ABSTRACT

Tadeusz Wojciechowski (1839–1919) first applied the retrogressive approach to the study of the early Slavs, thus using the conditions of the present to infer about the situation in prehistory. The French linguist Antoine Meillet (1866-1936) disagreed that any attempt to locate the area in which the language of the early Slavs was spoken is an exercise in futility. On the basis of the comparative method, Meillet attempted to reconstruct that language, which he called “Common Slavic” and defined in purely Herderian terms. There seems to be general agreement about the fact that Slavic emerged at the intersection of, and in direct contact with, several other Indo-European languages—northern Thracian (or Dacian) to the south(west), Baltic to the north, and Iranian to the southeast. The most serious problem of all attempts to reconstruct early Slavic history on the basis of linguistic data is the lack of chronological precision.