Page:The Position of the Slavonic Languages at the present day.djvu/18

 the Slavonic tribes, and of the proximity to each other which they must at one time have experienced.

The language of the Lusatian Wends consists of two sharply-differentiated dialects, known, according to the position on the river Spree of the people who speak them, as Upper and Lower; the former is spoken by about 100,000 in and around (Bautzen) Budyšin in the upper valley of the Spree in Eastern Saxony, the latter lower down the same river, in the country known as the Spreewald, by a little over 50,000 people. The marked differences between the two dialects have prompted some savants to treat Upper and Lower Lusatian- Wendish as two separate and independent languages, but the numerous points of fundamental similarity between them hardly justify such a course.

The Lusatian Wends have, with their northern fellow-Slavs, had to bear the brunt of the aggression of their western neighbours, whose advance eastwards since the time of Charlemagne has been uninterrupted. As was mentioned before, barely 150,000 of the Lusatian Wends have survived to tell the tale; and this only thanks to the inaccessible nature of their retreats, while it must unfortunately be admitted that the incessant erosion of the surrounding German tide causes an estimated annual decrease in their numbers of a thousand.

However minute the territory of this smallest of the Slavonic nations at the present day, proof of its former extent, and of the completeness of the sometime Slavonic occupation, is to be seen in the quantity of Slavonic place-names which occur wholesale in Germany east of the Elbe and Saal. To take only some of the best-known towns in Saxony, for instance, within many miles of which there are now no longer any Slavonic villages, we find such names as Dresden, the etymology of which refers to the thickly wooded nature of the country in which it was founded; Leipzig (Lipsk), 'the city of the lime trees' ('lipa', the sticky tree), Kamenz and Chemnitz, two variations of a very common Slavonic