Page:The Position of the Slavonic Languages at the present day.djvu/32

 in the current vernacular of the day. Again, though both peoples, Servian and Bulgarian, have been subjected to similar physical and political conditions, have suffered identical historical vicissitudes, and been exposed to the influence of the same neighbours, yet the present condition of the two languages is widely dissimilar. While Servian is in many respects the most antique of the Slavonic languages in use to-day, and has preserved a wealth of old forms and inflections, Bulgarian, saturated with Rumanian and Albanian influences, has reached an advanced stage of analysis comparable with that of our own.

The history of Bulgarian is unfortunately far less continuous than that of Servian, and though the developments and changes that it underwent can be controlled from the ninth up till the fourteenth century, that is till the Ottoman conquest, yet of the language as spoken from that time till the beginning of the nineteenth century scarcely any specimens exist. The ecclesiastical language, crystallized in the liturgy and Scriptures, has remained much as it was in the ninth century; the speech of the people, apart from changes and peculiarities due to the Rumanian and Albanian influences already mentioned, has, like Servian, adopted an immense stock of Turkish words for use in everyday life; while the language of the literary and national revival dating from the second half of the nineteenth century has borrowed its more elaborate vocabulary wholesale from Russian.

Bulgarian orthography is in a state of chaos, because the people cannot decide between the luxury of an historical and the advantage of a scientific alphabet; that of the ninth century is still in use entire and unaltered; but the language has much changed in form and sound since the time of the Byzantine philologist missionaries, and no Vuk Stefanović Karadžić has arisen, as in Servia, to impose reform on the unwilling.

Compared with the intricate geographical and political conditions under which the western and southern divisions of the Slavonic languages labour, and with the many-faceted problems with which they are beset, those of Russian,