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IV. — Adamantios Koraes, and his Reformation of the Greek Language. 

 By Emeritus Professor Blackie. 



(Read 5th May 1890. ) 



The appearance of a learned and exhaustive work on the life and labours of Koraes, 

 by a native Greek of great ability, naturally invites the scholars of Western Europe to a 

 grateful acknowledgment of the obligation of the Greek language to this most distinguished 

 of its modern exponents.* The fact, indeed, that Greek in this country is popularly 

 talked of as a dead language, and as such taught from books through the eye and the 

 understanding, rather than by living converse with those who speak it, may serve as an 

 apology for the general ignorance that prevails, even in professional circles, with regard 

 to the scholarly achievements of this remarkable man ; but the appearance of works of 

 such mark in the living literature of Greece as those of Thereianos, Paspates, Bikellas, 

 Polylas, and others, warns us that it is high time to take note of living Greece as living 

 Greece again, and give to the learned Grecians of the present day their proper share 

 in that homage which we pay so liberally to the great masters of Greek wisdom in 

 the past. 



Adamantios Koraes was born at Smyrna in 1748, the son of a Chiote merchant who 

 had removed from the island to the great centre of commerce on the Continent. As a 

 boy young Koraes was remarkable for his love of learning and his hatred of the Turks 

 as the enslavers and debasers of his people ; and having inherited a valuable library 

 from one of his maternal relatives, he found it necessary to acquire the Latin language, 

 in which all the famous commentaries on the great Greek classics had been composed. 

 This acquisition he made from the resident Dutch chaplain, Bernard Keun, with whom he 

 continued through life on terms of the most familiar intimacy. In the year 1772 he 

 went to Amsterdam to conduct his father's business in that city ; but neither then nor 

 ever afterwards did he show any inclination for a mercantile life ; on the contrary, the 

 main fruit of his residence there, which lasted for some years, was to introduce him to 

 the great scholars of the Dutch school, and send him back to the East as great a master 

 of German as he had formerly been of Latin. In 1782, in his thirty-fourth year, turning 

 his back finally on the mercantile life, he went to Montpellier in France, then the seat of 

 a famous medical school, and took his degree of Doctor of Medicine there with marked 

 honour. In 1788, in his fortieth year, he removed to Paris, where he remained through 

 life, occupied with a scholarly work, for which the rich stores of the libraries in that centre 

 of wit and culture offered him abundant opportunity. Like many great scholars, he was 



* ~AhxjLixi/rio; Koaa'/is vnzo A. Qt^axvov • in Te^yiam roftot t^us, 1889. The book may be obtained gratis by appli- 

 cation to the 'Ett/tjox^ tou 0'tx.ovofiiiov x.'hyi^oioT'/ifiixTog, Trieste. 



VOL. XXXVI. PART I. (NO. 4). L 



