between the pronunciation of the living Greeks, and that of those who
are taught only out of dead grammars and dictionaries, is so striking,
that the contest has been peculiarly keen. Here, however, as is wont
to be the case in more important matters, it may be that after much
dusty discussion, erudite wrangling, and inky hostility, it shall turn
out that both parties are in the right. On the first blush of the
matter, it seems plain that such words as βασιλεύς, ναῦν, καλεῦνται,
sound extremely harsh, and not according to the famous euphony of
the Attic ear, if in them the second letter of the diphthong receive
the consonantal sound of _v_ or _f_ given by the modern Greeks.
=VASILEFS, NAFN, CALEFNTAE=—these are sounds which no chaste classic
ear can tolerate, and which, among the phenomena of human articulation,
are more naturally classed with such harsh Germanisms as _Pfingst_,
_Probst_, &c., than with any sound that can be imagined to have been
wedded euphoniously to Apollo’s lute. All this is very true; and yet,
as modern German is not all harsh, so ancient Greek, it may be, was
not all mellow; and no mere general talk about euphony or cacophony
can, in so freakish a thing as human speech, be allowed to settle any
question of orthoepy. Now, when we look into the matter an inch beyond
the film of such shallow scholastic declamation, we find that so early
as the time of Crassus, that is, in the first half of the first century
before the Christian era, the diphthong _au_, which we pronounce _ou_,
(as in _bound_,) and the English like the same vowel in their own
language, (as in _vault_,) was actually enunciated consonantally like
_av_ or _af_. For Cicero (Divinat. ii. 40) tells the anecdote how,
when that unfortunate soldier was on his way to the East, and about
embarking in a ship at Brundusium, he happened to meet a Greek on the
quay calling out CAUNIAS! by which call the basket slung over his
shoulder might have plainly indicated that he meant FIGS! figs of the
best quality (worthy of a triumvir) from Caunus, in the south-west
corner of Asia Minor; but the triumvir’s ear—dark destiny brooding in
his soul—caught up the syllables separately, as _Cav’ ne eas_—=BEWARE
HOW YOU GO!= Now, as no person pretends that the _v_ in _caveo_ was
pronounced like the _u_ in _causa_, or could be so scanned in existing
Latin poetry, it follows that the _au_ in Caunias was pronounced by
a Greek of those times as a _v_ or _f_, exactly as the living Greeks
pronounce it now. This is one example, among the many that we have
adduced, shewing in a particularly striking way how impossible it is
for modern schoolmasters, judging from mere abstract considerations,
and bad scholastic habits, to say how the ancient Greeks might or might
not have pronounced any particular combination of sounds. No doubt this
Calabrian fig-merchant might not have pronounced that combination of
letters exactly in the same way that Pericles did 400 years earlier,
when, from the tribunal on the Athenian Pnyx, with the ominous roar
of a thirty years’ war in his ear, “he lightened and thundered and
confounded Greece;” but there is no reason, on the other hand, why a
Greek fig-merchant and a Greek statesman should not have pronounced
certain rough syllables in the same way, (for a great orator requires
rough as well as smooth syllables;) and this much at least is certain,
the anecdote proves that the modern pronunciation of αὐτός, _aftos_, is
ancient as well as modern; and the talk of those who will have it that
this, and other most characteristic sounds of the living orthoepy, were
introduced by the Turks and the Venetians, or the Greeks themselves
under their perverse influence, is mere talk—talk of that kind in which
scholastic men are fond of indulging, when, knowing nothing, they wish
to have it appear that they know everything. What was the real state of
the pronunciation with regard to this and the other diphthong ευ in the
days of Pericles or Plato, we have no means of knowing. Meanwhile the
result which Seyffarth, after a long and learned investigation, brings
out, that they were pronounced before a vowel as _v_, or the German
_w_, and before a consonant as a real diphthong, seems probable enough.
This agrees both with the natural laws of elocutional physiology, and
explains how the imperial name FLAVIUS in Roman coins (_Liscov_, p.
51) came to be written sometimes =ΦΛΑΥΙΟΣ= and sometimes =ΦΛΑΒΙΟΣ=.
However this be, there is no doubt that the consonantal pronunciation
of these letters has for more than 1800 years been known among the
Greeks. It has therefore all the claims that belong to a venerable
conservatism; whereas, if we reject its title, we throw ourselves loose
into an element of mere conjecture; as no person can tell us whether
Demosthenes pronounced αυ in the Scotch or English way, (supposing
one of the two to be right;) and as for ευ, what extraordinary feats
the human tongue can play with it, we may learn from the Germans, who
pronounce it like _oy_ in our _boy_—a rare lesson to the restorers of a
lost pronunciation how much is to be learnt in such a field from mere
argument and analogy!
Let us now collect the different points of this inquiry under a single
glance. In the days of the first Emperors, and, in a majority of cases,
as early as the first Ptolemies, the scale of Greek vocalization,
according to the best evidence now obtainable, was as follows:—
Letter. Power.
Long Α = _a_, as in _father_.
Short Α = _a_, ” _hat_.
Η = _ai_, ” _pain_.
Ε = _e_, ” _get_.
Ω = _o_, ” _pore_.
Ο = _o_, ” _got_.
Long Υ = _ü_, ” _Bühne_.
Short Υ = the same shortened.
Long I = _ee_, as in _green_.
Short I = the same shortened.
AI = _ai_, as in _pain_.
EI = _ee_, ” _green_.
OI = _ee_, ” _green_.
OU = _oo_, ” _boom_.
AU = _av_, _af_, or?
EU = _ev_, _ef_, or?
Now, in stating the results thus, I wish it to be observed in the
first place, that I throw no sort of doubt on the possibility that
in the days of Herodotus and Pericles some of the diphthongal sounds
here declared normal in the days of the Ptolemies and the Cæsars might
have been pronounced otherwise. The theory of Pennington, also, (p.
51), that there might have co-existed in ancient times a system of
orthoepy for reciting the old poets, considerably different from that
used in common conversation, may be entertained by whosoever pleases,
and is not without its uses; but in the present purely practical
inquiry we must leave all mere theory out of view. It is also perfectly
open to Liscov, or any philologist, working out a suggestion of the
great Herman, to prove from the internal analogy of the language, and
especially from a comparison of the most ancient dialects,[23] that
_originally_ the diphthongs were pronounced differently from what
they are now, and were in the days of Ptolemy Philadelphus, (Homer
unquestionably said, παις—_païs_, and not _pace_. II. _Z_, 467;) but
in the present investigation, as a practical man, I want something
better than general probabilities and philosophical negations, or
even isolated correct assertions; I want a complete scheme of Greek
pronunciation, for some particular age, congruous within itself, and
standing on something like historical evidence. This I find only in
the pronunciation of the modern Greeks, or in that of the Ptolemies
and Cæsars, which differs from the other only in a very few points.
What then, we may ask, should hinder us from at once adopting this
pronunciation? Nothing, I imagine, but the dull inertness of mere
conservatism, (which in such matters is very potent,) the conceit of
academical men, proud of their own clumsy invention, and the dread
of ITACISM. Is it not monstrous, we hear it said, that half a dozen
different vowels, or combinations of vowels, should be pronounced
in the same way, and that in such a fashion as only curs yelp, and
mice squeak, and tenuous shades with feeble whine flit through the
airy paths that lead to Pluto’s unsubstantial hall? Now, I at once
admit that the prevalence of the slender sound of _i_ (_ee_), is a
corruption from the original purity of Hellenic vocalization, from
which I have no doubt the Pelasgi, and the venerable patriarchs who
put up the lions, now seen on the gates of Mycenæ, were free; but no
language spoken by a polished people is free from some corruption
of this kind; and this particular corruption, like the defects
observable in men of great original genius, is characteristic. In such
strongly marked men as Beethoven, Samuel Johnson, and John Hunter
the physiologist, nothing is more easy than for the nice moralist to
point out half a dozen points of character that he could have wished
otherwise. So it is with language. Who, for instance, would not wish to
reform the capriciousness of our English systemless system of spelling
and pronunciation? Who can say that we have not too much of the
sibilant sound of _s_ and _th_ in our language? who will not lament the
want of body in our vocalization, and the tendency to the ineffective
tribrachic and even proceleusmatic accent in the termination of our
polysyllables? In German, again, who does not indulge in a spurt of
indignation against “_Wenn Ich mich nicht_,” and other such common
collocations of gutturals? and in Italian are we not so cloyed with
_ōnes_ and _āres_, and other broad trochaic modulations, that we
long for the resurrection of some Gothic Quinctilian to inoculate
the luscious “_lingua Toscana in bocca Romana_,” with a few harsh
solecisms; while the French, who for cleverness and refinement, (and
some other things also,) are a sort of Greeks, do so clip and mince
the stout old Roman lingo, which they have adopted, that except in the
mouth of flower girls and ballet dancers, their dialect is altogether
intolerable to many a masculine ear. All these things are true; but no
sane man thinks of rebelling against such hereditary characteristics
of a human language, any more than he would against the ingrained
peculiarities of human character. We take these things as we find them;
just as we must make the best of a snub nose, or a set of bad teeth
in an otherwise pretty face. So also we must even attune our ears to
the Itacism of the Greeks; otherwise we shall assuredly sin against a
notable characteristic of the language, much more intimately connected
with the genius of that singular people, than many a clipper of new
Greek grammars and filcher of notes to old Attic plays imagines. What
says QUINCTILIAN? _Non possumus esse tam_ GRACILES; _simus_ FORTIORES,
(xii. 10.) Now, I ask the defenders of our modern system of pronouncing
Greek in this country, which some of them perhaps call classical and
Erasmian, but which is in fact, as has been proved, an incoherent
jabber of barbarisms, what if the so much decried _Itacism_ were
part of this _gracilitas_, this slenderness or tenuity of ancient
Hellenic speech, by which it was to the ear of the greatest of Latin
rhetoricians so strikingly distinguished from the Roman? Certain it is,
that the rude Teutonic sounds of _ou_ and _i_, (English _i_ and _ai_
in _Kaiser_), that we hear so often in English Greek, do not answer to
Quinctilian’s description. In fact, both English and Scotch, instead of
preserving this natural contrast between Greek and Roman enunciation,
have in this, and in other matters, (as we shall see presently, when
we come to talk of accents,) done everything in their power to sweep
it away; and of nothing am I more firmly convinced than of this, that
a living conception of what the spoken Greek language really was in
its best days, will never be attained by any scholar who has not the
courage to kick all the Erasmian academic gear aside for a season, and
take a free amble with some living Christopoulos, or Papadopoulos, on
the banks of the Ilissus, or round the base of Lycabettus. This living
experience of the language is indeed the only efficient way to argue
against the learned prejudices of academic men; for, as THIERSCH well
observes, every one laughs at that pronunciation to which he has not
been accustomed, (_Sprachlehre_, sect. xvii. 3;) and no man can live
at Athens for any time, without having his ears reconciled to a slight
deviation from perfect euphony, or even coming to admire it, as one
sometimes does the lisp of a pretty woman, or the squint of an arch
humorist.[24]
[23] GODOFREDI HERMANI _de emendenda ratione Græcæ grammaticæ_, Lib. i.
c. 2, quoted at length by LISCOV, p. 21.
[24] On revisal it strikes me I have given the enemies of Itacism an
unfair advantage by not stating, that, while in any other language
the attenuation of so many different sounds into one, might have
proved a very grievous evil, there is such a richness of the full
sound of α (which the English have effaced) and ω in Greek, that the
blemish rarely offends. I have to mention also, that, while a certain
prominence even of this slender sound seems necessary to the phonetic
character of Greek, as distinguished from Latin, I have no objection,
in reading Homer and the elder poets, (were it only for the sake of
the often quoted πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης!) to pronounce οι, as _boy_ in
English, and η, as we do it in Scotland; just as in reading Chaucer we
may be forced to adopt some of the peculiarities of the pronunciation
of his day. But in the common use of the prose language, I think it
safer to stick by the tradition of so many centuries, than to venture
on patches of classical restoration, where it is impossible to revive
a consistent whole. I may say also, that if υ be pronounced uniformly
like the French _u_, the itacism will be diminished by one letter,
while the difference between that and the modern Greek pronunciation
is so slight, that a Scotchman so speaking in Athens will be generally
understood, whereas our broad Scotch _u_ (_oo_) besides being
entirely without classical authority, recedes so far from the actual
pronunciation of the Greeks, as to be a serious bar in the way of
intelligibility.
So much for the vowel-sounds. I say nothing of the consonants, because
they are of less consequence in the controversy. I have already
spoken incidentally about β, (p. 21 above), and I have no wish to
write a complete treatise. Detailed information on minute points of
neo-Hellenic pronunciation may be found in Pennington’s work already
quoted, and in a recent work by Corpe.[25] I now proceed to the matter
of ACCENT, which we shall find to be no less important, but happily
much more easily settled.
“In the pronunciation of a Greek word,” says JELF,[26] “regard ought
to be had both to accent and quantity;” a most significant power
lying in that word OUGHT, as we know well that many teachers in this
country pay a very irregular regard to quantity in reading, and very
few, if any, pay any regard to accent.[27] But that the proposition
laid down by Mr. JELF is true, no scholar can doubt for a moment,
though Mr. PENNINGTON, in the year 1844, most evidently anticipated
a great amount of stolidity, obstinacy, and scepticism, among his
academic friends on this point; with such minute and scrupulous care,
and breadth of philological preparation does he set himself to prove,
what no man that had ever dipped into an ancient Greek grammar, or a
common Latin work on rhetoric, would ever dream of denying. However,
I gave myself some trouble to set forth this matter learnedly some
years ago,[28] knowing that I might have to do with persons not always
open to reason, and utterly impervious to nature and common sense;
and the Fellow of King’s also might have had occasion to know that it
is one thing to prick soft flesh with a pin, another to drive nails
into a stone wall. The fact is, that the living Greek language having
come down to us with most audible accentuation, and the signs of these
accents being contained in all printed Greek books, and not only so,
but commented on by a long series of grammarians, from Herodian and
Arcadius, down through the Homeric bishop of Thessalonica, to Gaza and
Lascaris; in this state of the case, if any man does not pronounce
Greek according to accents, while I do, the burden of proof lies with
him who throws off all established authority in the matter, not with
me who acknowledge it. If there is no authority for accent in the
ancient grammarians, then as little is there for quantity. The fact
of the existence of the one as a living characteristic of the spoken
and written language of ancient Greece, stands exactly on the same
foundation as the other. So many ancient grammars, and comments on
grammars have been published within the last fifty years by Bekker
and other library-excavators, that the teacher who now requires to be
taught formally that the ancients really used accents in their public
elocution, is more worthy of a good flogging than the greatest dunce
in his drill. But what were accents? Accents are an _intension_ and
_remission_ (ἐπίτασις and ἄνεσις) of the voice in articulate speech,
whereby one syllable receives a marked predominance over the others,
this predominance manifesting itself principally in a higher note or
intonation given to the accented syllable.[29] This definition occurs
fifty times if it occurs once in the works of the ancient grammarians
and rhetoricians; so I need not trouble myself here by an array
of erudite citations to prove it; and that such an accent is both
possible and easy to bring out in the case of any Greek word, may be
experienced by anybody who will pronounce κεφαλή with a marked rise of
the voice on the last syllable, or νεφέλη with a similar intension of
vocal utterance on the penult. That the living Greeks give a distinct
prominence to these very syllables, any man may learn by seeking them
out in Manchester or London, in both which places they have a chapel.
Why then should Etonian schoolmasters, and Oxonian lecturers not do
the same? Do they not teach the doctrine of accents? Have they not
translated GOETTLING? Do they not print all their books with those very
marks which Aristophanes of Byzantium, two thousand years ago, with
provident cunning, devised even for this purpose, that we, studious
academic men, in the then ULTIMA THULE of civilisation, should now have
the pleasure of intoning a philosophic period as the divine Plato did,
or a blast of patriotic indignation as Demosthenes? They say there are
no accents properly so called in the French language. This I never
could exactly understand; but do our academic men actually realize this
peculiar form of levelled human enunciation, (the ὁμαλισμὸς of the old
grammarians,) without intension or remission, by pronouncing Greek
altogether unaccented? Believe it not. As if determined to produce a
scholastic impersonation of every possible monstrosity with regard to
the finest language in the world, they neglect the written accents
which lie before their nose, and read according to those accents which
they have borrowed from the Latin! and this directly in the teeth of
the public declaration of CICERO and QUINCTILIAN, that Latin had one
monotonous law of accentuation, Greek another and a much more rich
and various one.[30] And, as if to place the top-stone on the pyramid
of absurdities which they pile, after reading Greek with this Latin
accent (which sounds to a Greek ear exactly as a rude Frenchman’s first
attempts at English sound to an Englishman) for some half dozen years,
they set seriously to cram their brain-chambers with rules how Greek
accents should be placed, and exercise their memory and their eye, with
a most villainous abuse of function, in doing that work which should
have been done from the beginning by the ear! If consistency could have
been looked for from men involved in such a labyrinth of bungling,
there would have been something heroic in throwing away the marks
altogether from their books and from their brains, as well as from
their tongue; certainly this procedure would have saved many a peeping
editor a great deal of trouble, and many a brisk young gentleman
riding up in a Cambridge “coach” right into the possession of a snug
tutorship in Trinity, would have travelled on a smoother road, and felt
less seriously how the flowers of ancient literature are scarce to be
enjoyed amid the thorns of modern grammar that besiege a man’s fingers
and eyes from all sides.[31] But intellectual consistency is not to be
expected from persons once involved in a gross error, any more than
moral consistency is from thieves; and it is well for all parties that
it is so; for by this wise arrangement of nature, as a thief’s story
often discovers the theft it would conceal, so a philologer’s nonsense
is most readily refuted by the remnants of incoherent sense that he had
not wit or courage enough to eliminate. Besides, the dictum of PORSON
stood mighty over their heads;[32] and as for the young men, the more
time that was wasted on a reasonless method of teaching Greek, the
less danger would there be of that rude invasion of BOTANY, GEOLOGY,
HISTORY, and all the array of modern sciences which has long been the
special terror of English academic men. So they went on, and so they
go on now, teaching that people ought to accent κεφαλή on the last
syllable, and yet actually accenting it on the first! The consequence
of which perverse proceeding is not only that accents are one of the
most difficult things to learn in Greek, and seldom thoroughly mastered
even by those who are excellent scholars otherwise, (_see_ JELF, page
52, _note_), but an accomplished English scholar, when he makes his
continental tour, as is common enough in these days, even with men
who have not much money, finds that his perverse enunciation of the
Greek vowels, combined with his utter neglect of accents, has put him
in possession of a language of which he can make no use except in
soliloquy, and which any person can understand sooner than a native
of the country to which it belongs.[33] He then comes home belike
and tells his English friends that the modern Greeks are a set of
barbarians, who speak a “swallow’s jabber,” so corrupt that no scholar
can understand a word they say! So true is the record which honest
Thomas Fuller has left of the issue of the notable Hellenic controversy
raised by Sir John Cheke—“Here Bishop Gardiner, chancellor of the
university, interposed his power, affirming Cheke’s pronunciation,
pretended to be ancient, to be antiquated. He imposed a penalty on all
such as used this new pronunciation, which, notwithstanding, since
hath prevailed, and whereby we Englishmen speak Greek and are able to
understand one another, _which nobody else can_.”[34]
[25] CORPE’s Neo-Hellenic Greek Grammar. London, 1851. See also a
notice of this work in the ATHENÆUM for last year, where I am happy to
observe that the opinions advocated in this paper are supported.
[26] Greek Grammar. 1851, sect. 44, 45. DONALDSON (Greek Grammar, p.
17) says, ‘The accent is the sharp or elevated sound with which one of
the last three syllables of a Greek word is _regularly_ pronounced.
This “_regularly_” is as significant as Mr. JELF’s “_ought_.”’
[27] Of course I except Professor MASSON of Belfast, whose complete
mastery of the living dialect of Greece is the object of admiration to
all who know him.
[28] Classical Museum, vol. i. p. 338.
[29] There is also a greater _emphasis_ or _stress_ given to the
accented syllable, as is manifest from the pronunciation of the modern
Greeks, and from the striking fact that in the modern dialect, the
unaccented syllable has sometimes been dropt, while the accented
constitutes the whole modern word, as δὲν for οὐδὲν, μᾶς for ἡμᾶς.
[30] QUINCTIL., lib. i. c. 5; DIOMED. de Oratione, ii.; PUTSCH. i. 426.
[31] JELF, in the Preface to his Grammar, calls the doctrine of accent
“a difficult branch of scholarship.” The difficulty is altogether an
artificial one, made by scholastic men who will insist on teaching by
the eye only and the understanding, what has no meaning at all except
when addressed to the ear. The doctrine of accentuation in English has
no peculiar difficulty, plainly because men learn it in the natural way
by hearing.
[32] “_Si quis igitur vestrum ad accuratam Græcarum literarum scientiam
aspirat, is probabilem sibi accentuum rationem quam maturrime comparet,
in propositoque perstet scurrarum dicacitate et stultorum derisione
immotus_,” ad Med. 1, apud JELF, vol. i. p. 37. I wonder if Porson
himself pronounced according to the accents. If he did not, he is just
another instance of that extraordinary incapacity of apprehending a
large principle that is so characteristic of the English mind.
[33] I may insert here the whole of the passage of BOISSONADE, from
which the words in one of the prefixed mottoes are taken. “_Nisi quod
maxime cupio, in omnibus academiis nostris, gymnasiis et scholis
hodierna Græcorum pronuntiatio recipiatur. Nam cum prorsus perierit
antiqua pronuntiandi ratio qua Demosthenes, et Sophocles, vel ipsi
Alexandrini sub Ptolemæis utebantur, et fere ridiculum sit unumquemque
populum ad suæ linguæ sonos, atque etiam ad libitum, Græcorum quos
legit librorum pronuntiationem efformare, id saltem boni, admissa
neotericorum pronuntiatione, lucrabimur, non solum ut Gallus homo
et Germanus Anglum intelligant Græce loquentem et ab illo Græce
ipsi loquentes intelligantur, sed id etiam ut cum Græcis doctis et
scholastica institutione politis confabulemur verbis antiquorum
et facillime, si velimus, hodiernæ linguæ cognitionem ac usum
assequamur._”—HERODIAN, Epimerisni, BOISSONADE. London, 1819. Prefat.
[34] History of the University of Cambridge, Section vii.