8 PROFESSOR BLACKIE ON THE 
Proposition XI.—When scholars talk of a type of language, such as the 
strange events of long centuries have produced in modern Greece, they are apt 
to talk of it altogether as a corruption, and as the pure result of phonetic decay. 
But this is only a part, and a small part of the truth. A language is corrupt 
when it abandons its own natural analogies, or adopts foreign ones, which do not 
harmonise with its original type, or when it is defaced and disfigured in various 
ways by sheer ignorance and carelessness. In this sense it is quite correct in 
Italian, for instance, to say, that donna is a corruption of domina, avuto of habitum; 
and in the same way, in Neo-Hellenic, to say that €Byd\\w is a corruption of 
exBdddo, and pabaive of pavOdvw; and of such corruptions, no doubt, a large 
part of Italian, and a certain much less considerable part of modern Greek is 
composed. But, on the other hand, it is no corruption when, in the progress 
of time, an old word comes to be used in a modified, or perhaps, altogether 
different sense; as when x«déyuvw, In modern Greek, takes the place of zou, 
when oyxdw, which in Plutarch signifies to weigh, in modern Greek signifies 
to raise, when ¢0dvw is used generally-for ddixvéopa, to arrive, or tadedvw, for 
paotvydw, as they are not only in modern Greek, but in the New Testament. 
Such progressions and transmutations of meaning are always going on in all livmg 
languages, of which ample illustrations could be produced from English and every 
spoken language, if it were necessary. As little can it be called a corruption, 
when new forms blossom out from old roots, so long as these new forms follow 
the fair analogies of the language. No one, for instance, supposes that the 
English language is corrupted when we bring into currency such words as 
solidarity, complicity, utilise, and similar French formations from Latin roots long 
ago acknowledged in both languages. Inthe same way, ypyoipevo, vootiyevopar, 
and other such words, are perfectly legitimate formations, even though it be true 
that the Attics were not in the habit of affixing the termination ev to verbals in 
pos; for the Athenians at all times had their peculiar local idioms, just as 
London has its Cockneyisms ; and the mere Attic usage could prescribe the law 
to the common Greek tongue, only so long as Athens remained the political 
and literary capital of Greece, which it ceased to be exclusively when the centre 
of intellectual activity was transferred first to Alexandria and then to. Byzantium. 
To write pure Attic Greek, after the Athenian literary dictatorship had ceased, 
was an affectation of which only pedantry or a false fastidiousness could 
be guilty. The barbarism to which, in a general way, a certain class of 
scholars would consign such words, is more justly regarded as an overgrowth 
of lusty vitality. Such new coined words may not indeed be necessary ; the 
old words might have served all purposes equally well; but they are the 
natural and legitimate product of the right of a living organism to put forth 
new shoots according to its type. If it be said that a word is always barbar- 
ous till it be stamped by the authority of a great classic of the language, 
