304 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



with some of its own formative endings, it is not now spoken in any 

 part of Greece. Questions of this sort can be asked only by tliose 

 who are but imperfectly acquainted witii the history of raedia^val 

 Greece. Such persons seem to forget that language, as expressive of 

 ideas, is, as it were, an artificial thing ; and consequently one race 

 may adopt the language of another ; and, what is more remarkable, 

 tlie same race changes its language constantly, and usually by an 

 endogenous process, so to speak. The argument from language, 

 therefore, is of no weight, when it is opposed to direct historical evi- 

 dence. The preservation of the Greek language would indeed be an 

 extraordinary phenomenon, if we assumed that the Greek race ceased 

 to exist after the great plague in the eighth century. " Languages," 

 says a distinguished linguist,* "adhere so tenaciously to their native 

 soil, that, in general, they can be eradicated only by the extirpation of 

 the races that speak them." The vitality or tenacity of the Greek 

 language is too well known to require any comments here. 



But the Greek race was not extirpated by the great plague. There 

 is sufficient historical evidence that the Greeks (oi 'EWadiKol) did not 

 entirely disappear during the eighth century. Thus, Saint ^'icephorus 

 the Confessor says that, as Constantinople was all but depopulated by 

 the plague, it became necessary to replenish it with people brought 

 from the continental parts of the empire and from the islands.! And 

 there is no proof that these new Constantinopolitans did not speak 

 Greek as their vernacular tongue. Again, Porphyrog'enitus tells us 

 that when the Slavs of Peloponnesus rebelled against the government 

 in the reign of Nicephorus, nearly two generations after the plague, 

 they plundered the houses of the Greeks (juv TpaiKav) in their vicinity.f 

 In another place he observes that the inhabitants of Matvr), a fortified 

 town near Ta^narum, were not Slavs ; they were descended from the 

 earlier Romans (and by Homans he means Greeks). In his time they 



y6p€ (neuter), a place behind a mountain. KapXaj, a, 6, Kdrlax, the an- 

 cient Boi/3r;if ; from the Russian KcipXa, a dwarf , because the Karlas is a 

 litde sea or lake f 



* Gkorgk p. Marsh, Lectures on the English Langiutf/e, p. 25. 



f NlCEPHORUS CONSTANTINOPOLITANDS, p. 72 'EvTfiidfP Toivvv dvoiKijTOi/ 

 (Tx,t86v ^8r] yeyovvlav rrjv nuXip ravrrjv KaroiKi^fi €K rdf ^copav Koi TUiv vfjaoiv 

 TTjS VTTo Pco/xat'ots e^ovcrias Xaav nXijOrj pLerdyuv. 



J See above, p. 301. 



