Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/141

 have the Mongol characters for the Buriat language, you have Russian characters for Great Russian, Little Russian, and White Russian, Each of these alphabets represents a very different type of culture. The Russian alphabet stands for the old Byzantine culture. The Gothic characters stand for the Germanic culture of the north-west of Russia. The Armenian and Georgian alphabets represent the ancient civilisations of Transcaucasia. The Arabic alphabet stands for the great Mohammedan culture which dominated the middle east and still has great power there. The Mongol alphabet, which is ultimately derived from the Syriac alphabet, shows how the Semitic culture of Mesopotamia impinged at one time on the ancient civilisation of China.

Then you have an extraordinary variety of forms of speech. Several great families of languages are represented. You have the Indo-European family, including Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Lettish, Swedish, and also German, so far as it is spoken in Russia. Then you have what is called the Finno-Ugric family, including the Finnish of Finland and the Finnish languages of the east of European Russia, and also the languages related to Hungarian on the borders of European Russia and Siberia. You have the Tartar or Turkish languages, represented by Kazan Tartar, Azerbaijan Tartar, Crimean Tartar, Bashkir, Sart or Uzbeg, Kirghiz and Turkoman. You have the Mongolian family, including Buriat and Kalmyk, which latter is spoken near the mouth of the Volga. You have the Manchu family, represented by the languages of Tunguses and other tribes in Siberia. You have the