( 615 ) 



XXVII. — On Bistratification in the Growth of Languages, with Special Reference 

 to Greek. By Emeritus Professor Blackie. 



(Read 4th December 1893.) 



I. In all languages where there exists a certain amount of intellectual culture, 

 manifesting itself in the oral or written form of what is called Literature, there must 

 always coexist with it an inferior stratum or platform of speech ; the platform of common 

 colloquial intercourse of the mass of the people, and specially of the peasantry and 

 lower classes. The necessity of this bistratification arises from the diverse class of ideas, 

 and the diverse style of intercourse, pervading the two platforms. Language is a growth 

 that flows from the intercommunion of associated persons working out, within a certain 

 bounded circle, the vocal expression which their ideas, their energies, and their circum- 

 stances demand for the purpose of common action. 



II. Though these two platforms are naturally as distinct and separate as two geological 

 formations, they are, by the very conditions of social life, forced into an interplay of vocal 

 action, which necessarily produces an approximation of the one to the other, gradu- 

 ally passing into an assimilation, and, to a certain extent, a fusion and identification. 

 In this process of interchange, assimilation, and identification, in the normal state of a 

 healthy society, it is always the higher platform that modifies and absorbs the lower ; for 

 it lies in the very nature of things, in the moral as in the physical world, that the lower 

 should look up to the higher, both as a pattern and a stimulus ; and in this way, with the 

 progress of education and the expansion of culture, the gap between the cultured and 

 the uncultured classes will become less and less ; and the superiority will, of course, 

 remain with the upper. Absolute extinction, however, of the lower platform, as 

 human society is constituted, is not possible, nor indeed desirable. The lower orders of 

 the people, independent altogether of literary culture, have their own range of feeling 

 and observation, which not seldom keeps them closer to Nature than the cultivated 

 classes, with all their brilliant cleverness and rich variety of many-sided culture, can 

 manage to maintain. 



III. The normal action of the higher on the lower stratum of national speech of course 

 depends on the continued existence of an independent government, and the influence of 

 governmental, ecclesiastical, and legal personalities on the inferior classes of the com- 

 munity. But when government decays or becomes paralysed, and the inferior platform 

 is left to act on its own untutored instincts, a complete reversal of the linguistic situation 

 takes place. The artificial garden of the literary classes becomes a waste, and, like all 

 wastes, is fruitful not only in noxious weeds, but in beautiful bloom and fragrant fruits in 



VOL. XXXVII. PART III. (NO. 27). 4 Z 



