cf. Birnbaum 1993: 245246 and 250.) The question whether Old Church Slavonic shows some firstBalkanisms has therefore long intrigued scholars in the field. And it is primar-ily at this level of the spoken language and its neighboring tongues, foremostamong them, again, the spoken Middle Greek of nearby Byzantium (which wasalso the lingua franca of the Southern Balkans, namely, south of the socalledJire~ek line, subsequently slightly adjusted by P. Skok) that the notion of living  languages in contact, as conceived of by R. Filipovi} and, before him,by U. Weinreich, comes into play. If therefore, in addition to the numerouspurely literary genuine Hellenisms, not enumerated and examined here, wecan distinguish a much smaller group of pseudoHellenisms (alias Semitisms)in Old Church Slavonic, this additional  third  class of foreign elementscould be labeled popular Hellenisms, or Byzantinisms proper. Frequently,though, it may be difficult to decide whether a particular phenomenon can beconsidered merely a popular Hellenism (Byzantinism) or rather perhaps as ow-ing to a combination of the bilingual milieu of its origin and the literary normof an Old Church Slavonic text. Thus, the use of the more common periphras-tic future (with one of the auxiliary verbs im\ti, always in the present tense,or, in particular, xot\ti, in the present, the present participle, as well as, lessfrequently, past tense forms) has by some scholars been explained as due tothe influence of the Byzantine spoken language (as well as perhaps also ver-nacular Balkan Romance) or as owing its use to a combination of vernacularGreek (Balkan) influence and the model effect of the Greek literary originals,where the use of periphrases with  /  plus infinitive was fairly wide-spread; the construction with , while common in Byzantine Greek, was notyet known in the New Testament Greek koinZ. For details, see Birnbaum1958b: 253260.In a similar vein, the phrase (Mk 6: 3940) i povel\ im posaditi jb vsb naspody. na spody. na tr\v\ zelen\. i vzlego{b na l\xy. na l\xy..., attested in theCodex Zographensis, appears at first glance as a mechanical rendition of theequivalent Greek original: !" #$%%!&&%'(!!!...And he com-manded them all to sit down by companies upon the green grass. So they satdown in groups... Yet, as A. M. Seli{~ev (1951: 1920) has pointed out, the useof double forms of the same word to indicate distribution has also enteredMiddle and Modern Bulgarian; thus, examples of this can be found in theworks of a modern writer like ElinPelin. The construction can therefore beconsidered fairly common in the Southeast Balkan area and thus a native, orat least seminative, means of expression also in Old Church Slavonic; cf. fur-ther Birnbaum 1958a: 248250. The exact number of only just evolving Bal-kanisms in Old Church Slavonic is, as indicated, as yet to be determined (cf.Hinrichs 1984). Among features which have been potentially identified as Bal-kanisms in Old Church Slavonic are: (1) the presence of a midtongue vowelin the phonological system; (2) the morphological marking of the vocative case;H. Birnbaum, Language Contact and Language Interference  SL 41/42, 3944 (1996)42(3) the use of the postpositive article; (4) case syncretism (genitive/dative andaccusative, respectively); (5) the replacement of infinitive constructions by asubordinate clause (introduced by the conjunction da and with a finite verbform); (6) the use of an adnominal dative to express possessivity; (7) the omis-sion of the pronoun it; (8) the duplication of the syntactic object; (9) the du-plication of conjunctions; (10) the duplication of words to mark distribution (cf.above); (11) the differentiation of past tense forms depending on pragmatic re-lations; (12) the formation of the conditional by means of the auxiliary xot\ti;(13) the formation of a periphrastic future by means of the auxiliary xot\ti;(14) the nondistinction of expressions for position (place) and direction; (15)the use of im\ti plus past active participle to form the perfect; (16) the use ofthe word for smaller in the meaning of younger; (17) the use of the verbmeaning to catch, to grasp for to begin; (18) the use of the combinationoneonten etc. to form the numerals from 11 through 19; and (19) a generalpreference for paratactic sentence structure. Yet Old Church Slavonic cannot,it would seem, be considered a fullfledged Balkan language in the arealty-pological sense since, being a purely literary language, it  contrary to thespoken Slavic of the area  lacked the live contact with other vernacular lan-guages of the region and therefore, despite several rudimentary or incipientBalkanisms, did not partake in the typically Balkan multilingual symbiosis.The users of Old Church Slavonic would as a rule prefer a nonBalkan to agenuinely Balkan solution in their choice of phrase and sentence structure (cf.Birnbaum 1990: 126127).With these few remarks I hope to have been able to show that the earliestliterary language of the Slavs and its relationship to Greek, both written andspoken, can and ought to be viewed from several angles, all falling under therubric of languages in contact  an area of research so close to the heart ofour honoree.ReferencesBirnbaum, H. 1958aZur Aussonderung der syntaktischen Gräzismen im Altkirchenslavischen. Einige methodi-sche Bemerkungen. ScandoSlavica 4: 239257.. 1958bUntersuchungen zu den Zukunftsumschreibungen mit dem Infinitiv im Altkirchenslavischen.Ein Beitrag zur historischen Verbalsyntax des Slavischen. Stockholm.. 1965Balkanslavisch und Südslavisch. Zur Reichweite der Balkanismen im südslavischenSprachraum. Zeitschrift für Balkanologie 3: 1263.. 1966On Typology, Affinity, and Balkan Linguistics. Zbornik za filologiju i lingvistiku 9: 1730.. 1968aSlavjanskie jazyki na Balkanax i ponjatie tak nazyvaemyx jazykovyx sojuzov. Glossa 2:7092.. 1968bOb{~eslavjanskoe nasledie i inojazy~nye obrazcy v strukturnyx raznovidnostjaxstaroslavjanskogo predloenija. American Contributions to the Sixth International Congressof Slavists, I: Linguistic Contributions, The Hague: 2963.H. Birnbaum, Language Contact and Language Interference  SL 41/42, 3944 (1996)43. 1968cOn Deep Structure and Loan Syntax in Slavic. Studies in Slavic Linguistics and Poeticsin Honor of B. O. Unbegaun, New York: 2131.. 1983Tiefen und Oberflächenstrukturen balkanlinguistischer Erscheinungen. Ziele und Wegeder Balkanlinguistik (Balkanologische Veröffentlichungen 8), Berlin: 4058.. 1985New Approaches to Balkan Linguistics. Mélanges Skok (JAZU), Zagreb: 7987.. 1987[Review of] R. Filipovi}, Teorija jezika u kontaktu, Language 63: 450451.. 1990The Linguistic Type of Old Church Slavonic Viewed in the Perspective of Time andSpace. ScandoSlavica 36: 115130.. 1993Divergencija i konvergencija v razvitii junoslavjanskix literaturnyx jazykov. Philologiaslavica (Fs. N. I. Tolstoj), Moscow: 245253.Filipovi}, R. 1990Anglicizmi u hrvatskom ili srpskom jeziku: Porijeklo, razvoj, zna~enje. Zagreb.Hinrichs, U. 1984Ist das Altkirchenslavische eine Balkansprache? Zeitschrift für Balkanologie 20: 142160.Huntley, D. 1990Old Church Slavonic. The Slavonic Languages, B. Comrie and G. G. Corbett, eds., London& New York: 125187.Molnár, N. 1985The Calques of Greek Origin in the Most Ancient Old Slavic Gospel Texts. A TheoreticalExamination of Calque Phenomena in the Texts of the Archaic Old Slavic Gospel Codices.Cologne & Vienna.Schumann, K. 1958Die griechischen Lehnbildungen und Lehnbedeutungen im Altbulgarischen. Berlin & Wies-baden.Seli{~ev, A. M. 1951Staroslavjanskij jazyk. ^ ast pervaja: Vvedenie. Fonetika. Moscow.Tabachovitz, D. 1956Die Septuaginta und das Neue Testament. Lund.Ve~erka, R. 1989, 1993, 1996.Altkirchenslavische (altbulgarische) Syntax. 3 vols. Freiburg i. Br.Jezi~ni dodir i jezi~na interferencija: slu~aj gr~koga istarocrkvenoslavenskogaUvaavaju}i glavne prinose akademika R. Filipovi}a kontrastivnoj lingvistici i lingvistici jezi~nihdodira autor najprije propitkuje mogu}nost pisanja eseja u njegovu ~ast, a u kojem bi se obradilepojave balkanskog Sprachbunda ili pak jezi~ni dodiri hrvatskoga i njema~koga (kao i ma|arskoga)ili talijanskoga. Me|utim, uzev{i u obzir pi{~eva ranija istraivanja u podru~ju gr~kocrkvenostaro-slavenskih jezi~nih dodira i interferencija, u kratkim crtama raspravlja se o dosada manje istra-enim ~injenicama u tom podru~ju. Naime, umjesto da se jo{ jednom razmatra o ve} prou~enimsintakti~kim i leksi~kim helenizmima (grecizmima), pozornost se posve}uje semitizmima (koji suposu|eni posredovanjem gr~koga, te se nazivaju pseudohelenizmima) te vernakularnim (neknjiev-nim) bizantinizmima najstarijeg crkvenog i pisanog jezika Slavena. Potonji se, me|utim, mogu o-zna~iti jedino kao balkanizami u nastajanju.H. Birnbaum, Language Contact and Language Interference  SL 41/42, 3944 (1996)44

Language Contact and Language Interference: The Case of Greek and Old Church Slavonic

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