54 EMERITUS PROFESSOR BLACKIE ON THE 



Greek tongue by residence in the country, and attendance on historical and philological 

 classes in the University of Athens, on condition that after six months they shall return 

 home and report progress to the Neo-Hellenic coadjutor of the Greek class in the 

 university to which they belong. 



The objections that may be made to such a reform in our method of teaching Greek, 

 so far as they are not founded on mere stolid conservatism, I have answered elsewhere, 

 and need not repeat here.* Suffice it to say that, while it is obvious to object to certain 

 points in the orthoepy of the living Greeks, on the ground that they have departed from 

 the ascertained classical norm, it is, on the other hand, impossible to restore for practical 

 purposes a consistent orthoepic scheme that shall apply to all literary Greek from 

 Pherecydes to Chrysostom. All living languages, by the very fact of their being alive, 

 undergo changes, proceeding gradually but surely to the development of certain favourite 

 tendencies in pronunciation ; and these changes must be accepted by those who study 

 the Greek language, just as the antepenultimate accent of a host of words in English is 

 now accepted in place of the oxytone accent which regulated these words in Chaucer's 

 verse ; and there can be no harm in scholars reading individual authors, say Sophocles or 

 Homer, in such orthoepic fashion as can be proved to have ruled the language in the days 

 of these authors ; but for general purposes the catholic tradition of the language must be 

 accepted wholesale, as indeed it was by the great scholars of the fifteenth century, before 

 Erasmus, in his haste to point out a few faults in a fair structure, left a chaos for a few 

 blind masons to heap up into a motley architecture at their will. No doubt there is 

 always a difficulty in getting people to change their bad habits in language, as in every- 

 thing else ; but this difficulty, rooted principally in ignorance or prejudice, in laziness or 

 in conceit, is not one which should appear so formidable to academical, as it so often does 

 to political rulers. Besides the advantages which will flow from a radical reform in this 

 matter, are such as will amply compensate for any trouble that a change of scholastic 

 habits may occasion ; for not only will a living familiarity with the length and breadth of 

 the Greek tongue be in this fashion acquired by the few who aspire to professional 

 scholarship in a fourth part of the time now spent in the acquisition of the same language 

 treated as a dead language, but hundreds of individuals desirous of the best culture, for 

 one that now can achieve such a result, will be able to shake hands with Plato, and to 

 hold parley with Aristotle, as intimately as they can do now with Cudworth, or Hegel, 

 or Immanuel Kant. The teaching of Greek will cease to be to scholastic, and become 

 popular at a bound. Nor are we to keep out of view the immense social advantage to 

 British tourists in this age of cheap and speedy intercourse, of being able to strengthen 

 the bonds of social communion with such an intelligent people as the Greeks. As little 

 should we make small account of the mighty lever which a friendly familiarity with 

 living Greek will put into the hands of our statesmen to cultivate political relations with 

 a people who command the coasts of the Archipelago and the Levant, and whose 



* On Greek Pronunciation: Accent and Quantity, Edinburgh, 1852; and Essays on Subjects of Moral and Social 

 Interest, Edinburgh, 1890, Appendix. 



