Ancient Greek language

“ What is true of Latin is equally true of Greek, with its own peculiar alphabet, used by no other language, and its even greater remoteness from present European tongues, in spite of the many derivatives from it in modern vocabularies, especially in technical terminology, and in spite of the fact that the idiom developed from ancient Greek is a spoken language to-day. The languages of the past can not serve the peoples' of the present in any immediate and practical capacity. ”

“ We shall now limit our regards to the Greek language alone, and shall attempt to exhibit its more prominent and characteristic features as compared with those of its sister tongues. In the sounds which were formed by the various articulation of the voice, the Greek language hits that happy medium which characterises all the mental productions of this people, in being equally removed, on the one hand, from the superabundant fulness, and, on the other, from the meagreness and tenuity of sound, by which other languages are variously deformed. ”

“ This popular dialect in turn continued to degenerate until the middle of the last century. Recently institutions of learning have been established, and a new impulse given to improvement in Greece. Great progress has been made in the cultivation of the language, and great care is taken by modern Greek writers to avoid the use of foreign idioms and to preserve the ancient orthography. Many newspapers, periodicals, original works, and translations are published every year in Greece. The name Romaic, which has been applied to modern Greek, is now almost superseded by that of Neo-Hellenic. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Greek poetry, we say, is very direct, very simple, very free from irrelevant ornament. And yet when we translate it into English and look at our translation, our main feeling, I think, is that somehow the glory has gone: a thing that was high and lordly has become poor and mean. Any decent Greek scholar when he opens one of his ancient poets feels at once the presence of something lofty and rare—something like the atmosphere of Paradise Lost. But the language of Paradise Lost is elaborately twisted and embellished into loftiness and rarity; the language of the Greek poem is simple and direct. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For more than a century there has been a tendency in high quarters to approximate as much as possible to classical Greek. Especially during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, there has been a strenuous attempt on the part of the educated classes, backed by the authorities in Church and State, to mould the written language according to classical forms, by restoring the old orthography and grammatical{218} inflexions and by expressing new ideas and inventions in ancient terms, frequently compounded in a curious fashion. ”

“ He has at least the merit of being very good tempered, and so willing to teach, that he never leaves us till he is fairly turned out of the room. Nothing can be more different in sound than the ancient Greek, as spoken by one of their descendants, and the language called Greek by us ”

“ The movement in favour of an artificial revival of ancient Greek has already been of long duration, and has had a detrimental effect upon the modern language. The vulgar tongue has a melodious charm, while many classical words, in the modern pronunciation, are extremely harsh and uncouth. The object of the movement is to secure an uniform ‘pure’ speech, as they call it, approximate to that of Plato or of Xenophon ”

“ The Greek language must have attained great excellence at a very early period, for it existed in its essential perfection in the time of Homer. It was, also, early divided into dialects, as spoken by the various Hellenic tribes that inhabited different parts of the country. The principal of these found in written composition are the Aeolic, Doric, Ionic, and Attic, of which the Aeolic, the most ancient, was spoken north of the Isthmus, in the Aeolic colonies of Asia Minor, and in the northern islands of the Aegean Sea. ”

“ The classical scholar who is as yet unacquainted with modern Greek will find, in the pages of an ordinary periodical or newspaper, specimens of the conventional literary language, which he can read with ease side by side with poems or even prose in the vernacular which he will be altogether unable to interpret.
The vernacular or oral language is never taught, but is universally spoken. It has been evolved from the ancient language by a natural and regular process, similar to that which has produced the Romance languages from the Latin, Reforms of Coraës. ”

“ The demand for translations grew almost in direct ratio as the study of the Greek language and the reading of the literature in the original declined. The interest in Greece which had been fostered and developed through the century could only be satisfied by an abundance of translations whose range covered the whole of Greek literature.
This interest in and demand for the works of these ancient authors produced a form of publication which was new to the reading public, namely, the classical library. The first of these was The Works of the Greek and Roman Poets, translated into English verse. ”

“ It is proposed to adopt modern Greek, which has several great advantages. The first is that the old education has familiarized us sufficiently with ancient Greek to take away the first sense of strangeness in the same language under its modern form. ”

“ Modern Persian, on the contrary, is poorer in flexions than almost any language which exists; it may be said, without exaggeration, that its whole grammar might be compressed into a few pages. Modern Greek is the analysis or decomposition of ancient Greek during a long period of barbarism. The Romance languages are Latin submitted to the same process; Italian, Spanish, French, and Wallachian, are merely Latin mutilated, deprived of its flexions, reduced to shortened forms, and supplying by numerous monosyllables the learned organisation of the ancient idioms. ”

“ The Greek Tongue has a vast variety of long Words, wherein long and short Syllables are agreeably intermixed together, with great Numbers of Vowels and Diphthongs in the Middle-Syllables, and those very seldom clogged by the joyning of harsh-sounding Consonants in the same Syllable: All which Things give it a vast Advantage above any other Language that has ever yet been cultivated by Learned Men. By this Means all manner of Tunable Numbers may be formed in it with Ease; as still appears in the remaining Dramatick and Lyrick Composures of the Greek Poets. ”

“ This progressive tendency might well have led, in the 11th and 12th centuries, to the founding in the Greek vernacular of a new literary language similar to the promising national languages and literature which, at that period, in the Romance countries, developed out of the despised popular idiom. ”

“ And at the very last there is the attempt, rather respectable than successful, to re-create at once the language and the literature, for the use of Greeks who are at least questionably Hellenic, in relation to forms and subjects separated by more than a millennium—by nearly two millennia—from the forms and the subjects in regard to which Greek was once a living speech. ”

“ Its scholars are beginning to see that the idea of classical Greek ever becoming a universal language for men of culture is a vain dream, and that a nation’s speech, like its life, must undergo continual modification. ”

“ The Greek language, once the tongue of a petty people, grew to be a universal language of culture, spoken even by barbarian lips, and the art, the science, the literature, the principles of politics and philosophy, developed in isolation by the Greek mind, henceforth became the heritage of many nations. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the study of Greek and Latin literature leaves no doubt in one’s mind that the difference of language there is less significant than the unity of form, and that one is really dealing with a single literature, the Hellenic, which in many of its branches was imitated and propagated in the Latin language, just as it was to a lesser extent in Hebrew, or later on in Syriac and Arabic. ”

“ The foundation of this world seems to be the Myth; and as the world grew it developed in terms of Myth. The Greek mind had only one background. Athletics and Statuary, Epic and Drama, Religion and Art, Skepticism and Science expressed themselves through the same myths. In this lies the fascination of Greece for us. What a complete cosmos it is! And how different from any other civilization! Modern life, like modern language, is a monstrous amalgam, a conglomeration and mess of idioms from every age and every clime. The classic Greek hangs together like a wreath. ”

“ There is no book which shows the Greeks precisely as they were; they seem all written for children with the caution that no practice or sentiment, highly inconsistent with our present manners, should be mentioned, lest those manners should receive outrage and violation. But there are many to whom the Greek language is inaccessible, who ought not to be excluded by this prudery from possessing an exact and comprehensive conception of the history of man ”

“ Approaching the literature and language of the Greeks with this abundant knowledge of their real surroundings and conditions of life, he saw the deeper, fuller significance of every classical author and the great literary masterpieces were perceived as the expression of the national life. He appreciated language as the wonderful medium through which the more wonderful life of the versatile Greek expressed itself. The reason he was such a great philologist was because he was so great a realist, a man who was intensely interested in the Greek people, their history and life. ”

“ And as oratory grew into a power which dominated the life of the community, so language itself was advanced to a new stage in development, when Athens became the centre of the world. What grew out of the local dialect was a new idiom, in which the power inherent in the Greek language first came to its full maturity by becoming the vehicle of Attic culture. ”

“ It is true that the poems of all the epochs are written in a language that professes to be one, but this is only due to the consciousness of the learned Greeks, a consciousness we still respect in them to-day, that the glorious language of old Greece is their imperishable heritage, a heritage that the corruption of the ages should not be permitted to defile. ”

“ It is an instrument which responds with happy elasticity to every demand of the Greek intellect. The forms which it has retained are light, graceful, flexible. It can express the most delicate shades of meaning with an elegant simplicity. This power is due, not only to its organic structure, but also to the tact with which words expressing the same general idea have been discriminated in its rich vocabulary. The Greek language is the earliest work of art created by the spontaneous working of the Greek mind, and it is the greatest work of Greek art which has survived. ”

“ For, like every living tongue, the vernacular Greek continually changed in pronunciation and form, as well as in vocabulary and grammar, and thus the living language surely and gradually separated itself from the rigid written language. ”

“ And Greek, not Latin, was still the language in which most of the greatest literature of the Imperial period was written. One need only mention works which are still widely read and which have influenced our own civilization—Plutarch’s Lives, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, and the New Testament. They are all written in Greek, and who will venture to assert that the age in which they were written falls outside Greek history, or that the social experience which produced them was not an act in the tragedy of Hellenic civilization? Even statistically the Empire was more Greek than anything else. ”