¹ Cf. the locution is going to say with future meaning.

² In Romanic, German, English, etc., no distinction in method of formation must be made between the forms with suffix or ablaut and those which are 'syntactically paradigmatic'. The forms I saw and I have seen obviously fall into different morphological categories, but syntactically they fall into the same category, i.e. they are both tenses.

³ Auxiliary verbs do not only serve for tense formation. In French, Spanish, Italian, English, and German the complete passive in all its tenses is formed by means of auxiliary verbs.

⁴ The variable usage of the auxiliary in the formation of the OR future is much the same as English I shall come and he will come, both forms indicating a time. Therefore the OR and OCS compound future is a real tense.

⁵ Our only sources for the study of OR morphology are mistakes in Old Church Slavonic (OCS) texts copied or written in Russia. The most important texts of the earliest period are: The Ostromir Gospel (OG) 1056; Izbornik Svyatoslava (IS) 1073, 1076; The Archangel Gospel (AG) 1092; Menaeae of Novgorod 1095-97; The Mstislav Gospel (MG) 1117. A full list of texts is to be found in N. Durnovo's Vvedenie v istoriü russkogo äzyka, 1.32-97 (Brno, 1927).

Having no access to the originals and to the most important editions of texts, I have quoted the examples mainly from Sobolevskij's book Lekcii po istorii äzyka (St. Petersburg, 1891).

Note on transcription. There is no one accepted system of transcribing the Cyrillic alphabet. We have chosen the simplest possible transliteration, using the Cyrillic letters and in all places where they appear in OR or in modern Russian. Russian possesses special letters for a and u with palatalization of the preceding consonant, which were pronounced ja, ju in initial position; we transcribe them ä, ü. The Russian letter usually transcribed šč is reproduced by ç in accordance with the principle: one Roman letter for one Cyrillic.

⁶ There are in other languages numerous examples of the use of certain tense forms only in fine writing: the French passé simple (e.g. vous allâtes) is lacking in colloquial; in Southern German (Vienna) imperfect forms like er sass, du assest are only written and hardly ever used in spoken language; in modern Serbo-Croat the aorist is used as a literary device and is not to be found in standard colloquial speech.

⁷ By verbal character we mean inflecting forms which indicate person and number. In the case of both these characteristics are lacking. Moreover, the form itself may be omitted, e.g. u bráta dénbgi 'the brother has money'. In present-day Russian, equational predications are the only possibility. Only in newspaper or scientific language do we find and less frequently ‘they are’ used as a copula. This, however, is to be ascribed to the influence of translations from Latin, French, and German.

⁸ The copula of the 1st and 2d persons is not of OCS origin, it is native to Russian, as witness the folk song formulae oj ty goj esí, vy dóčeri esté 'you are the daughters', and Ukrainian dóbre esí 'thou art good'. Furthermore, the fact that the 1st and 2d pl. forms of the auxiliar by̓ti have been subject to considerable variations in medieval Russian, proves that these forms were not borrowed from OCS, but were original OR forms; cf. 1st sg. and esmí, 1st dual esvě, esvá, and esmá, 1st pl. , , esmó, esmé, and esmä.

⁹ OR texts use almost indifferently the OCS form and the genuine OR form ä for the 1st sg. pronoun ‘I’.

¹⁰ Cf. L. Bloomfield's remark (Language 439) 'in English and in German, forms like sing, singest, singeth have come to demand an actor, although there is no homonymy.'

¹¹ That it is not a question of a mechanical disappearance of in all positions is clear from a consideration of Czech, where equational predications are not found, but where the 3d sg. and pl. perfect forms occur without auxiliary: on přišel 'he came'.

¹² These forms do not only occur in literary language influenced by OCS (such as ecclesiastical texts), but also in genuine secular documents, such as deeds of sale, and in the language of officialdom, where the influence of OCS is at a minimum.

¹³ The form ä dal bylo means in modern Russian ‘I had originally intended to give’ and no longer 'I had given'. The particle bylo can now be used even with declinable participles, e.g. on razbudíl zasnuvšégo (acc.) bylo továriça 'he woke the comrade who had been sleeping for a little while'.

¹⁴ Cf. expressions like by ‘more would be desirable’ and vódki by 'some vodka would be a good thing', where the particle by is combined with an adverb and a noun.

¹⁵ The future form of imperfective verbs ä búdu ‘I shall be writing’ is in no way distinct from or opposed to such forms as ä stánu 'I am going to write' or ä sädu 'I shall sit down to write'.

¹⁶ On the other hand, Serbo-Croat has lost the distinction between dat. and loc. in the singular and between dat. and instr. in the plural, and has thus reduced its declension.

¹⁷ Slovene has lost the syntactical use of the instrumental, which appears now only in combination with a preposition s, z ‘with’, pod ‘under’, nad ‘over’, etc. For the Czech cf. R. Jakobson's article Beitrag zur allgemeinen Kasuslehre, Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague 6.240-88.

¹⁸ Such sentences as ä iméü vrémä instead of u menä vrémä ‘I have time’ are felt to be Germanisms.