Page:The Position of the Slavonic Languages at the present day.djvu/20

 numbers of this people. As usual disputes have arisen as to whether Kashubish is to be regarded as a separate language, or as a dialect of Polish, the Polish savants maintaining the latter view, while their Russian colleagues naturally seize the opportunity offered of subtracting the Kashubs from the sum total of the Polish nationality. Be that as it may, Kashubish is undoubtedly the remnant of the language spoken at one time throughout Pomerania, or, as it is called in Polish, Pomorze, which means the coast land, by the people called Pomorzanie, in Russian Pomoryane, or 'the dwellers by the sea', from 'po' = along, and 'more' = the sea.

Another Slavonic dialect of the Lechish group has come down to us in the form of a few glossaries, though it is itself extinct since the seventeenth century; this is the dialect known as Polabish, because spoken by the Slavonic tribes settled on the lower Elbe from ' po ' along, and 'Laba'- the Elbe.

As in the case of the place-names in the country inhabited by the Lusatian Wends, those of Northern Germany between the Eider and the Vistula furnish ample proof of the complete occupation of this country at one time by the Slavs. It has been pointed out that Pommern simply means * by the sea ', or ' super mare ', and we have only to scratch such well-known names of towns as Schwerin, Strelitz, Stettin, Danzig, Stargard (literally, 'the old city') Belgard ('the white city'), Colberg, Rostock, to find the Slavonic originals underneath, while a well-known suburb of Berlin, Nowa Wies, 'the new village,' is allowed in the twentieth century to proclaim its Slavonic origin undisguised.

Turning from these moribund and fragmentary dialects, it is reassuring to find Polish, the most prominent of the Western Slav languages and numerically the second in importance of them all, leading a vigorous and militant existence. It is the language of nearly twenty million people, who form a solid ethnographical quadrangle with its southern base resting on the Carpathians. The