330 PHONETIC ANOMALIES OBSERVED IN SOME 
times the case, had been handed on and finally become legitimized 
by force of custom. 
We cannot imagine that Augustine and his monks, fresh from 
Italy, pronounced, or taught the English people to pronounce, a, ay, 
or e, ee, or i, et. They would rather have represented the sound 
which we call ay, by e accented or unaccented ; whilst the English e 
would have been written 7; and what we call 2, would have gone 
down as é or at. : 
By strangely deviating in these respects from the general usage, 
our nation has rendered itself doubly insular, and considerable diffi- 
culty has been thrown in the way of foreigners desiring to learn our 
language. Not even do our Scandinavian brethren, I believe, herein 
agree with us. But although the continental nations have preserved 
more truly than we have done the tones of the languages which we 
are in the practice of calling dead, we are not to imagine that this 
has been anything more than an accident. These nations, either 
occupying the ground which was formerly the area of those tongues, 
or being geographically in contact with it, adopted in the written 
and spoken developments of their own respective vernacular langua- 
ges the phonetic systems of vanquished or superseded races, simply 
as a matter of convenience, with no particular desire to perpetuate 
the veritable tones of the classic tongues. Ever since the revival of 
literature in the beginning of the sixteenth century, there has been 
a school of learned men on the European continent who contend 
that the classic languages ought to be more completely resuscitated ; 
that many niceties and elegances of utterance which usage in the 
several nations has failed to secure, might and ought to be recovered 
and practised.* 
* The numerous native “professors” of the Greek tongue who found their way to Italy 
after, and iong before, the fall of Constantinople (1453), naturally pronounced the ancient 
language as they would their own vernacular Romaic, which bears the same relation to it 
that Italian does to Latin. Manuel Chrysoloras, who died in 1415, thus taught in Florence. - 
Milan, and Rome. Previous to this, Boccacio, who died in 1875, was a diligent student of 
Greek under similar tuition. 
Reuchlin (1455—1522) advocated the Romaic pronunciationinGermany. In 1528 Erasmus 
published his treatise “De recta Latini Greecique Sermonis pronunciatione,” in which, in 
opposition to the great German scholar, he maintained that the ancient sounds are not 
reproduced by the modern modes. Henceforward there were two schools of Greek orthoe- 
pists, the Erasmian and the Reuchlinian—the etists and the iotacists, (the latter so called 
from their giving the sound of iota tog”, 4, V, and the diphthongs ce and x.) At Oxford, 
Grocyn (1442—1519) taught Greek, prohably Romaicé; aud strangely enough, under him if 
is said that Erasmus first began the study of this language in 1497. At Cambridge, Cheke 
(1514—1577) inculcated a method resembling the Erasmian in his “ Disputatio de Pronuncia- 
