524 SLAVIC LITERATURE 



over the prairies and through the forests of North America to that 

 of the Russian language over the steppes and through the forests of 

 eastern Europe and Siberia. Certain peculiarities of local pronuncia- 

 tion, certain eccentricities of vocabulary, do not mean that your lan- 

 guage is not remarkably one, from New York to San Francisco, from 

 Alaska to Texas. 



In its continued march toward the east, a linguistic Drang nach 

 Osten which went side by side with the political Drang nach Osten, 

 Russian collided with two groups of languages, the Turkish languages 

 spoken by the Turkish hordes of the southern steppes and the Tatar- 

 Mongols who invaded Russia in the thirteenth century, and the 

 Finnish languages spoken ^by the different Finnish populations which 

 the Russian colonists ousted as they progressed. It is interesting 

 to note the effects of this double contact. They reduce themselves to 

 very little, as we shall see. 



From the Turkish languages Russian has borrowed a considerable 

 number of words, almost all substantives, referring either to political 

 and civil life (zalovanije, jarlyk, etc.), or to domestic life and in par- 

 ticular to dress (khalat, sapog, basmak, etc.). But these words are 

 not more numerous than those already borrowed or those that have 

 since been borrowed from Germanic and Romance languages. There 

 is nothing comparable, for example, to the afflux of French words 

 into English following the Norman Conquest, or even that of Osmanli 

 words into Bulgarian. 



The influence of the Finnish languages, since it exerted itself with 

 more continuity, might have been more profound, and we might be 

 tempted to exaggerate its importance. We might, for instance, not 

 be content with pointing out the incontestable borrowing of words, 

 but presume to explain, by this same influence, certain general facts 

 which, in reality, have their similarities in the Finnish languages: 

 the maintenance of the y (a hard and broad i) beside i (a soft and 

 short i) when this distinction between the two qualities of i disap- 

 peared at an early moment in the Southern Slavic languages; the 

 non-expression of the verb to be in the present tense (on doma, on<'< 

 dftltri'i): the construction of the instrumental used as a predicate (on 

 It'll nnzni'iccn korolnn). But if it is true that the sound y exists in 

 Finnish languages, it is no less true that it has been maintained in 

 Poli-h as in Russian, and there could be no question of Finnish influ- 

 eric" in Polish. The other two facts alleged are not more convincing. 

 The non-expression of the verb to be in the present tense seems to have 

 had its point of departure in the coexistence of the two forms of 

 the adjective, the determinate and the indeterminate form (noxyj. 

 ni'irajd. n^rojc. beside ,nor. nov/'i , n<'>ro}. The construction of the 

 instrumental used a- a predicate is very clearly explained by con- 



