PHASES OF THE LIVING GREEK LANGUAGE. 53 



of popular song should go hand in hand with the language of literary culture, just as 

 Doric dialect in ancient times did with the Attic norm, and as Scotch does at the 

 present moment, in the lyrical domain, with the English of literary prose ; while, at the 

 same time, there can be no greater mistake in the mouth of a philologer than to denounce 

 the one as a hateful barbarism and to disown the other as a pedantic affectation. They 

 are both living forms of a living language, the noblest of all living languages, and a 

 language which has preserved its vital continuity through a period of more than three 

 thousand years, and as such ought to be dealt with by all intelligent persons in such a 

 living fashion, as the principles of linguistic science and the utilities of international inter- 

 course enjoin. 



Remains only now to indicate the process of practical reform which our teaching of 

 Greek in this country must go through in order to grow from this lusty root into living 

 fruit ; and here the well-known aphorism of the wisest British thinker sets before us, 

 with his usual pregnant conciseness, at once our starting point and our goal. " Speak- 

 ing," says he, " makes a ready man. reading makes a full man, writing an exact 

 man" — all the three necessary to make an accomplished scholar, but each in its own 

 place. The acquisition of any language is always, like dancing or fencing, a living 

 dexterity of art in the first place, and only in a secondary way an application of bookish 

 rules. People must have their nails before they pare them. In honestly endeavouring 

 to realise this teaching of languages according to nature, we must set a machinery agoing, 

 somewhat in the following style : — 



1. Let the universities declare that they will tolerate no longer the figmentary and 

 hybrid pronunciation of Greek generally practised in this country, and that after five years 

 they will expect all entrants to the Greek classes to come to college with their ears well 

 exercised to understand any sequence of intelligible sentences on common matters, 

 whether in the style of Xenophon or of Tricoupi, according to the laws of Hellenic 

 orthoepy handed down to the present day from the Alexandrian grammarians and through 

 the continuous living traditions of the Greek people. 



2. That to every professorship of Greek in a Scottish university, and tutorship in 

 an English college, there shall be attached a practical class or classes, containing not 

 more than twenty-five students, to be superintended by a native Greek, and exercised 

 by him in the conversational use of the Greek language, and to be instructed in the 

 literary, political, and ecclesiastical history of Greece from the taking of Constantinople 

 to the present time. 



3. That all university libraries, reading-rooms, and students' unions shall be supplied 

 regularly with some Greek newspaper and literary periodical, to give them a living sense 

 of the continuity of Greek as a medium of expression for the political events and the social 

 interests of the hour. 



4. That all patriotic patrons of learning, specially the pious donors of bursaries and 

 exhibitions for students in the university, shall be invited to present £100 or £150 a 

 year to such hopeful young scholars as may be desirous to gain a living knowledge of the 



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



