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.
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