ter, Servian literature attained a high degree of
excellence. Bulgarian, for nearly four centuries, ceased to be a written
language except in a few monasteries; a literary revival, which began about
the middle of the 18th century, was the first symptom of returning national
consciousness. The Servian, Bulgarian and Rumanian languages have borrowed
largely from the Turkish in their vocabularies, but not in their structural
forms, and have adopted many words from the Greek. Modern Greek has also a
large number of Turkish words which are rejected in the artificial literary
language. The revival of the various Balkan nationalities was in every case
accompanied or preceded by a literary movement; in Servian literature,
under the influence of Obradovich and Vuk Karajich, the popular idiom,
notwithstanding the opposition of the priesthood, superseded the
ecclesiastical Russian-Slavonic; in Bulgaria the eastern dialect, that of
the Sredna Gora, prevailed. Among the Greeks, whose literature never
suffered a complete eclipse, a similar effort to restore the classical
tongue resulted in a kind of compromise; the conventional literary
language, which is neither ancient nor modern, differs widely from the
vernacular. Albanian, the only surviving remnant of the ancient
Thraco-Illyrian speech, affords an interesting study to philologists. It
undoubtedly belongs to the Indo-European family, but its earlier forms
cannot, unfortunately, be ascertained owing to the absence of literary
monuments. Certain remarkable analogies between Albanian and the other
languages of the Peninsula, especially Bulgarian and Rumanian, have been
supposed to point to the influence exercised by the primitive speech upon
the idioms of the immigrant races.

_History._--The great Slavonic immigration, which changed the ethnographic
face of the Peninsula, began in the 3rd century A.D. and continued at
intervals throughout the following four centuries. At the beginning of this
movement the Byzantine empire was in actual or nominal possession of all
the regions south of the Danube; the greater part of the native
Thraco-Illyrian population of the interior had been romanized and spoke
Latin. The Thracians, the progenitors of the Vlachs, took refuge in the
mountainous districts and for some centuries disappeared from history:
originally an agricultural people, they became nomad shepherds. In Albania
the aboriginal Illyrian element, which preserved its ancient language,