Lastly, we come to the Slavonians (Slavs), about whom and the Panslavonic movement which is to weld all the Slavonic peoples into one great nationality we have heard so much in recent years. The word Slav comes from _slowan_, which in old Slavonian meant to ‘speak,’ and was given by the Slavonians to themselves as the people who alone, in their view, spoke intelligibly. Just so the Greek word βάρβαροι (_barbaroi_), from which we get our word barbarians, arose, in obedience to a like prejudice, only from the imitation of people babbling or making unintelligible sounds--‘bar-bar-bar.’ But among the Germans who conquered and enslaved the people, Slav became synonymous with the Latin _servus_, and from them it passed on to express the idea of slave--_esclave_, _schiavo_, etc. The Slavonic people once extended much farther to the west in Northern Europe than they do at present--as far, for instance, as the Elbe in Northern Germany. We begin to hear of them in history about the age of Charlemagne--a little, that is, before the end of the eighth century, A.D. The _Obotriti_ and the _Wiltzi_ are the names of two Slavonic nations on the Baltic, of whom we hear much about this time. But they can no longer be identified as the ancestors of any existing race. In the reign of Charlemagne’s grandson, called Lewis the German, we hear much of other Slavonic peoples whose names have more meaning for us--the Sorabians, the Czechs (_i.e._ Bohemians), the Mähren or Moravians, and the Carinthians, who, if they have as separate peoples ceased to exist, have left behind them their names in the lands they inhabited.
The same has been the case with other Slavonic peoples who appear later in history--the Pomeranians and the Prussians (earlier Borussians) and the Silesians. The people who now bear these names and inhabit these countries are by origin almost exclusively Teutonic; but the names themselves and the earlier inhabitants were not Teutons, but Slavs.
The existing Slavonic nationalities are the Russians, Lithuanians (incorporated in Russia), the Poles, the Czechs or Bohemians, the Bulgarians, Servians, Montenegrins, etc.,--most, in fact, of the nations of the Southern Danube.
[Sidenote: Pre-historic research through language.]