Handbook of Old Church Slavonic - Texts and Glossary by R. Auty. -"Old Church Slavonic" is the name now generally used in English for the language in which the earliest known Slavonic written texts were composed in the ninth century. It was a literary
language, based primarily on a Macedonian Slavonic dialect but not identical in all its features with the speech of any single area (see § 8).
Other designations of the language that are still in use are 'Old Bulgarian' and 'Old Slavonic' (Fr vieux slave, R. cmapocлавянски, Serbo-Croati staroslavenski jezik, Cz staroslovensky
jazyk). Both these terms have misleading implications: Old Bulgarian' (even if the term be held to include the medieval dialects of Macedonia) has too specific a national and geographical connotation; and 'Old Slavonic', on the other hand, is too general and might tend to perpetuate, at least subconsciously, the romantic illusion that this language was in some sense the common ancestor of all the Slavonic languages.