His grounds seemed indeed incontestable, until Kopitar, a name of equally high authority and importance in Slavic matters, who formerly agreed with him,[4] proved in a later work,[5] by arguments of no less weight, that the true home of the language of the Slavic Bible was to be sought among the Pannonic or Carantano-Slavi, the Slovenzi or Vindes of the present times.[6] The adoption of a number of German (not Greek) words for Christian ideas, as tzerkwa Kirch, post fast, chrestiti christening, etc., can only be explained, he asserts, by German neighbourhood and German influence.  These Pannonian Slavi were Methodius’ own diocesans; for their instruction the Scriptures were first translated, and only carried by the two brethren, at a later period, to the Bulgarians and Moravians, who easily understood the kindred dialect.

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.  Schloezer, 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 Caedmon 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]