It is becoming quite a trend amongst ROCOR clergy to say that I read Church Slavonic with a Serbian accent. Can anyone enlighten me as to the characteristics of a Serbian accent? From what I can tell from wikipedia it means I don't take enough note of the soft signs, right?

On a related point, can anyone tell me whether the accent marks in Ukrainian or Serbian Church Slavonic books are on different syllables than in Russian ones? When I listen to Serbian bishops or Ukrainian priests celebrating in Slavonic, I don't see how they could get some of their pronunciations using texts marked the same.

It could also be that you are giving all the vowels their full value in every word, which is something done in both Serbian and Church Slavonic.

Russians speaking and singing Church Slavonic tend to lessen the value of unaccented vowels as they do in their contemporary language - although if you tackled a priest on it he would probably deny doing it. He is probably not even aware he is doing it.

Good point, and in this case the Serbs are 'guilty' of doing something similar to what the Russians do with their vowel pronunciation of unaccented Slavonic vowels.

The accent marks in Serbian Church Slavonic books are IDENTICAL to those in Russian Church Slavonic books.

But in modern Serbian the accent cannot fall on the last syllable and quite often the accent is one syllable ahead of where it would be in the equivalent Russian word.

Example -

Russian and Slavonic: zhivOt

Serbian: zhIvot

Russian and Slavonic: Slava otsU...

Serbian: Slava Otsu...

Serbs tend to use their own system of accentuation when reading Slavonic and ignore the printed accent marks in the text.

OK thank you Father that makes sense. Initially when I started reading Slavonic I was told not to soften the "o" sounds if they are unaccented etc and told that in Slavonic, unlike Russian, "o" is always "o" not "a". However I have noticed that some Russians pronounce slavonic unaccented "o"s as you would in Russian, and indeed, some deny that they do it.

From Praha to Kijiv, folks at Liturgy sing "Hospodin" east of there it's "Gospodin". Each nation pronounces Church Slovanic as they would their own modern language regardless of what the books state and most never think much of it.

Indeed, the issue of 'correctness' of pronunciation is certainly relevant within the tradition of a particular parish and rightly so. I can state with authority from my memory that if a priest had been assigned to any of my grandparent's Rusyn parishes, both in the period when they were Greek Catholic and later when they were Orthodox, who had the 'misfortune' of having been trained in a Muscovite pronunciation of Church Slavonic, it would have taken one 'Godpodi Pomiluj' for the poor man to be shown the door. Now that we use English things are better, even if you are in New Jersey, it's OK to speak Pittsburgeese!

The only problem I've face with Gospodi is that my Russian co-worker used to talk about taking her sick child to the Gospital.

True story.

from the Russian dictionary I use:

I was just trying to inject some humor, but the h/g v/b/w differences between multiple languages dialects is truly fascinating from a linguistic perspective.

Blessings,
Jonathan