Page:Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse by Paul Selver.djvu/15

Wends who live under German rule in parts of Saxony and Brandenburg, scanty as they are, claim a division into two varying dialects.

However, making all reasonable allowances, we may regard the following as an accurate arrangement:—

 

Eastern	$\scriptstyle {\left\{{\begin{matrix}\ \\\\\ \ \end{matrix}}\right.}$	Russian Little Russian (Malo-Russian, Ruthenian, Ukrainian
Western	$\scriptstyle {\left\{{\begin{matrix}\ \\\\\ \ \end{matrix}}\right.}$	Polish Czech-Slovak Wendic
Southern	$\scriptstyle {\left\{{\begin{matrix}\ \\\\\ \ \end{matrix}}\right.}$	Serbo-Croat Slovene Bulgarian

 

Of these languages, Polish, Czech, Croat and Wendic are written in the Latin alphabet, adapted to their particular phonetic needs by the use of various diacritic signs. The remainder employ the so-called Cyrillic alphabet. This difference of alphabet is the only real distinction between Croat and Serbian. It should be noticed that the Cyrillic alpbabet is not identical in the case of all the languages that use it. Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian and Bulgarian have the bulk of the letters in common: but each language has also a few characters peculiar to itself.