18 PROFESSOR BLACKIE ON THE 
was living a lodger in Athens, about twenty years ago, a little girl, the land- 
lord’s daughter, as I was going out, used to say to me zov ware. When I 
heard this first I was considerably puzzled, and began at once to think of zaréw 
and pattens; but this scent led me far astray, and on inquiry I found that 
the mystical dissyllable was only a curtailed form of wéyere,as that word is 
used in the New Testament (Matthew xvi. 23). The same habit of dropping 
the medial gamma, I afterwards found, led to the forms és, Aére, Ae, familiarly 
used for Aéyes, Aéyere, and A€youy ; and in like manner ¢av stands for ddyou. 
(So in Cuaucer han for haben = have.) As to synizesis, or the slurring of 
two vowels into one syllable, which the readers of the Attic plays are quite 
familiar with, the modern Greek makes a systematic use of this figure in words 
of the first declension, such as codia, dwria, capdia, accompanying the slur of 
the slender vowel with the transference of the accent to the strong final vowel 
kapoid. Sometimes in such cases the slight vowel is omitted altogether, as 
xupa for xupia, lady, mother. 
Closely connected with syntzesis is the practice of crasis, so perplexing to the 
tyro in Sanscrit, and familiar to the ancient Greek in such cases as avyp for 
6 avnp, avep for & avep, and others. The most common phenomena of this 
kind in modern Greek, and on which a classical scholar will be apt to stumble, 
are such forms as— 
VAC aL, for wa coat, 
varOn, » wa enrOn, 
VAXEL, 4» Wa exel, 
TOXEL, y» TO EXEL, 
t 4 7 + 
TWPXETAL, ,, OTTOU EPYETAL, 
5 5 
TOTA, 3» TO €UTa, 
and others of a similar description, which occur frequently in the Erotocritus. 
Proposition X XI.—These remarks taken singly, might naturally lead to 
the idea that modern Greek is a sort of amputated ancient Greek, as the 
Saxon half of English is a sort of amputated German—a meagre dialect in 
which every dissyllable has been cropped down into a monosyllable, and every 
trisyllable into a dissyllable. But this is by no means the case. Miserable 
and meagre, in point of vocal swell and syllabic roll, as our truncated Saxon 
tongue would have been, had it not been reinforced by the strong intrusion of 
the sonorous element from the classical languages, the tongue of the ancient 
Hellenes has suffered no such loss as to produce any bald disfigurement of this 
kind. The explanation of this is obvious. The words of the Greek language 
are so exuberantly polysyllabic, that the abstraction of a single syllable 
from each word would leave the great body of the language still distinctly poly- 
syllabic ; thus, ’rOvpo falls upon the ear with pretty much the same amplitude 
