dialect spoken by those Slovaks who live
scattered through Hungary; and the correspondence of their grammatical
forms and flexion, to a degree not found in any other Slavic language;
seemed to decide for the Slovaks. An historical basis is likewise not
wanting to this hypothesis; for the Slovaks belonged formerly to the
great kingdom of Moravia; where, according to all the ancient
historians, Cyril and Methodius lived and taught the longest.[2]

On the other side, the venerable Bohemian Abbot Dobrovsky, who has
examined the opinions of his predecessors with more exactness and
erudition, and investigated the nature of the different Slavic
dialects more deeply than any philologist before him, decides for the
_Servians_. According to him, the Old Slavic was, in the time of Cyril
and Methodius, the Servian-Bulgarian-Macedonian dialect, the language
of the Slavi in Thessalonica, the birthplace of these two Slavic
apostles.[3]

His grounds seemed indeed incontestable, until Kopitar, a name of
equally high authority and importance in Slavic matters, who formerly
agreed with him,[4] proved in a later work,[5] by arguments of no
less weight, that the true home of the language of the Slavic Bible
was to be sought among the _Pannonic_ or _Carantano-Slavi_, the
_Slovenzi_ or _Vindes_ of the present times.[6] The adoption of a
number of _German_ (not _Greek_) words for Christian ideas, as
_tzerkwa_ Kirch, _post_ fast, _chrestiti_ christening, etc., can only
be explained, he asserts, by German neighbourhood and German
influence. These Pannonian Slavi were Methodius' own diocesans; for
their instruction the Scriptures were first translated, and only
carried by the two brethren, at a later period, to the Bulgarians and
Moravians, who easily understood the kindred dialect.

Kopitar's arguments have hitherto failed to convince other eminent
Slavic scholars, especially those of the Bohemian school; who still
accept it as a fact, that the language of the Slavic Bible was, in the
ninth century, the Servian-Bulgarian dialect; and Bulgaria its home.
Schaffarik, another great name in Slavic philological researches,
seemed in an earlier work to adopt the opinion of Kopitar; but, after
continuing his investigations further, he too came to the result, that
Bulgaria was the home of the Old Slavic; and that the language still
spoken in that province, corrupted indeed by foreign influences more
than any other Slavic dialect, is its direct descen