Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/165

 SLAVS 149 of Russian literature is given under RUSSIA, vol. xxi. p. 102 sq. Siberian Russian is spoken by the descendants of prisoners and convicts who have settled in that vast tract of northern Asia since Yermak conquered it for Ivan the Terrible. Specimens of it are occasionally quoted in the letters of Kiichelbecker, the Decabrist, and other exiles. Little Russian is spoken in all the southern governments of Russia. As current in Galicia and Bukovina it is called Red Russian ; an interesting variety is the Gouzoulian dialect in which Fedkovich composed his poems (see RUSSIA, vol. xxi. p. 110). Mention has already been made of the same language as spoken in Hungary. 1 There is a good grammar by Osadtza, a pupil of Miklosich. The latter justly regards it as a language and not a dialect. Till quite recently there were very poor aids by way of lexicons : of the Deutsch-Ruthcnisches Handworterbuch by Professor Partitzki of Lemberg the Ruthenish - German portion never ap- peared ; the vocabularies of Piskunoff and Verkhratzki are but frag- mentary. A good dictionary, however, is now in course of publica- tion by Professor Zelechowski of Stanislau, which promises to be all that could be desired. The orthography of Malo or Little Russian is not yet settled. A peculiar type is used for some of the books issued at Lemberg, especially the excellent Chitanka (Reading Book) of Alexander Barvinski. An altogether whimsical orthography was adopted by Hatzouk in his Ouzhinok Ridnogo Pola (Gleanings from a Native Field), which appeared at Moscow in 1857. The following are some of the chief characteristics which mark off the Little from the Great Russian language. The G. R. ie passes into i, as povist =poviest, L. R. richka G. R. riechka ; o undergoes the same mutation, especially in monosyllables, L.R. pid G.E,. pod, L.R. kin=G.R. kon, L. R. vivsa = G.R,. ovsa, where we may note the tendency to put v before the initial vowel already alluded to. The Russian ou is changed into L.R. v, and vice versa, thus rmirayou = G.R. oumirayou ; ouchora, on the other hand, is G.R. vchera. The Russian g is pronounced h ; the strong t (Polish I) is changed (especially at the end of a word or before other consonants) into v or ou, thus G.R. pisal, L.R. pisaou. The Russian t is want- ing, and L. R. changes the Old Slavonic k and g into ch and French j oftener than Russian does. In the conjugations and declensions Little very much resembles Great Russian. It has, however, like Polish, lost the present participle passive, which is retained in Russian, and it possesses infinitive forms with diminutive mean- ings. Moreover, the accent differs considerably from Russian. The peculiarities of the Little Russian spoken in the north of Hungary are fully treated by Do Vollant in his Ougro-Rousskia Narodnia Piesni (Ugro-Russian Popular Songs), St Petersburg, 1885. White Russian abounds with Polonisms, and in its orthography expresses the unaccented Russian o as a, which is in accordance with the pronunciation ; thus we have staraiui for storona, kago for kogo. As in Malo-Russian, g is pronounced h, as aha/rod, "a garden " ; gutturals are softened before ie, as na routzie, " on the hand. " The collection of poems published at Vilna in 1844, entitled Piosnki Wie'sniaczc (Rustic Songs), in what is called the Krevichian dialect, is in reality White Russian. There is a good White Russian diction- ary by Nosovich. Bui- Bulgarian. Connected with the Bulgarian division is the difn- garian. cult question as to which of the Slavonic languages, ancient or modern, exhibits the earliest form. The original tongue is, of course, lost, and only an elder sister remains, but to which language Mother- shall that title be assigned ? In the early days of Slavonic philology tongue many curious ideas prevailed on this point. According to the old- of Slav- fashioned views the church language was the old and stately mother- onic Ian- tongue from which all the living dialects had sprung. Russians guages. considered it to be Old Russian, Serbs Old Servian, and those who used the Glagolitic ritual held it to be Old Croatian. These opinions were very natural. The fragments of the Old Slovenish language had not yet been found at Freising, and the only accessible manu- scripts in the infantine state of the study of Slavistic were recent ones, in which Russian, Servian, and Croatian forms were mixed. The Russians had forgotten many of their historical traditions dur- ing their long servitude under the Mongols, and the same was the case with the Serbs and Bulgarians under the yoke of the Turks. The names of Cyril and Methodius were hardly remembered. The two precursors of Dobrovsky, but of inferior intellectual calibre, were the Bohemian Fort. Durich (1738-1802), who was the first to have sound views on the relations of Old Slavonic to the later lan- guages, and the Russian Kalaidovich (1792-1832), who threw con- siderable light on the question by his edition of the works of John, the exarch of Bulgaria. He, however, considered the Palseo-Slavonic to be Old Moravian. But the foundation of Slavonic scholarship was laid by Dobrovsky (1753-1829) and Vostokoff (1781-1864) ; the former treated the subject scientifically in his Institutiones Linguse Slavics Dialedi Veteris (Vienna, 1822), and the latter edited the Ostromir Code?, a Palseo-Slavonic manuscript of the Gospels, written in Russia in the llth century. Dobrovsky at first considered Paleeo- script in the Bodleian, gives some interesting examples ; thus for modern Russian sram, "shame," he gives sorom, &e. 1 An excellent map of this district is given in the Slavianski Sbornik (Slavonic Miscellany), vol. ii. Slavonic to be Old Servian, afterwards an- early language out of which both Servian and Bulgarian were formed. Vostokoii' was nearer the truth when he discovered elements of Old Slovenish. The views held by scholars with regard to the country from which the Pala;o-Slavonic, as preserved to us, has come may be briefly stated as follows. (1) It is Old Bulgarian. This opinion has been held by Schleicher, Schafarik, J. Schmidt, and Leskien. In the latter part of his life Schafarik 2 appears to have somewhat modified his views and to have looked upon it as a mixture of Bulgarian and Slovenish. (2) It is Old Slovenish, i.e., the older form of the language now spoken in Styria, Carinthia, and a part of southern Hungary. This opinion was first held by Kopitar and afterwards by his pupil Miklosich. Among its supporters may also be mentioned Danichich and Jagic. (3) Geitler/ now a professor at Agram, leans to the theory that the Russian language is a much earlier form of Slavonic than Old Slovenish. The case for Old Slovenish is clearly put by Miklosich 4 as follows : (Carantanian) Slovenish employs generally and j ; but how do we know that the Pannonian Slovenes pronounced f and not id, j and not id ? The Hun- garian nwstolia (pr. moshtoha), pest (pr. pesht), and palast (palasht) for the Old Slovenish matieha, pest, and plait, and rozsda (pr. rozlulu) for the Old Slovenish rida, postulate the existence of h and Id in the dialect of the Pannonian Slovenes. The nasalized syllables (to express the Old Slavonic nasals) in (modern) Sloven- ish and in the oldest loan words in Magyar from Slavonic separate the language from which these words are borrowed from Bulgarian.5 Let us also consider the following fact : Modern Bulgarian is more unlike Palseo-Slavonic than any other language of the eastern branch. Perhaps it may be observed with refer- ence to this that these corruptions have only crept in during the last centuries. But the language of the Tale of the Trojan War (of date 1350) is already Bul- garian, and, whatever may be said to the contrary, Modern Bulgarian. In the same stage of vocalic corruption is the Gospel of Trnov (Tirnova), which belongs to the year 1273. And does not the same remark hold good of the Psalter of Bologna, of the date 1186-1196? A Bulgarian language identical with Palaeo- Slavonic fades from our eyes like a/ata -morgana however far we follow it." The same author considers that even before the 9th century the Slavonic languages were separated as they are to-day. The most able exponent of the Old Bulgarian theory, Schleicher, writes as follows : Bulgarians, especially the softening of original Aryan t and d into sht and zM. And besides linguistic there are also historical grounds. Cyril and his Slavonic fellow-workers were Bulgarians.6 Why, then, should they not have written in their own language, especially since they found no written language among the other Slavs ? " Schleicher asks, "How came the Bulgarisms in the Codex Sup- rasliensis [see below], which, according to the opinion of Miklosich, was written 'in ipsa linguae palseoslovenicfe patria' ?" He sums up: " We therefore hold the language which we regard in this work 7 as alone the oldest to be Old Bulgarian." Schleicher appears to the present writer to have the best of the argument. Modern Bulgaria embraces ancient Moasia, Thrace, and Mace- Modern donia ; the Danube separates it from Roumania ; on the west it has Bui- Servian, on the south-west Albanian, and on the south Greek, which garian. begins to prevail from a line drawn from Salonica to Constantinople. Its area is dotted by Turkish colonies the Turks, however, are now fast emigrating and there is a considerable admixture of Greeks. Modern Bulgarian is a very corrupt form of Slavonic. The vocabu- lary, to begin with, is full of Turkish words. The wonder is that the language did not altogether disappear. It uses the Slavonic demonstrative pronoun as an article, which is placed at the end of words, as in Rouman, Albanian, and the Scandinavian languages. The cases are very defective, and are mostly expressed by preposi- tions. There is no regular form of the infinitive, for which a peri- phrasis is used. The language has only been resuscitated of late years. An American missionary named Riggs published a sketch of the grammar and a short vocabulary. In 1852 the brothers Tzankoff compiled a grammar in which Latin letters were employed. There are other grammars in Bulgarian by Momchiloff and Grouyeff. A dictionary (Bulgarian-French) has since been published by Bogo- roff, and there are indications that the language will be scientifi- cally treated, to judge by some excellent papers in the Archivfiir slawische PJiilologie. From these we learn that in the Bulgarian dialects the nouns are much more fully inflected, and traces of nasals are found. The Upper Mcesian dialect is also called the Shopsko narechie or dialect of the Shopi. Jirecek says that these Shopi differ very much in language, dress, and habits from the other Bulgarians, who regard them as simple folk. Their name he connects with the old Thracian tribe of the Sapsei. Those Bul- garians who have embraced Islam are called Pomaks, a word of which no satisfactory derivation has been given. 2 Ueber den Ursprung und die Heimath des Glagolitismvs, Prague, 1858. 3 See his Starobulharska Fonologie se stalym zfetelem k Jazyku Litevskemu (Old Bulgarian Phonology in Relation to Lithuanian), Prague, 1873. 4 Altslovenische Formenlehre in Paradigmen, Vienna, 1874. 5 But, as previously stated, nasals have been found in Bulgarian dialects. 6 This is rather strongly stated. They are said to have been of Greek origin, but had probably become thoroughly Bulgarized ; yet the argument used by Schleicher remains quite as strong, for they would use the form of Slavonic with which they were familiar. 7 Die Formenlere der Kirchen-Slawischen Sprache, Bonn, 1852.