PHASES OF THE LIVING GKEEK LANGUAGE. 51 



Greek, the literary as well as the popular ; and among these is specially to be observed 

 a partiality for the terminations l £o> and 6vw in verbs, as <£d\ifys from £a\>/, 7rA^-yoVo) from 

 ifKriyri, Tradalvco from TrdOog, (TrjKovco from a-^Kog, and many more. Under the category of 

 expansion falls also the application of old words to new circumstances, or attaching to 

 them new meanings, as a mere sport of the fancy, or simply from the delight in change, 

 as to fipaSv, " the evening," for ecnrepos, Spo/u.09 for 6S6?, Kd/mva) for -wpaTTw, and such like. 



All this looks a very formidable array of losses and disfigurements, which 

 may seem to justify the academical treatment of Greek as practically a dead lan- 

 guage, and recall to the mind of the scholar the glossarium grceco-barbarum of the 

 learned Dutchman Meursius, in which 1040 foreign words are paraded with due pomp of 

 quotation in a stout octavo of 650 pages. But we have only to recall the statement made 

 above in our introductory paragraph to show the utter falsehood of such a hasty impres- 

 sion. The corrupt dialect, whose peculiarities we have been enumerating, as a medium 

 of communication amongst educated Greeks, exists no longer ; it is universally condemned 

 as a false coin, and has no currency. The first step to this condemnation was made a 

 century ago, by the famous Adamantios Koraes, at that time resident in Paris, from 

 whom the prolusive blast of patriotic inspiration proceeded, that through the noble 

 martyrdom of Rhigas Pher^eas, and the patriarch Gregory V., culminated in the political 

 liberation of Greece by the revolt of 1822. But even before that period there were 

 degrees of corruption, separate platforms, so to speak, of vulgar Greek, which no intel- 

 ligent man could mistake for the current Greek of educated men. Of these platforms 

 the Cretan dialect was the lowest, the dialect used by a Cretan Greek resident in Venice, 

 Cornaro by name, who, in the year 1756, gave to the world a love romance or novel in 

 verse called Erotocritus, which achieved an immense popularity, and has run through 

 many editions. As a specimen of the current style of colloquial Greek, on a platform 

 considerably above this, we may take the Greek translation of the Arabian Nights, pub- 

 lished at Venice in the year 1792 ; but all this since the resurrection of Greece to poli- 

 tical independence in 1822 is past; and no man would dream now of translating any 

 modern work into the Greek of the Arabian Nights. As a proof of this, any one who 

 pleases may consult the work named below, a translation from the travels of a lady well 

 known in Cambridge for her expert use of Greek and other living languages.* How was 

 this ? Plainly enough from the superficial nature of the disease with which the noble lan- 

 guage of the Christian religion and literature had been tainted, and from the instinctive 

 ease with which the strong impulse of regenerate nationality was enabled to throw it off. 

 The instantaneous effect of the successful rising of 1822 was to give a pulsing reality 

 and a pervading force to the linguistic reformation preached by Koraes. The corrup- 

 tions that had hitherto defaced the classical tongue were felt as stamps of a hateful 

 tyranny, and badges of an unworthy slavery ; and so with one consent the educated 

 mind of liberated Greece arose to the grand conception of restoring their language of 

 literary and political intercommunion to a type not unworthy of shaking hands with 



* Ay*wt Ifttd : BhififtxTct ml row EKKyivixov jS/ou x.ctl Trig ' T&KKriviKV)? ronoy^oifpla;, kx. rou AyyKiKov, Leipzig, 1885. 



