The Germania of Tacitus Author:Publius Cornelius Tacitus Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: this the case in ethnology ? No. The Bussian language, although northern in locality, is southern in structure, being more akin to the Servian, with which it is ... more »not in contact, than the Polish with which it is. Nay, more, the older the specimens of the language the more it approaches the Old Church-language, or the Old Slavonic. § VI. ON THE DATE OF THE DIFFUSION OF THE BUSSIAN LANGUAGE OVER RUSSIA. This is by no means an irrelevant question even in German ethnology. For that of southern Europe and Asia it is all- important. The greater the area we give to the Germans of Tacitus, the less room we leave for the numerous Sarmatian populations now in existence ; and the less room we leave for these, the greater the difficulty of accounting for their wide diffusion. By supposing, however, that they originated in so large a country as Russia we meet this difficulty, since we thereby allow ourselves a vast tract of land to draw upon for the several migrations necessary to account for the present presence of Poles in Poland, Serbs in Silesia, Tsheks in Bohemia, Slovaks in Hungary, and Carinthians, Croatians, and Dalmatians, elsewhere. But what if the internal evidence derived from the paucity of Russian dialects, or (changing the expression) the uniformity of that tongue over a vast area indicate—as such phenomena do indicate—a recent introduction and a rapid diffusion ? In this case, the difficulty remains as before, and we must not only exclude a great number of Slavonians from the countries of the west, but from the valley of the Dnieper also. Now, from all that I collect from the language of the best Slavonic scholars, the Russian tongue in Russia seems fullas ne was the Anglo-Saxon is in England; in other words, its dialects are fewer and less marked than those of ...« less