Can you source this for me? It’s interesting. With respect to the Easterns I was making no implication that the three languages were absolutely necessary or the only languages. I was simply stating the fittingness of the three languages in the Roman Rite.
But the observance that languages in worship tend to die and be reserved for worship holds since the Old Slavonic is a dead language.
As for sacred languages tending to die once used for liturgy this analogy is wrong. They do not die, they evolve. No language is entirely static. It is only natural that if a language is attempted to be preseved for many centuries it separates from the languages organic living evolutionary vocabulary. It has not died it has simply been preserved as it was in in the past. This is not death this is history. If you are Serbian you can easily understand Old Church Slavonic. If you are Italian you can easily understand Church Latin. If you are Greek you can easily understand Biblical Koine Greek used in liturgy (modern greek is banned by all Greek Orthodox Churches in the world). If you are Amharic speaking Ethiopian you can easily understand liturgical Ge’ez.
When the first slavs were converted to Western (not eastern) christianity they all used Church Slavonic not Latin. Whether they had the Popes permission to do this I do not know or care. As far as I know Croatia is the only country in which the Western Liturgy has survived to be said in Old Church Slavonic. The independence of Dubrovnik facilitated the continuity of the tradition (It , thank God, was never conquered by germans/franks).
At this site you can see examples of Slavonic as the 4th liturgical language…as well as find a cd of chant by the Pharos Cantors for the WESTERN liturgy in Slavonic which is a few centuries old.
croatianhistory.net/etf/et12.html
The Old Church Slavonic became the fourth liturgical language of the Christian world, though by 1000 AD after most of the region became a marsh and formally part of the Frankish empire who opposed Slavonic in the liturgy, its use in Great Moravia proper gradually declined until it virtually vanished in the late Middle Ages. Its late form still remains the liturgical language of the Russian, Bulgarian, and Serbian Orthodox Church.
“Great Moravia was an empire existing in Central Europe between 833 and the early 10th century. It was inhabited and ruled by the ancestors of modern Moravians and Slovaks. The core territory laid on both sides of the Morava river, in present-day Slovakia and the Czech Republic, but the empire also extended into what are today parts of Hungary, Romania, Poland, Austria, Germany, Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia and Ukraine.”
Earlier in this conversation the book “Byzantine missions among the Slavs” by Francis Dvornik was mentioned I must agree that is a spectular composition . He is the greatest historian the Church produced in the 20th century.
(having been attached to the old rite insofar as reasonably possible since I was 21).