Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/164

148 SLAVS village deputy"; there are traces of it in Slovenish ; it is only in Bulgarian and Servian that it is entirely wanting. The principle laid down that mob, not represent a south-eastern variation and moc, noc a western is far from being universally true ; in Servian we have tsrn, " black," as against Bohemian ccrny, Russian cherni. Compare too Servian tsesta, " a road," also Slovenish, with Chekh testa. Schmidt gives a completely new table of differences, illustrating them by the accom- panying diagram. Casting aside some of the distinguishing marks previously adopted, ne makes great use of the phonetic law found in the Slavonic lan- guages which will be explained shortly. The reader will easily identify the divi- sions of the circle to which the rules refer. (1) dj, tj be- come among the western Slavs dz, ts ( = c). (2) d, t dis- appear before I and n among the Russians, Little Russians, Bulgarians, Serbs, and Croats, but are preserved by the Slovenes, with the exception of tu, and by the western Slavs. (3) vi is not used by the Bulgarians, Serbs, and Croats, but is kept by the Slovenes, Russians, and western Slavs. (4) (a) ere by svarabhakti 1 became rg at an early period among the southern Slavs and Chekhs, but is preserved in its original form among the rest. It became re at a later period among the Poles, Polabes, and Sorbs, (b) ele became le not only among the southern Slavs and Chekhs but also among the Polabes. Among the Poles and Sorbs ele and the cognate olo became simplified into le and lo. (c) &r& 2 in inlaut became ra among the southern Slavs and Chekhs. As in early times the Chekhs and southern Slavs were in close connexion with the Poles and Sorbs, the mutation developed among them ; thus Polish straz with stroz, Upper Sorbish straza with stroza, Polish and Upper Sorbish, trapic. (d) dl& in inlaut became la not only among the southern Slavs and Chekhs but also among the Polabes. This contraction spread over a wider region than that of &rd into ra. That the Polish also adopted it is shown by the form ptazic si% compared with plozic sie. Various opinions have been held as to what languages are to be considered the closest congeners of the Slavonic branch. That they stand in intimate relations to Lithuanian and Lettish has long been agreed ; and as a convenient classification it is customary to speak of them together as the Litu-Slavic family. In Russia there are 1,900,000 Lithuanians (including the Samogitians or Zhmudes). There are also 1,100,000 Letts. The rest of the Lithuanians, numbering 146,312, are in Eastern Prussia, commencing not far from Kbnigsberg and extending along the shores of the Kurisches Haff. The Lithuanian language in many respects exhibits an earlier type than the Slavonic. It has preserved the s of the nominative singular, as in Sanskrit ; but, on the other hand, the verb exhibits a much poorer form. As Leskien truly remarks, 3 " it has degener- ated most remarkably in its conjugation, and in this respect is far inferior to the oldest known Slavonic." He adds that Lithuanian is of primary importance in the comparative treatment of the Slavonic languages. Very closely connected with Lithuanian was Old Prussian, which died out in the 16th century ; the remains which have come down to us belong to the 15th and 16th centuries. Old Prussian extended from the lower Vistula (from Thorn down- wards) to the Niemen. The exact course of the boundary- line which separated it from Lithuanian can only be approximately deter- mined by historical arguments. Leskien has proposed "Baltic" as a generic name for Lithuanian, Lettish, and Prussian. The general opinion of philologists is that Litu-Slavic is most closely connected with the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family. Jacob Grimm was the first to assert this. Hiibschmann has shown that Slavonic has affinities with Armenian, and he seeks to make the latter language a link between the European and Asiatic branches of this family. Kuhn 4 writes, " The Slavonic languages remained a longer time in close connexion with the Indian or more probably with the Zend and Persian than with the remaining Indo- 1 This is the name given by the Indian grammarians to the vowel developed l>etween the liquids I and r and the consonant with which they come into con- tact, as vlas, volos. It has been called in Russian polnoglasie, and in Greek dvaTTTvi-is. It means in Sanskrit " voice-breaking." It is a marked feature in the Slavonic languages. 2 This is the way adopted by Schmidt to express the unaccented Slavonic o, which is pronounced a ; the form is taken from Swedish. 3 Proc. Phil. Soc., 1877, p. 49. 1 Zur ultesten Gesch. d. indog. Vtilker, Berlin, 1845, p. 324. European languages." Bopp regards the separation of the Litu- Slavic languages as having taken place before the division of the Asiatic branch of the family into Indian and Iranian. If we examine the Old or Palaeo-Slavonic, 5 the oldest known form Old of the Slavonic languages, we may note the following characteristics. 6 Slavonic. It has the vowels a, e, i, o, u, i, a guttural i, a short e sometimes pronounced as ya, and the semi-mutes t and u. It has also two nasals equivalent to the French in and on, now only found in Polish and Kashoubish, and in some of the Bulgarian dialects ; traces of them, however, occur in Slovenish and in the words which Magyar has borrowed from Slovenish. The Aryan diphthongs have been contracted to single vowels and General the hiatus is frequently avoided by the interposition of j ( = Eng. char- y) or v, both of which constantly occur at the beginning of words acteris- which formerly commenced with a vowel. The addition of a y tics of sound before vowels is one of the great characteristics of the Slavonic Slavonic languages, called " preiotization " ; and the inability to mark this tongues, distinctly is one of the deficiencies of the Cyrillic alphabet. It is also worthy of note that in the provincial dialects v is frequently put before vowels, as by the lower classes in Bohemia and Russia. The Aryan aspirates gh, dh, bh have been changed into the simple explosives g, d, b ; on the other hand, a number of fricatives have been developed, as sh, z, and the French j all unknown to the common Aryan and k is frequently changed to the palatal ch. Servo-Croatian, Slovenish, Slovakish, and Bohemian possess the vocal r, while the vocal I is found in both Bohemian and Slovakish. The latter has also I and r, both short and long. As regards grammar, the following peculiarities of the Slavonic family may be noted. A trace of the article exists in the adjectival termination, as in vclik-i ; but this has been forgotten, and attempts have been made to supply it in the use of the demonstrative pro- noun in Sorbish, which appears to have been used in the more corrupt stages of Slovenish also, but has been expelled since the regeneration of the language. Primus Truber, who translated the New Testament into Slovenish in the 16th century, was not free from this vice. The languages being in a high state of synthesis, the nouns and adjectives are fully declined, having three genders and seven cases, the nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, instru- mental, and prepositional. Sorbish and Slovenish have the dual number in both nouns and verbs. More of the numerals are de- clined than in most Aryan languages. The verbs have the so-called aspects, e.g., the iterative, perfect, imperfect, &c., whereby very delicate shades of meaning are expressed, and this partly atones for the poverty of tenses in some of them : Russian, for example, has only ene past tense, which is inflected according to gender, having been originally a past participle. Traces of these verbal aspects have been detected in Celtic and in Greek. We now proceed to classify the Slavonic languages according to their dialects. The following table has been adapted (in the main) from the valuable Russian History of Slavonic Literatures by Pipin and Spasovich. SOUTH-EASTERN BRANCH. Russian. (1) Great Russian: Mos- cow, Novgorod and northern, Siberian, and central Russian. (2) Little Russian : eastern, western (sometimes called Red Russian), and Carpathian. (3) White Russian. Bulgarian. (1) Old Bul- garian (the ecclesiastical language ; see below). (2) Modern Bul- garian : Upper Moesian, Lower Mcesian, and Macedonian. Servo- Croatian and Slovenish. (1) Servo-Croatian : southern or Herzego- vinian, Synnian, Resanian, and language of the coast or Dalmatian. (2) Slovenish : dialects of Upper, Middle, and Lower Carniola, Styrian, Ugro-Slovenish, Resanian, and Croato-Slovenish. WESTERN BRANCH. (1) Polish : Masovian or Mazurian, Great Polish, Silesian, and Kashoubish. (2) Bohemian : Chekish, Mor- avian, and Slovakish. (3) Lusatian Wendish or Sorbish : Upper Lusatian and Lower Lusatian. (4) Polabish (extinct). South-Eastcrn Branch. Russian Dialects. These as yet have rarely been scientifically Russian, treated ; but that can hardly be a ground of complaint against the Russian people, as our own are only just beginning to be properly studied. The work entitled Opit Oblastnago Velikorousskago Slovara (Attempt at a Provincial Dictionary of the Great Russian Lan- guage), published at St Petersburg in 1852, can, as its name implies, only be regarded as tentative : it is no more a scientific production than is Halliwell's Provincial Dictionary of English. Traces of Ugro- Finnish words and idioms occur in the northern and eastern dialects, but their importance has been much exaggerated. Whitney's theory that the Russian verb has been modified by Ugro-Finnish influence claims attention. Some have supposed that the origin of the svarabhakti is to be traced to it ; it occurs, however, in Little Russian and the western languages, as previously shown. It is much more frequent in Russian than in any other Slavonic lan- guage, and is even more developed in its dialects. 7 An account 5 Sometimes called " the church language." 6 See Hovelacque, Science of Language, p. 280, London, 1877. 7 The quaint little English-Russian vocabulary compiled by Richard James in Russia at the beginning of the 16th century, and still preserved in manu-