618 PROFESSOR BLACKIE ON 



truth in all practical matters ; but men still, and not seldom the best men, are fond of a 

 strong one-sided assertion of their own point of view, and proudly reject all claims of 

 approximation to the ground of a proscribed antagonist. So it has fared with modern 

 Greek ; one party standing aloof on the respectable ground of high classical tradition, 

 and the other coming valiantly forward in defence of the living rights of a spoken speech, 

 when brought into conflict with the armed champions of a bookish tradition. Of this 

 stout championship on the popular side of this notable linguistic controversy, the most 

 prominent representative is Mr Roides, a man of great learning, and librarian in the 

 national library, Athens, whose work on the subject, quite recently published, I have now 

 the honour to lay before the Society (E. A. PoiSou etS&Aa, Athens, 1893). 



IX. Tin; tone of this remarkable volume is decidedly aggressive, and seems to indicate 

 that the living Greek language should assert itself, in the face of the classical Greek, 

 pretty much in the same style that Anglo-Saxon did against the Norman French invasion. 

 But, as already stated, the parallel drawn betwixt English, a mixed language, and modern 

 Greek, is false, the true parallel lying rather in the relation of the written English of the 

 present day, to the local dialects of Lancashire, York, or the Scotch of the Borders. I 

 am willing to suppose, however, that Mr Roides' sweepingly aggressive tone is directed 

 chiefly against the extreme section of the classical side, whom he calls Attikio-tcu, or 

 Atticists, and that in the main he merely proposes to act on the principle of a kindly 

 compromise, following out the idea of Coraes. If this via media be practically the result 

 of his advocacy of the popular dialect, I think every sensible man will agree with him. 

 As in a well balanced government the aristocratic and the democratic elements of society 

 have to acknowledge one another by kindly condescension from above and respectful 

 recognition from below, so, when the course of the centuries has brought with it an upper 

 and a lower stratum of national speech, it is for the interest of both parties to proceed on 

 the kindly principle of give and take in brotherly interchange, not that the giving ought 

 to be all on one side and the taking on the other. How this system of mutual acknow- 

 ledgment should work in practice, I will now attempt to sketch in a very few sentences. 



X. On the one hand, I have no objection that whatever curtailments or insignificant 

 losses which may, in the course of the 2000 years' duration of the written language, 

 have become universally recognised in the currency of social speech, should be accepted 

 as henceforward to be acknowledged as part of the literary language, as, e.g., (l) ypa/A/ieVos 

 for yeypa/x/xeVo?, (2) the rejection of the superfluous aor med., (3) the dropping of the 

 optative mood, (4) the dropping of the double form of the aorist, as in ekafia for ekafiov, 

 (5) the loss of the infinitive mood, and the supplying of its place regularly by va for 7va 

 with the subjunctive, (G) the use of the auxiliaries da and eiya as in English, (7) ^ow 

 for expvai, (8) 6 ozroio? for ocrn?, (9) tov for avrov. 



Again, whatever new words or new uses of old words have acquired a wide ascend- 

 ency, whether to express new ideas, or merely to indulge the luxury of a branching 



