Page:The Position of the Slavonic Languages at the present day.djvu/31

 already mentioned, which was the language spoken by the Slavs, who already by the middle of the seventh century had occupied the eastern half of the Balkan peninsula, that is to say, all Moesia, Thrace, and Macedonia, except the maritime territory which was then, as it is now, held by the Greeks. How these Slavonic tribes designated themselves, except by the generic name Slovene, is not known. The Bulgars themselves were not Slavs at all, but a wild people, who came from the neighbourhood of Kazan on the Volga, and in the second half of the seventh century, in the course of one of their several invasions of the Balkan peninsula, succeeded in overcoming, more thoroughly than usual, the Slavs settled between the Danube and the Balkan mountains. Like the bee, who pays with her life for the application of her sting, the Bulgars, after inflicting defeat on the Slavs of the Balkans, became extinct as a nationality, absorbed by the people whom they had apparently subdued, and left nothing but their name behind them for remembrance.

It has already been indicated that old Bulgarian, the speech comprehended, transmitted into writing, and thus immortalized by the Byzantine missionaries of the ninth century, is the oldest form of any Slavonic language that has survived. But speech is a fickle and elusive thing, and that spoken by the Bulgarian people soon assumed forms different from those of the language familiar to St. Cyril in the ninth century, standardized in the liturgy and translation of the Scriptures used by all Slav adherents of the Orthodox faith, and preserved in a theological literature of considerable extent. In this respect there is a great contrast between the histories of Bulgarian and Servian as we know them; for although the Cyrillic alphabet, which never exactly corresponded to Servian phonology, was in use in its original form in Servia till the nineteenth century, yet it is fortunately possible to control the changes that have from very early times occurred in Servian and to follow the historical development of that language, owing to the preservation of large quantities of political documents which the Servians used to write