Page:The Position of the Slavonic Languages at the present day.djvu/12

 of East Prussia. The Prussian language in the seventeenth century became extinct, and only meagre fragments of it have been preserved in writing; Lithuanian and Lettish are still spoken. The natural phenomena peculiar to the country, which abounds in vast swamps and forests, as well as its remoteness from great trade-routes, have conduced to the preservation of the antique character of these languages, especially of Lithuanian, but at the same time it is largely due to this cause that the earliest records and monuments of these languages go no further back than the sixteenth century.

There is greater affinity between Lithuanian and Lettish than between either of them and Prussian, and, generally speaking, Lettish shows a later stage of development than Lithuanian; that is to say, it is the more remote of the two from what can be postulated as the language of their common origin.

To what extent Lithuanian was spoken during those early centuries when the country was independent of all foreign influence it is now impossible to determine, but at the present day it is current in the mouths of at least 100,000 people in East Prussia, and of considerably more than two millions in Russia. It is important to remember that the political boundaries of the mediaeval state of Lithuania, which covered an immense area and included at one time all of what is now Western Russia, always extended far beyond the limits of the area where the Lithuanian language was spoken. At the present day it is spoken over an irregularly shaped piece of territory which could be roughly delimited by a line drawn through the following towns: beginning at Labiau on the Kurisches Haff the line would go eastwards to Eydtkuhnen, the well-known frontier station on the line from Berlin to St. Petersburg, through the bilingual signs at which, and at the corresponding station on the other side of the frontier, the unsuspecting traveller is misled into believing that German and Russian are respectively the only languages current in that region. From Eydtkuhnen the