SLAVIC LANGUAGES. The Slavic languages form a separate group of the Indo European languages and are more nearly re lated to the Lettish, Lithuanian and Prussian, with which they are frequently mentioned as the Balto-Slavic languages. Their original habitat before the period of migration in the 4th century and the original tongue from which they have sprung are still a subject of specu lation. The origin of the word "Slav" which first makes its appearance among Syrian and Byzantine writers some time before the 9th century is equally undetermined. It certainly is not to be derived from slava, "fame" nor from slovo, °word," as assumed by some Slavic scholars, but must, with greater probability, be connected with the Low Latin sclavus, "slave,* since Spanish Goths and Arabs received the great bulk of their slaves and eunuchs from Russia, and "eunuch') is in Late Greek Kolo bos, asklabos.
The first Slavic tongue to be fixed by writ ing was the one adopted in the 9th century by the proto-apostles Cyril and Methodius, of the neighborhood of Saloniki, in their missionary work in Pannonia and Moravia, but it is still an unsettled question whether this original speech was Bulgarian or of the Moravian vari ety, hence the multiplicity of names for it, such as "Old Bulgarian, Old Slovenian, Pannonian." From the fact that it became the liturgical lan guage for all those Slays who received their Christianity from Constantinople it is also called "Church Slavic." It contains a consider able number of Germanic words and an ex ceedingly large number of Greek words in its vocabulary, especially such as refer to religious matters. In grammatical structure it is more primitive than any other Slavic language pre served to us, for it has an aorist in the verb and a dual both in the noun and the verb, and the earliest documents which have come down to us show unmistakably the presence of nasal sounds, now quite lost in all but the Polish and an occasional Bulgarian dialect. On account of these ancient characteristics, Church Slavic is put at the basis of Slavic philology, but it would be a mistake to assume that this Church Slavic is the primitive tongue from which the other Slavic languages are derived. (For the
further history of church Slavic see RUSSIA.N LANGUAGE).
The Russian literary tongue contains a greater proportion of Church Slavic elements than any other related language, which is the result of the important part the Church Slavic played in Russia as a means for literary expres sion. The history of the Russian language in modern times is treated separately, but here must be mentioned the fate of the Ruthenian or Little Russian, especially since through the separation of the Ukraine it is likely to gain new importance. It is a distinct group of the Russian dialects, which in the 18th century received literary polish under Kotlyarevski, and since produced the great poet Shevchenko and the storywriter Kvitka-Ovsyanenko. In the 19th century its literary activity was car ried away from the Ukraine, where it had its origin, to Galicia, where at the universities of Lemberg and Czernowitz it was permitted to develop freely. But here it fell under German and Polish influence and almost led to the for mation of a separate language, inaccessible to the Ukranians, who drew similarly upon the Russian dictionary for its new formations. The Ruthenian papers in the United States, nearly all of them of Ukranian origin, write in a curious mixture of Great and Little Russian. Now the formation of the Ukraine may change the aspect of the literary Ruthenian once more. The modern Bulgarian is phoneti cally very close to the Church Slavic, but grammatically it has departed from it more than any other Slavic language. It has lost practically all declensional forms and thus stands to the others in very much the same re lation that English bears to the other Germanic tongues. The oldest document of the Bulga rian vernacular does not go beyond the 14th century, but it was only in the forties of last century that the first grammar of the spoken tongue was written down by an American, Elias Riggs, after which it was used, at first almost exclusively by American missionaries, in the translation of textbooks. Since then it has fallen, for its vocabulary and style, under the influence of the Russian literature.