PRINCE— RARE OLD SLAVONIC RELIGIOUS MANUAL. 359 



earlier than did the Serbs themselves. We find essentially the same 

 conditions affecting the use of the Church Slavonic in Russia, where 

 the older idiom appears as an archaized dialect of Russian in Old 

 Slavonic dress. Among the Bulgarians, however, who were of 

 Hunnic origin, their adopted Slavonic idiom differed less than Serb 

 or Russian from the primitive Church Slavonic form of Macedonian, 

 which is sometimes, therefore, erroneously known as " Old Bul- 

 garian." Church Slavonic is not " Old Bulgarian," but simply stood 

 in a very close relationship to the Slavonic dialect adopted by the 

 Non-Slavonic Bulgars. 



The Croats came very early under the influence of the Roman rite, 

 which, however, was permitted by tb*" Pope to be celebrated in the Old 

 Slavonic language, which <-h>'s took on the specially Croatian form, 

 in which the Morgan text is printed. This Croatian variant is prac- 

 tically identical with the Serb redaction. Its chief characteristics are 

 the omission of the nasalized vowels of the original Macedonian and 

 a few other concessions to the current vernacular, some of which will 

 be noted below. It is interesting to observe that this Croatizing 

 idiom written in Glagolitic is still in use among the Roman Catholics 

 of Istria, Dalmatia, the Adriatic islands, and, in fact, all along the 

 Croatian coastland. The Croatian Old Slavonic in Glagolitic has, 

 during the course of centuries, become the medium of a very consid- 

 erable literature (cf. v. Jagic, in Branko A^odnik's Einlcitung zur 

 Kroatischcn Literatnrgeschichte , Agram). In fact, there are to this 

 day some old people who can read no other character than the 

 Glagolitic, which went into disuse at a very early date among the 

 Orthodox Slavs, who universally adopted the Cyrillic, which thus 

 became the parent of the modern Russian, Serbian and Bulgarian 

 alphabets. It is probable that the Cyrillic system was an evolution 

 from the Greek uncial letters, while the Glagolitic, now a distinctly 

 Roman Catholic alphabet, was developed from the Greek minusciilae 

 (Isaac Taylor, Archiv filr Slavische Philologie, V., 191 ff.). 



The Morgan text is especially interesting, because it presents the 

 Croatian Church Slavonic of the early sixteenth century in a highly 

 satisfactory manner, as may be seen from the following translitera- 

 tions with commentary of the "Lord's Prayer" and "Hail Mary" 

 shown on the accompanying plate (Plate V). 



