Language Contact and Language Interference: The Case of Greek and Old Church Slavonic

Considering Academician R. Filipović-s major contributions to contrastive and contact linguistics, the autor first ponders the possibility of writing an essay to his honor dealing with Balkan Sprachbund phenomena or with the linguistic contacts of Croatian and German (as well as Hungarian), or Italian. However, given the present writer\u27s own earlier research in the area of Greek-Old Church Slavonic language contacts and interference, some hitherto less explored facts of this subject are briefly discussed. Notably, rather than once again considering the already much studied syntactic and lexical Hellenisms (Grecisms) of Old Church Slavonic, attention is focused on the semitisms (which entered via Greek, hence also referred to as "pseudo-Hellenisms") and the vernacular (non-literary) Byzantinisms of the earliest liturgical and written language of the Slavs. Yet, the latter do at most qualify as nascent (incipient) Balkanisms only