Page:The Position of the Slavonic Languages at the present day.djvu/19

 place-name, meaning 'stony'. Then in the neighbourhood of Leipzig there is a stream known as Rječka, which in all Slavonic languages is the ordinary word for a rivulet. Such proofs, which can be enumerated to any number, are clearly incontestable; happily they are imperishable too, because they have become in their Germanized forms, the etymology of which is usually obvious, so familiar to the Germans themselves that the authorities would scarcely think of arbitrarily substituting for them artificial modern German names, invented ad hoc, as they have done lately in some of the more eastern provinces of the Empire.

Passing from Lusatian Wendish, the next of the Western Slavonic languages to be considered is Polish. Enjoying great prominence today, with a contemporary literature of extraordinary fertility and of great brilliance, and spoken by a larger number of people than any Slavonic language except Russian, Polish is only one of a group of dialects known in comparative philology as the Lechish group. The designation Lechish is an adaptation of the name by which the Poles were from early times called by their neighbours, but never used of themselves. In Lithuanian a Pole is still called Lenkas, and Poland Lenkai; the Russian equivalent is Lyahi. To the Lechish group belong, besides Polish, all the Slavonic languages, except Lusatian Wendish, which were at one time spoken throughout what is now Northern Germany from the Eider in Holstein to the Vistula.

The unique survivor of these once extensively spoken dialects, besides Polish, is that called Kashubish, spoken by the Kashubs, or, as some of them call themselves, Slovintsi; these now number slightly over 200,000 people inhabiting the country between Danzig and the boundary of the provinces of Western Prussia and Pomerania. This dialect was only identified and classified during the last century, and philologists have concentrated their attention on it none too soon, for emigration to America and erosion at home are causing a rapid diminution in the