399 
of Edinburgh, Session 1864 - 65 . 
which the living G-reeks with so much reason complain, and which, 
in my opinion, it is the duty of philologers, as it now is to a large 
extent in their power, to remove. 
III. In this haphazard creation of a modern pronunciation of 
Greek according to individual conceit all nations fared ill, but the 
English by far the worst ; for they flung the whole basketful of 
their phonic anomalies into the Greek grammar, and produced a 
jargon as like Greek as French would be spoken by a Cockney who 
had never shown himself beyond the sound of the Bow Bells in 
Cheapside. The Scotch, partly by following the analogy of their 
own musical Doric dialect — partly from old hajbits of familiar inter- 
course with Continental scholars not under English influence — 
contrived to preserve a pronunciation of Greek as far as possible 
removed from the barbarous innovations of their English neigh- 
bours, and conformable in some most important respects to the 
acknowledged practice of the Greeks in the classical periods. 
lY. Specially it can be proved by a very distinct passage in 
Dionysius of Halicarnassus — a rhetorician by profession in the age 
of Augustus Ceesar (Trept crw^eVews 6vop.dro)v, ch. XI Y.) — that the 
whole series of the vowels a e t o v is pronounced by the Scotch, as 
by all the Continental nations, correctly, with the single exception 
of V, which in some parts of Scotland is confounded with oo, and 
not according to the perfect analogy supplied by the native words 
guid, Uuid, as these words are pronounced by the best speakers of 
the Scottish dialect, corresponding to the sound of u in German, as 
in Buline, Bruder, &c. It is also certain that the pronunciation of 
the diphthong ov practised by the English is contrary alike to the 
whole traditions of philology and to the most marked characteristic 
of the Greek language. All scholars recognise oo as the only legi- 
timate pronunciation of that most musical of the diphthongs. 
Y. About the pronunciation of the other diphthongs in the strictly 
classical — that is, the Athenian — period, great doubt prevails ; but 
there is good evidence to show that at was pronounced like the 
same diphthong in the English word vain, and et like this diphthong 
in the English word receive, at Alexandria in the time of Calli- 
machus, about two hundred years before Christ. Any attempt to 
reconstruct the Attic orthoepy of the diphthongs on the principle 
suggested by Erasmus, of showing how they ought to be pronounced 
