Page:The Position of the Slavonic Languages at the present day.djvu/28

 the population in its neighbourhood was, in the ninth century, already purely Slavonic, and it is possible that many of the citizens were bi-lingual from childhood.

Cyril, who had received a particularly good education in Byzantium, had taken holy orders and occupied a chair of philosophy there, and must clearly have established quite early in his career a considerable and well-merited reputation as a linguist and philologist. For a legend has it that, when in the course of the ninth century the Slavonic Prince of Moravia, who wished to free himself from the ecclesiastical and political influences of the German Bishopric of Passau, sent to the Emperor Michael II at Byzantium for missionaries and enlightenment, then the emperor chose Cyril of Salonika to carry out this task. For the purposes of his journey and to alleviate the conversion of the Slavs, Cyril is said to have composed the Slavonic alphabet, which is now, in the absence of any reason for doubting his authorship of it, called after his name. This alphabet is for the most part identical with the Greek majuscule alphabet of the ninth century, but was altered, enlarged, and amplified in order to be capable of reproducing the phonetic intricacies of the Slavonic languages which had no counterpart in Greek phonology. According to the legends, the only sources of our information about St. Cyril, he would seem to have composed this alphabet at short notice, specially for his missionary journey, and certainly there is no tradition of the existence of any Slavonic alphabet before this time. But without detracting in the least from St. Cyril's philological capabilities, it is difficult to believe that he could have accomplished such a task in so short a space of time. All the evidence is strongly in favour of his being the author of this alphabet, but the alphabet itself is so scientifically and consistently thought out, and so admirably adapted to suit the complex requirements of Slavonic phonology, that while, on the one hand, it can only have been the work of one man, its elaboration must on the other have taken years. Sound philologist