Page:The Position of the Slavonic Languages at the present day.djvu/9

 place to take this opportunity of indicating the extent of the area over which these tongues are current to-day.

There are several reasons which might account for such misapprehension, but the most likely would seem to be the apparent remoteness of these countries and languages from our own, and the number of strange and complex names with which they are associated. It is as difficult for the English ear to assimilate these names as it is to differentiate between them. What makes it worse for foreigners is that each of the Slavonic languages has an orthography of its own, the peculiarities of which are reflected in its nomenclature of all the other Slavonic nationalities; and in this connexion it is at any rate comforting to know that Slavs themselves find it difficult to make clear the distinctions in the names by which, in their several languages, some of their nationalities are designated. There will be occasion later to give examples of this terminological confusion. But it is to be recalled that in other groups of cognate languages, too, each has its own orthography, its own method of transcribing the same word; for instance, the word España is transcribed differently in each of the Romance languages, in Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, and Rumanian.

But here geography comes to our help. It is easy to remember that Spanish, for instance, is spoken in Spain, and Italian in Italy, &c., where the political, geographical, and linguistic boundaries all more or less correspond. In Eastern Europe the conditions are different. To begin with, there are many fewer impressive natural boundaries than in the western half of the continent, such as the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and even when they do occur, they seldom correspond to the political, still more rarely to the linguistic divisions. Only three out of the seven principal Slavonic languages happen at the present day to be the state language in the respective political divisions where they are current, and to remember where the other four are spoken requires