Ellis Hovell Minns

“ Modern historians seem to adopt their attitude to the process according to their view of the Slavs; German writers, in their contempt for the Slavs, mostly deny the possibility of their having forced German tribes to leave their homes, and assume that the riches of southern Europe attracted the latter so that they willingly gave up their barren northern plains; most Slavonic authors have taken the same view in accordance with the idealistic picture of the peaceful, kindly, democratic Slavs who contrast so favourably with the savage Germans and their war-lords ”

“ In the earliest documents it appears with an apparatus of grammatical forms practically identical with that ascribed to primitive Slavonic. The history of the language is not so much that of its phonetic decay as that of its morphological simplification and syntactic development. The tracing of this process is rendered difficult by the fact that O.S. was the ecclesiastical and literary language until the 17th century, and though in the end the O.S. texts suffer modifications, producing the Russian form of Church Slavonic, it is only by accident that the Russian forms appear in them. ”

“ Its most interesting political document is the form of oath sworn to by all the citizens in the 3rd century B.C.
The remains of the city occupy a space about two-thirds of a mile long by half a mile broad. They are enclosed by a Byzantine wall. Foundations and considerable remains of a Greek wall going back to the 4th century B.C. have been found beneath this in the eastern or original part of the site. Many Byzantine churches, both cruciform and basilican, have been excavated. The latter survived here into the 13th century when they had long been extinct in other Greek-speaking lands. ”

“ Since then the Baltic languages have borrowed many Slavonic words. After the Aryans had moved eastwards Slavonic was left in contact with Thracian, but we know so little about it that we cannot measure their mutual influence. On the other side the Germans, beginning as the next group to the Balto-Slavs, and having thereby much in common with them (so much so that Schleicher wanted to make a Germano-Slavo-Baltic group) , have never ceased to influence them, have given them loan words at every stage and have received a few in return. ”

“ Lorentz calls the western dialect a language, and distinguishes 38 vowels. The chief points of Kashube as against Polish are that all its vowels can be nasal instead of a and e only, that it has preserved quantity and a free accent, has developed several special vowels, e.g. ”

“ A few ancient names on the Danube, notably that of the river Tsierna (Cerna, black) , have a Slavonic look, but a coincidence is quite possible. The gradual spread of the Slavs was masked by the wholesale migrations of the Goths, who for two centuries lorded it over the Slavs, at first on the Vistula and then in south Russia. We hear more of their movements because they were more immediately threatening for the Empire. In dealing with Ptolemy's location of the Goths and Slavs we must regard the former as superimposed upon the latter and occupying the same territories. ”

“ In their usages some tribes were nomads like the people of Scythia (q.v.) , others with their community of wives and habit of killing and eating their parents recalled the Issedones (q.v.) ; while the dwellers in the islands of the river were fish-eating savages. ”

“ The Moscow dialect, which is the foundation of the literary language, and White Russian, are both best classed with the a dialect.
The Moscow dialect really covers a very small area, not even the whole of the government of Moscow, but political causes have made it the language of the governing classes and hence of literature. It is a border dialect, having the southern pronunciation of unaccented o as a, but in the jo for accented e before a hard consonant it is akin to the North and it has also kept the northern pronunciation of g instead of the southern h. ”

“ Of the history of the Eastern Slavs, who were to become the Russian people, we know little before the coming of the Swedish Rus, who gave them their name and organization; we have but the mention of Antae acting in concert with the other Slavs and the Avars in attacking the Empire on the lower Danube, and scattered accounts of Mussulman travellers, which show that they had reached the Don and Volga and stretched up northward to Lake Ilmen. The more southerly tribes were tributary to the Khazars. ”

“ SLAVS. Judged by the language test, and no other is readily available, the Slavs are the most numerous race in Europe, amounting to some 140,000,000 souls. Outside Europe there are the Russians in Siberia, a mere extension of the main body, and a large number of emigrants settled in America, where, however, although most of the nationalities have their own newspapers, the second generation of immigrants tends to be assimilated. ”

“ The infinitive and four participles offer no special difficulty, but the gerundives or verbal adverbs, from the old masc. nom. sing., are troublesome. The curious mechanism by which these few verbal forms are by means of the aspects made to express most of our tenses and other shades of meaning of which even English is incapable, is briefly explained under Slavs. On the whole the syntax is simple, the periods which imitation of Latin and German once brought into fashion having given place to the shorter sentences of French and English models. ”

“ Borrowings.—The effect of the Church language upon Russian has been very strong, comparable to that of Latin upon French or English: O.S. forms of words and suffixes, betrayed by their phonetic peculiarities though pronounced more or less à la russe, have in some cases ousted the native forms, in other cases the two exist side by side; the Slav. form generally has the more dignified or metaphorical, the Russian the simpler and more direct sense: even some of the grammatical terminations (e.g. pres. part. act.; certain forms of the adj., &c.) are Slavonic ”

“ S. of the modern Sevastopol. After defending itself against the kingdom of Bosporus (q.v.) , and the native Scythians and Tauri, and even extending its power over the west coast of the peninsula, it was compelled to call in the aid of Mithradates VI. and his general Diophantus, c. ”

“ Čech has almost overshadowed Slovak and early afforded literary models to Polish. Polish has overshadowed Kasube and much influenced Little and White Russian and Great Russian in a less degree. Russian has in its turn supplied modern Bulgarian with a model. Again, other tongues have contributed something; in common Slavonic there are already German loan words, and others have followed in various periods, especially in Cech and Polish, while the very structure of Slovene and Sorb has been affected. Polish has adopted many Latin words. Bulgarian and Servian received many Turkish words. ”

“ Less important elements have been the Tatar which gave names for many Oriental things such as weapons, jewels, stuffs, garments and some terms concerned with government, and the Polish, which during the 17th century supplied many terms needed to express European things and ideas. In the 18th century such importations were made from Latin and all the Western European languages, in Peter's time mostly from German and Dutch (for nautical terms, English supplied some) , in Catherine's rather from French, which had become the language of the aristocracy. ”

“ In N.W. Slavonic, with the exception of Kasube in which it is free, the accent is fixed, in C., Slovak and Sorb on the first syllable of the word, in Polish on the penultimate.
On the whole it may be said that the geographical classification of the Slavs into N.W., S. and E. Slavs is justified linguistically, though too much stress must not be laid upon it as the lines of division are made less definite by the approximation of the languages which come next each other, the special characteristics of each group are generally represented in dialects of the others if not in the written languages ”

“ Between the Slovenes and the Croats there are transition dialects, and about 1840 there was an attempt (Illyrism) to establish a common literary language. In Macedonia and along the border are special varieties of Bulgarian, some of which approach Servian. Akin to the Macedonians were the Slavs, who once occupied the whole of Greece and left traces in the place-names, though they long ago disappeared among the older population. Akin to the Slovenes were the old inhabitants of Austria and south-west Hungary before the intrusion of the Germans and Magyars. ”

“ When brought or brought back to Bulgaria by Clement and the other pupils of Methodius, Glagolitic took root in the west, but in the east some one, probably at the court of Simeon, where everything Greek was in favour, had the idea of taking the arrangement of the Glagolitic alphabet, but making the signs like those of the Uncial Greek then in use for liturgical books, using actual Greek letters as far as they would serve, and for specifically Slavonic sounds the Glagolitic signs simplified and made to match the rest. ”

“ History.—This distribution of the Slavs can be accounted for historically. In spite of traditions (e.g. the first Russian chronicle of Pseudo-Nestor) which bring them from the basin of the Danube, most evidence goes to show that when they formed one people they were settled to the north-east of the Carpathians in the basins of the Vistula, Pripet and Upper Dněstr (Dniester) . To the N. they had their nearest relatives, the ancestors of the Baltic tribes, Prussians, Lithuanians and Letts ”

“ In fact, the triple division might be purely arbitrary but for the fact that the belt of Germans, Magyars and Rumanians has made impossible the survival of transitional dialects con- necting up Cech with Slovene, Slovak with Servian, Russian with Bulgarian. Slovak, as it were, just fails to be a universal link : in the north Russian and Polish have much in common, but Lithuania made some sort of barrier and the difference of religion favoured separate development. ”

“ The Slavs were acquainted with the beginnings of the domestic arts, and were probably more given to agriculture than the early Germans, though they practised it after a fashion which did not long tie them to any particular district—for all writers agree in telling of their errant nature. ”

“ CARPI, a Dacian tribe established upon the lower Danube from the 1st century B.C. They rose to considerable power during the 3rd century A.D., and claiming to be superior to the Goths accordingly demanded that their incursions into Roman territory likewise should be bought off by tribute. When this was refused they invaded in force, but were beaten back by the emperor Philip. After this they joined with the Goths in their successful inroads until both nations were defeated by Claudius Gothicus. ”

“ Sclaveni, or something like it, has been the regular name for the Slavs from that day to this. The native form is Slovene; in some cases, e.g. in modern Russian under foreign influence, we have an a instead of the o. The combination si was difficult to the Greeks and Romans and they inserted /, th or most commonly c, which continues to crop up. So too in Arabic Saqaliba, Saqldb. The name has been derived from slovo, a word, or slava, glory, either directly or through the -slav which forms the second element in so many Slavonic proper names, but no explanation is satisfactory. ”

“ These Slavs occupy the main mass of the Balkan Peninsula downwards from the Julian Alps and the line of the Muhr, Drave and Danube. North of this all three races have considerable settlements in southern Hungary. Their southern boundary is very ill-defined, various nationalities being closely intermingled. To the south-west the Slavs march with the Albanians, to the south-east with the Turks, and to the south and along the Aegean coasts they have the Greeks as neighbours. ”

“ In spite of the prevalent brachycephaly of the modern Slavs, measurements of skulls from cemeteries and ancient graves which are certainly Slavonic have shown, against all expectation, that the farther back we go the greater is the proportion of long heads, and the race appears to have been originally dolichocephalic and osteologically indis- tinguishable from its German, Baltic and Finnish neighbours. ”