Linguistic Discussions. 



311 



ble the scunJ of har in barter. The first syllable of the word hury he pro- 

 nounces as we do the surname of Aaron Burr, and if you refer him to 

 the equivalent given in Webster (berry) he says, Yes, Webster sus- 

 tains my pronunciation, b-e-r-r-y — burry." In this country where 

 dictionaries are found in almost every house, where common schools 

 are almost universal, there is a difference of pronunciation sufficient 

 to indicate to the keen observer the native state of the speaker. In 

 England there is still greater difference in the pronunciation of the 

 mother tongue from Newcastle to Land's End. If this makes it a 

 delicate point for one to say what is the exact pronunciation of the 

 English language to-day, and if, as there is good reason to believe, no 

 man living can with certainty give the pronunciation of the English 

 language in the life time of Shakespeare, three hundred years ago, what 

 is the probability of recovering that of the Latin language, dead for 

 fifteen centuries, or only living in its offshoots — offshoots corrupted 

 by ages of mental darkness, intermixed with Teutonic, Gallic, Slavic, 

 and Arabic, and suffering violence from them all, while those who 

 spoke them were in turn trampled under foot of Goth and Hun, and 

 Teuton and Moor ? 



If the pronunciation of the Latin of the age of Augustus has been 

 lost to earth, so has that of the Greek of the time of Alcibiades. There 

 is a mild attempt to bulldoze the conservative portion of the United 

 States into the new system of pronouncing Latin and Greek. Outside 

 of the schools, the world receives the attack through the proper names 

 of the classics. Thus the hero of my lord Beaconsfield's last novel 

 must, as they claim, have its accent on the third syllable, Endymion, 

 (although that syllable is short both in Greek and Latin) because in 

 Greek the acute accent is placed over it. But the object of Greek ac- 

 centuation is all a mystery. No one knows, except to his own satis- 

 faction, what it means at all. It was not in use previous to the sixth 

 or seventh century, and all tradition of its introduction has been lost. 

 The modern Greeks employ the accent to point out the emphatic 

 syllable, but the modern Greeks do not pretend to have the pronun- 

 ciation of the classics, and would have to abandon their system to read 

 a line of Homer according to its rhythm. Subjected to the modern 

 system by accent, the grand old poem would be reduced to plain prose 

 with none of that rhythmical beautv that has charmed the world for 

 three thousand years. 



ETYMOLOGIES. 



And now let us turn our investigations in another direction : into 

 discussions of word changes, etymologies, and whatever of interest may 

 be found in the practical use of the language of our fathers. There is 



