BISTRATIFICATION IN THE GROWTH OF LANGUAGES. 617 



with modern Greek ; and here the type to which the colloquial language of Greece belongs 

 is plainly the Italian, neither the Latinised French, nor the Frenchified Saxon, called 

 English ; for whatever changes took place on the spoken language of Greece during the 

 2000 years that have elapsed from the conquest of Corinth by Mummius to the present 

 hour, have been of native growth, and the borrowed element is so small as scarcely to be 

 taken into account. If Italian is in the main a mere modification of pure Latin, much 

 more Romaic Greek of classical Greek. And the reason of this more distinct assertion of 

 the natural rights of the upper platform lies on the surface. The regulative power of 

 the state and public officials ceased, as we have seen, with Latin in the 5th century ; 

 after that there was no Roman Empire in Rome, giving an imperial stamp to the currency 

 of the language of the Csesars : but the Byzantine Empire, which, though Roman by 

 descent of blood, was purely Greek in substance and operation, continued, with the short 

 interruption of the Venetian government in the beginning of the 13th century, for a 

 thousand years, when Constantinople was taken by the Turks. From that date to the 

 restoration of the Greek kingdom in 1821, there was only a period of 400 years during 

 which a Hellenic Dante might have arisen to create a new language out of the unregulated 

 elements of the unwritten currency of the popular speech. But this could not be ; partly 

 because the time of this loose drifting from the directing power of an upper platform was 

 too short, but much more because the antagonism and sacred horror with which all good 

 Greeks regarded their Mohammedan conquerors was so great, that anything like a corrupt- 

 ing influence from that quarter was impossible. 



VII. The bistratincation that belongs to the history of all language thus took in 

 modern Greek the peculiar form of a double tendency to unification ; the tendency of 

 the upper platform asserting its natural claim, both literary and ecclesiastical, on the 

 one hand, and the tendency of the lower from historical and ecclesiastical associations 

 not to oppose, but to respond to the call of its intellectual superior. The linguistic 

 position of the lower platform thus presented a perfect analogy to the relation of Scotch 

 to English in the days of Lady Nairne and the predecessors of Sir Walter Scott, only 

 the literary and social influences that tended to merge the lower platform in the upper 

 were much stronger in Greece than in Scotland. Nevertheless, the colloquial dominance 

 of the lower platform was so strong that the friends of popular intelligence, under the 

 leadership of the celebrated Adamantius Coraes, consented to an adoption, for literary 

 purposes, of some of its peculiarities in the way of compromise, or, as a distinguished 

 Greek writer calls it, o-v/AjSi/Sao-jaos ; and the few peculiarities which distinguish the Greek 

 of the newspapers of the present hour, from the Greek of Demosthenes, or Diodorus, or 

 the Church fathers, are the result of this compromise. 



VIII. But the matter could not rest here. To all questions of compromise, however 

 practically wise, there is sure to be a strong objection from the zealous advocates of the 

 contrasted elements. Aristotle has set forth the fxiaov, the golden mean, as the test of 



