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III. — Phases of the Living Greek Language. By Emeritus Professor Blackie. 



(Read 3rd March 1890.) 



GENERAL SCHEME OF CONTENTS. 



Historical Glance at the Conditions of Change 

 in the Greek Language. Specimen of the 

 Current Greek of the Newspapers, 



How the Current Notion of Greek being in a 

 state of Barbarous Corruption arose, and Con- 

 fusion of two Strata of Greek — the Literary 

 and the Popular. Specimen of the Vulgar 

 Greek of the Peasantry, .... 



Philological Classification of the Differentiating 

 Features of the Vulgar or Popular Greek, 



Restoration of the Greek of Literary Currency 



PAGE 



45 



46-47 



48-51 



PAGE 



to its legitimate Position as dominating the 

 corrupted types of Local Idioms by Koraes. 

 Regeneration of the Current Greek since 1 822, 51-52 



Principle of wise Compromise between the Lite- 

 rary and the Vulgar Greek in the Formation 

 of the present universally accepted type of 

 the Neo-Hellenic Standard, as distinguished 

 from the Romaic Dialect, .... 52-53 



Scheme of Reform for the Teaching of Greek as 

 a Living Language, with an indication of the 

 advantages to flow from such a Reform, . 53-55 



I will commence by stating that three reasons have moved me to bring this subject 

 before the Society — (1) Because I found everywhere loose and even altogether false 

 ideas possessing the public mind on the subject ; (2) because I much fear that we, the 

 academical teachers of the Greek language, are chiefly to blame for the currency of 

 these false ideas ; and (3) because, if Greek is a living and uncorrupted language, 

 and dominating large districts of Europe and the Mediterranean, as influentially as 

 French on the banks of the Seine and German on the Khine, it follows that a radical 

 reform must take place in our received methods of teaching this noble and most useful 

 language. Now that the current language of the Greeks in Athens and elsewhere is not, 

 in any sense, a new or a corrupt language, as Italian is a melodious and French a glitter- 

 ing corruption of Latin, may be gathered even a priori ; for languages are slow to die, 

 and the time that elapsed from the taking of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 and 

 the establishment of the Venetian power in the Morea in 1204, to the resurrection of Greek 

 political life in 1822, was not long enough to cause such a fusion of contrary elements as 

 produced the English language from the permanent occupation of the British Isles by 

 the Normans. Nay rather, so far from being a fusion, there was a strong repulsion 

 between the Mahommedan conquerors and their Christian subjects ; while the jealousy 

 between the Greek and the Latin Churches acted as a strong force to prevent any trans- 

 forming power that might have been exercised on Greek by a sporadic contagion from 

 the Italian ; and the results in the present state of the language are just what were to 

 be expected from such historical antecedents. Local varieties of careless or corrupt 

 Greek of course may be found among the peasantry, just as we have one type of English 

 in Yorkshire, another in Dorsetshire, another in Lancashire, and a fourth in Scotland ; 

 for Scotch is in no sense of the word a separate language from English, as Gaelic is from 



VOL. XXXVI. PART I. (NO. 3). I 



