use the same rites, they may celebrate them in almost any language they please. Oddly enough the result of this is not that they generally use a language understanded of the people. In most cases the liturgical language is an older form of the vulgar tongue, hardly more intelligible to the faithful than the original Greek. The Byzantine rite, after the Roman use, by far the most widely spread of any, is celebrated in these languages: Greek throughout the Great Church, except where Servian and Roumanian priests insist on using their own languages to the great annoyance of the Patriarch (pp. 326, 332), throughout part of Jerusalem, most of the Antiochene and nearly all the Alexandrine Patriarchate, and in the Greek Church; Arabic in parts of Antioch (it has spread very much since Meletios, p. 287) and Jerusalem, and in a few Churches in Egypt; Old Slavonic or Church Slavonic in Russia, Bulgaria (and by all the Exarchists), Czernagora, Servia, and by the Orthodox in Austria and Hungary; Roumanian by the national Church of that country. These four languages are the chief ones. Later Russian missions have caused the following to be used too: Esthonian, Lettish, and German in the Baltic provinces; Finnish and Tartar among the converts in Finland and Siberia; Eskimo and North American Indian in Alaska and thereabouts; Chinese and Japanese by the missionaries in those countries; and, lastly, English by a body of Austrians in the United States who were originally Uniates, but who have now placed themselves under the Orthodox bishop of Alaska at San Francisco.[1] Extinct languages, in which this rite is no longer celebrated, are Syriac, once used by the Orthodox under Antioch, and Georgian, the language of the now destroyed Georgian Church.
The chief points in connection with the Byzantine rite are the Calendar and feasts, the service books, churches and vestments, Church music, the Holy Liturgy, and lastly, the principal other services, the Divine Office, administration of Sacraments, and various blessings and sacramentals.
- ↑ This list from Brightman: Eastern Liturgies, pp. lxxxi.-lxxxii. I have left out the Uniates, who use the same liturgy. The four languages first named are the more important ones (Greek, Old Slavonic, Arabic, Roumanian); the others are used only by small communities.
