Page:Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse by Paul Selver.djvu/17

Rh parative Handbook of the Slavonic Languages" that he "often had the opportunity of observing how Czech, Polish and Russian workmen conversed readily in their native idioms with Croat pedlars for hours at a time." This is, if anything, slightly overstated.

The fact is, that in spite of many cognate words and constractions, each member of the group has peculiarities of pronunciation and vocabulary which distinguish it often very strikingly from the rest. Thus, Russian with its Tartar elements (found in several everyday words) and fluctuating stress, contrasts with Polish where the stress falls on the penultimate syllable, and where, as in no other modern Slavonic language, two nasal sounds have survived from primitive Slavonic. In Czech again, words have their chief stress on the first syllable, while the vocabulary as a whole is more purely Slavonic than that of the previous two. In general, it will be found that the Slavonic languages of recent development, such as Czech and Slovene, contain fewer words of foreign origin than those whose tradition is more continuous. The reason is, that on the revival of these languages during the early part of last century, the non-Slavonic elements were deliberately eliminated. But even in these languages the native element has, in the last twenty years or so, been modified by an admixture of