Page:The Position of the Slavonic Languages at the present day.djvu/10

 a more intimate knowledge of the history and geography of Eastern Europe than can be gained from familiarity with a purely political map of that half of the continent.

History and geography tell us that the Slavonic languages on the whole are spoken to-day over a far greater area than they were 1000 years ago, but also that the general position and shape of that area have considerably changed. Some of the Slavonic languages have waxed, others have waned; some are moribund, others are obsolete. A language is like any other organism, it cannot remain passive; stagnation means death, it must either grow or decay, expand or recede, and the history of the Slavonic languages furnishes instructive proof of this inevitable law.

The principal difference between the position which the Slavonic languages held in the ninth century, and that which they occupy to-day, is the following: The limits reached by the Slav tribes in the ninth century at the close of the era of wholesale migrations show that the direction of their expansion up to that time had been centrifugal; they had radiated west, south, and east from a common centre, the Carpathians and the plains to the north and south of them. The positions held by them at the present day show that their expansion eastwards has continued uninterruptedly; but on the west and south they have either remained stationary, in some places protected from the retaliation of evicted tenants by mountains, in others obstructed from further progress by the sea, or they have receded before nations they had themselves displaced, now claiming to redeem what had once been their own.

But before examining the vicissitudes of the Slavonic languages, it is necessary to make a digression in order to mention a subsidiary but important group of languages whose fate has always been intimately connected with that of its Slavonic neighbours. It is customary in comparative philology, when tabulating the Indo-European family of languages, to speak of them as the Baltic group.