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Edited in 1787 and 1789 by Peter Simon Pallas (1741-1811) in St. Petersburg, the two-volume dictionary Linguarum totius orbis vocabularia comparativa by Catherine II contains equivalents in 200 languages for 285 more or less elementary Russian words. The Slavonic part, prominently placed on the lines 1 to 12 under the Russian head-word, was given a rather critical review in Josef Dobrovský's (1753-1829) Vergleichung der Russischen und Böhmischen Sprache (1796). Correcting first of all the unsatisfactory documentation of Czech and Slovak with their strange and sometimes erroneous Cyrillic transcription, the reviewer added some suitable equivalents and made many useful comments on the divergent phonetic shapes of the Slavonic words under one and the same Russian lemma. As early as 1794 Dobrovský had found out that in several cases the distribution of these divergencies seems to be regular, suggesting an areal division of the Slavonic languages into a southeastern and a northwestern group (Russian and Serbian vs. Polish and Czech). Already in the 1790s, he began to plan a new edition of the dictionary, for which he published inter alia the so far missing Kajkavian word-list in 1815, and with his model in Vergleichung he inspired Vuk Karadžić (1787-1864) to correct in 1822 the deficient Serbian list and to compile a Bulgarian one. There is convincing evidence that the traditional tripartition of the Slavonic languages introduced by Aleksandr Vostokov (1781-1864) in 1820 (East, West, and South Slavonic) was directly based on Dobrovský's proposal and in some respect benefitted from his painstaking revision of the shortcomings and inconsistencies in the Slavonic entries of the Vocabularia comparativa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]