Russian Historical Grammar

Book excerpt: The material which makes up the text of this book is arranged for convenience of reference in the three coherent parts, of which the last is essentially a supplement to the preceding two. Part I provides the requisite orientation for readers who may be new to linguistics, and its first two chapters should be useful to students of both Russian and other other Slavonic languages. The remainder of Part I is intended specifically for those studying Russian and constitutes, as it were, the prolegomena to Part II, which is entirely concerned with the evolution of the Russian phonological and grammatical system in its conventionally accepted domains and categories. Part II contains a series of appendices of which the first illustrates the evolutionary process with annotated excerpts from the historical records of the language covering a space of nine centuries; the main body of the work concludes with a short history of Russian historical grammar and a classified and annotated bibliography.