quence of the fatigue and exposure of this journey he died at a village in Volhynia. He has been styled the Polish Du Gueselin.
CZARTORYSKI, chär’-tô-rĭs’kḗ, Adam Jerzy (George). Prince (1770-1861). A Polish patriot, born at Warsaw, January 14, 1770. He was the son of Prince Adam Casimir Czartoryski, the head of an ancient Polish house. After studying in Edinburgh and London, he returned to his native country and took part against Russia in the war following the second partition of Poland, in 1793. On the defeat of the Poles, Czartoryski was taken to Saint Petersburg as a hostage, and here he exhibited so much ability and prudence as to gain the friendship of the Grand Duke Alexander, and the confidence of Emperor Paul, who made him ambassador to Sardinia. When Alexander ascended the throne (1801) he appointed Czartoryski assistant to the Minister of Foreign Affairs; and he took an active part in official life until after the peace of Tilsit (1807). As curator of the University of Vilna he exerted all his influence to keep alive a spirit of nationality among the Poles, and when some of the students were arrested on a charge of sedition and sent to Siberia, Czartoryski resigned his
office. His successor reported to the Emperor that the amalgamation of Russia and Lithuania had been delayed a century by Czartoryski's activity as head of the university. When the Revolution of 1830 broke out, he threw in his lot with his countrymen. He was elected president of the provisional Government, and in this capacity summoned a national diet, which met in January, 1831, and declared the Polish throne vacant, and elected Czartoryski head of the National Government. He immediately devoted half of his large estates to the public service, and adopted energetic measures to meet the Russian invasion. The Poles were soon crushed by superior numbers, and Czartoryski—specially excluded from the general amnesty, and his estates
in Poland confiscated—escaped to Paris, where he afterwards resided, the friend of his poor expatriated countrymen, and the centre of their hopes of a revived nationality. In 1848 he liberated all the serfs on his Galician estates, and during the Crimean War he ineffectually endeavored to induce the Allies to identify the cause of Poland with that of Turkey. He refused an amnesty offered to him by Alexander II., and died in
Paris, July 16, 1861. Consult his Mémoires et correspondance avec l’empereur Alexandre Ier (Paris, 1887; English translation, Sielgerd
(London, 1888); Morfill, Story of Poland, in "Stories of the Nations" series (London, 1893). See Poland.
CZASLAU, chäs’lou, Bohem. pron. chäs’läv. A town of Bohemia, about 40 miles east-southeast of Prague (Map: Austria, D 2). The Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul was the place of burial of the blind Hussite leader Ziska, a fine statue of whom adorns one of the public squares. The town's manufactures include beet-sugar, alcohol, and beer. Between Czaslau and the neighboring village of Chotusitz the Prussians under Frederick the Great gained a decisive victory over the Austrians under Charles of Lorraine. May 17, 1742. Population, in 1890, 8145; in 1900, 9105, mostly Czechs.
CZECH (chĕk) or BOHEMIAN LANGUAGE. The Czech language, like the Polish, Kashubian, and Sorbian, belongs to the northwestern group of the Slavic languages (q.v.). The number of persons speaking Czech, exclusive of the Slovaks, is about 6,000,000. Of these 3,650,000 are found in Bohemia, 1,550,000 in Moravia, 130,000 in Austrian Silesia, 300,000 in other Austro-Hungarian provinces, 30.000 in Russia, 100,000 in Germany, and 250,000 in America. The Czechs occupy the quadrangle bounded by the Bohemian Forest, the Erzgebirge, the Sudetic Mountains, and the Little Carpathians. They are thus surrounded on three sides by Germans, and only on the eastern side do the Czechs come in contact with Slavs: in Silesia with the Poles, and in southeastern Moravia and Hungary with the Slovaks, their nearest kindred, with whom the Czechs are usually grouped into the Czecho-Slovakian division. Within the quadrangle the Czechs are interspersed with Germans, against whom they have maintained a continuous struggle. (See Czech Literature.) Literary Czech is most nearly related to the dialect of the Prague district, but taken as a whole the Czech language presents a great variety of well-defined dialects.
The first mention of the existence of Czech dialects is found in Jan Blahoslav's Grammar (1571), published by Jireček in 1857. The Slavic alphabets used in the earliest times were superseded by the Roman characters on the establishment of Roman Catholicism instead of the earlier Greek Orthodox faith. The Latin alphabet was insufficient to reproduce all the native sounds, and diacritical letters were introduced. Thus, č = Engl. ch, ž = Engl. zh (as in pleasure), š = sh, while the acute accent is used to denote long vowels. Among the phonetic characteristics of the language may be noted: (1) Disappearance of the old Slavic sounds ŭ, ĭ, and their transition into e: Old Church Slavic sŭnŭ, sleep, dĭnĭ, day, lĭvŭ, lion, lĭva (id., gen. sing.) = Czech sen, den, lev, lva. (2) Substitution of open sounds u, ú and a, ě, e for the old Slavic nasal vowels a and e : muka, torture, nesu, I carry = Old Church Slavic maka, nesa; patero, five, deset, older desět, ten=Old Church Slavic petero, deseti. (3) The so-called transvocalization, whereby a becomes ě (e), á, ie (é, í): zeme, land, for zemía, dušě, soul, for *dušía, while u, ú = iu, iú, become i, í: duši for *dušu (acc. sing., ep. Russian dushu), duši for dušú (abl. sing., ep. Russian dushoyu), lid for *lud, people (Russian lyud). (4) The obliteration of distinction between y (=Engl ĭ) and i (Engl. ē) in pronunciation: býk, bull, mýš, mouse, sýr, cheese, are pronounced as if spelled bik, miš, sir; byl, I was, and bil, I beat, are pronounced precisely alike. (5) Syllabic or vocalic r, l, m, n: zrno, grain, srdce, heart, vlna, wave, wool, slny, strong, correspond to Russian zerno, serdtse, volna, silniy; Rožmberg Licmburk, represent German Rosenberg, Luxemburg. This peculiarity is common also to the Slovakian and Serbo-Horvatan (Serbo-Croat). (6) Long and short vowels: Short, a, e, i, o, u, y: long, á, é, í, ó, ú, ý. (7) The primary accent is expiratory or stressed, and is always on the first syllable of the word, as in Slovakian, Serbo-Lusatian, and South Kashubian. This accent has been proved to be an historical development of the primitive Slavic free accent. See Slavic languages.
The quantitative system of versification based on the Latin has been almost entirely superseded of late by the tonic system—more proper
