^70 Mr. Pickerins: on the Pronunciation 



^> 



/ 



asccrtaiu the pronunciation of the language as far back as that 

 period, it will be sufficiently near the classic ages of Greece, to 

 satisfy the most fastidious ear of foreigners^ as we are in respect 



to the language. The arguments ou both sides of the question 

 respecting the p}, are very minutely stated (from various authors 

 but not without remarks of his ow a) by Velastus^ a Greek monk 

 of the island of CliioSy in the Dissertation to w hich I have before 



F 



referred, and in which upw ards of thirty quarto pages are devot- 



4 



ed to this letter alone.* I shall here only give a very general 

 \iew of the reasoning on the suhjcct; and, in doing this, it will 

 be necessary for the present to assume as true, that the diphthong 



«; liad the same sound with the i ; which, by the aid of the Her- 

 culanean Manuscripts, in addition to the ancient monuments here- 

 tofore discovered, may now be proved beyond a doubt to hava 



been the case. 



In prosecuting this inquiry, we are enabled to go back at once 

 to the twelfth century by means of the writings of the learned and 



J y 



venerable Eustathius ; and he, it should be recollected, express- 

 ly informs bis readers, that his Commentary on- Homer consists 

 chiefly of selections from the toorJcs of others, whom even in that 

 age he styles "the ancients,^' Among those writers, (upwards of 

 three hundred' and fifty in number, according to the catalogue in 

 Fabricius,t) we do, indeed, find the names of philosophers and 

 critics and grammarians from the very earliest periods of Grecian 

 literature. Now Eustathius, in the course of his Commentary, 

 ives several instances of what he calls '^ctp^^fjagi or words, which 



Thorns Stanislai Velastij societatia JesUj Dissertatio de Literarum Grop- 

 ^arum Pronunciaiione^ Rom^, 1751. 



t Fabric. Bib. Gr?ec. torn* 1. p. 506. 



t 



