This is a hymn in Old Church Slavonic, not in Church Slavonic that you'll probably hear in an Orthodox Church. OCS is an older form of Slavonic and is not used in any church today. There are only such experimental projects like this hymn, or the Old Church Slavonic Wikipedia: http://cu.wikipedia.org

The hymn is from a manuscript containing texts used during holy mass, written in the Glagolitic alphabet. The language is of the Great Moravian dialect, ancestor of modern Slovak and Moravian. It is also the oldest Old Church Slavonic manuscript known today!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJJGu7fK ... re=related

Text in Cyrillic:
Цѣсарьствѣ нашємъ господі, мілостьѭ твоєѭ прізьрі: і нє отъдазь нашєго тѹзімъ, і нє обраті насъ въ плѣнъ народомъ поганьскъимъ: Хріста раді господі нашєго, іжє цѣсарітъ съ отьцємь і съ Свѩтъимь Дѹхомь.

In Glagolitic:



http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/texte/etc ... evf004.htm
(Folia 4, Page b, starts at Line 7.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiev_Missal

Glagolitic is so exotic, isn't it?

This is a GooglePage I have been working on.

http://sites.google.com/site/oldchurchslavonic/

I add new texts when I have time. The problem is that I first need to check every word of ever sentence of the originals I'm copying these texts from, because they are full of errors and features of the scribes' local dialects. I'm trying to post how it would look in the original language of St. Cyril Constantine and St. Methodius Michael and for this I constantly consult dictionaries, grammars and even standardized versions of the texts in Church Slavonic.

I also plan to add some grammar later.

So I'm trying to figure out what would be the best way to write OCS in Cyrillic.

Studying Glagolitic manuscripts and reading some literature on it and comparing other people's work I established how OCS in Glagolitic should be written. Nothing like that has been done before, as far as I know not on the internet at least. Since there is no common census on some of the details, mainly concerning pronunciation of some letters of which we most likely will never know how they were pronounced, I devised a way to write OCS in Glagolitic that resembles the original way it was used in the oldest OCS manuscripts.

As for Cyrillic, there are some aesthetic issues there. There are standardized versions for writing OCS in Cyrillic today, like the ones used for dictionaries and grammars. But these are made in a simple way, to eliminate ambiguity and to be easy for reading. But OCS had many synographs. There was no standardized way to write it (not until Church Slavonic was standardized in the Early Modern period) so scribes could use whatever symbol they liked in whatever place (in a single paragraph one can find the same word written in more than one way); scribes invented their own ligatures and symbols for already existing ones, mainly for aesthetic purposes, and used them all parallelly not just in the same text or sentence but in the same word. This made OCS texts very beautiful, but also quite ununiformed.

I used a simple, undecorative style, for my GooglePage, but at the moment I'm experimenting with more decorative styles for my own use. I mainly use chrestomathies of OCS texts and so far I have discovered that certain symbols used in Church Slavonic were actually never used in OCS, namely Ѻ ѻ, the Broad or Round O. This one is from the 15th or latter centuries I think.

Here is a Russian forum where they discuss in many languages:
http://lingvoforum.net/index.php
http://lingvoforum.net/index.php/board,24.0.html

There is also a topic in Old Church Slavonic:
http://lingvoforum.net/index.php?PHPSES ... opic=531.0

The website is coming along nicely.
http://sites.google.com/site/oldchurchslavonic/Home

I also added a message board.
http://palaeoslavistica.proboards.com/