C 494 ) 



On one Source of the Non-Hellenic Portion of the Latin Lan- 

 guage. By the Rev. Archdeacon Williams, F.R.S. E., Rec- 

 tor of the Edinburgh Academy, &c. &c. 



{Read 1th March 1836.) 



Payne Knight, no mean name among philologers, after a 

 masterly and convincing proof, that neither Zenodotus nor 

 Aristarchus, the great critics of the Alexandrian school, could 

 be acquitted of the charge of " scarcely credible ignorance" of the 

 primitive form of the Homeric language, thus proceeds : — 



" The grammarians and critics of Alexandria were all guilty 

 of the same fault. They never investigated the original sources 

 of the language, but classed among anomalous dialects and poetic 

 licenses every thing that was not in unison with their own usual 

 style of speaking. In their age there existed many clews to the 

 inquiry, which have now disappeared, but which, at that time, 

 might easily have been found in written records, and in the rude 

 and semi-barbarous languages of Italy and other countries adja- 

 cent to Greece. Had any one, however, suggested to Ari- 

 starchus that the true form and character of the Homeric dia- 

 lect was to be extracted from the Latin, Tuscan, or Oscan lan- 

 guages, he would in my opinion have been as much astonished 

 as if he had heard of the claims of the Irish antiquary, who affirmed 

 that the Homeric poems had been translated furtively from the 

 " Gaelic into Greek." 1 



Whatever might have been the astonishment of Aristarchus 

 on being referred to the rude and semi-barbarous dialects of iso- 

 lated and mountainous districts for a resolution of his philological 

 difficulties, every man acquainted with the subject knows that the 



1 Prolegomena, p. 35. 



