John Stuart Blackie

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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;” [Pg 57] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 [Pg 81] to that dominancy of usage which Horace recognises as supreme in 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 [Pg 51] they have borrowed from the Latin! ”

“ Now, I at once admit that the prevalence of the [Pg 43] 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 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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 [Pg 49] and written language of ancient Greece, stands exactly on the same foundation as the other. ”

“ 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 [Pg 48] 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. ”

“ 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? ”