[Footnote 21: Like the English _e_ in _they_.] [Footnote 22: Compare the smooth breathing of the Greeks, and the Shemitish _Aleph_ or _Elif_.] [Footnote 23: There is e.g. a single letter in Old Slavonic and Russian for _shish_. The Pole writes _szez_.] [Footnote 24: Schaffarik in his _Geschichte_, p. 40 sq.] [Footnote 25: We abstain here from giving any historical references, as it would swell the volume beyond all due proportion; and historical notices, with the exception of those circumstances in immediate connection with the _language_, cannot properly be expected. All philological sources have been faithfully mentioned.] * * * * * PART 1. HISTORY OF THE OLD OR CHURCH SLAVIC (COMMONLY CALLED SLAVONIC) LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. It can hardly be doubted that in very ancient times the whole Slavic race spoke only one language. This seems however very early to have been broken up into several dialects; and such indeed must have been the natural result of the wide extension of the people. Eginhard, the secretary and historian of Charlemagne, (ob. 839.) calls the Slavic nations, whom his hero subjugated, Veletabæ, Sorabæ, Obotrites, and Bohemians; and mentions expressly that they did not all speak the same, but a very similar language. It would be difficult to decide what portion of the still existing Slavic tongue has kept itself the purest; the Old Slavic has its Græcisms, the Servian its Turcisms, the Polish and Bohemian their Germanisms, the Russian its Tartarisms, Germanisms, and Gallicisms. No language in the world will ever resist the influence of the languages of its neighbours; and even the lofty Chinese wall cannot protect the inhabitants of that vast empire from corruptions in their language. It was formerly the general view, that the ecclesiastical Slavonic was to be considered as the _mother_ of all the living Slavic dialects; and there are indeed even now a few philologians and historians who still adhere to that opinion. The deeper investigations of modern times, wherever an equal share of profound erudition and love of truth has happened to be united in the same persons, have sufficiently proved, that the church Slavonic is to be considered, not as the mother of all the other Slavic languages, but as standing to them only in the relation of an elder sister,--a _dialect_ like them, but earlier developed and cultivated. The original mother-tongue, from which they were all derived, must have perished many centuries ago. But _where_ the Old Slavic was once spoken, and which of the still living dialects has been developed _immediately_ out of it,--an honour to which all the nations of the eastern stem, and one of the western, aspire,--is a question which all the investigations and conclusions of able historians and philologians have not hitherto been able to answer in a satisfactory manner. The highest authorities in Slavic matters are divided on this point. The