It belongs to the group of old Slavonic states which have preserved their nationality while losing their political independence.
On the other hand, we learn from Herodotus of the great serpent which defended the citadel of Athens; the Roman genius loci took the form of a serpent; a snake was kept and fed with milk in the temple of Potrimpos, an old Slavonic god.
The old Slavonic lists of forbidden books of the i 5th and 16th centuries also give us a clue to the discovery of this heretical literature and of the means the Bogomils employed to carry on their propaganda.
The origin of Pest proper is obscure, but the name, apparently derived from the old Slavonic pestj, a stove (like Ofen, the German name of Buda), seems to point to an early Slavonic settlement.
The Latin alphabet is used, with special signs to represent sounds borrowed from Slavonic, &c. All the unaccented vowels except e are pronounced as in Italian; e has the same phonetic value as in Old Slavonic (=French e) and is often similarly preiotized (= ye in yet), notably at the beginning of all words except neologisms. The accented vowels é and ó are pronounced as ea and oa (petra, rock, = peatra; morte, death, = moarte); they are written in full, as diphthongs, at the end of a word and sometimes in other positions.
