Church Slavonic Resources

Church Slavonic E-Tutor - The Church Slavonic E-Tutor is a program that teaches Church Slavonic prayers and pronunciation. It has RealAudio and MP3 versions of common prayers and hymns, as well as other interesting resources. This is an excellent site for developing an ear for the sound of Church Slavonic and its stresses and phrasings.

Church Slavonic Resources - A collection of many Church Slavonic-related resources, including fonts, scholarly material, and more.

Online Orthodox Liturgical Texts in Slavonic - This is a collection of links to prayers, services, and music in Church Slavonic.

Online Church Slavonic Trebnik - This is a scan of the 1882 Moscow edition of the Trebnik (Book of Needs). Each page of the book has been scanned as a JPG file, so no special fonts or encodings are required. However, the master page with links to each of the needs is in Russian (Windows-1251 encoding).

Elisaveta - A project create an online Church Slavonic Bible. The New Testament as well as a few books of the Old Testament are currently available for free. This site is in Russian, but the texts are easy for non-Russian speakers to find.

Church Slavonic Bible CD - This is a Bible study program that includes the Church Slavonic, Russian, Latin, Greek, and English (KJV) text of the Bible with search and note-taking capabilities. It is currently scheduled for release in November 2000. A demo version and pricing information are available now.

Glagol E-mail List at egroups.com - This is a mailing list for those interested in the Church Slavonic language.

Church Slavonic Grammar - This is an out-of-print English-language edition of a Church Slavonic grammar. It has been made available by the Orthodox Electronic Publishing Society. It is a packaged as a PDF file inside a zip file. The text is taken from the book: A Short Grammar of Church Slavonic Adapted fron the Russian Text of A. Preobrazhensky by Rev. Maurice F. Meyers, S.J. Second Edition 1956 One Fold Books Fordham Univ, NYC, NY

Church Slavonic Grammar Summary - This is a brief summary of Archbishop Alypy's grammar of Church Slavonic. It consists mostly of grammar tables. It is packaged as a PDF file inside a zip file.

<Grammatika Cerkovno-Slavjanskagw Jazyka> by Hieromonk (now Archbishop) Alypy (Gamanovich) - This is a classic reference work of the modern Church Slavonic language. It is written in Russian and is available from Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, NY.

<Grammatika Cerkovnoslavjanskago Jazyka> by Hieromonk Andrei (Erastov) - This is a textbook for Church Slavonic used at Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary in Jordanville, NY. It is written in Russian, but the titles of each lesson are given in English as well. All of the vocabulary words are given in both Russian and English. It contains many tables that are helpful even if you don't know Russian. It contains a large number of exercises, mostly using texts from the Bible. The first section of this book has been translated into English by Dr. Joseph McLellan and is used in the Summer School of Liturgical Music at Holy Trinity Monastery.

<Polnyj Cerkovnoslavjanskij Slovar'> by Protopriest Grigorij D'jachenko - A complete Church Slavonic dictionary, written in Russian. It contains the definitions of over 30,000 words. I use this in conjunction with a Russian-English dictionary to look up the definitions of words. This book may be hard to find. I got my copy from Victor Kamkin Bookstore.

Church Slavonic Bible - A Church Slavonic Bible is now available from American Bible Society as catalog item 105610. This is the 1900 edition, reprinted in Moscow in 1997. It contains the complete Old and New Testaments. An appendix contains a list of the lectionary readings for the entire year.

The Orthodox Prayer Book, 1975 edition, published by St. Tikhon's Press and available through St. Tikhon's Seminary Bookstore. - This is a bilingual prayer book with English and Church Slavonic on facing pages. It contains Morning and Evening Prayers, Vespers, Matins, the Divine Liturgy, pre- and post-communion prayers, selections from the Octoechos, molieben, panikhida, and more. This is very useful for learning specific texts. There are a few minor errors, mostly in not always using the proper accents and spelling rules to distinguish plural forms from otherwise identical singular forms (e.g. <otec"> (nom. sg.); vs. <otEc"> (gen. pl.)). It also does not use Church Slavonic abbreviations.

<Bukvar'> - This is a kind of primer originally published in Russia in 1908 and reprinted 1992. It appears to be intended for learning to read, using Church Slavonic (and some Russian) texts as a foundation. It contains many prayers, a small catechism (in Russian), and even multiplication tables. I found a copy of this, by chance, at Victor Kamkin Bookstore.

Church Slavonic-Russian-English Dictionary, published by St. Tikhon's Seminary Press and available through St. Tikhon's Seminary Bookstore. - This is a small (44 pp.) dictionary of Church Slavonic words and their Russian and English equivalents. It is more of a word list than a real dictionary, and I haven't found it very useful, but I list it here for completeness.

A Comprehensive Russian Grammar, by Terence Wade - This is an excellent reference for Russian grammar. Since many texts on Church Slavonic assume knowledge of Russian, I have used this book to fill in many of the blanks left in other textbooks.

Reading Modern Russian, by Jule Levin - This is a textbook for Russian that focuses on reading and working with texts. It is not extremely comprehensive, but it gives good explanations of concepts. I found its discussion of verb aspect to be particularly helpful.

The Oxford Russian Dictionary: Russian-English English-Russian - This is a comprehensive Russian-English dictionary, with over 180,000 words. This is helpful in working with Russian texts about Church Slavonic as well as in conjunction with D'jachenko's dictionary.

An On-line Russian Reference Grammar - An excellent overview of Russian grammar. Includes some Java-based exercises.

Russian Web Tutor - A web-based tutorial of Russian, with exercises.

Online Phonetics Course - An online course for learning phonetics. This is helpful for learning correct Church Slavonic pronunciation.

Modern English Grammar - This is the text for an online English grammar course.

HyperGrammar - A nice online English Grammar reference

Britannica Article on Slavic Languages - This is a good article from the Encyclopaedia Britannica on Slavic languages. It contains interesting historical and linguistic information about the development of Church Slavonic and other Slavic languages.