on MODERN GREEK, which have a vital connexion with the state of the
argument. The reader will observe that I have from the beginning spoken
of Greek as a living language, having had a continuous uninterrupted
existence, though under various and well-marked modifications, from
the days of Cadmus and his earth-sown brood to the present hour. Now
the vulgar notion is, that Romaic, as it used to be called, though
the present Greeks have with a just pride, I understand, rejected the
epithet, is not only a different dialect of the Greek, from that spoken
by Plato and Demosthenes, but a different language altogether, in the
same way that Italian and Spanish are languages formed on Latin indeed,
but with an organic type altogether their own. In this view Greek
becomes a dead language; and the mass of scholastic and academical men
who teach it habitually as such, without any regard to its existing
state, will receive a justification of which they are not slow to
make use. But this vulgar notion, like many others, has grown out of
pedantic prejudice, and is supported by sheer ignorance. How such a
notion should have got abroad is easy enough to explain. I mentioned
already, that the English scholars—who have been allowed to give the
law on such subjects—have so completely disfigured the classical
features of Greek speech, that when they happen to meet Greeks, or to
travel in Greece and attempt conversation, they can make no more of
the answer they receive, than they can of the twitter of swallows, or
the language of any other bird. Again, at Oxford and Cambridge, as is
well known, the majority confine themselves to a very limited range
even of strictly classical Greek, so that a man may well have received
high honours for working up his Æschylus and his Aristotle, and yet be
quite unfit to make out the meaning of a plain modern Greek book when
he sees it; but the fact is, I have good reason to believe, there is
not one among a hundred of their scholars that ever saw such a thing.
Thirdly, we must consider under what a system of prim classical prudery
these gentlemen are often brought up. They are taught to believe, and
have been taught here also in Scotland publicly, that after a certain
golden age of Attic or Atticizing purity, the limits of which are very
arbitrarily fixed, a race of Greek writers succeeded who “increased
immensely the vocabulary of the language, while they injured its
simplicity and debased its beauty;” and under the influence of this
salutary fear they regard with a strong jealousy whole centuries of
the most interesting and instructive authors who do not come under
their arbitrary definition of “classical.” Men who think that the
vocabulary of the Hellenic language should have been finally closed at
the time of Polybius, and who pass a philologic interdict against any
phrase or idiom introduced after that period, will not be very likely
to look with peculiar favour on the prose of Perrhæbus, or the poetry
of Soutzos. But by a large-minded philologist all this prudery is
disregarded. He knows that grammarians can as little cause a language
to be corrupted and to die, by any dainty squeamishness of theirs, as
they with their meagre art can create a single word, or manufacture
one verse of a poem. Looking at the language of Homer and Plato as a
real historical phenomenon, and not as a mere record in grammatical
books, he sees that it went on growing and putting forth fresh buds and
blossoms long after nice lexicographers had declared that it ceased
to possess vitality. A language lives as long as a people lives—a
distinct and tangible social totality—speaking it, nor has it the power
to die at any point, where grammarians may choose to draw a line,
and say that its authors are no longer classical. What “classical”
means is hard to say; but as a matter of fact many persons will read
the Byzantine historians with much more pleasure than Xenophon’s
Hellenics, and not be able to explain intelligibly why the Greek of
the one should not be considered as good as the Greek of the other.
Greek certainly was not a dead language in any sense at the taking
of Constantinople in the year 1453. If it is dead, it has died since
that date; but the facts to those who will examine them, prove that
it is not dead. No doubt, under the oppressive atmosphere of Turkish
and Venetian domination, the stout old tree began to droop visibly,
and became encrusted with leprous scabs, and to shew livid blotches,
which were not pleasant to behold; but such a strong central vitality
had God planted in that noble organism, that, with the returning
breeze of freedom, and the spread of intelligence since the great year
1789, the inward power of healthy life began again to act powerfully,
and the Turkish and Venetian disfigurement dropt off speedily like a
mere skin-disease as it was; and smooth Greek sounded glibly again,
not only in the pulpit, which was the strong refuge of its prolonged
vitality, but in the forum and from the throne. Those who doubt what I
say in this matter, had best go to Athens and see; meanwhile, for the
sake of those to whom the subject may be altogether new,—and from the
general pedantic narrowness of our academical Greek I fear there may be
many such—I shall set down a passage from Perrhæbus, and another from a
common Greek newspaper, from which the fact will be abundantly evident
that the language of Homer is not dead, but lives, and that in a state
of purity, to which, considering the extraordinary duration of its
literary existence—2500 years at least,—there is no parallel perhaps on
the face of the globe, in Europe certainly not.
“Κατὰ τὸ 1820 διατρίβων εἰς τὴν Σπάρτην ὁ Πεῤῥαιβὸς
ἐπὶ ἡγεμονίας τοῦ Πέτρου Μαυρομιχάλη, διέβη εἰς
Κωνσταντινούπολιν, κἀκεῖθεν εἰς Δακίαν, Βασσαραβίαν
καὶ Ὀδησσὸν, ὅπου εὗρε τὸν Ἀλέξανδρον Ὑψηλάντην
καὶ Γεώργιον Καντακοζηνὸν, φέροντας τὰ πρῶτα
τῆς Ἑταιρείας, καὶ μὲ ἀπερίγραπτον ἔνθουσιασμὸν
ἐτοιμαζομένους διὰ νὰ κινηθῶσι κατὰ τοῦ Σουλτάνου.
Τὸν αὐτὸν σχεδὸν ἐνθουσιασμὸν ἔβλεπέ τις οὐ μόνον
κατ’ ἐκεῖνα τὰ μέρη, ἀλλὰ καθ’ ὅλην τὴν Ἑλλάδα,
τόσον εἰς σημαντικοὺς, ὅσον καὶ παντὸς ἐπαγγέλματος
Ἕλληνας κατοικοῦντας εἰς πόλεις, χώρας καὶ χωρία.
Δὲν συστέλλομαι νὰ ὁμολογήσω, ὅτι ἤμην ἐναντίος τοῦ
τοιούτου κινήματος κατὰ τοῦ Σουλτάνου· ὄχι διότι
δὲν ἐπεθύμουν τὴν ἐλευθερίαν τοῦ Ἔθνους μου, ἀλλὰ
διότι μ’ ἐφαίνετο ἄωρον τὸ κίνημα, μὲ τὸ νὰ ἦσαν
ἀπειροπόλεμοι οἱ Ἕλληνες, καὶ οἱ πλεῖστοι ἄοπλοι, ὁ
δὲ κίνδυνος μέγας.”[40]
=Ο ΚΟΣΣΟΥΤ ΕΝ ΑΜΕΡΙΚΗ=.
“Τήν 6 Δεκεμβρίου εἰσήλθεν ὁ ἀρχηγὸς τῆς Οὐγγαρικῆς
δημοκρατίας εἰς τὴν πρωτεύουσαν πόλιν τῶν ἡνωμένων
Πολιτειῶν. Ἀπὸ τῆς πρώτης στιγμῆς τῆς ἀφίξεως του
ὅλοι οἱ ζωγράφοι παρουσιάσθησαν διὰ νὰ λάβωσι τὴν
εἰκόνα τοῦ διὰ τῆς ἡλιοτυπίας, ἀλλ’ ὁ Κοσσοὺθ κατ’
οὐδένα πρόπον δὲν ἠθέλησε νὰ δεχθῇ τοῦτο. Ἄλλος τις
εὐφυέστερος καλλιτέχνης ἐφεῦρε τὸ μέσον νὰ τὴν λάβῃ
ἄκοντος αὐτοῦ. Ἔθεσε τὴν μηχανήν του εἴς τι παράθυρον
κατα τὴν διάβασίν του καὶ ἐπροκάλεσε μίαν ἔριν ὲν τῇ
ὁδῷ διὰ νὰ σταματήσῃ τὴν τέθριππόν του. Τοιουτοτρόπως
δὲ κατώρθωσε νὰ λάβῃ λάθρα οὐχὶ μόνον τὴν εἰκόνα τοῦ
Μαγυάρου Ἥρωος, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἄλλων τεσσάρων εὑρισκομένων
μετ’ αὐτοῦ ἐν τῇ ἁμάξῃ. Ὁ Κοσσοὺθ εὕρισκετο ἐντὸς
ἁμάξης ὑπὸ ἕξ καστανοχρόων ἵππων συρομένης ἐφόρει
δὲ στολὴν Οὐγγρικὴν, καὶ ἐπὶ τοῦ πίλου τοῦ μέλαν
πτερόν.”[41]
[40] “Ἀπομνημονεύματα Πολεμικὰ, διαφόρων μαχῶν συγκροτηθεισῶν μεταξὺ
Ἑλλήνων καὶ Ὀθωμάνων κατά τε τὸ Σούλιον καὶ Ἀνατολικὴν Ελλάδα ἀπὸ
τοῦ 1820 μέχρι τοῦ 1829 ἔτους. Συγγραφέντα παρὰ τοῦ Συνταγματαρχοῦ
Χριστοφόρου Πεῤῥαίβου τοῦ ἐξ Ὀλύμπου τῆς Θετταλίας, καὶ διῃρήμενκ εἰς
τόμους δύω. Ἐν Ἀθήναις, ἐκ τῆς Τυπογραφίας Ἀνδρέου Κορόμηλα, Ὁδός
Ἓρμου, Ἀριθ. 215. 1836.”
[41] “Αθηνα, Decemb. 31, 1851.”
These are as fair specimens of the current dialect of Greece as I can
produce. For it is manifest that while it would be quite easy on the
one hand to select a specimen of the living dialect written by mere
men of learning, (as from the works of ŒCONOMUS,) which should make
a much nearer approach to the idiom of Xenophon, it would be equally
open on the other to produce a brigand’s song from the mountains of
Acarnania containing a great deal more of the elements of what the
admirers of unmixed Atticism would be entitled to call corruption. But
it is evident that a specimen of the first kind would be no more a
fair specimen of the average Greek now spoken, than the polished style
of George Buchanan was of the average Latin current in his day; and
a brigand’s song were just as fair a specimen of the Greek spoken by
people of education in modern Athens, as a ballad in the Cumberland
or the Craven dialect is of the English of Macaulay’s History, or
Wordsworth’s White Doe. With this remark, by way of explanation, let
any person who can read common classical Greek without a dictionary,
tell me with what face it can be asserted that the above is a specimen
of a new language, in the same sense that Italian is a different
language from Latin, and Dutch from German. I find nothing in the
extracts given, but such slight variations in verbal form, and in
the use of one or two prepositions and pronouns, as the reader of
Xenophon will find in far greater abundance when he turns to Homer. The
principal syntactic difference observable is the use of νὰ (for ἵνα),
with the subjunctive mood, instead of the infinitive, which the modern
Greeks have allowed to drop; but this is a usage, borrowed from the
Latin I have often thought, of which very frequent examples occur in
the New Testament; and besides, a mere new fashion in the syntactical
form of a sentence was never dreamt of by any sane grammarian, as
the sufficient sign of a new language. In English, for instance, we
say, _I beg you will accept this_, and, _I beg you to accept this_.
Now suppose one of these forms of expression to become obsolete, by a
change which mere fashion may effect any day, and the other to become
all dominant, could, I ask, any such change as this, or a whole score
of such changes, be said to corrupt the English language in such a
degree as to constitute a new tongue? Much less could the introduction
of a few new words, formed according to the analogy of the language,
be said to achieve such a transformation, though an academic purist
might indeed refuse to put such words as ἡλιοτυπία (photography),
and ἀτμοπλoῖov (a steam-boat), into his lexicon. As little could a
philosophical classical scholar be offended by the loss of the optative
mood, (used in the New Testament so sparingly,) and the substitution
for it of the auxiliary verb θέλω, which, though it is of comparatively
rare occurrence, is just as much according to the genius of the Greek
language, as the frequent use of the other auxiliary verb _to be_,
both in classical Greek and Latin. Instead of fastening upon such
insignificant peculiarities, a catholic-minded scholar will rather be
astonished to find that _in three columns of a Greek newspaper of the
year 1852, there do not certainly occur three words that are not pure
native Greek_. In fact the language, so far from being corrupt, as its
ignorant detractors assert, is the most uncorrupt language in Europe,
perhaps in the world, at the present moment. The Germans boast of their
linguistic purity, and sing songs to Hermann who sent the legions of
Varus with their lingo so bravely out of the Westphalian swamps; but
let any man compare a column of a German newspaper with a column from
the =ΑΘΗΝΑ=, or any other ἐφημερίς issued within the girth of King
Otho’s dominions, and he will understand that while the Greek language
even now is as a perfectly pure vestment, the German in its familiar
use is defaced by the ingrained blots of many ages, which no philologic
sponge of Adelung or Jacob Grimm will ever prevail to wash out. There
are reasons for this remarkable phenomenon in the history of language,
which to a thoughtful student of the history of the Greek people will
readily suggest themselves. I content myself with stating the fact.
These things being so, the natural observation that will occur to
every one, as bearing on our present inquiry, is, that as the Greek is
manifestly a living language, and never was dead, but only suffering
for a season under a cutaneous disease now thrown off, those who speak
that language are entitled to a decisive voice in the question how
their language is to be pronounced, _and this on the mere ground that
they are alive and speak it_; and to their decision we must bow on the
sole ground of living authority and possessory right. For every living
language exercises this despotic authority over those who learn it;
and it is not in the nature of things that one should escape from such
a sovereignty. No doubt there may be certain exceptions to which, for
certain special philological purposes, this general rule of obedience
is liable; but the rule remains. Such an exception, for instance,
in the literature of our existing English language, is the peculiar
accentuation of many words that occur in Shakspeare, and even in
Milton, different from that now used, whereby their rhythm limps to
our ear in the places where such words occur. Such exceptions, also,
are the dissyllabic words in Chaucer, that are now shortened into
monosyllables, and yet must be read as dissyllables by all those who
will enjoy the original harmony of the poet’s rhythm. In Greek, as I
have already observed, the whole quantitative value of the language has
had its poles inverted; in which practice we cannot possibly follow
the living users of the tongue, because we learn the language not to
speak with them, as a main object, (though this also has its uses
seldom thought of by schoolmasters,[42]) but to read the works of their
ancient poets, the rhythmical value of whose works their living speech
disowns. This is a sweeping exception to that dominancy of usage which
Horace recognises as supreme in language; but philological necessity
compels; and the modern Athenians must even submit in such points to
receive laws from learned foreigners. But with all this large exceptive
liberty, we dare not disown the rule. We must follow the authority of
their living dictation, so far as the object we have in view allows;
and if we are philosophical students of the language, our object never
can be resolutely to ignore all knowledge of the elocutional genius
and habits of the living people who speak it. It must be borne in mind
also, with how much greater ease a living language can be acquired than
a dead one; so that were it only for the sake of the speedy mastery of
the ancient dialect, a thorough practical familiarity with the spoken
tongue ought first to be cultivated. The present practice, indeed,
of teaching Greek in our schools and colleges, altogether as a dead
language, can be regarded only as a great scholastic mistake; and it
may be confidently affirmed by any person who has reflected on the
method of nature in teaching languages, that more Greek will be learned
by three months’ well-directed study at Athens, where it is spoken,
than by three years’ devotion to the language under the influence of
our common scholastic and academic appliances in this country.
[42] Perhaps some classical young gentleman at Oxford or Cambridge
may be moved by the consideration brought forward in the following
passage:—“I was much delighted with this really Grecian ball, at which
I was the only foreigner. The Grecian fair I have ever found peculiarly
agreeable in society. They are not in the smallest degree tainted with
the artificial refinements and affectations of more civilised life,
while they have all its graces and fascinations; and I cannot help
thinking that as some one thought it worth while to learn ancient Greek
at the age of seventy, for the sole purpose of reading the Iliad, so it
is well worthy the pains of learning modern Greek at _any_ age, for the
pleasure of conversing, in her own tongue, with a young and cultivated
Greek beauty.”—_Wanderings in Greece_, by GEORGE COCHRAN, Esq. London,
1837.
I am now led, in the last place, to observe, that whatever may be
thought of Itacism and of accents, as the dominant norm for the
teaching of Greek in this country, one thing is plain, that no scholar
of large and catholic views can, after what has been said and proved
in this paper, content himself with teaching Greek according to the
present arbitrary and anti-classical fashion _only_. The living dialect
also must be taught with all its peculiarities, not only because the
heroic exploits of a modern Admiral Miaulis are as well worthy of the
attention of a Hellenic student as those of an ancient Phormion; but
for strictly philological uses also, and that of more kinds than one.
The transcribers of the MSS., for one thing, in the Middle Ages, all
wrote with their ear under the habitual influence of the pronunciation
which now prevails; and were accordingly constantly liable to make
mistakes that reveal themselves at once to those who are acquainted
with that pronunciation, but will only slowly be gathered by those
whose ears have not been trained in the same way. But what is of more
consequence for Hellenic philologers to note accurately is, that the
spoken dialect of the Greek tongue, though modern in name and form,
is nowise altogether modern in substance: but like the conglomerate
strata of the geologists, contains imbedded very valuable fragments
of the oldest language of the country. Of this it were easy to adduce
proofs from so common a book as Passow’s Greek-German Dictionary, where
occasional reference is made to the modern dialect in illustration of
the ancient; from which source, I presume, with much else that is of
first-rate excellence in lexicography, such references have passed into
the English work of Liddell and Scott. But on this head I shall content
myself with simply directing the student’s attention to the fact, and
appending below the testimony of Professor Ross of Halle—a man who has
travelled much in Greece, can write the language with perfect fluency,
and is entitled, if any man in Europe is, to speak with the voice of
authority on such a point.[43]
[43] In a paper on the Comparison of the Forms of the Nominative
Case in certain Latin and Greek Nouns, (_Zeitschrift für die
Alterthums-Wissenschaft. 9ͭͤͬ Jahrgang_, No. 49,) Professor Ross writes
to Professor BERGH of Marburg, as follows:—“My views are founded
chiefly on the observation of the dialect used by the common people of
Greece, among whom and with whom I lived so long. This dialect, indeed,
now spoken by the Greek shepherds and sailors, and which, of course,
is not to be learnt from books, but from actual intercourse with the
people, the majority of philologists are apt to hold cheap, but it
has been to me a mine of rich instruction, and I have no hesitation
in saying that, at all events, in reference to the non-Attic dialects
of the Greek tongue, to Latin, Oscan, and even Etruscan, more may be
got from this source than from the many bulky commentaries of the
grammarians of the Middle Ages. See what I have said on this point in
my _Reisen auf den Griechischen Inseln_, iii. p. 155.”
I have now finished all that I had to say on this subject, which has
proved perhaps more fertile of speculative suggestion and of practical
direction than the title at first promised. What I have said will at
least serve the purpose for which it was immediately intended, that
of justifying my conduct should I find it expedient to introduce
any decided innovations in the practice of teaching Greek in our
metropolitan University. And if it should further have the effect
of inducing any thoughtful teacher to inquire into a curious branch
of philology which he may have hitherto overlooked, and to question
the soundness of the established routine of classical inculcation in
some points, whatever disagreeable labour I may have gone through in
clearing the learned rubbish from so perplexed a path will not have
been without its reward. Any sympathizing reader who may communicate
with me, wishing that I should explain, reconsider, or modify any
statement here made, will find me, I hope, as willing to listen as to
speak, and not more zealous for victory than for truth.
EDINBURGH: T. CONSTABLE, PRINTER TO HER MAJESTY.