PRINCE— SLAV AND CELT. 185 



It is the thesis of this paper to set forth how Slavs and Celts, 

 although speaking widely varying branches of the Indo-European 

 linguistic family, are nonetheless strikingly similar to each other 

 in habits of mind and expression. 



The Slav, in spite of his prominence in the great war, is even yet 

 but little understood by the West. In fact, the majority of Amer- 

 icans do not even know who these people are, nor whence they 

 come. The Slavonic family is essentially a linguistic division. In- 

 deed, the very word " Slav " probably means * he who can speak 

 intelligibly ' from the same root as slovo ' word,' in distinction from 

 non-Slavs, who are known as njemcy ' dumb ones,' i.e., unintelligible 

 speakers, a term originally applied by Slavs to all foreigners, but 

 now exclusively to the Germans. The derivation of " Slav " from 

 slava 'glory' is unimportant, as slaz'a itself is probably but a 

 variant of the slov-slav-root meaning ' speak, proclaim.' The 

 Slavonic tribes are much more numerous to-day than their con- 

 geners the modern Celts. 



There are six linguistic divisions of Slavonic speaking nationali- 

 ties, viz., Russians, who are subdivided into Great Russians, White 

 Russians and Ukrainians (Little Russians) ; Poles (with Kashu- 

 bians) ; Slovaks, who extend across the entire northern border of 

 what was Hungary, from the Ukrainian language-line on the east 

 to the Bohemian border on the west; Bohemians (Czechs) embrac- 

 ing also the Moravian population to the south of them, both tribes 

 speaking a distinctly western Slavonic idiom ; Serbs and Croats on 

 the south, who differ only in that they write their common speech, 

 the Serbs in the Cyrillic (Russian) and the Croats in the Latin 

 alphabet ; and finally the Bulgarians who speak a simplified form of 

 Slavonic and whose dialects extend, not only through political 

 Bulgaria, but also through a large part of Macedonia. To the 

 Serbo-Croats must be added the Montenegrins and also the Slovenes, 

 inhabiting the district just behind Trieste, and, strangely enough, the 

 little linguistic island of Wends in Saxony and Prussia, who, 

 although separated by centuries of isolation from their southern 

 Slavonic cousins, still use a distinctly Serbo-Slavonic form of 

 speech (Sorbian). 



These then are the Slavs, and it will at once be observed that 



