Kopitar's arguments have hitherto failed to convince other eminent Slavic scholars, especially those of the Bohemian school; who still accept it as a fact, that the language of the Slavic Bible was, in the ninth century, the Servian-Bulgarian dialect; and Bulgaria its home. Schaffarik, another great name in Slavic philological researches, seemed in an earlier work to adopt the opinion of Kopitar; but, after continuing his investigations further, he too came to the result, that Bulgaria was the home of the Old Slavic; and that the language still spoken in that province, corrupted indeed by foreign influences more than any other Slavic dialect, is its direct descendant.[7]
Be this as it may, the Old Slavic has long since become the common property of all the Slavic nations, and its treasures are for all of them an inexhaustible mine. Dobrovsky counted in it 1605 radical syllables.[8] Hence, it is not only rich in its present state, but has in itself the inestimable power of augmenting its richness, the faculty of creating new forms of expression for new ideas. But its great perfection does not consist alone in this multiplicity of words. Schlözer, the great historian and linguist, justly observes: "Among all modern languages the Slavonic (Old Slavic) is one of those which are most fully developed. With its richness and other perfections I have here no concern. How it became so, the history of its cultivation sufficiently explains. Its model was the Greek language, in those days the most cultivated in the world; although Cedrenus no longer wrote like Xenophon. No idiom was more capable than the Slavonic of adopting the beauties of the Greek. The translators, intending a literal version, and not like Cædmon the Anglo-Saxon, or Otfried the German, a mere _poetic metaphrase_, were in a certain measure compelled to _subdue_ their own language, to make it flexible, to invent new turns, in order faithfully to imitate the original." [9]
After having ceased for centuries to be a language of common life, the Old Slavic has of course lost that kind of pliancy and facility, which only a living language, employed to express all the daily wants of men, can possibly acquire. But for this same reason it has gained infinitely in solemnity and dignity. Imposing by its very sound, exciting in the minds of millions sanctifying religious associations, it seems to have grown almost unfit for any vulgar use, and to have become exclusively devoted to holy, or at least to serious and dignified subjects.