in the neighbourhood of
Salonica and Castoria; in modern literary Bulgarian the _rhinesmus_ has
disappeared, but the old nasal vowels preserve a peculiar pronunciation,
the greater _us_ changing to _[)u]_, as in English "but," the lesser to
_[)e]_, as in "bet," while in Servian, Russian and Slovene the greater _us_
becomes _[=u]_ or _[=o]_, the lesser _e_ or _ya_. The remnants of the
declensions still existing in Bulgarian (mainly in pronominal and adverbial
forms) show a close analogy to those of the old ecclesiastical language.

The Slavonic apostles wrote in the 9th century (St Cyril died in 869, St
Methodius in 885), but the original manuscripts have not been preserved.
The oldest existing copies, which date from the 10th century, already
betray the influence of the contemporary vernacular speech, but as the
alterations introduced by the copyists are neither constant nor regular, it
is possible to reconstruct the original language with tolerable certainty.
The "Old Bulgarian," or archaic Slavonic, was an inflexional language of
the synthetic type, containing few foreign elements in its vocabulary. The
Christian terminology was, of course, mainly Greek; the Latin or German
words which occasionally occur were derived from Moravia and Pannonia,
where the two saints pursued their missionary labours. In course of time it
underwent considerable modifications, both phonetic and structural, in the
various Slavonic countries in which it became the liturgical language, and
the various MSS. are consequently classified as "Servian-Slavonic,"
"Croatian-Slavonic," "Russian-Slavonic," &c., according to the different
recensions. The "Russian-Slavonic" is the liturgical language now in
general use among the Orthodox Slavs of the Balkan Peninsula owing to the
great number of ecclesiastical books introduced from Russia in the 17th and
18th centuries; until comparatively recent times it was believed to be the
genuine language of the Slavonic apostles. Among the Bulgarians the spoken
language of the 9th century underwent important changes during the next
three hundred years. The influence of these changes gradually asserts
itself in the written language; in the period extending from the 12th to
the 15th century the writers still endeavoured to follow the archaic model,
but it is evident that the vernacular had already become widely different
from the speech of SS. Cyril and Methodius. The language of the MSS. of
this period is known as th