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If there was a Proto-Slavic language, then theoretically there was also a Proto-Slavic people.
There were people speaking a set of closely related dialects that, long after the fact, could be seen to have been the precursors of the Slavic group of languages.--Wetman 08:26, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)
The bulk of the article doesn't deal at all with the history of Slavic languages, but the history of Proto-Slavic (internal, and from PIE and PBSl. perspective). From an article titled History of the Slavic languages I'd primarily expect Proto-Slavic as a starting point, with developments to modern Slavic languages in phonology, grammar, lexicon, syntax and so on being summarized. I doubt that the article could be renamed to something appropriate considering the vastness of topics it covers, so the offending content should be extracted to other (perhaps new) articles, leaving the space for further editing because the article is already way too huge.
Periodization of Proto-Slavic differs from one author to another, every sentence involving years must be sourced otherwise it's OR. I'd suggest refraining from terms such as MCS and PSl. (which is ambiguous) altogether and simply listing reconstructions in chains when describing accent shifts and sound changes. If necessary, simply use Early PSl. *x > .. > .. > .. > (L)CS *y everywhere.
Everything from Kortlandt comes with a big question mark, because things such as "Van Wijk's law" are not generally accepted. A more balanced approach is needed with theories of other (Balto-)Slavists as well.
Wiktionary uses different notation for Proto-Slavic segments, so wikilinking there could be problematic and/or introduce confusion. Perhaps they should harmonize? Is there a particular reason why there are no links to enwikt at all? --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 00:41, 28 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I've been wanting to add a section about the grammatical developments from Proto-Slavic onwards. Things like the development of the aspect distinction, animacy, the loss of certain cases in some Slavic languages, the loss of the aorist and so on. CodeCat (talk) 02:16, 28 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The article is already > 100K and there is not much place for further additions.. However, if the first part of the article were to be moved to e.g. History of Proto-Slavic, there'd plenty of space left. This article would start from Late Proto-Slavic and continue to modern languages. Then, if it grows too big we'd extract pieces to History of Slavic declension and so on. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 03:43, 30 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
See my comments in Proto-Slavic about where terms like MCS come from. I think it's important to specify the periodization in one way or another because otherwise it's simply far too confusing to figure out the very long history of Common Slavic. I'm not attached to particular terms like "Middle Common Slavic" and this doesn't mean that unperiodized chained reconstructions are bad but we need to be careful not to make an already highly technical subject accessible only to Slavic experts. I agree about sourcing the years better. Likewise your comments about Kortlandt. I put this article together after a great deal of trying to puzzle through the sources, which often disagree with each other, and there may well be errors. The non-Kortlandt sources are even less accessible than Kortlandt, since he's the only one (AFAIK) that actually gives a list of sound changes in approximate order so that I could actually work through specific examples when I didn't understand something. Feel free to update things to include a more balanced approach.
As for lack of enwikt links, it's simply for want of time to put them in.
Splitting into History of Proto-Slavic or whatever is not necessarily a bad idea. I wanted to keep the pre-history of Proto-Slavic together with the stuff describing the later breakup of the Slavic languages because the two topics are so closely intertwined and because it's hard to figure out where to draw the line given the long history of Common Slavic. However, I could see a split at section 5 "Dialectal differentiation". The accentual changes are hard to handle this way, though; the entire topic from PBS to present needs to be discussed together. Benwing (talk) 01:26, 28 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I started Proto-Slavic accent but it's unfinished since some other articles that it depends on need to be expanded a bit first (I prefer the bottom-up approach). Article on Balto-Slavic accent would only deal with developments from PIE to the stage immediately before the Proto-Balto-Slavic split. Later developments in Slavic and Baltic are completely unrelated to each other. Similarly, article on Serbo-Croatian accent would use Proto-Slavic accent as a starting point and explain how the modern system evolved. Each of these topic is sufficiently complex to merit their own articles. One big problem with Proto-Balto-Slavic accent is that every author has their own theory, and there is very little that all agree upon, so for it to be written in a NPOV manner basically it would have to be written as a survey of various theories. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 02:26, 28 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for creating that article! It looks very good. At some point you should probably extract the text on Slavic accent from here and History of Proto-Slavic, move it to that article, and integrate it, leaving summaries of some sort in place of the extracted text. You seem to understand this area a lot more than I do so you're the logical person to do it. The text I wrote and User:CodeCat contributed to is based on English sources (esp. Kortlandt, whose theories I realize aren't always well-accepted); unfortunately I can't read Croatian. Benwing (talk) 23:10, 3 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The whole article writes about the Serbo-Croatian language as one entity. This language existed only temporary, when Croatian and Serbian were brought under one roof. It wrongly writes about "modern Serbo-Croatian". Something like modern Serbo-Croatian does not exist. The wrongs in this article in regards to Serbo-Croatian go so far that one of the references, namely Matasović, Ranko (2008), Poredbenopovijesna gramatika hrvatskoga jezika, Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, ISBN 978-953-150-840-7, a book that writes about the Croatian language in Croatian, is said to be written in Sebo-Croatian instead of Croatian. See language of the book here: https://glottolog.org/resource/reference/id/87739 The book is written in Croatian. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Umno22 (talk • contribs) 11:23, 28 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
A text in the Old East Slavic looks strongly archaic for a modern East Slav. A text in the Old Belarusian looks archaic for a modern Belarusian. These languages arguably “do not exist anymore”. Is a random text in 20th-century Serbo-Croatian archaic for a modern Serb or Croat or Bosniak or Monte-Crna-how-are-they-called? Incnis Mrsi (talk) 11:35, 28 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
"For most comparative purposes, however, South Slavic does not function as a unit. Bulgarian and Macedonian, while quite similar to each other, are radically different from the other South Slavic languages in phonology and grammar. The phonology of Bulgarian and Macedonian is similar to East Slavic rather than their nearest Slavic neighbor Serbo-Croatian[citation needed] (suggesting an early East–West divide across the whole Slavic territory, before the incursion of Hungarian and Romanian speakers). In grammar, Bulgarian and Macedonian have developed distinctly from all other Slavic languages, eliminating nearly all case distinctions (strongly preserved elsewhere), but preserving and even strengthening the older Indo-European[citation needed] aspectual system consisting of synthetic aorist and imperfect tenses (largely eliminated elsewhere in favor of the new Slavic aspectual system)."
The problem with this unsourced section is that it conflates contrastive and historical-comparative analysis: most of the observations about the differences between Bulgarian-Madedonian and Serbo-Croatian-Slovene apply to the modern languages, but not to the time of the alleged (and undated) 'early East–West divide across the whole Slavic territory, before the incursion of Hungarian and Romanian speakers'. None of the indisputably ancient, Common Slavic sound changes splits all the Slavic languages along this line. The loss of case and, most likely, the development of the article in Bulgarian-Madedonian happened much later, and likewise the loss of the imperfect in other Slavic. The quantitative and accentual distinctions don't seem likely to have disappeared in all of East and South-East Slavic, since they influence the accentuation of the article in Bulgarian, and it hadn't developed before the split. The vowel reductions are also late and very different in East Slavic and South-East Slavic. Eastern Bulgarian reduction and (conservative) palatalisation are fairly different from the East Slavic ones and also shared much more with Russian than with the closest neighbour, Ukrainian.
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