Publisher's Synopsis
This work traces the merging of Russian with Old Church Slavonic, from which classical modern Russian evolved by the end of the eighteenth century, now the standard literary language.;The author aims to present the essential matter of a Russian historical grammar but also to illustrate and interpret the various kinds of written language current in Russia from the beginnings of literacy down to the establishment of the modern "received standard" literary language at the beginning of the 19th century.;The text is intended to enable the student reading a Russian text of any period, to recognize and appreciate in its historical context the amalgam which written Russian usually was and still is.
