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Title: The Pronunciation of Greek
Author: Blackie, John Stuart
Language: English
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Transcriber’s Notes:
Underscores “_” before and after a word or phrase indicate _italics_
in the original text.
Equal signs “=” before and after a word or phrase indicate =bold=
in the original text.
Small capitals have been converted to SOLID capitals.
Old or antiquated spellings have been preserved.
Typographical and punctuation errors have been silently corrected.
THE
PRONUNCIATION OF GREEK;
ACCENT AND QUANTITY.
A PHILOLOGICAL INQUIRY.
BY
JOHN STUART BLACKIE,
PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN
THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH.
EDINBURGH: SUTHERLAND AND KNOX.
LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, AND CO.
MDCCCLII.
EDINBURGH: T. CONSTABLE,
PRINTER TO HER MAJESTY.
“_Sit omnibus rebus suum senium, sua juventus; et
ut verba verbis, sic etiam sonis sonos succedere
permittamus._”—BISHOP GARDINER.
“_This new pronunciation hath since prevailed,
whereby we Englishmen speak Greek, and are able
to understand one another, which nobody else
can._”—THOMAS FULLER.
“_Maxime cupio ut in omnibus Academiis nostris
hodierna Græcorum pronuntiatio recipiatur._”
—BOISSONADE.
“_Neque dubitamus quin_ ERASMUS, _si in tantam
Græcæ pronuntiationis discrepantiam incidisset,
vulgarem usum intactum et salvum reliquisset_.”
—SEYFFARTH.
“_Ich gebe der neugriechischen Aus-sprache im
Ganzen bei weitem den Vorzug._”—THIERSCH.
“_Neque enim de cœlo dilapsa ad nos pervenit Græcorum
lingua, sed e patria sua una cum omnibus quæ habemus
subsidiis, suo vestita cultu prodiit, quem tollere
aut immutare velle esset imperium in linguam liberam
exercere._”—WETSTEN.
“_Die sogenannte Erasmische Aus-sprache, wie es
in Deutschland erscheint, ist völlig grundlos, ein
Gebilde man weiss nicht von wannen es kam, ein
Gemische welches jeder sich zustutzt nach eigner
Lust und Willkühr._”—LISCOV.
THE PRONUNCIATION OF GREEK, &c.
It is purely as a practical man, and with a direct practical result in
view, that I venture to put forth a few words on the vexed question
of the PRONUNCIATION OF GREEK. He were a frigid pedant, indeed, who,
with the whole glorious literature of Hellas before him, and the rich
vein of Hellenic Archæology, scarcely yet opened in Scotland, should,
for the mere gratification of a subtle speculative restlessness, walk
direct into this region of philological thorns. So far as my personal
curiosity was concerned, Sir John Cheke, wrapt in his many folded
mantle of Ciceronian verboseness, and the Right Reverend Stephen
Gardiner’s prætorian edicts in favour of Greek sounds,[1] and the βή ϐή
of the old comedian’s Attic sheep, might have been allowed to sleep
undisturbed on the library shelves. I had settled the question long
ago in my own mind on broad grounds of common sense, rather than on
any nice results that seemed obtainable from the investigations of the
learned; but the nature of the public duties now imposed on me does not
allow me to take my own course in such matters, merely because I think
it right. I must shew to the satisfaction of my fellow-teachers and of
my students, that I am not seeking after an ephemeral notoriety by the
public galvanisation of a dead crotchet; that any innovations which I
may propose are in reality, as so often happens in the political world
also, and in the ecclesiastical, a mere recurrence to the ancient
and established practice of centuries, and that whatever opinions I
may entertain on points confessedly open to debate, I entertain not
for myself alone, but in company with some of the ripest scholars
and profoundest philologists of modern times. I have reason also for
thinking with a recent writer, that the present time is peculiarly
favourable for the reconsideration of the question;[2] for, although
Sir John Cheke might have said with some show of truth in his day,
“_Græca jam lingua nemini patria est_,”[3] none but a prophetic
partisan of universal Russian domination in the Mediterranean will
now assert, that the living Greeks are not a nation and a people who
have a right to be heard on the question, how their own language is to
be pronounced. Taking the Greek language as it appears in the works
of the learned commentator Corais, in the poetry of the Soutzos and
Rangabe, in the history of Perrhæbus, so highly spoken of by Niebuhr,
and in the publications of the daily press at Athens; and taking
the new kingdom for no greater thing than the intrigues of meddling
diplomatists, its own wretched cabals, and the guns of Admiral Parker
will allow it to be; it is plain that to disregard the witness of
such a speaking fact, standing as it does upon the unbroken tradition
and catholic philological succession of eighteen centuries, would be,
much more manifestly now than in the days of the learned WETSTEN, to
“exercise a despotism over a free language,” such as no man has a right
to claim.[4] Besides, in Scotland we have already had our orthodox
hereditary routine in this matter disturbed by the invasion of English
teachers of the Greek language; an invasion, no doubt, which our strong
national feeling may look on with jealousy, but which we brought on
ourselves by the shameful condition of prostration in which we allowed
the philological classes in our higher schools and colleges to lie
for two centuries; and it was not to be expected that these English
teachers, being placed in a position which enabled them to give the
law within a certain influential circle, should sacrifice their own
traditional pronunciation of the Greek language, however arbitrary, to
ours, in favour of which, in some points, there was little but the mere
conservatism of an equally arbitrary usage to plead. Finding matters
in this condition, I feel it impossible for me to waive the discussion
of a matter already fermenting with all the elements of uncertainty. I
have therefore taken the trouble of working my way through Havercamp’s
two volumes, and comparing the arguments used in the famous old
Cantabrigian controversy with those advanced by a well-informed modern
member of the same learned corporation. I have taken the learned
Germans, too, as in duty bound, on such a question, into my counsels;
I have devoted not a little time and attention to the language and
literature of modern Greece; and above all, I have carefully examined
those places of the ancient rhetoricians and grammarians that touch
upon the various branches of the subject. With all these precautions,
if I shall not succeed in making converts to my views, I hope, at
least with reasonable men, to escape the imputation of rashness and
superficiality.
[1] _Ego sonorum causam tueor ex edicto possessorio, et ut prætor,
interdixi de possessione._
[2] An Essay on the Pronunciation of the Greek Language. By G. T.
PENNINGTON, M.A., late Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. London:
Murray. 1844. This is the work that I recommend to the English student
who wishes to understand the subject in detail, without wading through
the confounding mass of pertinent and impertinent matter that the
learned eloquence of more than three centuries has heaped up.
[3] _Sylloge scriptorum qui de linguæ Græcæ vera et recta
pronuntiatione Commentarios reliquerunt; edidit_ HAVERCAMPUS. _Ludg.
Bat._, 1740. Vol. ii. p. 220
[4] JOH. RUDOLFI WETSTENII: _pro Græca et genuina linguæ Græcæ
pronuntiatione Orationes Apologeticæ_. Basil; 1686, p. 27. The whole
passage is quoted in the prefixed mottoes.
The exact history of our present pronunciation of Greek, both in
England and Scotland, I have not learning enough curiously to trace;
but one thing seems to me plain, that all the great scholars in this
country, and on the continent generally, in the fifteenth, and the
early part of the sixteenth century, could have known nothing of our
present arbitrary method of pronouncing;[5] for they could pronounce
Greek no other way than as they received it from Chrysoloras, Gaza,
Lascaris, Musurus, and the other native Greeks who were their masters.
Erasmus was, if not absolutely the first,[6] certainly the first
scholar of extensive European influence and popularity who ventured to
disturb the tradition of the Byzantine elders in this matter; but his
famous dialogue, _De recta Latini Græcique sermonis pronuntiatione_,
did not appear till the year 1528, by which time so strong a
prescription had already run in favour of the received method, that it
seems strange how even his learning and wit should have prevailed to
overturn it. But there are periods in the history of the world when the
minds of men are naturally disposed to receive all sorts of novelties;
and the era of the Reformation was one of them. Erasmus, though a
conservative in religion, (as many persons are who are conservative
in nothing else,) pleased his free speculative whim with all sorts of
imaginations; and among other things fell—though, if what Wetsten
tells be true, in a very strange way[7]—on the notion of purging
the pronunciation of the classical languages of all those defects
which belonged to it, whether by degenerate tradition or perverse
provincialism, and erecting in its stead an ideal pronunciation, made
up of erudite conjecture and philosophical argumentation. Nothing was
more easy than to prove that in the course of two thousand years the
orthoepy of the language of the Greeks had declined considerably from
the perfection in which its musical fulness had rolled like a river of
gold from the mouth of Plato, or had been dashed like a thunderbolt
of Jove from the indignant lips of Demosthenes; yet more easy was it,
and admirable game for such a fine spirit as Erasmus, to evoke the
shades of Cicero and Quinctilian, and make mirth to them out of a
Latin oration delivered before the Emperor Maximilian, by a twittering
French courtier and a splay-mouthed Westphalian baron.[8] It is certain
also that there are in that dialogue many admirable observations on
the blundering practices of the schoolmasters, and even the learned
professors, his contemporaries, which very many of them in that day,
and the great majority even now have wanted either sense or courage to
attend to; observations which, I doubt not, will yet bear fruit in the
present age, if education is to be advanced in the only way possible,
viz., by those whose profession it is to teach others, learning in
the first place to teach themselves. But in one great point of his
rich and various discourse, the learned Dutchman was more witty than
wise, and achieved a success where he was altogether wrong, or only
half-right, that has been denied to him where he is altogether right.
While his admirable observations on accent and quantity, and many of
his precepts on the practical art of teaching languages, have been
totally lost sight of by the great mass of our classical teachers, his
strictures on the pronunciation of the Greek vowels and diphthongs have
been received more or less by pedagogic men in all parts of Europe;
or at least prevailed so far as to shake the faith of scholars in the
pronunciation of the native Greek, and lead them to invent a new and
arbitrary Hellenic utterance for each country, an altogether barbarous
conglomerate, made up of modern national peculiarities and scraps of
Erasmian philology. This is a sorry state of matters; but as European
scholarship then stood, innovators could look for no more satisfactory
result. Neither Erasmus nor the scholars who followed his “divisive
courses” in England and other countries, were in possession of
philological materials sufficiently comprehensive for settling so nice
a point. Much less could they use the materials in their hands with
that spirit of calm philosophic survey, and that touch of fine critical
sagacity which the ripe scholars of Germany now exhibit. It was one
thing to quarrel learnedly with the pronunciation of Chrysoloras, and
to chuckle with academic pride over the tautophonic tenuity of σὺ
δ’ εἶπέ μοι μὴ μῆκος, and other such ingeniously gathered scraps of
Atticism in the mouth of a modern Turkish serf; another, and a far more
serious thing, to draw out a complete table of elocutionary sounds,
such as they existed at any given period in Greek literature; say at
the successive epochs of Homer, Æschylus, Plato, Callimachus, Strabo,
Chrysostom. Bishop Gardiner, therefore, was right to press this point
hard against the Erasmians,—“_Quod vero difficillimum dicebam neque
statuis neque potes, ut tanquam ad punctum constituas sonorum modum. Ab
usu præsente manifeste recedis: sed an ad veterum sonorum formam omnino
accedas, nihil expeditum est._” Here, as in more serious matters, the
good Bishop saw that it was easier to destroy than to build up; and
therefore he interposed his interdict despotically in the Roman style,
_ne quid detrimenti respublica capiat_. But these maxims of old Roman
aristocracy do not apply to the democracy of letters. So the Bishop’s
philological thunderbolt started more heretics than it laid. The love
of liberty was now conjoined with the love of originality; to speak
Greek with Erasmus became now the sign of academic patriotism and the
watchword of philological progress. FORCE being the chief apparent
power on the one side, it was naturally felt by those against whom it
was exercised, that REASON was altogether on their side. The matter was
therefore practically settled on the side of persecuted innovation;
the subtlety of a few academic doctors triumphed proudly over the long
tradition of Byzantine centuries, and the living protest of millions of
men, with Greek blood in their veins and Greek words in their mouths;
and they who were once the few despised Nazarenes of the scholastic
world, are now a sort of philological Scribes and Pharisees, sitting in
the seat of Aristarchus, whose dictum it is dangerous to dispute.
[5] See the opinions of SCALIGER, SALMASIUS, and some others, quoted by
WETSTEN.
[6] WETSTEN refers to a work by ALDUS MANUTIUS _de potestate
literarum_, which I have not seen.
[7] “_Audici M. Rutgerum Reschium professorem Linguæ Græcæ in collegio
Baslidiano apud Lovanienses, meum piæ memoriæ præceptorem, narrantem,
se habitasse in Liliensi pædagogeo una cum Erasmo, eo superius, se
inferius cubiculum obtinente. Henricum autum Glareanum Parisiis
Lovanium venisse, atque ab Erasmo in collegium vocatum fuisse ad
prandium: quo cum venisset, quid novi adferret interrogatum dixisse
(quod in itinere commentus erat, quod sciret Erasmum plus satis
rerum novarum studiosum ac mire credulum) quosdam in Græcia natos
Lutetiam venisse, viros ad miraculum doctos; qui longe aliam Græci
sermonis pronunciationem usurparent, quam quæ vulgo in hisce partibus
recepta esset: Eos nempe sonare pro_ Vita Beta, _pro_ II ita Eta,
_pro_ AI, ai, _pro_ OI, oi, _et sic in cæteris. Quo audito Erasmum
paulo post conscripsisse dialogum de recta Latini Græcique sermonis
pronunciatione, ut videretur hujus rei ipse incentor, et obtulisse
Petro Alostensi Typographo imprimendum: Qui cum forte aliis occupatus
renueret, aut certe se tam cito excudere quam volebat non posse
diceret, misisse libellum Basileam ad Frobenium, a quo max impressus in
lucem prodiit. Verum Erasmum cognita fraude, nunquam ea pronunciandi
ratione postea usum, nec amicis, quibuscum familiariter vivebat, ut eam
observarent, præcepisse. In ejus rei fidem exhibuit Rutgerus ipsius
Erasmi manu scriptam in gratiam Damiani a Gœs Hispani pronunciationis
formulam, in nullo diversam ab ea, qua passim docti et indocti in hac
lingua utuntur._” The voucher for the story is VOSSIUS, from whose
_Aristarchus_, lib. 1, c. 28, Wetsten quotes it.
[8] Havercamp, vol. ii. p 174.
Nevertheless, Erasmus, Wetsten distinctly asserts, (pp. 15, 115,)
did not himself adopt in his practice the perfect theory of Hellenic
vocalization which he sketched out. So much the less cause is there
for our having any hesitation in considering the whole question as now
open, and treating it exactly as if Professor John Cheke, and Professor
Thomas Smith of Cambridge University, and Adolphus Mekerchus, knight
and perpetual senator of Bruges, and the other Havercampian hoplites
had never existed. Let us inquire, therefore, in the first place,
whether any certain data exist on which such a matter can be settled
scientifically. We shall give only the grand outlines of the question,
referring the special student to the English work of PENNINGTON already
quoted, the German work of LISKOV, and the Latin of SEYFFARTH.[9]
[9] _Ueber die Aus-sprache des Griechischen._ Leipzig, 1825. _De Sonis
literarum Græcarum_; _auctore_ GUSTAVO SEYFFARTHIO. Lipsiæ, 1824.
Now, there are five ways by which the method of pronunciation used by
any gone generation of “articulate-speaking men” may be ascertained,
if not with a curious exactness in every point, at least with such
an amount of approximation as will be esteemed satisfactory by a
reasonable inquirer. FIRST, we have the imitation in articulate letters
of natural sounds and of the cries of animals. There is nothing more
certain in the philosophy of language than that whole classes of
words expressive of sound were formed on the principle of a direct
dramatic imitation of the sound signified. Thus the words DASH,
HASH, SMASH, in our most significant Saxon tongue, evidently express
an action producing sound, in which the strong vowel sound of A is
combined with a sharp sound to which the aspirated S was considered
the nearest approximation by the original framer of the word. So,
in the names expressive of flowing water, the liquids L and R are
observed to preponderate in all languages, these being the sounds
which are actually given forth by the natural objects so signified:
thus _river_, ῤέω, _strom_, _flumen_, _purl_, the Hebrew _nahar_ and
_nahal_, &c. And in the same manner, if the bird which we call CUCKOO
was called by the Latins _cuculus_, by the Greeks κόκκυξ, and by the
Germans _kukuk_, no person can doubt that the vowel sounds at least, in
these words, were intended to be a more or less exact echo of the cry
of the bird so designated. In arguing, however, from such words, care
must be taken not to press the argument too closely; for two things
are manifest—that the original framer of the words might have given,
and in all likelihood did give only a loose, and not a curiously exact
imitation of the sound or cry he meant to express; and then that in
the course of centuries the word may have deviated so far from its
original pronunciation, as to be no longer a very striking likeness
of the natural sound it is intended to imitate. These considerations
explain the fact how the very simple and obvious cry made by sheep,
which no child will mistake, is expressed by three very different
vowels, in three of the most notable European languages,—our own
_bleat_, the Latin _balare_, and the Greek βληχή, pronounced like A
in _mate_, according to the practice of the Greeks in the classical
age. From such words, therefore, no safe conclusion can be drawn as
to the pronunciation of any particular word at any particular period
of a highly advanced civilization. It is different, however, with
words not forming any part of the spoken system of articulate speech,
but invented expressly for the occasion, in order to represent by way
of echo certain natural sounds. In this way, should we find in an
old Athenian spelling-book this sentence, “_the sheep cries_ Βή,” we
should be most justly entitled to conclude, if not that the Greek _B_
was pronounced exactly like the corresponding letter in our alphabet,
(for the consonants are less easily fixed down in such imitations
of inarticulate cries,) certainly that _H_ had the sound of our AI;
and this conclusion would be irresistible if other arguments were at
hand, such as will presently be mentioned, leading plainly to the same
conclusion. Here, however, also, care must be taken not to generalize
too largely; for, strictly speaking, the inference from such a fact
as the one supposed, is only that at the particular time and place
where the said book was composed, a particular vowel sounded to the
ear of the writer in a particular way; the proof remaining perfectly
open that at some other place during the same period, or at the same
place fifty years later, the same vowel may have been pronounced in a
perfectly different way.[10]. Those who are at all acquainted with the
style of reasoning on such points, exemplified in almost every page of
Havercamp’s Collection, will see the necessity of applying at every
step of their progress the rein of a strictly logical restraint.
[10] “If we find a word pronounced in a given manner in the time of
Athenæus, we are warranted, in the absence of proof, in supposing it
to have been pronounced in the same way in the time of Homer; and what
prevailed in Homer’s time may be presumed to have continued till the
age of Athenæus.”—PENNINGTON, p. 7. This is too strong. Considering
the immense interval of time and progress of culture between HOMER and
ATHENÆUS, and considering the tendency to change inherent in human
nature, I can see no presumption that the pronunciation of the language
should have remained through so many centuries unchanged.
Another and a most scientific way by which we may recover the traces of
a lost orthoepy, is from the physiological description of the action
of the organs of speech in producing the sounds belonging to certain
letters, as preserved in the works of grammatical or rhetorical
writers. This method of proof, taken by itself, may, no doubt, fail of
giving complete satisfaction in delicate cases; for it is extremely
difficult to give such an exact description of the action of the organs
of speech as will enable a student of an unknown language to reproduce
the sound, without the assistance of the living voice. But, taken
along with other circumstances, the proof from this source may be so
strong as absolutely to force conviction; or at all events imperatively
to exclude certain suppositions, which, without the existence of
such a description, would have been admissible. Now, it happens most
fortunately for our present inquiry, that a very satisfactory scale
of the Greek vowel-sounds is extant in the works of the well-known
historian and critic Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who lived in the time
of Augustus Cæsar. This we shall quote at length immediately; and as
the author was a professional rhetorician, no higher authority on such
a point, for the epoch to which he belongs, can be wished for.[11]
[11] “I cannot help thinking that if this treatise of Dionysius had
been in early times made a text-book in schools, no controversy would
ever have arisen upon the pronunciation of the Greek letters,” (except
the diphthongs,) “or upon the nature of quantity.”—PENNINGTON.
Again, a very large and various field of proof lies in those instances
of the direct transference of the sounds of one language into those
of another, which literary composition sometimes requires, and which
are sure to occur very frequently in an extensive literature like the
Greek. Examples of this are most common in the case of proper names,
and occur especially in translations, as in the ancient translations of
the Hebrew Bible and of the New Testament, which have been admirably
used for the illustration of Greek orthoepy in the work of Seyffarth.
When Strabo, for instance, (p. 213,) in the case given by Pennington,
(p. 73,) says of the inhabitants of the newly colonized town of Como in
Upper Italy,—Νεο κωμῖται ἐκλήθησαν ἅπαντες· τοῦτο δὲ μεθερμηνευθὲν Νο
ϐουμκώμουμ λέγεται, we learn that the diphthong ου was considered by
an intelligent scientific man in the time of Augustus, as being either
the exact equipollent of the Latin U, or the nearest approximation
to it within the compass of Hellenic vocalization; and when we are
told further that the modern Greeks and the modern Italians pronounce
the same vowels the same way even now, we cannot for a moment doubt
that the method of pronouncing that Greek diphthong now practised in
Scotland (as in _boom_) is the correct one. From the same passage we
may legitimately draw the inference, with regard to the second letter
in the Greek alphabet, that it was in all probability pronounced
softly like our V; for our B is no representative whatever of the Latin
V, whether we suppose that letter to have been pronounced like the
corresponding letter with us, or like our W. The modern Germans, in
the same way, who have not our sound of W, substitute for it in their
language the sound of V regularly, as in WASSER, which they pronounce
VASSER, and many such words. If, therefore, an ancient Greek wished
to express the letter V, and does so by his own _B_, the inference is
irresistible, either that his _B_ was pronounced like our V, and was
viewed as the exact expression of the Latin letter so pronounced, or
as an approximation to it, if pronounced like our W; or, on the other
hand, that the Greek organ being utterly incapable of pronouncing the
soft sound of the Latin V, and having no letter or combination of
letters capable of expressing it, gave up the attempt in despair, and
wrote the soft Latin V with a hard Greek _B_. But this supposition is
improbable, for three reasons: FIRST, because the general character
of the Greek language, as contrasted with the Roman, was not that of
blunt hardness but of liquid softness, (see QUINCTILIAN and CICERO,
_passim_;) SECONDLY, the ancient Greeks, in fact, had a combination of
letters by which they could express in an approximate way the Latin
V, namely, ου, and by which they actually did so express it on many
occasions; THIRDLY, the modern Greeks likewise do pronounce the second
letter of the alphabet like the Latin V; and the burden of proof lies
on those who assert that the ancients pronounced it otherwise.
A fourth method of proof lies in the remarks made on the identical or
cognate sounds of syllables, either incidentally by general writers,
or specially by grammarians in treating orthography and orthoepy; and
in the accidental interchange of letters in inscriptions and coins.
Of the strictly grammatical kind of evidence a very valuable fragment
has been preserved in the Ἐπιμερισμοί of Herodian, the Priscian of the
Greek grammarians, published by Boissonnade in 1817. In this work are
alphabetically arranged large classes of words, which, while they are
pronounced with the same vowel to the ear, are differently spelt to
the eye; as if I should say in English that the vowel-sounds in the
words FAIR, FARE, HEIR, THERE, have the same or a similar orthoepy,
but a very different orthography. Of the other, or incidental kind,
may be mentioned those plays of sound with which epigrammatic writers
sometimes amuse themselves, and of which the echo-poems found in some
of the collections of modern Latin, are the most notable example. Thus,
Erasmus, in ridicule of the Ciceronians, wrote two lines, of which
the first, a hexameter, ends with _Cicerone_, the ablative case of
the great orator’s Latin name, while the second line, a pentameter,
striking the ear as a sort of echo of the first, ends with the Greek
word ὄνε, _O you ass!_ from which significant jingle the inference is
ready enough, that the penultimate syllable of both these words, in the
classical pronunciation of Erasmus, was accented, and that the sound of
the vowel in both was the same. The proof, of course, in such a case
would have been equally complete if the word in the second line had
been spelt with a different vowel instead of with the same.
_Fifthly_, In determining the pronunciation of any language at any
past period of its history, its presently existing pronunciation,
though furnishing no absolute proof, is entitled to be taken into
account along with other circumstances, and in the absence of any
distinct evidence to the contrary, must be taken as conclusive. Erasmus
appealed with great success to the vanity of academic men, when he
said, with reference to the common Greek pronunciation in his day,
“_Pronuntiationem, quam nunc habent eruditi, non aliunde petunt quam
a vulgo, scis quali magistro_;” but to this a learned advocate of the
existing Itacism very wisely replies, that even supposing it were
true that the vulgar pronunciation of Greek comes to us only from the
VULGAR, the common people, as is well known, are generally far more
tenacious of hereditary national accent than the upper classes of
society;[12] of which we have a familiar English example in the case
of the stout Yorkshiremen, who have preserved for two thousand years
the deep hollow sound of _u_, (saying _Ool_, for _Hull_, &c.,) which is
the normal sound of that vowel in all the European languages. In this
view it is passing strange to note, that the slender sound of the first
syllable of ἡμέρα, as if written _heeméra_, which is the rule with the
modern Greeks, is the precise sound, that in a passage of Plato is
noted as the ancient sound, compared with the fuller sound, _haiméra_,
fashionable in his day;[13] while Aristophanes[14] in one of his plays,
introduces a conservative old Spartan lady saying ἵκει, instead of
ἥκει; a distinct proof both that η was not considered identical with ι
in his day, and that it was then sounded as it is now, by one of the
most ancient people in the Pelasgic peninsula.
Such appear to me to be the methods of proof that lie open to an
inquirer into the orthoepy of any language, living or dead, at any
given period of its history. With these, of course, the student must
combine such general rules on the philosophy of language, and on the
habits of human speech, as a little experience of practical philology
will readily supply. I now proceed to state the results to which I have
arrived, by a thorough study of the existing evidences. After that we
shall make our practical inference, and answer a few natural objections.
[12] “_Vulgus antiquæ pronuntiationis tenacissimus est._”—WETSTEN.
Compare the observations of Professor L. Ross, below, on the antique
element in modern Greek.
[13] Pluto Cratylus, sec. 74, Bekker.
[14] Aristophanes, Lysist. 86.
In the shape of results, therefore, all that my present purely
practical purpose requires me to lay down, with regard to ancient Greek
vocalization, may be combined in the following two propositions—
PROPOSITION I.—It is demonstrably certain that the
method of pronouncing the vowels and diphthongs
generally practised in England and Scotland,
especially in England, since the days of Sir John
Cheke,—that is from about the middle of the sixteenth
century—is doubtful in many points, and in not a few
most important points directly opposed to the whole
stream of ancient authority and tradition. It is in
fact in a great measure conjectural, arbitrary, and
capricious.
PROPOSITION II.—It is equally certain that the modern
Greeks have declined in several most important points
from the purity of Hellenic orthoepy, as practised
in the most classic times; but many of the striking
peculiarities of the modern pronunciation can be
traced back, with more or less uniformity, to a
period not far removed from the most flourishing
period of Greek literature, a period certainly when
pure Greek was both a spoken and a written language,
and preserving such a living organic power, as
entitled it by a spontaneous impulse from within to
modify the laws of its own orthoepy.
Both these propositions, so far as the vowels are concerned, are proved
by a single glance at the passage of Dionysius (περὶ συντάξεως) already
referred to, and which I shall now translate:—
“There are seven vowels; two long, η and ω, and two short, ε and ο;
three both long and short, α, ι, υ. All these are pronounced by the
wind-pipe acting on the breath, while the mouth remains in its simple
natural state, and the tongue remaining at rest takes no part in the
utterance. Now, the long vowels, and those which may be either long or
short, when they are used as long, are pronounced with the stream of
breath, extended and continuous; but the short vowels, and those used
as short, are uttered by a stroke of the mouth cut off immediately
on emission, the wind-pipe exerting its power only for the shortest
time. Of all these, the most agreeable sounds are produced by the
long vowels, and those which are used as long, because their sound
continues for a considerable time, and they do not suddenly break off
the energy of the breath. Of an inferior value are the short vowels,
and those used as short, because the volume of sound in them is small
and broken. Of the long again, the most sonorous is the α, when it is
used as long, for it is pronounced by opening the mouth to the fullest,
while the breath strikes the palate. The next is η, because in its
formation, while the mouth is moderately open, the sound is driven out
from below at the mouth of the tongue, and keeping in that quarter does
not strike upwards. Next comes the ω, for in it the mouth is rounded,
and contracts the lips, and the stroke of the mouth is sent against the
extreme end of the mouth, (ἀκροστόμιον, the lips, I presume.) Inferior
to this is the υ, for in this vowel an observable contraction takes
place in the extreme region of the lips, so that the sonorous breath
comes out attenuated and compressed. Last of all comes ι, for here the
stroke of the breath takes place about the teeth, while the opening of
the mouth is small, and the lips contribute nothing towards giving the
sound more dignity as it passes through. Of the short vowels, neither
is sonorous; but o is the least agreeable, for it parts the mouth more
than the other, and receives the stroke nearer the wind-pipe.”
Now, while every point of this physiological description may not be
curiously accurate,[15] there is enough of obvious certainty in it to
settle some of the most important points of Greek orthoepy, so far as
the rhetorician of Halicarnassus is concerned; and his authority in
this matter is that of a man of the highest skill, which, as the daily
practice of our law courts shows, is worth that of a thousand persons
taken at random. That the ITACISM of the modern Greeks did not exist,
or was not allowed by good speakers[16] in the time of this writer, so
far as the single vowels are concerned, is abundantly manifest; for
not only do η, ι, υ, which the modern Greeks identify, mean different
sounds, but the sound of the η in particular is removed as far from the
ι as it could well be in any scale of vocalization, which sets out with
the supremacy of the broad A. And if these sounds were distinguished
by polished ears in the days of Augustus Cæsar, it is contrary to
all analogy of language to suppose that in the days of Alexander
the Great, Plato, or Pericles, they should have been confounded.
Provincialisms, indeed, and certain itacizing peculiarities, such as
that noticed by Plato, (page 24 above), there might have been; but
that any language should confound its vowel-sounds in its best days,
and distinguish them in its days of commencing feebleness, is contrary
to all that succession of things which we daily witness. Different
letters were originally invented to express different sounds, and did
so naturally for a long time, till fashion and freak combined with
habit, either overran the phonetic rule of speech by a rank growth of
exceptive oddities, (as has happened in English,) or fixed upon the
organs of articulation some strong tendency towards the predominance
of a particular sound, which in process of time became a marked
idiosyncrasy, from which centuries of supervening usage could not
shake the language free. This is what has taken place in Greece with
regard to certain vowel-sounds. But before pursuing these observations
further, let us see distinctly what the special points are, that this
remarkable passage of the Halicarnassian distinctly brings out. The
ascertained points are these,—
[15] What he says about the tongue performing no part in the formation
of the vowels is manifestly false, as any one may convince himself by
pronouncing the three sounds, _au_, _ai_, _ee_, successively, with open
mouth before a mirror. He will thus observe a gradual elevation and
advance of the tongue, as the sound to be emitted becomes more slender.
[16] This limitation must be carefully borne in mind; for after Athens
ceased to be a capital, being overwhelmed by Alexandria, it still
remained a sort of literary metropolis, giving, or affecting to give,
the law in matters of taste, long after its authority had ceased
practically to bind large masses of those whose usage fashioned the
existing language.
1. The long or slender sound of the English A, (as
in _lane_,) is not acknowledged by Dionysius, nor
is its existence possible under his description. It
is altogether an anomaly and a monstrosity—like so
many things in this island—and should never have been
tolerated for a moment in the pronunciation of Latin
or Greek.[17]
2. The slender sound of η used by the English and
the modern Greeks, is an attenuation the farthest
possible removed from the conception of Dionysius.
About ε there is no dispute anywhere.
3. The sound of υ described is manifestly the French
_u_, or German _ü_ heard in _Brüder_, _Bühne_: a very
delicate and elegant sound bordering closely on the
slender sound of _i_, (_ee_, English,) into which
it is sometimes attenuated by the Germans, and with
which, by a poetical license, it is allowed to rhyme,
(as _Brüder_—_nieder_,) but having no connection with
the English sound of _oo_, (as in _boom_,) with
which, in Scotland, it is confounded. This with us
is the more unpardonable, as our Doric dialect in
the south possesses a similar sound in such words as
_guid_, _bluid_, attenuated by the Northerns into the
slender sound of _gueed_, and _bleed_. The English
sound of long _u_ is, as Walker has pointed out,
a compound sound, of which one element is a sort
of consonant—Y. It is, besides, altogether a piece
of English idiosyncrasy, that we have no reason to
suppose ever existed anywhere, either amongst Greeks
or Romans.[18]
4. The English sound of I is another of John Bull’s
phonetic crotchets, and must be utterly discarded.
It is, in fact, a compound sound, of which the deep
vowel α is the predominant element—an element which,
we have seen, stands at the very opposite end of the
Halicarnassian’s scale!
[17] In some English schools a small concession has been made to common
sense, and to sound principles of teaching, by confining the long
slender sound of _a_ to the long α, while the short α is pronounced
like the short _a_ in _bat_. Now, as changes are not easily made
in England, especially among schoolmasters, who are a stiff-necked
generation everywhere, it would have been worth while when they were
moving, to kick the barbarous English A out of the scholastic world
altogether. But their conservatism was too strong for this; besides,
the ears of many were so gross that they would not have distinguished,
or would have sworn that they could not distinguish, a long _a_ from a
short one, without giving the former the sound of an entirely distinct
vowel! There is no limit to the nonsense that men will talk in defence
of an inveterate absurdity.
[18] The following passage from MITFORD (Pennington, p. 37) may stand
here as an instructive lesson, how blindly prejudice many sometimes
speak: “Strong national partiality only, and determined habit, could
lead to the imagination cherished by the French critics, that the
Greek υ was a sound so unpleasant, produced by a position of the
lips so ungraceful as the French U.”—_History_, book ii. sec. iii.,
note. SCALIGER (Opuscula: Paris, 1610, p. 131) says rightly, “Est
obscurissimus sonus in Græca vocali υ, quæ ita pronuntianda est ut
proxime accedat ad iota.”
So far as we see, therefore, the English, Scotch, and modern Greek
methods of pronouncing the five vowels all depart in some point from
the highest authority that can be produced on the subject; in fact, the
single vowel ω alone has preserved its full rounded purity uncorrupted
by any party. But with regard to the other four vowels, there is a
marked difference in the degree of deflection from the classical norm;
for, while the Scotch err only in one point, υ, the modern Greeks err
in two, η and υ, (though their error is but a very nice one in the case
of υ, and has, in both cases, long centuries of undeviating usage to
stand on,) and the English err in all the four points, α, η, ι, and
υ, and that in the most paradoxical and abnormal fashion that could
have been invented, had it been the direct purpose of our Oxonian and
Etonian doctors to put all classical propriety at defiance. In such
lawless anarchy has ended the restoration of the divine speech of
Plato, so loftily promised by Sir John Cheke; and so true in this small
matter also, is that wise parable of the New Testament, which advises
reformers to beware of putting new patches on old vestments. Instead of
the robe of genuine Melibean purple which Erasmus wished to throw round
the shoulders of the old Greek gods, our English scholars, following in
his track of conjectural innovation, have produced an English clown’s
motley jacket, which the Zeus of Olympus never saw, and even Momus
would disdain. But let us proceed to the diphthongs.
Unhappily Dionysius, by a very unaccountable omission, has given us
no information on this head; so we are left to pursue our inquiries
over a wide field of stray inquiry, and conclude from a greater mass
of materials with much less appearance of scientific certainty. The
following results, however, to any man that will fairly weigh the
cumulative power of the evidence brought together with such laborious
conscientiousness by Liscov and Seyffarth, must appear unquestionable:—
1. It is proved by evidence reaching as far back as the time of
the first Ptolemies, that the diphthong ΑΙ was pronounced like the
same diphthong in our English word _gain_.[19] So the diphthong is
pronounced by the living Greek nation. There is, therefore, the
evidence of more than 2000 years in its favour, and against the
prevalent pronunciation, which gives it the broad sound of _ai_ in the
German word KAISER, rhyming pretty nearly with our English word WISER.
[19] “_Utut sit, id saltem nacti sumus interpretum S. sc. singularum
atque omnium auctoritate ut constet_ AI _mature atque optimis adeo
Græcorum temporibus simplici vocali_ E _respondisse_.”—SEYFFARTH, p.
101. See also the Stanza from CALLIMACHUS, where ναίχι echoes to ἔχει,
Epig. xxx. 5, (and SEXTUS EMPIRICUS _adv._ Grammat. c. 5.)
2. The diphthong EI was pronounced in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus
like the English _ee_ in _seen_, or _ea_ in _beam_.[20] This
pronunciation it retains at the present day. In this, as in the
preceding case, we have a striking proof of the tenacity with which
a great nation clings to elocutional peculiarities. What likelihood
is there that a people, so constant to itself for 2000 years under
the most adverse circumstances, should, in the 200 years previous to
that period, have known nothing of what was afterwards one of its most
marked characteristics?
[20] “_Quâ potestate literæ_ EI _fuerint eâ Græcorum ætate in quam
veteres Sc. s. interpretes incidunt ex plurimis iisque variis verbis in
singulas linguas conversis adeo clarum est ut nulla fere restet causa
de eâ dubitare._”—SEYFFARTH. The Old Testament translators, in fact,
use it as regularly for _Hirek_ and _Yod_, as they do AI for _Tzere_,
_Segol_, and _Sheva_.
3. The evidence for the pronunciation of the diphthong ΟΙ is more
scanty. Unfortunately the Septuagint translators use this diphthong
only once for expressing a Hebrew name in the whole compass of the
Old Testament. From other evidence, and by a train of deduction that
appears somewhat slippery, Seyffarth comes to the conclusion that its
original pronunciation was probably that of the German _oe_, from which
it was by degrees softened into the French _u_, and lastly into the
slender sound of _i_ (_ee_), which it now has. But as I am dealing
with certainties in this paper, and not with probabilities, it will be
enough to say that LISCOV has produced evidence to shew that it was
confounded with _i_ so early as the time of Julius Cæsar, =ΙΩΝΙΣΤΗΣ=
being found on a coin of the great dictator for οἰωνιστής. So in
the coins of Emperors of the second century, =ΟΙΚΟΣΤΟΥ= frequently
occurs for εἰκοστοῦ.[21] That λοιμός was not pronounced exactly like
λιμός in the time of Thucydides, has been concluded from a well-known
passage in his second book, (c. 54;) but the passage is of doubtful
interpretation,[22] and no man can tell at this time of day what the
exact, perhaps a very small shade of, difference, was between the two
sounds.
[21] With regard to this sort of evidence arising from wrong spelt
words, it is manifest that a single example proves nothing. When Aunt
Chloe, for instance, in the American novel, says, “I’m _clar_ on’t,”
this is no proof that the Americans pronounce the _ea_ in _clear_ like
_a_; the only conclusion is, that certain vulgar people in America
pronounce it so, and a word with a different vocalization must be
written in order to express their peculiar method of utterance. But
when mistakes of this kind occur extensively, and in quarters where
there is no reason to suspect anything particularly vulgar, they
authorize a conclusion as general as the fact, especially where no
evidence exists pointing in a different direction.
[22] THIERSCH uses the passage as a proof of the antiquity of the
modern slender sound.—_Sprachlehre_, § 16, 5.
4. In the above three examples, the Scotch and the English have equally
conspired to overthrow the living tradition of two centuries, by an act
of arbitrary academical conceit or pedagogic carelessness. In the case
of OU, we Northerns have again been happy; while the English, with
their fatal facility of blundering in such matters, have invented a
pronunciation of this diphthong which seems more natural to a growling
Saxon mastiff than to the smooth fulness of ancient Greek eloquence.
The Greek writers, with great uniformity, agree in expressing by
this diphthong the sound of the Latin _u_; while the modern Greeks,
with equal uniformity, agree in pronouncing their ου as the Italians
pronounce _u_; that is to say, like the English _oo_ in _boom_.
Seyffarth classes this diphthong with _a_ and _i_, _o_ and _e_, as a
sound about which there is no controversy.
5. The diphthongs AU and EU follow; and in their case the contrast
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.
Let us now ask in a single sentence how all this mass of absurdity came
about; for we may depend upon it a whole array of brave philologic
hoplites cannot have stumbled on their way suddenly without the
apparition of some real or imaginary ghost. The ghost that frightened
them on the present occasion, and caused them to forswear SPOKEN
ACCENT (for as we have seen they stuck to it on PAPER) was QUANTITY;
concerning which, therefore, we must now inquire, whether it be a
real ghost or only a white sheet. Quantity, they say, cannot stand
before Accent, or rather is swallowed up by it. Like hostile religious
sects, or belligerent medical corporations, they cannot meet without
quarrelling; so the public peace is consulted by getting rid of one of
them, not in the way of violent murder, (for the law does not allow
that,) but by what certain philosophical Chartist-Reformers used to
call “painless extinction.” Therefore they who speak according to
accent, are wont to remove quantity out of the way noiselessly; and
they who speak according to quantity must treat accent in the same way.
This is an old story. The BEAR in Erasmus’ dialogue, (Havercamp, ii.
95,) speaking rare wisdom in a gruff Johnsonian sort of style, says,
“_Sunt quidam adeo_ CRASSI _ut non distinguant accentum a quantitate,
quum sit longe diversa ratio_. =ALIUD EST ENIM ACUTUM ALIUD DIU
TINNIRE: ALIUD INTENDI, ALIUD EXTENDI.= _At eruditos novi qui, quum
pronunciarent illud_ ἀνέχου καὶ ἀπέχου, _mediam syllabam, quoniam tonum
habet acutum, quantum possent producerent, quum sit natura brevis vel
brevissima potius_.” Certain learned men, it appears, in the beginning
of the sixteenth century, could not accent the word ἀνέχου on the
penult, as it ought to be accented, without in the same breath making
that syllable long, which it is not. To avoid this blunder, the
Etonians, Oxonians, and other famous modern teachers, omit the accent
altogether on that syllable and on every syllable—of which the name is
legion—similarly situated in the Greek language, and thus, by removing
the cause, are sure of annihilating the effect. A very obvious, but
surely a very clumsy expedient, and hardly worthy of the subtlety of
the academic mind. A man by running too hard sometimes breaks his
legs; and you forthwith vow to avoid his fate by sitting in your chair
constantly and taking no exercise! Let us see how the case stands here.
The accent, you say, lengthens the syllable. Take any English word
in the first place, (as nonsense is not so transparent in a learned
tongue,) and make the experiment. If a Scotsman says _véesible_, you
will allow, I suppose, that the first syllable of that word is both
long and accented: if an Englishman says _viśible_, ’tis equally clear
that the same syllable is still accented, but it is not now long.
Accent, therefore, in English has no necessary power to lengthen the
sound of the vowel of the syllable on which it is placed; and if some
learned men on the banks of the Rhine, in the days of Erasmus, or on
the banks of the Isis, in our day, cannot accent a syllable without
at the same time lengthening it, this happens merely because, as
the Bear says, they are “ADEO CRASSI;” their ears are gross, and
have lost—by the dust of the libraries, perhaps—the healthy power of
discerning differences of modulation in the living human voice. Not a
few persons have I met with among those who are, or would be scholars,
in this country, who in this way assert that it is impossible to put
the accent on the penult of a Greek word, and at the same time, as the
law of the language requires, make the last syllable long. But these
persons had got their ears confounded by the traditionary jargon of
teachers inculcating from dead books a doctrine of which they had no
living apprehension; and this, along with the utter neglect of musical
and elocutionary culture so common among our classical devotees, had
rendered them incapable of perceiving, without an act of special
attention, the commonest phenomena of spoken language appealing to
the ear. In the English words _echo_, _primrose_, and many other of
the same description, the accent and quantity stand in that exact
relation which is so characteristic of Greek, as in ἔχω, λόγῳ; while
in the English words _clód-pated_, _hoúsekeeper_, we have that precise
disposal of accent and quantity which occurs in the word ἄνθρωπος, and
which has been so often quoted as a proof that it is impossible to
give effect to accent without violating quantity.[35] A very slight
elocutionary culture would put a stop to such vain talk; but we have,
unfortunately, too many scholars who gather their crude notions on
such subjects from a few phrases current in the schools, without ever
questioning their own ears, the only proper witness of what is right or
wrong in the matter of enunciation. Hence the cumbrous mass of erudite
nonsense on accent and quantity under which our library shelves groan;
hence the host of imaginary difficulties and impossibilities that
birch-bearing men will raise when you tell them to perform the simplest
act of perception of which an unsophisticated human ear is capable.
“_Vel ab_ ASINIS _licebat hoc discrimen discere_,” continues the
learned Bear, “_qui rudentes corripiunt acutam vocem, imam producunt_.”
Very true; a really wise man may learn much from an ass; but they who
conceit themselves to be wise, when they are not, will learn from
nobody. And so I conclude with regard to this whole matter of QUANTITY,
that it is only an imaginary ghost after all; a white sheet which a
single touch of the finger will turn aside, or only a white mist,
perhaps, which, if a brave man will only march up to, he shall not know
that it is there.
[35] When I was at the railway station, SKIPTON, in Yorkshire,
waiting for a train, I heard one of the men call out, “Any person for
_Mánchéster_” with a distinct and well-marked dwelling of the voice
on the second as well as the first syllable. This gave me a very vivid
idea of the manner in which the Greeks must have pronounced ἄνθρωπος,
accenting the first syllable, but dwelling on the second syllable with
a distinct prolongation of the voice.
One thing, however, I will admit—by way of palliation for the enormous
blunders that have been committed in this matter—that in words of two,
three, or more syllables, where the accent is on a syllable naturally
short, while the long syllable is unaccented, a careless speaker may
readily slur over the long syllable so as to make it short, thus
converting an anapæst accented on the first syllable, as
ˏ ˏ
_cĕlăndīne_, into a tribrach with the same accent _cĕlăndĭn_,
a very common vulgarism, as we all know. The unaccented syllable,
indeed, is, in the very nature of things, placed in a position where
it is not so likely to get its fair mass of sound as its accented
neighbour. Thus, except in solemn speaking, the first syllable of
ŌBĒDĬĔNT seldom gets full weight, though it is equally long with its
accented sequent; and the second syllable of EDUCATION is vulgarized
into _edication_, purely from the want of the accent. But that such
vulgarisms should form any bar in the way of academical men doing
proper justice to the correct elocution of the Greeks is really too
bad. The modern Greeks, indeed, we know, go a step farther;[36] they
not only in their common conversation fail to give the due prolongation
to their long syllables, when unaccented—making no distinction between
ω and ο—but they actually give _extension_ as well as _intension_
to all their accented syllables, and thus fall into the same sin as
respects quantity that our academicians daily commit against accent.
But there is not the slightest reason why we should imagine it
necessary to imitate them in this idiosyncrasy. To do so would be for
the sake of a superfluous compliment to the living, to cut off one
great necessary organ, whereby the beautiful wisdom of the dead being
made alive again becomes ours. The laws of accent are a most important
element of the oratory of Pericles and Demosthenes; but without
quantity the harmony of Homer’s numbers is unintelligible. There is no
reason why we should sacrifice either the one or the other of these two
great modulating principles of ancient Hellenic speech. The one, so far
from destroying, does, in fact, regulate to a certain extent,[37] and
beautifully vary the other. Quantity without accent were a monotonous
level of dreary sing-song; accent without quantity can be likened
only to a series of sharp parallel ridges, with steep narrow ravines
interposed, but without the amplitude of grassy slope, flowering mead,
and far-stretching fields of yellow-waving corn.
[36] See the essay on this subject in the second volume of the Greek
works of Professor RANGABE of Athens.
[37] Every practical teacher ought to know how much more easily the
doctrine of quantity may be taught with constant reference to accent
than without it; so that pronouncing a word like ἡμέρα, the accent on
the penult, is the easiest way to make the student remember that the
final syllable of that word is long.
But some one will still press the question, _How am I to read Homer?
how Sophocles?_ Is it not manifest, that if I read according to the
spoken accent, and not according to the quantitative metre, though I
may preserve myself, by decent care, from grossly violating quantity,
I shall certainly fail to bring out anything that the ear of the most
harshly-modulated Hottentot or Cherokee could recognise as rhythm?
Now what has been said hitherto of the compatibility of accent and
quantity relates only to words taken separately, or as they occur in
the loose succession of unfettered speech—a purely elocutional matter:
of the musical element of rhythm nothing has been said. That this must
modify the singing or recitation of measured verses to a considerable
extent, so as to make it different from the oratorical declamation of
prose, is evident; but that there is no such incomprehensible mystery
in the matter, as some people imagine, I hope I shall be able to make
plain in a very few words. The poetry of the ancients differed from
the mass of that now written in nothing more than in this, that it was
considered as a living element of the existing music, and exercised in
subjection to the laws of that divine art. Now the singing of words in
music has the effect of bringing out more prominently the mass of vocal
sound in the words, or what the prosodians in their technical style
call quantity, while the spoken accent—unless it be identified with the
musical accent or rhythmical beat—is apt to be overwhelmed altogether
and superseded. That this must be the case the very nature of the thing
shows; but we have a distinct testimony of an ancient musical writer
to this effect, which will be useful to those who in all matters are
constitutionally apt to depend more on authority than on reason.[38]
This explains why, in the ancient treatises on poetical measures, we
find not a word said about the spoken accent. If the full musical value
of each foot, (or bar, as we call it,) in point of vowel-fulness,
according to an established sequence be given, the poet is considered
to have done his duty to the musician; the rhythmical beat, or musical
accent, accompanies the measured succession of bars, as with us, but
the spoken accent is disregarded. Of all this in our elocutional
poetry we do, and must, in the nature of things, do the very reverse.
Poetry composed primarily for recitation must follow the laws of
spoken speech; and the spoken accent being the most prominent element
in that speech, becomes of course the great regulator of poetical
rhythm. Quantity, as the secondary element of spoken speech, though
the principal thing in music, is not indeed neglected altogether, but
left to the free disposal of the poet, so that the technical structure
of his verse is in no wise bound by it. The musician then comes in,
and finding that he has no liberty in the matter of the spoken accent,
(the public ear being altogether formed on that,) exercises his large
discretion in the matter of quantity, drawing out, without ceremony, a
spoken quaver into a sung minim, or cutting short a spoken minim into
a sung quaver. Now this license, familiar as it is to us, would have
strangely startled, and appeared almost ludicrous to a Greek ear; and
by the same effect of mere custom, we have to explain the fact, that
the practice of composing poetry, without any reference to the spoken
accent, practised by the ancients, appears to us so extraordinary. In
our attempts to explain it, we have sometimes altogether lost out of
view the fact, that music and conversational speech, though kindred
arts, and arts in the ancient practice of poetry indissolubly wedded,
have each their own distinctive tendencies and laws, to which full
effect cannot easily be given while they act together; and every such
case of joint action must accordingly be, to a certain extent—like the
harmonious practice of connubial life—a compromise. My conclusion,
therefore, with regard to the reading of Homer and Sophocles is, in
the first place, that they were never intended to be read in our sense
of the word, that they are not constructed on reading principles,
and that, when we do recite them—as the ancients themselves no doubt
likewise did—we must read them in a manner that makes as near an
approach as possible to the musical principles on which they were
constructed. With regard to the strictly lyrical parts of poetry, as
Pindar and the tragic choruses, I have no hesitation in saying, that
the only proper way to obtain a full perception of their rhythmical
beauty, is to sing or chant them to any extemporized melody, (which
would be much more readily done were not music so unworthily neglected
in our higher schools;) while with regard to the dialogic parts of the
drama, which were declaimed and not sung by the ancients themselves,
the teacher must take care to accustom his pupils to a deep and mellow
fulness of vocalization, and a deliberate stateliness of verbal
procession, as much as possible the reverse of that hasty trip with
which we are accustomed to read the dialogue of our dramatic poetry.
The musical accent, or rhythmical beat, will, of course, in such a
method of recitation, receive a marked prominence; the long quantity
will never be slurred; and with regard to the spoken accent, what I
say is this, the ear of the student must first be trained in reading
prose never to omit the accent, and accustomed to feel, by the living
iteration of the ear, that both accent and quantity are an essential
part of the word. This many schoolmasters will not do, because it
requires science, and will take a little trouble; but let such pass.
Those who do so train the young classical ear, will find that in
turning to poetry, and keeping time with their foot as they read any
metre, the attentive scholar will not only readily follow the given
rhythm, and appreciate the position of the musical accent, (very few
human beings being altogether destitute of the rhythmical principle,)
but will be able also to preserve the spoken accent in those places
where the flow of the rhythm does not altogether overpower it. What I
mean is this. In the line, for instance,
οὐλομένην ἣ μυρἴ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε’ ἔθηκεν,
the second of the Iliad, the boy who has been properly trained to put
the accent on the penult of οὔλομένην, preserving the long quantity
of the final syllable, will, even though he retains that accent in
the rhythmical declamation of the line, find no impediment to the
rhythmical progress of the verse, but rather an agreeable variety, and
an antidote against monotony; and though, on account of the strong
effect which the rhythm always exercises on the closing word of the
line, it will be difficult to give the full effect to the spoken accent
on the antepenultimate of ἔθηκεν, while the closing musical accent lies
on the penult, nevertheless, a person who has been accustomed always
to pronounce this word in prose with its proper accent and quantity,
will bring out the first syllable of the word much more distinctly
than is done in the sing-song of a merely rhythmical recitation, and
will not spoil the verse, but rather improve it. And if any person
asks me how I prove that the ancients read Homer this way, I might
content myself by giving a Scotch answer, and asking, _How do you prove
that they read it your way?_ But, in fact, there is no possibility
of their having read it otherwise; for having once introduced the
habit of reading compositions, constructed originally on musical, not
elocutional principles, with that habit they could not but bring in
as much of the element of their spoken language as was consistent with
the musical principle on which the very existence of the composition,
as a rhythmical work of art, depended; that is to say, they allowed
the musical principle of quantitative rhythm to prevail over the
elocutional principle of accent, so far only as to produce harmony, not
so far as to fatigue with monotony.
[38] Δεῖ τὴν φωνὴν ἐν τῷ μελῳδεῖν τὰς μὲν ἐπιτάσεις τε καὶ ἀνέσεις
ἀφανεῖς ποίεισθαι—ARISTOXENUS, apud PENNINGTON, p. 226.
The reader will observe that I am not theorizing in all this, but
speaking from experience; and therefore I speak with confidence. For
ten years I read the Latin poets in Aberdeen, and I found no difficulty
in reading them so as to combine the living effect of both accent and
quantity, and teaching the student both by the ear alone. The first
line of Virgil, to take an example, in respect of accent and quantity,
may be read three ways. Either
ˏ ˏ
_Árma virúmque cānŏ Trōjæ qui prímus ab óris_
Or,
ˏ
... _cănō Trōjáe_ ...
Or,
ˏ ˏ
... _căn-ō Trōjæ_ ...
I take notice of these two words CANO and TROJǼ, only because they are
the only two in which the musical accent of this line clashes with the
spoken accent, the rules of which, though not marked in Latin books as
in Greek, were preserved by the living tradition of the Roman Catholic
Church, and the accentual Latin poetry of their Service, and are
observed by our schoolmasters as faithfully (without knowing it, many
of them) as they violate the accent of the Greek. Now, of these three
ways of reading a Latin hexameter, the second is the only one which
proceeds upon the principle of the quantitative rhythm exclusively,
observing the spoken accent only where it happens to coincide with it,
(as happens here in four bars of the six;) while the first, which is
the vulgar English way, asserts the dominancy of the spoken accent in
all the six cases; and yet, as the clash only takes place in two cases,
preserves, without effort, (as I have just said with regard to Homer,)
the flow of the musical rhythm. With that grossness of ear, however,
which Erasmus and his learned Bear noticed in the learned of his day,
they fall with respect to Latin, plump into the extreme error practised
by the modern Greeks, and cannot accentuate the first syllable of CANO,
without lengthening it, while the final syllable of the same word is
generally deprived of its natural amount of sound, a strange error for
a people to make with whom Latin verse making (I shall not say with
what propriety) forms so prominent a part of school-discipline; but
there is no end to their absurdities, no limit to their contradictions;
the fact being, as one of themselves has distinctly stated,[39] that
the “composition of classical verses with them is almost entirely
MECHANICAL;” and yet they have the assurance to hold up this scholastic
abortion to the admiration of the public as one of the indispensable
elements in the training of that improved edition of the ancient
Roman—John Bull. But to finish. The third method of recitation is, I
think, the correct one. It violates neither quantity nor accent, but
makes the one play with an agreeable variety over the other, as we
see the iridescent colours in a gown of shot silk. I think I have now
answered the question satisfactorily—_How is Homer to be read?_ If
anything remains unclear, I shall be happy to communicate personally
with any person who has an ear.
[39] “Our composition of classical verses is almost entirely
mechanical. When a boy composes such a verse as _Insignemque canas
Neptunum vertice cano_, how is he guided to the proper collocation
of the words? Not by his ear, certainly, for that would be struck
precisely in the same manner if he wrote it _Insignemque cano Neptunum
vertice canas_; no, he learns from books that the first of _cano_ (I
sing) is short, and the first of _canus_ (hoary) is long. Having so
used them, their respective quantity is stored up as a fact in his
memory, and by degrees he remembers them so well, that when he sees
either of them used in a wrong place, he thinks it offends his ear,
while in truth it only offends his understanding. But I apprehend a
Roman boy’s process of composition would be quite different. Having
been used from his cradle to hear the first syllable of _canus_
take up about twice as much time as that of _cano_, such a verse as
_Insignemque cano Neptunum vertice canas_, would really hurt his ear,
because in the second foot the thesis would be complete before the
syllable was expressed, and he would have a time or σημεῖον too much;
and in the sixth he could not fill up the time of the arsis without
giving to the syllable a drawling sound which would be both unusual
and offensive.”—PENNINGTON, p. 249. So long as such an absurd system
of writing verses, whether Latin or Greek—from the understanding and
not from the ear—is practised, the boys who refuse to have anything
to do with prosody shew a great deal more sense than the masters who
inculcate it.
Before concluding these observations, I have one or two remarks to make
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.
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