The claims of the Russians in this matter have long since been given
up as easily refuted; being indeed destitute of any historical
foundation. The circumstance, however, that the language of the Slavic
Bible was, in Russia, until the reign of Peter the Great, exclusively
the language of books, confirmed the natives for a long time in the
belief, that the old Russian and the church Slavic were one and the
same language; and that the modern Russian was the immediate
descendant of the latter; until modern criticism has better
illustrated the whole subject.[1]

The great similarity of the _Slovakish_ language with the Old Slavic,
especially of the national dialect spoken by those Slovaks who live
scattered through Hungary; and the correspondence of their grammatical
forms and flexion, to a degree not found in any other Slavic language;
seemed to decide for the Slovaks. An historical basis is likewise not
wanting to this hypothesis; for the Slovaks belonged formerly to the
great kingdom of Moravia; where, according to all the ancient
historians, Cyril and Methodius lived and taught the longest.[2]

On the other side, the venerable Bohemian Abbot Dobrovsky, who has
examined the opinions of his predecessors with more exactness and
erudition, and investigated the nature of the different Slavic
dialects more deeply than any philologist before him, decides for the
_Servians_. According to him, the Old Slavic was, in the time of Cyril
and Methodius, the Servian-Bulgarian-Macedonian dialect, the language
of the Slavi in Thessalonica, the birthplace of these two Slavic
apostles.[3]

His grounds seemed indeed incontestable, until Kopitar, a name of