Page:The Position of the Slavonic Languages at the present day.djvu/24

 expositions of national renascence. From early times surrounded by Germans, the Čechs would seem to have lost the anarchic inconsistency, the fatalistic insouciance, which have always been the charm and the bane of the Slavs, to have in good stead assimilated some of the irrepressible energy and methodical industry so characteristic of their Teutonic neighbours, and to have typified these qualities in the indefatigable martellato of their speech. But Economics have not monopolized their attention. The Germans say that every Čech is born holding either a purse or a fiddle, and it is true that the Čechs, besides being the most thrifty, are also the most musical of the Slavonic peoples; moreover, besides national establishments of education and distraction, considerable political privileges, have also been secured by this determined people in the face of the most strenuous opposition.

The position of the Čech language is considerably better than that of Slovak, which, for many centuries immune from the Germanizing influences at work in Austria, has now to bear the brunt of the nationalistic revival of the Magyars. After recovering from the invasion of the Avars in the sixth century, Slovak was by the ninth century spoken over the whole of what was then the principality of Moravia. But the irruption of the Magyars from Asia finally displaced the Slavonic occupants of Pannonia to the north and south of the Danube, at the same time imposing on them the political supremacy of the newcomers. After leading an unnoticed and undisturbed existence in Northern Hungary till the nineteenth century, the Slovaks have now to weather the rising storm of Magyarization, and have neither the numerical nor the economic strength of the Čechs to fortify their resistance.

Passing from the western to the southern division of Slavonic languages, between which the Danube is roughly the line of delimitation, the first to be considered in geographical order is that known as Slovenish. Strictly speaking, Slovenish is only a strongly-marked variation of Serbo-Croatian, just as Slovak is of Čech, and it is