526 SLAVIC LITERATURE 



at the present hour presents dictionaries that are old and out of 

 print, and unfinished dictionaries (the Dictionary of the Academy 

 does not go beyond the compound words of which za is the first 

 element; the new edition of the Dictionary of Dal is at the letter s). 



Phonetics are of no value except in so far as they examine sounds, 

 phonemes, in the course of their successive evolution in time. The 

 principal facts of Russian phonetics therefore found their expression 

 in works dealing with the historical grammar of Russian, the authors 

 of which have been designated above. But the same cannot be said of 

 Russian morphology. The excellent grammar of A. Vostokov, so 

 often reprinted (1st edition, 1831; 12th edition, 1874), of which the 

 classical grammars used in Russian schools are only more or less 

 faithful abridgments, is not sufficient to explain the forms of the 

 present parler. When the old Buslaiev, only a few months before 

 his death, presented me with a copy of his Historical Grammar (1st 

 edition, 1858; 5th edition, 1881), the first part of which, entitled 

 "Etymology," exposes in three distinct chapters, (1) Sounds and 

 Corresponding Letters; (2) The Formation of Words or Derivation; 

 (3) The Inflection of Words or Morphology, he added with a charm- 

 ing simplicity: "Above all, do not make use of my chapters on 

 derivation and morphology. They are antiquated, like their author, 

 and are no longer of any value." For want of a comprehensive 

 work it would be useful to consult the notes and corrections added 

 by Roman Brandt to the Russian translation (by Shliakov) of the 

 morphology of the monumental work of F. Miklosich, Vcrglcichende 

 Grammatik dcr Slavischen Sprache (the morphology of the Little 

 Russian and Russian languages appeared in the third part of the 

 complete Russian translation, Moscow, 1886). The work itself of 

 Miklosich could not be used in its original form, the indications 

 given being, for languages other than the Slovenish and Serbo- 

 Croatian, much too untrustworthy. 



Russian syntax has had the advantage of an exposition made in 

 a work that can justly be termed a masterpiece. The Syntax of 

 Buslaiev, the second part of his Historical Grammar (see above), 

 has deserved, since its appearance, this qualification, and time has 

 not diminished its merit. This book, however, is open to a serious 

 reproach. Its author does not distinguish, in the different facts 

 which he analyzes, between those that properly belong to the regular 

 development of the language, and those that were artificially intro- 

 duced by way of borrowing and have not even outlived the authors 

 who had given them right of asylum. Too often he persists in jus- 

 tifying a construction for which he seeks, in the history itself of the 

 language, an impossible genesis, when this construction is only one 

 of the varieties of what has been termed lomonosovshchina. An 

 example is the instance of the infinitive construction in Russian. 



