Slavic (idea)

Some common Slavic languages:

West Slavic:

• Czech.
• Slovak.
• Polish.
• Kashubian.
• Sorbian.

East Slavic:

• Russian.
• Ukrainian.
• Belarusian (known before Belarus's independence as Belorussian or Byelorussian).

• Serbo-Croatian. For political reasons, it may be more appropriate to refer to this as three languages: Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian. shallot's Serbo-Croatian writeup offers an informative discussion of this issue. A language is a dialect with an army.
• Old Church Slavonic, which is dead in the same way that Latin, Sanskrit, and Pali are dead. Occasionally called Old Bulgarian.
• Bulgarian.
• Macedonian.
• Slovenian.

A number of Slavic languages, most notably those of the East Slavic branch and some of those of the South Slavic branch, are written in the Cyrillic script. Old Church Slavonic is written in the Glagolitic script, from which the Cyrillic script is probably derived. All the others are written in the Latin script. Notably, one of the major distinctions between Serbian (Serbo-Croatian as spoken in the east---primarily Serbia) and Bosnian and Croatian (Serbo-Croatian as spoken in the west---primarily Croatian in Croatia and Bosnian in most of Bosnia-Hercegovina) is that the first is written in Cyrillic and the last two in Latin.

Slavic languages typically have rather complex case systems compared to many Indo-European languages. Macedonian and Bulgarian, though, have mostly replaced their system of declension with the use of prepositions. Many Slavic languages have a dual number, in addition to singular and plural. Finally, in many Slavic languages verbs come in pairs---a perfective verb, which denotes the completed action, and an imperfective verb, which indicates an incomplete action; that is, such languages are hybrid aspectual languages.

The Slavic languages belong to the satem branch of the Indo-European language family. `Satem', after the Avestan word for `hundred', means that the Proto-Indo-European palatovelar consonant *k' (not labiovelar *k^w) tends to become a sibilant (s or a similar sound). The other members of the palatovelar series (*g' and *g'h) likewise became sibilants. Some examples:

PIE root                ok'to- k'erd-  g'r̥əno-     ghel-
meaning                 eight  heart   corn    gold, yellow-green

CENTUM
English  (Germanic)*    eight  heart   corn    gold     yellow
German   (Germanic)     acht   Herz    Korn    Gold     gelb
Latin    (Italic)       octo   cor     granum  **       helvus
Irish    (Celtic)       ocht   croí    **      **       **
Greek    (Hellenic)     oktō   kardia  **      chrusos  chlōros

SATEM
Sanskrit (Indo-Aryan)   aSTan  śrad-   **      hiraNya  hari
Bosnian  (S.Slavic)     osam   srce    zrno    zlato    žut
Polish   (W.Slavic)     osiem  serce   ziarno  złoto    żołty
Slovak   (W.Slavic)     osem   srdce   zrno    zlato    žlty
Russian  (E.Slavic)     vosem' serdtse zerno   zoloto   zhyoltyy

• * English is grammatically Germanic, but borrows a lot of vocabulary from French. The English words shown are all Germanic in origin.
• ** I know of no native words that are obviously cognate to to the PIE root.