Greek language

“ All we know is, that the Greek language has survived the Byzantine anarchy, the Slavonic conquest, the Frank occupation; and that the nimble wit, the acquisitiveness and inquisitiveness, the cunning and craft of the modern Greek, seem to be the perversion of the nobler and yet not altogether dissimilar qualities which made the ancient Greeks the leaders of the human race. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ HOMER AND THE STUDY OF GREEK
The Greek language is being ousted from education, here, in France, and in America. The speech of the earliest democracies is not democratic enough for modern anarchy. There is nothing to be gained, it is said, by a knowledge of Greek. We have not to fight the battle of life with Hellenic waiters; and, even if we had, Romaic, or modern Greek, is much more easily learned than the old classical tongue. The reason of this comparative ease will be plain to any one who, retaining a vague memory of his Greek grammar, takes up a modern Greek newspaper. ”

“ To my thinking, it is a movement of great importance, which is very likely to mark the beginning of a time when a first-hand knowledge of Greek shall be more widely diffused. It would be a notable and fruitful result if, as these new classes seem to promise, the interest felt in the Greek language should grow into anything that could fairly be described as a popular interest,—so that considerable numbers of students, outside of our great schools and Universities, should set themselves to acquire the power of reading the Greek literature in the original. ”

“ Greek philosophy was to prove the greatest intellectual asset of humanity. No other civilization or language before the Greek had invented the abstract ideas: time, will, space, beauty, truth, and the others. And from these wonderful, though imperfect, word ideas the vigorous and subtle Greek intellect rapidly raised a structure which found its supreme expression in Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno. But from the close of the Fourth Century before Christ, the time of Aristotle and his pupil Alexander the Great, Greek began to lose its vitality and to decay. ”

“ We must not pass over one important characteristic of the Greek language, which is closely connected with the early condition of the Greek nation, and which may be considered as, in some degree, prefiguring the subsequent character of its civilisation. In order to convey an adequate idea of our meaning, we will ask any person who is acquainted with Greek, to recal to his mind the toils and fatigue which he underwent in mastering the forms of the language, and the difficulty which he found to impress them on his memory ”

“ Man, man, Greek is the only living bridge between the present and the past!"
Then, snatching up a handful of newspapers from Athens, he continued, "Some folks call Greek a dead language. Poor souls! They don't know any better. These things should interest you. They are fresh from Athens; not a week old." And then he read aloud from them, a bit of politics, an advertisement, lines from the bargain counter, as if to show that one touch of shopping makes the whole world kin. "But no heroes, man, no heroes! There's no Aristotle now, no Shakespeare, no Goethe, no Apostle Paul!" ”

“ 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. ”

“ Space forbids, or it would be possible to write pages on the delights of Greek literature. But to any girl who has leisure and inclination, the study of the Greek language itself is most strongly recommended. Translations abound, and are excellent, but the best translation cannot give the beauty of the original. The study of the lovely, flexible language is in itself an education; it is surely an inducement that the New Testament is written in comparatively easy Greek; and the wealth of literature to which Greek constitutes a title-deed may well repay hard labour. ”

“ No ancient Greek ever thought of learning a foreign language. Why should he? He divided the whole world into Greeks and Barbarians, and he would have felt himself degraded by adopting either the dress or the manners or the language of his barbarian neighbors. He considered it a privilege to speak Greek, and even dialects closely related to his own, were treated by him as mere jargons. It takes time before people conceive the idea that it is possible to express oneself in any but one's own language. ”

“ And even in Greek, though few would deny him the merit of fine scholarship on the whole, though his command of the language as an orator is masterly, his style luminous, his diction copious and rich without being offensively ornate or redundant, yet his hold upon the language for critical purposes is neither that of a man who spoke it when it was in its purest stage, nor that of a scholar who, living in a later age and speaking a different tongue, has made a careful, laborious study of it as a dead language. ”

“ For seven hundred years no one in Italy has known Greek literature, and yet we agree that all language comes from the Greeks. How greatly would familiarity with that language advantage thee in promoting thy knowledge and in the mere increase of thy pleasure? There are teachers of Roman law to be found everywhere, and thou wilt never want an opportunity to continue that study, but there is but one teacher of Greek, and if he escapes thee there will be no one from whom thou canst learn. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But every person with the slightest pretence to education spoke Greek. Greek was universally the State language, and the exclusive language of all literature and science, It formed also for the merchant, the trader, and the traveller, as well as for the courtier, the government official, and the soldier, the organ of intercommunication among the myriads of mankind inhabiting these large portions of the Old World. ”

“ The Greek language, mastered in any eminent degree, is the very rarest of all accomplishments, and precisely because it is unspeakably the most difficult. Let not the reader dupe himself by popular cant. To be an accomplished Grecian, demands a very peculiar quality of talent; and it is almost inevitable that one who is such should be vain of a distinction which represents so much labor and difficulty overcome. ”

“ The language which we use ourselves is full of nerve and vigor, with a certain northern force and a habit of appropriating the material stores of other languages by incorporating their words, which suits well the descendants of sea-kings, who have provinces all over the world; but it is without inflexions, deprived of cases and genders, defective in marking time, whereas the Greek in all these is most rich and flexible: the one resembles the torso of a Hercules without its limbs, the other an Apollo as he touches the earth in his perfect symmetry. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Accordingly, we should not say that the Greek civilization with its language, its art, its science, its philosophy, its eloquence, its literature, its civil and military life, was the outgrowth of the Greek genius, the native faculty of the Hellenic race, but rather that this genius, this spiritual faculty, this unrivalled intellectual-artistic endowment of the Greeks, was the continuous resultant at each moment in the history of the race of the collective culture-experiences through which, up to that moment, it had passed. ”

“ I therefore cannot resist the conclusion that, if the language of Greek poetry has, to those who know it intimately, this special quality of keen austere beauty, it is because the minds of the poets who used that language were habitually toned to a higher level both of intensity and of nobility than ours. It is a finer language because it expresses the minds of finer men. By ‘finer men’ I do not necessarily mean men who behaved better, either by our standards or by their own ”

“ 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. ”

“ A language not only makes the literature embodied in it the heritage of all who speak it, but it diffuses among them the subtle genius which has shaped its growth. The lofty regard in which the Greeks held their own musical and flexible language is illustrated by an anecdote of Themis'tocles, who put to death the interpreter of a Persian embassy to Athens because he dared "to use the Greek tongue to utter the demands of the barbarian king." From Col'chis to Spain some Grecian dialect attested the extent and the unity of the Hellenic race. ”