John Stuart Blackie

“ In respect of accentuation the Greek language has the advantage above most others that, while in Latin, English, or German the proper intonation of a word in doubtful cases can only be known by an appeal to a dictionary or to an authoritative speaker, in Greek every word in a book, as it stands before the eye, exhibits and perpetuates the tonic relation of the syllables to one another. ”

“ As to when, and how far, and in what kind the usual furniture of elementary books of grammar, reading, and exercises should go parallel with colloquial practice, this I leave altogether in the hands of the practised teacher, being well assured that easy reading and accurate writing, so far from being inconsistent with, are the natural blossom and the ripe fruit of the root of living utterance from which I start. ”

“ As to the quantity of the vowels, which is the stumbling block with most English scholars, we have no lack of words, even in our own unmusical English, such as lándholder, in which, as in the Greek ἄνθρωπος, the antepenultimate has the rising inflexion, while the penult is long; and if the modern Greeks pronounce ἄνθρωπος as if written ἄνθροπος, that is only a natural curtailment of the unaccented syllable which lies in the nature of human speech, and will be found exemplified more or less in all languages. ”

“ The infinitive mood gives the action of the verb substantively as we use the participle in seeing is a good thing, but in Greek, as in Latin, always the infinitive, as καλὸν τὸ ὁρᾶν, and declined with the article like a noun, through all the cases, of course neuter, as the gender does not lie in the action, but in the actor. Its normal ending in the active voice is ειν, as in the present βάλλειν, to throw, and second aorist βαλεῖν; but in first aorist its termination is αι, as κόψαι, from κόπτω. Pure verbs follow their vowel, as τῑμᾶν, to honour; φιλεῖν, to love. ”

“ No one learns dancing, or fencing, or golf, or lawn-tennis from a book. The evils caused by this unnatural delegation of the work of a living teacher to the formulas of a dead book are three: (1) The direct connection between the reasonable soul and the new articulate sign of the object is lost; the learner does not shake hands, so to speak, with the object, but he cumbers himself with the phraseology of his mother tongue, and instead of saying at once δός μοι ἄρτον, give me bread, he must first ask what is the Greek for bread. ”

“ LESSON II Cases, Genitive and Dative
The genitive case signifies the source from which a thing comes and to which it belongs, as the folly of fools, the fool’s folly, the folly that comes from the fool. The dative case means either the secondary or more distant object of an action, as I gave the book to the boy; or it signifies rest or residence in a thing, for which in English there is no special form; also in Greek it signifies the instrument with which, or by which, a thing is [Pg 16] done, as to cut with a knife. ”

“ In the present little work it will be sufficient to mark the long vowel where it occurs in doubtful cases, and leave the short ones to be understood as short from the absence of the long mark. But the real difficulty that prevents both accent and quantity from being easily acquired by English scholars is the negligent practice of transferring Latin or English habits of accentuation to Greek words, as when θεός is pronounced like Déus, and Σωκράτης as Sócrates, and again the supposition that the accent cannot be put on a syllable without making it long, or removed without making it short. ”

“ In particular, the so-called learned languages, two hundred years ago the only medium of culture to an accomplished English gentleman, have now become the luxury of the leisurely, or the arsenal of the professional few, while other languages, such as German, not named in those days, are now sought after as the keys to the most valuable storehouses of all sorts of knowledge. ”

“ Thus it is in the main identical with what in Latin grammar used to be called neuter verbs, only it is subject to not a few nice shades of personal reference, which leads to its apparent confusion with the active voice, and to various anomalous usages which can only be learned by practice. It is, of course, in strictness more nearly allied to the passive than to the active voice; for in both these voices, as distinguished from the active, the force of the verb is either altogether spent on the agent, or is in some way passively or emotionally or intentionally connected with him. ”

“ Enclitics are small words, which, so to speak, have not force enough to stand on their own legs, but lean (ἐγκλίνω) on the weightier word that precedes them for support, and become absorbed in it; just as in English we say don’t for do not, and in Italian dimmi for the Latin dic mihi. These enclitics are πού, ποτέ, γε, and a few others, the oblique cases of the personal pronouns, the indefinite pronoun τις, and the verbs εἰμί, I am, φημί, I say, except in the second person singular. ”

“ It is as easy to look the Sun in the face and say שׁמּשּׁ, Shemish, as to say Sun, and there is no more difficulty in saying λαβὼν τὸ σκάλευθρον κίνει τὸ πῦρ, than in saying, take the poker and stir the fire. In both cases the direct connection of thought, thing, and word is equally obvious, equally easy, and equally natural; only at the start the habit of thinking exclusively in the mother tongue must be broken. ”

“ Why does it seem such a difficult business to acquire a familiar knowledge of any foreign language, and why is so much brain and so much time spent so frequently on their acquisition with such scanty results? The answer can be only one: because your teacher has ignored the method of Nature, and given you a bad substitute for it in his own devices ”

“ Simply because they have forgotten the lesson taught in a well-known dialogue of Plato, [1] that the printed papers which we call books, useful for record, are rather prejudicial than profitable to the culture of memory; they have become the slaves of their tools, and defrauded the ear and the tongue of their natural rights in the field of significant speech by a wholesale transference of their functions to the eyes. ”

“ LESSON I.—NOUNS Nominative and Objective Case
First and Second Declension
VERBS
Three Persons Singular,
Present Indicative
A noun is the name of a thing or person, a verb signifies an action, an adjective a quality as good or bad belonging to a noun. The nominative case is the person who is or may be doing what the verb means; the objective case is the thing or person to which or towards which the action of the verb tends. The verb to be, denoting simple existence, not action, of course is followed by the nominative, not the objective case.
Nouns are masculine, feminine, or neuter. ”

“ The scholar, in their conception, is a reading animal, and without books he is nowhere. Why then, they will argue, when our object is to read and to understand books, should we trouble ourselves with conversation? We do not learn Latin in order to talk with Cæsar and Cicero, but to read their books ”

“ It is just as if in music the same note, with the same rhythmical dominance, were sung an octave lower. Practically, the learner need not concern himself curiously about the matter.
It is a rule, both in Greek and Latin, that no word can be accented farther back than the third syllable from the end, the antepenultimate, the favourite accent of the English language. ”

“ In this respect Greek is decidedly superior to both Latin and English; for, while Latin rejects the sonorous cadence of the accent on the last syllable altogether, English uses it only in some verbs, remnants of the past participle of Latin verbs, as in rejéct, suppóse, accépt, and such-like; and in the case of the penult the fine swelling cadence of the Greek words, in which the acute accent of the penult is followed by a final long syllable, altogether fails, as in πραγμάτων, which an Englishman, following his English ear, will pronounce not only πράγματων but πράγματον, as if ω were ο. ”

“ The scraps of talk that are given under each lesson are meant to lend him a helping hand in the use of a new organ; and, to enable both teacher and learner to furnish themselves with a living vocabulary of Greek words in direct connection with their daily surroundings, I have added an alphabetical list of the names of the most familiar objects that belong to the field of life in town or country where the learner may happen to be. ”

“ In the first place, whatever may be said of Hebrew or Latin, Greek is a living language, and must be treated as such even by those who persist in the notion that, while the [Pg xii] method of living vocal appeal applies in its full extent to modern languages, it is certainly out of place in the treatment of the two ancient languages which justly claim the first place in the linguistic culture of our highest schools. ”

“ The first cause is ignorance. In not a few of our educational institutions it is to be feared there are teachers—an over-worked and under-paid class—who are employed to teach languages of which they have only a very superficial knowledge and no firm hold. With persons [Pg x] of this class the whole process of linguistic training amounts to this, Read your book, Get your lesson, and I will hear you. Of a living appeal from the tongue of the teacher and a living response from the tongue of the learner these gentlemen have no conception. ”

“ The termination s in the names of many of the sciences, as optics, acoustics, mechanics, is simply the sign of the plural in English, put for ά the neuter plural in Greek, as in τὰ πολιτικά, things belonging to the state; τὰ ὀπτικά, things belonging to vision, which, however, the Greeks often express by ἡ ὀπτική in the nominative singular feminine, with τέχνη, art, or θεωρία, theory, understood. ”

“ As the Greek element in the English language often comes to us not directly from the Greek, but indirectly through the Latin of the Middle Ages, it sometimes happens that we find a pure Greek word with a Latin termination attached to it naturalised in English, as in cathédral, from καθέδρα, and in ephemeral, from ἐφήμερος. In this example the termination al, so common in Latin, takes the place of the Greek ος, with the same adjectival force ”

“ Manifestly the difference lies only in one point, and that altogether in favour of the adult, viz. the application of a regulated system to the accidental sequences by which the child learns its mother tongue, easily indeed and pleasantly, but slowly; for he learns not architecturally as a mason builds a house, but by the way, as one picks up a pebble on the shore or a daisy from the meadow; whereas the adult, with his firm will and his reasonable [Pg viii] purpose, wishing to learn a language can submit himself to a reasonable and a calculated treatment ”

“ The converse takes place in verbs, where the accent is naturally on the root, as in λέγω, of which the imperfect is ἔλεγον; but in the aor. mid. indic., while the third person is ἐλέξατο, the first person is not ἐλέξαμην, but ἐλεξάμην.
A long syllable of course, as in προφήτης, may have an acute accent on a long vowel with the same right as a short syllable; but there are many long syllables in Greek which are marked neither with an acute nor a grave but with a circumflex, which is a prolonged accent compounded of a rise and a fall marked thus ^, or for greater ease, ~. ”

“ He must in no wise be content with the lazy habit of recognising a word only in a passive recipient style when he meets with it in a book, but he must stamp it directly on every object that comes in his way, and repeat it frequently without the [Pg 58] intervention of the mother tongue, till he uses it as familiarly as a workman handles his tools. ”

“ Sometimes also the vowel of the last syllable of the nominative is shortened before the addition of the genitival termination, as in ποιμήν, ποιμένος. In some classes of nouns no change is made, and the analogy of the two other declensions is followed throughout. We shall take our examples from the more simple classes, leaving the more complex and exceptional to be learned in the course of reading. ”

“ It is an invariable condition of the antepenultimate accent that the last syllable be short, as in ἄνθρωπος, a man; and in consequence,
(2) If in the course of flexion a word with an antepenultimate accent takes a long final vowel, as in the genitive and dative singular of the second declension, the accent of the first syllable is advanced to the penult, as in ἀνθρώπου. ”

“ There is one other objection to the conversational method in the teaching of languages, viz. that it makes a man a parrot. Well, a parrot is an imitative animal, and so is a man, and so far must not be ashamed to own his kinship with the plumy prattler. But he is a parrot and something more; and this something more every sensible teacher will take into account. ”

“ The verb to be, εἰμί, has second person εἶ, third ἐστί, or before a vowel ἐστίν, and in plural ἐσμέν, ἐστέ, εἰσί.
The pronouns of the first and second persons are—
λαμπρός ἐστι ὁ ἥλιος, the sun is bright.
καὶ καλὴ ἡ ἡμέρα, and the day beautiful.
ὁρᾷς τὸν ἥλιον; do you see the sun?
ὁρῶ νεφέλην, I see a cloud.
νεφέλην στυγνὴν ὁρῶ, I see a dark cloud.
[Pg 14]
ὁρᾷς τὸν καπνόν; do you see the smoke?
ὁρᾷς τὸν οὐρανὸν τὸν κυανοῦν; do you see the blue sky?
ἀκούεις τοῦ ποταμοῦ; do you hear the river?
ἀκούεις τῆς βροντῆς; do you hear the thunder? ”

“ Finally, as at least two-thirds of the technical words used in our scientific nomenclature, and not a few even outside of the range, are of Greek extraction, the student would act wisely if at starting he were to make a list of all such terms in familiar use, with their Greek form and Greek analysis in an opposite column; as—
He will thus find that he knows already some two or three hundred Greek words in a slightly disguised English form. ”

“ These complaints, no doubt, arise partly from the want of judgment on the part of the parents, and the want of capacity and inclination on the part of their young hopefuls: parents often acting thoughtlessly on the vulgar notion that far birds have fair feathers, and preferring what is foreign to what is native, and what lies at a great distance in time or space to what is near; and young persons being forced to submit themselves to a grammatical indoctrination in which they feel no interest, and from which they derive no benefit. ”

“ In Greek masculines in ος have the genitive in ου and the dative in ῳ; feminines in ρᾱ or ρᾰ and ίᾱ have the genitive in ας and the dative in ᾳ; other feminines in α—as τράπεζᾰ, a table—and feminines in η have ης in the genitive and ῃ in the dative. ”