6 PROFESSOR BLACKIE ON THE 
of foreign materials, in this case we shall have only a new dialect—not anew , 
language. The second question, as to what we may take as a fair standard 
of modern Greek, can be answered as a matter of fact only by hitting a judi- 
cious medium between the two extremes of gross corruption, and that greater 
or less approximation to the standard of classical Greek, which the practice 
of some writers presents. Topographical and political causes conspired to 
create different shades or grades, or types cf modification in the popular 
Greek dialect, which had more or less of a local character. The Byzantine 
Greek of THzoporvs, the Albanian Greek of the Epirotic KLeputs, and the Cretan 
Greek of CorNARo, who wrote the romance of Erotocritus, in the first half of the 
eighteenth century (first edition, Venice, 1737), are in some characteristic points 
essentially different. These constitute what, according to a botanical analogy, 
we might call local varieties of a common species ; and such varieties, as a 
rule, present a greater amount of deviation from the normal classical type than 
the floating mass of modern Greek common to all the existing race. On the 
other hand, since the time of Korazs, there has commenced a process of puri- 
fication and restoration which tends to remove from the modern language some 
of those peculiarities which are its most distinctive characteristics. In judging 
of the language as a whole, therefore, it is wise to take some work or book of an 
essentially popular character written for general circulation in the last century, 
before the appearance of Korass ; and I have used for this purpose a translation 
of the “ Arabian Nights” into modern Greek, published at Venice by the well- 
known house of Guiycys, in the year 1792. This choice, however, was dictated 
purely with a view to the conclusions of philological science ; for practical pur- 
poses, it is manifest that the best type of the Greek actually now spoken in 
Greece is contained in the Greek newspapers destined for general circulation. 
But neither can the philologer, though he refuses to accept local varieties, as 
part of the general norm of the dialect, overlook them as a fact. They are 
part either of the disintegration of the old type, or of the growth of the new, of 
which he is bound to take cognisance in all its stages; the more that the 
phenomena of linguistic change, which are the most interesting to him, present 
themselves more strikingly in the more corrupt than in the less corrupt forms 
of the language. 
Proposition X.—In examining the processes of modification through 
which the Neo-Hellenic language has attained its present type, the most obvious 
helps are, of course, the dictionaries of medieval Greek by Du Cancr and 
Meuvrstius, the learned commentaries of Korazs on Theodorus, the dictionary 
of Byzantine Greek by SopHocteEs, the dictionaries of modern Greek by GERASI- 
Mus, BentoTEs, Kinp, DE HeEQus, Byzantius, and others, with the grammars 
from THomAs downwards to that of SopHoctes and Mutzacu, which is the most 
