Modern Greek language

“ If such a recovery of sound education takes place, it is impossible that Greek shall not resume its old importance. We now know far more of Hellenic work than did our fore-fathers. We can vindicate Greek studies in a manner wholly strange to them, had they ever thought a vindication called for. But, on the other hand, the teaching of Greek must be reformed. It must be made a human and lively study, taught like a modern language by dictation and recitation, as well as by written composition and reading of authors. ”

“ If one can grapple with a scheme of education including an accurate knowledge of the Greek language without being compelled to omit lines of study more necessary to place him—where every modern man should be—at the modern standpoint, we should say by all means let him study Greek and have his sense of beauty quickened by living intercourse with its wonderful literature, and his logical and critical faculties strengthened by investigation of its linguistic elements and grammatical forms. ”

“ 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 advocates of modern science naturally set themselves against what they are pleased to call the dead languages, and so, as Greek seemed more remote to them, because of its strange alphabet, they have so far prevailed as to get rid, from a vast number of schools, of the study of that language. Even in the universities of Europe there is an irresistible tendency to make it a voluntary subject of study. The innovators, most of whom are ignorant in any proper sense both of Greek and Latin, still profess a great respect for Latin and loudly assert its importance even in modern education. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The patois which, if it had been recognised as the language of the Greek kingdom, would now have made Herodotus and Plato foreign authors in Athens, is indeed still preserved in familiar conversation, but it is little used in writing and not taught in schools. A language year by year more closely approximating in its forms to that of classical Greece unites the Greeks both with their past and among themselves, and serves as the instrument of a widening Hellenic civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In furtherance of our principal object in this critique, we have only to add a wish that some of our Grecian tourists, among the fresh articles of information concerning Greece which they have lately imported, would turn their minds to the language of the country. So strikingly similar to the ancient Greek is the modern Romaic as a written language, and so dissimilar in sound, that even a few general rules concerning pronunciation would be of most extensive use. ”

“ It is, indeed, one of the best features in the Greek character that the owner of wealth has so often been, and still so often is, the promoter of the culture of his race. As in Germany in the last century, and in Hungary and Bohemia at a more recent date, the national revival of Greece was preceded by a striking revival of interest in the national language. ”

“ The more bigoted among the classicists of our own time have little of the truly Hellenic about them. Greece in its finest period owed its greatness partly to its frank use of its own vernacular language, partly to its exceptional freedom from tradition and routine. The classicist, on the contrary, would have us base our education upon dead languages and adhere piously to tradition, and routine. The Greek writers of the fifth century before Christ were free and progressive; their modern retainers are too often ultra-conservative and indifferent to the glowing opportunities of their own time. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 22] 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. ”

“ On this day, it is fitting that we reflect on the enormous contributions the Greek people have made to the modern world. The legacy of the ancient Greeks, in the fields of philosophy, literature, drama, sculpture, and architecture, continues to influence our beliefs, our values, and our concept of art. And, after more than 2,000 years, the ideology of Greece-as embodied in the concept of democracy-is still the ideal that guides us in charting our course for the future. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Such modification, though it may appear to the pedant to be corruption, is evolution to the philosopher and man of sense. The history of the Russian and Czech languages, which have adapted themselves to literary purposes with such success during the last two hundred years, encourages the hope that the language now spoken by the common people of Greece may go through a similar process of development, borrowing from the ancient Greek what it requires in order to meet the needs of science and philosophy, while holding its ground as the essential basis of the national speech. ”

“ 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 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”