Nevill Forbes

“ Already in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it produced works, which would of themselves have constituted a great literature; in the nineteenth, sprouting from the grave of political freedom, it has borne fruit a hundredfold; dismemberment of the state and disfranchisement of the people have only intensified the vitality of the nation, which has found expression in one of the most original and remarkable of contemporary literatures.
The third group of the western division of the Slavonic languages is that known as Čech-Slovak. ”

“ It is advisable to prepose the Baltic to the Slavonic languages for more reasons than one. In the first place, they are in many ways more antique than the Slavonic languages, already themselves remarkable for their wealth of morphological and accidental survivals from an earlier epoch, compared with other Indo-European languages. Again, they cover such a relatively small and remote area, and the claims on our interest of their literatures are so modest, that they are apt to be neglected by all but specialists in Indo-European comparative philology. ”

“ The ecclesiastical language, crystallized in the liturgy and Scriptures, has remained much as it was in the ninth century; the speech of the people, apart from changes and peculiarities due to the Rumanian and Albanian influences already mentioned, has, like Servian, adopted an immense stock of Turkish words for use in everyday life; while the language of the literary and national revival dating from the second half of the nineteenth century has borrowed its more elaborate vocabulary wholesale from Russian. ”

“ Passing from Lusatian Wendish, the next of the Western Slavonic languages to be considered is Polish. Enjoying great prominence today, with a contemporary literature of extraordinary fertility and of great brilliance, and spoken by a larger number of people than any Slavonic language except Russian, Polish is only one of a group of dialects known in comparative philology as the Lechish group. ”

“ The fortunes of the Polish language have been very different in each of the three empires under whose political control the Polish nation passed when it was arbitrarily trisected at the tragic culmination of its history as an independent state in the eighteenth century. They have been darkest in Prussia, where the policy of exterminating the Polish nationality has been consistently applied by an incorruptible bureaucracy. ”

“ Education is, however, an even more potent weapon than expropriation, and the fact that no primary or secondary schools exist in Germany where a word of Polish is spoken is inevitably having a fatal influence on the vocabulary and syntax of Polish in Prussia. The only province, however, where the German language is making real headway against Polish is that of East Prussia, where religious differences make matters more complex. In East Prussia, namely, the majority of Poles have been Lutherans since they were invaded and converted by the Teutonic knights in the thirteenth century ”

“ Then in the neighbourhood of Leipzig there is a stream known as Rječka, which in all Slavonic languages is the ordinary word for a rivulet. Such proofs, which can be enumerated to any number, are clearly incontestable; happily they are imperishable too, because they have become in their Germanized forms, the etymology of which is usually obvious, so familiar to the Germans themselves that the authorities would scarcely think of arbitrarily substituting for them artificial modern German names, invented ad hoc, as they have done lately in some of the more eastern provinces of the Empire. ”

“ Slovenish is the language spoken by about one and a half million Slavs, who inhabit the southern parts of the Austrian provinces of Styria and Carinthia, the whole of Carniola, or Krain (a name, common to all Slavonic languages, which merely means 'The Borderland') , and the northern part of Istria. The centre of their national activity is the town known in German as Laibach and in Slovenish as Ljubljana, the capital of Carniola, but the Slovenes form at least 20 per cent, of the population of Trieste, and take a growing interest in the direction of the affairs of that busy city. ”

“ The name given by the Letts to the Russians is of great interest and historical importance. In Lettish all Russians are to this day known as Kreewis, and this is nothing but a perpetuation and generalization of the name of one of the original Slavonic tribes, the Kriviči, whom history discovered settled in the basin of the western Dvina. There is nothing correspondingly interesting in the Lithuanian name for Russian, which is simply Rùssas, but the names given by the Lithuanians to their Western German and their Southern Polish neighbours are curious. ”

“ Russian is the most important of the Slavonic languages and is spoken by 103 million people; it is usually and most correctly divided into two groups: Great Russian, of which White Russian is a variation, and Little Russian. It is impossible here to consider the separatist motives which have prompted many Little Russian philologists to treat their own dialect as a language independent of and on a level with Great Russian. ”

“ The numerous tribal names, many of which have survived and are well known to-day, such as the Mazurowie and Kujawianie, have all been superseded by that of the principal central nationality, the Polanie, literally, the dwellers in the open fields, a name used at one time by several Slavonic tribes. The fact that in English the name Poland has come to be used to designate only Russian Poland causes it to be overlooked that the Polish provinces of Russia include little more than half of the territory over which Polish is spoken. ”

“ The word is ubiquitous as a place-name wherever the Germans and Slavs have been in contact, and is even at the present day used to designate more than one Slavonic nationality. It is simplest for us to follow the German lead and call these people the Lusatian Wends, though it must not be forgotten that they call themselves and all other Slavs call them Serbs, and even the Germans sometimes call them Sorben, and their language Sorbisch. ”

“ Bulgarian orthography is in a state of chaos, because the people cannot decide between the luxury of an historical and the advantage of a scientific alphabet; that of the ninth century is still in use entire and unaltered; but the language has much changed in form and sound since the time of the Byzantine philologist missionaries, and no Vuk Stefanović Karadžić has arisen, as in Servia, to impose reform on the unwilling. ”

“ The territory where Lettish is spoken lies immediately to the north of that occupied by the Lithuanians; it is bounded on the west by the Baltic and on the south by the political boundary dividing the government of Kurland, the whole of which is Lettish, from that of Kovno, which is purely Lithuanian. Lettish is also the language of the southern half of the government of Livonia and of the western half of that of Vitebsk. ”

“ The Germans of Carinthia and Styria usually specify the Slovenes as Winden or Wenden; this has always been the generic term applied indiscriminately to all Slavs by Germans, but is now limited in its application to the Slovenes of Austria, and, as already mentioned, to the Lusatian Wends in Saxony and Prussia.
In the sixth century the Slovenes occupied a more extensive territory than that held by them to-day; they reached north to the Danube, west to the Tyrol, and covered South-western Hungary. ”

“ Accordingly the vocabulary of Lithuanian betrays Polish, that of Lettish, German influence. Lettish has also been influenced by the proximity of its neighbours of Finnish race, whom the Letts gradually propelled northwards into the extreme northern corner of the promontory of Kurland, where a portion of them still remains, and into Livonia proper. Lithuanian has also been much influenced by White Russian, the dialect current in those provinces which in the Middle Ages formed the lands of the Lithuanian crown, and later with Lithuania became part of Poland. ”

“ The Lithuanian community in America publish newspapers, books, and dictionaries with an energy that betrays the influence of their new surroundings, yet the wholesale appropriation of necessary but inadequately assimilated Americanisms, together with prolonged absence from the secular traditions of the mother-country, must at an increasing rate lower the standard of linguistic purity. ”

“ It is noticeable that while the Russian nationality and language have expanded to the north and east and south, its western boundary conterminous with those of the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Letts, and the Finnish Esthonians is almost identical with that existing in the ninth century. ”

“ To begin with, there are many fewer impressive natural boundaries than in the western half of the continent, such as the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and even when they do occur, they seldom correspond to the political, still more rarely to the linguistic divisions. ”

“ The designation Lechish is an adaptation of the name by which the Poles were from early times called by their neighbours, but never used of themselves. In Lithuanian a Pole is still called Lenkas, and Poland Lenkai; the Russian equivalent is Lyahi. To the Lechish group belong, besides Polish, all the Slavonic languages, except Lusatian Wendish, which were at one time spoken throughout what is now Northern Germany from the Eider in Holstein to the Vistula. ”

“ But Economics have not monopolized their attention. The Germans say that every Čech is born holding either a purse or a fiddle, and it is true that the Čechs, besides being the most thrifty, are also the most musical of the Slavonic peoples ”