If we may
confide in our own recollections, the translation, the merits of which
the committee of the Russian Bible Society was so little disposed to
acknowledge, was made by Vuk Stephanovitch, who knew better than any
one else the wants of the Servian people, and who presented in the
above mentioned Gospel of St. Luke a specimen to the learned world,
which received the approbation of all those Slavic scholars entitled
to judge of the subject. The committee of St. Petersburg, however, was
probably composed of gentlemen of the opposite party; as indeed the
Russian Servians are, in general, advocates of the mixed Slavo-Servian
language, in which for about fifty years all books for the Servians
were written, and which we have described above in Schaffarik's words;
see p. 108. According to their ideas of the Servian language, the mere
use of the common dialect of the people was sufficient to inspire
doubts of the competency of the translator; although it was for the
people, the unlearned, that the translation was professedly made. They
engaged in consequence Professor Stoikovitch, the author of several
Russian and Slavo-Servian books (see above p. 112), and who had been
for more than twenty years in the Russian service, to make a new
translation.
Pages:
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232