historical importance and literary value, and its more modern appearance.[1] The oldest of its dialects in date, and, in nearly all respects, the most primitive in form, is the language of the ancient Bulgarians, into which their apostle Cyril translated the Scriptures, now just about a thousand years ago. It is a curious coincidence that our knowledge of both Germanic and Slavonic speech thus begins, like that of many a rude and hitherto unlettered dialect in the hands of missionaries at the present day, with a Bible version, and at nearly the same geographical locality; the kingdom of the Bulgarians having followed that of the Goths on the southern bank of the lower Danube. But this ancient idiom—from which the modern Bulgarian differs greatly, having changed with unusual rapidity in the interval—is more commonly called the Old Slavonic, or the Church Slavic, having been adopted by a large part of the Slavonian races as their sacred language, and being still employed as such, within the ecclesiastical limits of the Greek Church. It belongs to what is known as the south-eastern section of the Slavonic branch. By far the most important of the other languages in the same section is the Russian, in its two divisions, the Russian proper and the Little-Russian, or Ruthenian. The Russian is in our day a literary language of considerable importance; its forms are traceable, in scanty documents, back into the eleventh century. In its cultivated development, it has been strongly influenced by the Church Slavonic. The south-eastern section further includes the Servian, with its closely related dialect, the Kroatian, and the Slovenian of Carinthia and Styria. Specimens of these tongues are as old as the tenth, or even the ninth, century. The Servian has an interesting modern literature of popular songs.
To the other section, the western, belong the Polish, the Bohemian with the related Moravian and Slovakian, the upper and lower Sorbian, and the Polabian, on the Elbe. Of these, the Bohemiam is the oldest, having monuments probably of the tenth century. Polish literature begins in the four-
- ↑ In sketching the relations of the Slavonic languages, I follow the authority of Professor August Schleicher, in the Beiträge zur Vergleichenden Sprachforschung, vol. i., p. 1 seq.
