THE PRONUNCIATION OF GREEK, &c.
It is purely as a practical man, and with a direct practical result in view, that I venture to put forth a few words on the vexed question of thePronunciation of Greek. He were a frigid pedant, indeed, who, with the whole glorious literature of Hellas before him, and the rich vein of Hellenic Archæology, scarcely yet opened in Scotland, should, for the mere gratification of a subtle speculative restlessness, walk direct into this region of philological thorns. So far as my personal curiosity was concerned, Sir John Cheke, wrapt in his many folded mantle of Ciceronian verboseness, and the Right Reverend Stephen Gardiner’s prætorian edicts in favour of Greek sounds,[1]and the βή ϐή of the old comedian’s Attic sheep, might have beenallowed to sleep undisturbed on the library shelves. I had settled the question long ago in my own mind on broad grounds of common sense, rather than on any nice results that seemed obtainable from the investigations of the learned; but the nature of the public duties now imposed on me does not allow me to take my own course in such matters, merely because I think it right. I must shew to the satisfaction of my fellow-teachers and of my students, that I am not seeking after an ephemeral notoriety by the public galvanisation of a dead crotchet; that any innovations which I may propose are in reality, as so often happens in the political world also, and in the ecclesiastical, a mere recurrence to the ancient and established practice of centuries, and that whatever opinions I may entertain on points confessedly open to debate, I entertain not for myself alone, but in company with some of the ripest scholars and profoundest philologists of modern times. I have reason also for thinking with a recent writer, that the present time is peculiarly favourable for the reconsideration of thequestion;[2]for, although Sir John Cheke might have said with some show of truth in his day, “Græca jam lingua nemini patria est,”[3]none but a prophetic partisan of universal Russian domination in the Mediterranean will now assert, that the living Greeks are not a nation and a people who have a right to be heard on the question, how their own language is to be pronounced. Taking the Greek language as it appears in the works of the learned commentator Corais, in the poetry of the Soutzos and Rangabe, in the history of Perrhæbus, so highly spoken of by Niebuhr, and in the publications of the daily press at Athens; and taking the new kingdom for no greater thing than the intrigues of meddling diplomatists, its own wretched cabals, and the guns of Admiral Parker will allow it to be; it is plain that to disregard the witness of such a speaking fact, standing as it does upon the unbroken tradition and catholic philological succession of eighteen centuries, would be, much more manifestly now than in the days of the learnedWetsten, to “exercise a despotism over a free language,” such as no man has a right to claim.[4]Besides, in Scotland we have already had our orthodox hereditaryroutine in this matter disturbed by the invasion of English teachers of the Greek language; an invasion, no doubt, which our strong national feeling may look on with jealousy, but which we brought on ourselves by the shameful condition of prostration in which we allowed the philological classes in our higher schools and colleges to lie for two centuries; and it was not to be expected that these English teachers, being placed in a position which enabled them to give the law within a certain influential circle, should sacrifice their own traditional pronunciation of the Greek language, however arbitrary, to ours, in favour of which, in some points, there was little but the mere conservatism of an equally arbitrary usage to plead. Finding matters in this condition, I feel it impossible for me to waive the discussion of a matter already fermenting with all the elements of uncertainty. I have therefore taken the trouble of working my way through Havercamp’s two volumes, and comparing the arguments used in the famous old Cantabrigian controversy with those advanced by a well-informed modern member of the same learned corporation. I have taken the learned Germans, too, as in duty bound, on such a question, into my counsels; Ihave devoted not a little time and attention to the language and literature of modern Greece; and above all, I have carefully examined those places of the ancient rhetoricians and grammarians that touch upon the various branches of the subject. With all these precautions, if I shall not succeed in making converts to my views, I hope, at least with reasonable men, to escape the imputation of rashness and superficiality.
The exact history of our present pronunciation of Greek, both in England and Scotland, I have not learning enough curiously to trace; but one thing seems to me plain, that all the great scholars in this country, and on the continent generally, in the fifteenth, and the early part of the sixteenth century, could have known nothing of our present arbitrary method of pronouncing;[5]for they could pronounce Greek no other way than as they received it from Chrysoloras, Gaza, Lascaris, Musurus, and the other native Greeks who were their masters. Erasmus was, if not absolutely the first,[6]certainly the first scholar of extensive European influence and popularity who ventured to disturb the tradition of the Byzantine elders in this matter; but his famous dialogue,De recta Latini Græcique sermonispronuntiatione, did not appear till the year 1528, by which time so strong a prescription had already run in favour of the received method, that it seems strange how even his learning and wit should have prevailed to overturn it. But there are periods in the history of the world when the minds of men are naturally disposed to receive all sorts of novelties; and the era of the Reformation was one of them. Erasmus, though a conservative in religion, (as many persons are who are conservative in nothing else,) pleased his free speculative whim with all sorts of imaginations; and among other things fell—though,if what Wetsten tells be true, in a very strange way[7]—on the notion of purging the pronunciation of the classical languages of all those defects which belonged to it, whether by degenerate tradition or perverse provincialism, and erecting in its stead an ideal pronunciation, made up of erudite conjecture and philosophical argumentation. Nothing was more easy than to prove that in the course of two thousand years the orthoepy of the language of the Greeks had declined considerably from the perfection in which its musical fulness had rolled like a river of gold from the mouth of Plato, or had been dashed like a thunderbolt of Jove from the indignant lips of Demosthenes; yet more easy was it, and admirable game for such a fine spirit as Erasmus, to evoke the shades of Cicero and Quinctilian, and make mirth to them out of a Latin oration delivered before the Emperor Maximilian, by a twittering French courtier and a splay-mouthed Westphalian baron.[8]It is certain also that there are in that dialogue many admirable observations on the blundering practices of the schoolmasters, and eventhe learned professors, his contemporaries, which very many of them in that day, and the great majority even now have wanted either sense or courage to attend to; observations which, I doubt not, will yet bear fruit in the present age, if education is to be advanced in the only way possible, viz., by those whose profession it is to teach others, learning in the first place to teach themselves. But in one great point of his rich and various discourse, the learned Dutchman was more witty than wise, and achieved a success where he was altogether wrong, or only half-right, that has been denied to him where he is altogether right. While his admirable observations on accent and quantity, and many of his precepts on the practical art of teaching languages, have been totally lost sight of by the great mass of our classical teachers, his strictures on the pronunciation of the Greek vowels and diphthongs have been received more or less by pedagogic men in all parts of Europe; or at least prevailed so far as to shake the faith of scholars in the pronunciation of the native Greek, and lead them to invent a new and arbitrary Hellenic utterance for each country, an altogether barbarous conglomerate, made up of modern national peculiarities and scraps of Erasmian philology. This is a sorry state of matters; but asEuropean scholarship then stood, innovators could look for no more satisfactory result. Neither Erasmus nor the scholars who followed his “divisive courses” in England and other countries, were in possession of philological materials sufficiently comprehensive for settling so nice a point. Much less could they use the materials in their hands with that spirit of calm philosophic survey, and that touch of fine critical sagacity which the ripe scholars of Germany now exhibit. It was one thing to quarrel learnedly with the pronunciation of Chrysoloras, and to chuckle with academic pride over the tautophonic tenuity of σὺ δ’ εἶπέ μοι μὴ μῆκος, and other such ingeniously gathered scraps of Atticism in the mouth of a modern Turkish serf; another, and a far more serious thing, to draw out a complete table of elocutionary sounds, such as they existed at any given period in Greek literature; say at the successive epochs of Homer, Æschylus, Plato, Callimachus, Strabo, Chrysostom. Bishop Gardiner, therefore, was right to press this point hard against the Erasmians,—“Quod vero difficillimum dicebam neque statuis neque potes, ut tanquam ad punctum constituas sonorum modum. Ab usu præsente manifeste recedis: sed an ad veterum sonorum formam omnino accedas, nihil expeditum est.” Here, as in more serious matters, the good Bishop saw that it was easier to destroy thanto build up; and therefore he interposed his interdict despotically in the Roman style,ne quid detrimenti respublica capiat. But these maxims of old Roman aristocracy do not apply to the democracy of letters. So the Bishop’s philological thunderbolt started more heretics than it laid. The love of liberty was now conjoined with the love of originality; to speak Greek with Erasmus became now the sign of academic patriotism and the watchword of philological progress.Forcebeing the chief apparent power on the one side, it was naturally felt by those against whom it was exercised, thatREASONwas altogether on their side. The matter was therefore practically settled on the side of persecuted innovation; the subtlety of a few academic doctors triumphed proudly over the long tradition of Byzantine centuries, and the living protest of millions of men, with Greek blood in their veins and Greek words in their mouths; and they who were once the few despised Nazarenes of the scholastic world, are now a sort of philological Scribes and Pharisees, sitting in the seat of Aristarchus, whose dictum it is dangerous to dispute.
Nevertheless, Erasmus, Wetsten distinctly asserts, (pp. 15, 115,) did not himself adopt in his practice the perfect theory of Hellenic vocalization which he sketched out. So much the less cause is there forour having any hesitation in considering the whole question as now open, and treating it exactly as if Professor John Cheke, and Professor Thomas Smith of Cambridge University, and Adolphus Mekerchus, knight and perpetual senator of Bruges, and the other Havercampian hoplites had never existed. Let us inquire, therefore, in the first place, whether any certain data exist on which such a matter can be settled scientifically. We shall give only the grand outlines of the question, referring the special student to the English work ofPenningtonalready quoted, the German work ofLiskov, and the Latin ofSeyffarth.[9]
Now, there are five ways by which the method of pronunciation used by any gone generation of “articulate-speaking men” may be ascertained, if not with a curious exactness in every point, at least with such an amount of approximation as will be esteemed satisfactory by a reasonable inquirer.First, we have the imitation in articulate letters of natural sounds and of the cries of animals. There is nothing more certain in the philosophy of language than that whole classes of words expressive of sound were formed on theprinciple of a direct dramatic imitation of the sound signified. Thus the wordsdash,hash,smash, in our most significant Saxon tongue, evidently express an action producing sound, in which the strong vowel sound ofais combined with a sharp sound to which the aspiratedswas considered the nearest approximation by the original framer of the word. So, in the names expressive of flowing water, the liquidslandrare observed to preponderate in all languages, these being the sounds which are actually given forth by the natural objects so signified: thusriver, ῤέω,strom,flumen,purl, the Hebrewnaharandnahal, &c. And in the same manner, if the bird which we callcuckoowas called by the Latinscuculus, by the Greeks κόκκυξ, and by the Germanskukuk, no person can doubt that the vowel sounds at least, in these words, were intended to be a more or less exact echo of the cry of the bird so designated. In arguing, however, from such words, care must be taken not to press the argument too closely; for two things are manifest—that the original framer of the words might have given, and in all likelihood did give only a loose, and not a curiously exact imitation of the sound or cry he meant to express; and then that in the course of centuries the word may have deviated so far from its original pronunciation, as to be nolonger a very striking likeness of the natural sound it is intended to imitate. These considerations explain the fact how the very simple and obvious cry made by sheep, which no child will mistake, is expressed by three very different vowels, in three of the most notable European languages,—our ownbleat, the Latinbalare, and the Greek βληχή, pronounced likeainmate, according to the practice of the Greeks in the classical age. From such words, therefore, no safe conclusion can be drawn as to the pronunciation of any particular word at any particular period of a highly advanced civilization. It is different, however, with words not forming any part of the spoken system of articulate speech, but invented expressly for the occasion, in order to represent by way of echo certain natural sounds. In this way, should we find in an old Athenian spelling-book this sentence, “the sheep criesΒή,” we should be most justly entitled to conclude, if not that the GreekBwas pronounced exactly like the corresponding letter in our alphabet, (for the consonants are less easily fixed down in such imitations of inarticulate cries,) certainly thatHhad the sound of ourai; and this conclusion would be irresistible if other arguments were at hand, such as will presently be mentioned, leading plainly to the same conclusion. Here, however,also, care must be taken not to generalize too largely; for, strictly speaking, the inference from such a fact as the one supposed, is only that at the particular time and place where the said book was composed, a particular vowel sounded to the ear of the writer in a particular way; the proof remaining perfectly open that at some other place during the same period, or at the same place fifty years later, the same vowel may have been pronounced in a perfectly different way.[10]. Those who are at all acquainted with the style of reasoning on such points, exemplified in almost every page of Havercamp’s Collection, will see the necessity of applying at every step of their progress the rein of a strictly logical restraint.
Another and a most scientific way by which we may recover the traces of a lost orthoepy, is from the physiological description of the action of the organs of speech in producing the sounds belonging to certain letters, as preserved in the works of grammatical or rhetoricalwriters. This method of proof, taken by itself, may, no doubt, fail of giving complete satisfaction in delicate cases; for it is extremely difficult to give such an exact description of the action of the organs of speech as will enable a student of an unknown language to reproduce the sound, without the assistance of the living voice. But, taken along with other circumstances, the proof from this source may be so strong as absolutely to force conviction; or at all events imperatively to exclude certain suppositions, which, without the existence of such a description, would have been admissible. Now, it happens most fortunately for our present inquiry, that a very satisfactory scale of the Greek vowel-sounds is extant in the works of the well-known historian and critic Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who lived in the time of Augustus Cæsar. This we shall quote at length immediately; and as the author was a professional rhetorician, no higher authority on such a point, for the epoch to which he belongs, can be wished for.[11]
Again, a very large and various field of proof lies in those instances of the direct transference of the sounds of one language into those ofanother, which literary composition sometimes requires, and which are sure to occur very frequently in an extensive literature like the Greek. Examples of this are most common in the case of proper names, and occur especially in translations, as in the ancient translations of the Hebrew Bible and of the New Testament, which have been admirably used for the illustration of Greek orthoepy in the work of Seyffarth. When Strabo, for instance, (p. 213,) in the case given by Pennington, (p. 73,) says of the inhabitants of the newly colonized town of Como in Upper Italy,—Νεο κωμῖται ἐκλήθησαν ἅπαντες· τοῦτο δὲ μεθερμηνευθὲν Νο ϐουμκώμουμ λέγεται, we learn that the diphthong ου was considered by an intelligent scientific man in the time of Augustus, as being either the exact equipollent of the Latinu, or the nearest approximation to it within the compass of Hellenic vocalization; and when we are told further that the modern Greeks and the modern Italians pronounce the same vowels the same way even now, we cannot for a moment doubt that the method of pronouncing that Greek diphthong now practised in Scotland (as inboom) is the correct one. From the same passage we may legitimately draw the inference, with regard to the second letter in the Greek alphabet, that it was in all probability pronouncedsoftly like ourv; for ourbis no representative whatever of the Latinv, whether we suppose that letter to have been pronounced like the corresponding letter with us, or like ourw. The modern Germans, in the same way, who have not our sound ofw, substitute for it in their language the sound ofvregularly, as inwasser, which they pronounceVASSER, and many such words. If, therefore, an ancient Greek wished to express the letterv, and does so by his ownB, the inference is irresistible, either that hisBwas pronounced like ourv, and was viewed as the exact expression of the Latin letter so pronounced, or as an approximation to it, if pronounced like ourw; or, on the other hand, that the Greek organ being utterly incapable of pronouncing the soft sound of the Latinv, and having no letter or combination of letters capable of expressing it, gave up the attempt in despair, and wrote the soft Latinvwith a hard GreekB. But this supposition is improbable, for three reasons:First, because the general character of the Greek language, as contrasted with the Roman, was not that of blunt hardness but of liquid softness, (seeQuinctilianandCicero,passim;)Secondly, the ancient Greeks, in fact, had a combination of letters by which they could express in an approximate way the Latinv, namely, ου, and by which they actually did so express it onmany occasions;Thirdly, the modern Greeks likewise do pronounce the second letter of the alphabet like the Latinv; and the burden of proof lies on those who assert that the ancients pronounced it otherwise.
A fourth method of proof lies in the remarks made on the identical or cognate sounds of syllables, either incidentally by general writers, or specially by grammarians in treating orthography and orthoepy; and in the accidental interchange of letters in inscriptions and coins. Of the strictly grammatical kind of evidence a very valuable fragment has been preserved in the Ἐπιμερισμοί of Herodian, the Priscian of the Greek grammarians, published by Boissonnade in 1817. In this work are alphabetically arranged large classes of words, which, while they are pronounced with the same vowel to the ear, are differently spelt to the eye; as if I should say in English that the vowel-sounds in the wordsfair,fare,heir,there, have the same or a similar orthoepy, but a very different orthography. Of the other, or incidental kind, may be mentioned those plays of sound with which epigrammatic writers sometimes amuse themselves, and of which the echo-poems found in some of the collections of modern Latin, are the most notable example. Thus, Erasmus, in ridicule of the Ciceronians,wrote two lines, of which the first, a hexameter, ends withCicerone, the ablative case of the great orator’s Latin name, while the second line, a pentameter, striking the ear as a sort of echo of the first, ends with the Greek word ὄνε,O you ass!from which significant jingle the inference is ready enough, that the penultimate syllable of both these words, in the classical pronunciation of Erasmus, was accented, and that the sound of the vowel in both was the same. The proof, of course, in such a case would have been equally complete if the word in the second line had been spelt with a different vowel instead of with the same.
Fifthly, In determining the pronunciation of any language at any past period of its history, its presently existing pronunciation, though furnishing no absolute proof, is entitled to be taken into account along with other circumstances, and in the absence of any distinct evidence to the contrary, must be taken as conclusive. Erasmus appealed with great success to the vanity of academic men, when he said, with reference to the common Greek pronunciation in his day, “Pronuntiationem, quam nunc habent eruditi, non aliunde petunt quam a vulgo, scis quali magistro;” but to this a learned advocate of the existing Itacism very wisely replies, that even supposing it weretrue that the vulgar pronunciation of Greek comes to us only from thevulgar, the common people, as is well known, are generally far more tenacious of hereditary national accent than the upper classes of society;[12]of which we have a familiar English example in the case of the stout Yorkshiremen, who have preserved for two thousand years the deep hollow sound ofu, (sayingOol, forHull, &c.,) which is the normal sound of that vowel in all the European languages. In this view it is passing strange to note, that the slender sound of the first syllable of ἡμέρα, as if writtenheeméra, which is the rule with the modern Greeks, is the precise sound, that in a passage of Plato is noted as the ancient sound, compared with the fuller sound,haiméra, fashionable in his day;[13]while Aristophanes[14]in one of his plays, introduces a conservative old Spartan lady saying ἵκει, instead of ἥκει; a distinct proof both that η was not considered identical with ι in his day, and that it was then sounded as it is now, by one of the most ancient people in the Pelasgic peninsula.
Such appear to me to be the methods of proof that lie open to aninquirer into the orthoepy of any language, living or dead, at any given period of its history. With these, of course, the student must combine such general rules on the philosophy of language, and on the habits of human speech, as a little experience of practical philology will readily supply. I now proceed to state the results to which I have arrived, by a thorough study of the existing evidences. After that we shall make our practical inference, and answer a few natural objections.
In the shape of results, therefore, all that my present purely practical purpose requires me to lay down, with regard to ancient Greek vocalization, may be combined in the following two propositions—
Proposition I.—It is demonstrably certain that the method of pronouncing the vowels and diphthongs generally practised in England and Scotland, especially in England, since the days of Sir John Cheke,—that is from about the middle of the sixteenth century—is doubtful in many points, and in not a few most important points directly opposed to the whole stream of ancient authority and tradition. It is in fact in a great measure conjectural, arbitrary, and capricious.
Proposition II.—It is equally certain that the modern Greeks have declined in several most important points from the purity of Hellenic orthoepy, as practised in the most classic times; but many of the striking peculiarities of the modern pronunciation can be traced back, with more or less uniformity, to a period not far removed from the most flourishing period of Greek literature, a period certainly when pure Greek was both a spoken and a written language, and preserving such a living organic power, as entitled it by a spontaneous impulse from within to modify the laws of its own orthoepy.
Both these propositions, so far as the vowels are concerned, are proved by a single glance at the passage of Dionysius (περὶ συντάξεως) already referred to, and which I shall now translate:—
“There are seven vowels; two long, η and ω, and two short, ε and ο; three both long and short, α, ι, υ. All these are pronounced by the wind-pipe acting on the breath, while the mouth remains in its simple natural state, and the tongue remaining at rest takes no part in the utterance. Now, the long vowels, and those which may be either long or short, when they are used as long, are pronounced with the stream of breath, extended and continuous; but the short vowels, and those used as short, are uttered by a stroke of the mouth cut off immediately onemission, the wind-pipe exerting its power only for the shortest time. Of all these, the most agreeable sounds are produced by the long vowels, and those which are used as long, because their sound continues for a considerable time, and they do not suddenly break off the energy of the breath. Of an inferior value are the short vowels, and those used as short, because the volume of sound in them is small and broken. Of the long again, the most sonorous is the α, when it is used as long, for it is pronounced by opening the mouth to the fullest, while the breath strikes the palate. The next is η, because in its formation, while the mouth is moderately open, the sound is driven out from below at the mouth of the tongue, and keeping in that quarter does not strike upwards. Next comes the ω, for in it the mouth is rounded, and contracts the lips, and the stroke of the mouth is sent against the extreme end of the mouth, (ἀκροστόμιον, the lips, I presume.) Inferior to this is the υ, for in this vowel an observable contraction takes place in the extreme region of the lips, so that the sonorous breath comes out attenuated and compressed. Last of all comes ι, for here the stroke of the breath takes place about the teeth, while the opening of the mouth is small, and the lips contribute nothing towards giving the sound more dignity as it passes through. Of the short vowels, neither is sonorous; but o is the least agreeable, for it parts the mouth more than the other, and receives the stroke nearer the wind-pipe.”
Now, while every point of this physiological description may not be curiously accurate,[15]there is enough of obvious certainty in it to settle some of the most important points of Greek orthoepy, so far as the rhetorician of Halicarnassus is concerned; and his authority in this matter is that of a man of the highest skill, which, as the daily practice of our law courts shows, is worth that of a thousand persons taken at random. That theItacismof the modern Greeks did not exist, or was not allowed by good speakers[16]in the time of this writer, so far as the single vowels are concerned, is abundantly manifest; for not only do η, ι, υ, which the modern Greeks identify, mean different sounds, but the sound of the η in particular is removed as far from the ι as it could well be in any scale of vocalization, which sets out with the supremacy of the broada. And if these sounds were distinguishedby polished ears in the days of Augustus Cæsar, it is contrary to all analogy of language to suppose that in the days of Alexander the Great, Plato, or Pericles, they should have been confounded. Provincialisms, indeed, and certain itacizing peculiarities, such as that noticed by Plato, (page 24 above), there might have been; but that any language should confound its vowel-sounds in its best days, and distinguish them in its days of commencing feebleness, is contrary to all that succession of things which we daily witness. Different letters were originally invented to express different sounds, and did so naturally for a long time, till fashion and freak combined with habit, either overran the phonetic rule of speech by a rank growth of exceptive oddities, (as has happened in English,) or fixed upon the organs of articulation some strong tendency towards the predominance of a particular sound, which in process of time became a marked idiosyncrasy, from which centuries of supervening usage could not shake the language free. This is what has taken place in Greece with regard to certain vowel-sounds. But before pursuing these observations further, let us see distinctly what the special points are, that this remarkable passage of the Halicarnassian distinctly brings out. The ascertained points are these,—
1. The long or slender sound of the Englisha, (as inlane,) is not acknowledged by Dionysius, nor is its existence possible under his description. It is altogether an anomaly and a monstrosity—like so many things in this island—and should never have been tolerated for a moment in the pronunciation of Latin or Greek.[17]2. The slender sound of η used by the English and the modern Greeks, is an attenuation the farthest possible removed from the conception of Dionysius. About ε there is no dispute anywhere.3. The sound of υ described is manifestly the Frenchu, or Germanüheard inBrüder,Bühne: a very delicate and elegant sound bordering closely on the slender sound ofi, (ee, English,) into which it is sometimes attenuated by the Germans, and with which, by a poetical license, it is allowed to rhyme, (asBrüder—nieder,) but having no connection with theEnglish sound ofoo, (as inboom,) with which, in Scotland, it is confounded. This with us is the more unpardonable, as our Doric dialect in the south possesses a similar sound in such words asguid,bluid, attenuated by the Northerns into the slender sound ofgueed, andbleed. The English sound of longuis, as Walker has pointed out, a compound sound, of which one element is a sort of consonant—y. It is, besides, altogether a piece of English idiosyncrasy, that we have no reason to suppose ever existed anywhere, either amongst Greeks or Romans.[18]4. The English sound ofiis another of John Bull’s phonetic crotchets, and must be utterly discarded. It is, in fact, a compound sound, of which the deep vowel α is the predominant element—an element which, we have seen, stands at the very opposite end of the Halicarnassian’s scale!
1. The long or slender sound of the Englisha, (as inlane,) is not acknowledged by Dionysius, nor is its existence possible under his description. It is altogether an anomaly and a monstrosity—like so many things in this island—and should never have been tolerated for a moment in the pronunciation of Latin or Greek.[17]
2. The slender sound of η used by the English and the modern Greeks, is an attenuation the farthest possible removed from the conception of Dionysius. About ε there is no dispute anywhere.
3. The sound of υ described is manifestly the Frenchu, or Germanüheard inBrüder,Bühne: a very delicate and elegant sound bordering closely on the slender sound ofi, (ee, English,) into which it is sometimes attenuated by the Germans, and with which, by a poetical license, it is allowed to rhyme, (asBrüder—nieder,) but having no connection with theEnglish sound ofoo, (as inboom,) with which, in Scotland, it is confounded. This with us is the more unpardonable, as our Doric dialect in the south possesses a similar sound in such words asguid,bluid, attenuated by the Northerns into the slender sound ofgueed, andbleed. The English sound of longuis, as Walker has pointed out, a compound sound, of which one element is a sort of consonant—y. It is, besides, altogether a piece of English idiosyncrasy, that we have no reason to suppose ever existed anywhere, either amongst Greeks or Romans.[18]
4. The English sound ofiis another of John Bull’s phonetic crotchets, and must be utterly discarded. It is, in fact, a compound sound, of which the deep vowel α is the predominant element—an element which, we have seen, stands at the very opposite end of the Halicarnassian’s scale!
So far as we see, therefore, the English, Scotch, and modern Greek methods of pronouncing the five vowels all depart in some point fromthe highest authority that can be produced on the subject; in fact, the single vowel ω alone has preserved its full rounded purity uncorrupted by any party. But with regard to the other four vowels, there is a marked difference in the degree of deflection from the classical norm; for, while the Scotch err only in one point, υ, the modern Greeks err in two, η and υ, (though their error is but a very nice one in the case of υ, and has, in both cases, long centuries of undeviating usage to stand on,) and the English err in all the four points, α, η, ι, and υ, and that in the most paradoxical and abnormal fashion that could have been invented, had it been the direct purpose of our Oxonian and Etonian doctors to put all classical propriety at defiance. In such lawless anarchy has ended the restoration of the divine speech of Plato, so loftily promised by Sir John Cheke; and so true in this small matter also, is that wise parable of the New Testament, which advises reformers to beware of putting new patches on old vestments. Instead of the robe of genuine Melibean purple which Erasmus wished to throw round the shoulders of the old Greek gods, our English scholars, following in his track of conjectural innovation, have produced an English clown’s motley jacket, which the Zeus of Olympus never saw, and even Momus would disdain. But let us proceed to the diphthongs.
Unhappily Dionysius, by a very unaccountable omission, has given us no information on this head; so we are left to pursue our inquiries over a wide field of stray inquiry, and conclude from a greater mass of materials with much less appearance of scientific certainty. The following results, however, to any man that will fairly weigh the cumulative power of the evidence brought together with such laborious conscientiousness by Liscov and Seyffarth, must appear unquestionable:—
1. It is proved by evidence reaching as far back as the time of the first Ptolemies, that the diphthongaiwas pronounced like the same diphthong in our English wordgain.[19]So the diphthong is pronounced by the living Greek nation. There is, therefore, the evidence of more than 2000 years in its favour, and against the prevalent pronunciation, which gives it the broad sound ofaiin the German wordkaiser, rhyming pretty nearly with our English wordwiser.
2. The diphthongeiwas pronounced in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus like the Englisheeinseen, oreainbeam.[20]This pronunciation it retains at the present day. In this, as in the preceding case, we have a striking proof of the tenacity with which a great nation clings to elocutional peculiarities. What likelihood is there that a people, so constant to itself for 2000 years under the most adverse circumstances, should, in the 200 years previous to that period, have known nothing of what was afterwards one of its most marked characteristics?
3. The evidence for the pronunciation of the diphthong ΟΙ is more scanty. Unfortunately the Septuagint translators use this diphthong only once for expressing a Hebrew name in the whole compass of the Old Testament. From other evidence, and by a train of deduction that appears somewhat slippery, Seyffarth comes to the conclusion that its original pronunciation was probably that of the Germanoe, from which it was by degrees softened into the Frenchu, and lastly into the slender sound ofi(ee), which it now has. But as I am dealing with certainties in this paper, and not with probabilities, it will be enough to say thatLiscovhas produced evidence to shew that it was confounded withiso early as the time of Julius Cæsar,ΙΩΝΙΣΤΗΣbeing found on a coin of the great dictator for οἰωνιστής. So in the coins of Emperors of the second century,ΟΙΚΟΣΤΟΥfrequently occurs for εἰκοστοῦ.[21]That λοιμός was not pronounced exactly like λιμός in the time of Thucydides, has been concluded from a well-known passage in his second book, (c. 54;) but the passage is of doubtful interpretation,[22]and no man can tell at this time of day what the exact, perhaps a very small shade of, difference, was between the two sounds.
4. In the above three examples, the Scotch and the English have equally conspired to overthrow the living tradition of two centuries, by an act of arbitrary academical conceit or pedagogic carelessness. In the caseofou, we Northerns have again been happy; while the English, with their fatal facility of blundering in such matters, have invented a pronunciation of this diphthong which seems more natural to a growling Saxon mastiff than to the smooth fulness of ancient Greek eloquence. The Greek writers, with great uniformity, agree in expressing by this diphthong the sound of the Latinu; while the modern Greeks, with equal uniformity, agree in pronouncing their ου as the Italians pronounceu; that is to say, like the Englishooinboom. Seyffarth classes this diphthong withaandi,oande, as a sound about which there is no controversy.
5. The diphthongsAUandEUfollow; and in their case the contrast between the pronunciation of the living Greeks, and that of those who are taught only out of dead grammars and dictionaries, is so striking, that the contest has been peculiarly keen. Here, however, as is wont to be the case in more important matters, it may be that after much dusty discussion, erudite wrangling, and inky hostility, it shall turn out that both parties are in the right. On the first blush of the matter, it seems plain that such words as βασιλεύς, ναῦν, καλεῦνται, sound extremely harsh, and notaccording to the famous euphony of the Attic ear, if in them the second letter of the diphthong receive the consonantal sound ofvorfgiven by the modern Greeks.Vasilefs, Nafn, Calefntae—these are sounds which no chaste classic ear can tolerate, and which, among the phenomena of human articulation, are more naturally classed with such harsh Germanisms asPfingst,Probst, &c., than with any sound that can be imagined to have been wedded euphoniously to Apollo’s lute. All this is very true; and yet, as modern German is not all harsh, so ancient Greek, it may be, was not all mellow; and no mere general talk about euphony or cacophony can, in so freakish a thing as human speech, be allowed to settle any question of orthoepy. Now, when we look into the matter an inch beyond the film of such shallow scholastic declamation, we find that so early as the time of Crassus, that is, in the first half of the first century before the Christian era, the diphthongau, which we pronounceou, (as inbound,) and the English like the same vowel in their own language, (as invault,) was actually enunciated consonantally likeavoraf. For Cicero (Divinat. ii. 40) tells the anecdote how, when that unfortunate soldier was on his way to the East, and about embarking in a ship at Brundusium, he happened to meet a Greek on the quay calling outCaunias!by which call the basketslung over his shoulder might have plainly indicated that he meantFigs!figs of the best quality (worthy of a triumvir) from Caunus, in the south-west corner of Asia Minor; but the triumvir’s ear—dark destiny brooding in his soul—caught up the syllables separately, asCav’ ne eas—Beware how you go!Now, as no person pretends that thevincaveowas pronounced like theuincausa, or could be so scanned in existing Latin poetry, it follows that theauin Caunias was pronounced by a Greek of those times as avorf, exactly as the living Greeks pronounce it now. This is one example, among the many that we have adduced, shewing in a particularly striking way how impossible it is for modern schoolmasters, judging from mere abstract considerations, and bad scholastic habits, to say how the ancient Greeks might or might not have pronounced any particular combination of sounds. No doubt this Calabrian fig-merchant might not have pronounced that combination of letters exactly in the same way that Pericles did 400 years earlier, when, from the tribunal on the Athenian Pnyx, with the ominous roar of a thirty years’ war in his ear, “he lightened and thundered and confounded Greece;” but there is no reason, on the other hand, why a Greek fig-merchant and a Greek statesman should not havepronounced certain rough syllables in the same way, (for a great orator requires rough as well as smooth syllables;) and this much at least is certain, the anecdote proves that the modern pronunciation of αὐτός,aftos, is ancient as well as modern; and the talk of those who will have it that this, and other most characteristic sounds of the living orthoepy, were introduced by the Turks and the Venetians, or the Greeks themselves under their perverse influence, is mere talk—talk of that kind in which scholastic men are fond of indulging, when, knowing nothing, they wish to have it appear that they know everything. What was the real state of the pronunciation with regard to this and the other diphthong ευ in the days of Pericles or Plato, we have no means of knowing. Meanwhile the result which Seyffarth, after a long and learned investigation, brings out, that they were pronounced before a vowel asv, or the Germanw, and before a consonant as a real diphthong, seems probable enough. This agrees both with the natural laws of elocutional physiology, and explains how the imperial nameFlaviusin Roman coins (Liscov, p. 51) came to be written sometimesΦΛΑΥΙΟΣand sometimesΦΛΑΒΙΟΣ. However this be, there is no doubt that the consonantalpronunciation of these letters has for more than 1800 years been known among the Greeks. It has therefore all the claims that belong to a venerable conservatism; whereas, if we reject its title, we throw ourselves loose into an element of mere conjecture; as no person can tell us whether Demosthenes pronounced αυ in the Scotch or English way, (supposing one of the two to be right;) and as for ευ, what extraordinary feats the human tongue can play with it, we may learn from the Germans, who pronounce it likeoyin ourboy—a rare lesson to the restorers of a lost pronunciation how much is to be learnt in such a field from mere argument and analogy!
Let us now collect the different points of this inquiry under a single glance. In the days of the first Emperors, and, in a majority of cases, as early as the first Ptolemies, the scale of Greek vocalization, according to the best evidence now obtainable, was as follows:—
Now, in stating the results thus, I wish it to be observed in the first place, that I throw no sort of doubt on the possibility that in the days of Herodotus and Pericles some of the diphthongal sounds here declared normal in the days of the Ptolemies and the Cæsars might have been pronounced otherwise. The theory of Pennington, also, (p. 51), that there might have co-existed in ancient times a system of orthoepy for reciting the old poets, considerably different from that used in common conversation, may be entertained by whosoever pleases, and is not without its uses; but in the present purely practical inquiry we must leave all mere theory out of view. It is also perfectly open to Liscov, or any philologist, working out a suggestion of the great Herman, to prove from the internal analogy of the language, and especially from a comparison of the most ancient dialects,[23]thatoriginallythe diphthongs were pronounced differently from whatthey are now, and were in the days of Ptolemy Philadelphus, (Homer unquestionably said, παις—païs, and notpace. II.Z, 467;) but in the present investigation, as a practical man, I want something better than general probabilities and philosophical negations, or even isolated correct assertions; I want a complete scheme of Greek pronunciation, for some particular age, congruous within itself, and standing on something like historical evidence. This I find only in the pronunciation of the modern Greeks, or in that of the Ptolemies and Cæsars, which differs from the other only in a very few points. What then, we may ask, should hinder us from at once adopting this pronunciation? Nothing, I imagine, but the dull inertness of mere conservatism, (which in such matters is very potent,) the conceit of academical men, proud of their own clumsy invention, and the dread ofItacism. Is it not monstrous, we hear it said, that half a dozen different vowels, or combinations of vowels, should be pronounced in the same way, and that in such a fashion as only curs yelp, and mice squeak, and tenuous shades with feeble whine flit through the airy paths that lead to Pluto’s unsubstantial hall? Now, I at once admit that the prevalence of theslender sound ofi(ee), is a corruption from the original purity of Hellenic vocalization, from which I have no doubt the Pelasgi, and the venerable patriarchs who put up the lions, now seen on the gates of Mycenæ, were free; but no language spoken by a polished people is free from some corruption of this kind; and this particular corruption, like the defects observable in men of great original genius, is characteristic. In such strongly marked men as Beethoven, Samuel Johnson, and John Hunter the physiologist, nothing is more easy than for the nice moralist to point out half a dozen points of character that he could have wished otherwise. So it is with language. Who, for instance, would not wish to reform the capriciousness of our English systemless system of spelling and pronunciation? Who can say that we have not too much of the sibilant sound ofsandthin our language? who will not lament the want of body in our vocalization, and the tendency to the ineffective tribrachic and even proceleusmatic accent in the termination of our polysyllables? In German, again, who does not indulge in a spurt of indignation against “Wenn Ich mich nicht,” and other such common collocations of gutturals? and in Italian are we not so cloyed withōnesandāres, and other broadtrochaic modulations, that we long for the resurrection of some Gothic Quinctilian to inoculate the luscious “lingua Toscana in bocca Romana,” with a few harsh solecisms; while the French, who for cleverness and refinement, (and some other things also,) are a sort of Greeks, do so clip and mince the stout old Roman lingo, which they have adopted, that except in the mouth of flower girls and ballet dancers, their dialect is altogether intolerable to many a masculine ear. All these things are true; but no sane man thinks of rebelling against such hereditary characteristics of a human language, any more than he would against the ingrained peculiarities of human character. We take these things as we find them; just as we must make the best of a snub nose, or a set of bad teeth in an otherwise pretty face. So also we must even attune our ears to the Itacism of the Greeks; otherwise we shall assuredly sin against a notable characteristic of the language, much more intimately connected with the genius of that singular people, than many a clipper of new Greek grammars and filcher of notes to old Attic plays imagines. What saysQuinctilian?Non possumus esse tamgraciles;simusFortiores, (xii. 10.) Now, I ask the defenders of our modern system of pronouncing Greek in this country, which some of them perhaps call classical and Erasmian,but which is in fact, as has been proved, an incoherent jabber of barbarisms, what if the so much decriedItacismwere part of thisgracilitas, this slenderness or tenuity of ancient Hellenic speech, by which it was to the ear of the greatest of Latin rhetoricians so strikingly distinguished from the Roman? Certain it is, that the rude Teutonic sounds ofouandi, (EnglishiandaiinKaiser), that we hear so often in English Greek, do not answer to Quinctilian’s description. In fact, both English and Scotch, instead of preserving this natural contrast between Greek and Roman enunciation, have in this, and in other matters, (as we shall see presently, when we come to talk of accents,) done everything in their power to sweep it away; and of nothing am I more firmly convinced than of this, that a living conception of what the spoken Greek language really was in its best days, will never be attained by any scholar who has not the courage to kick all the Erasmian academic gear aside for a season, and take a free amble with some living Christopoulos, or Papadopoulos, on the banks of the Ilissus, or round the base of Lycabettus. This living experience of the language is indeed the only efficient way to argue against the learned prejudices of academic men; for, asThierschwell observes, every one laughs at that pronunciation to which he has not beenaccustomed, (Sprachlehre, sect. xvii. 3;) and no man can live at Athens for any time, without having his ears reconciled to a slight deviation from perfect euphony, or even coming to admire it, as one sometimes does the lisp of a pretty woman, or the squint of an arch humorist.[24]
So much for the vowel-sounds. I say nothing of the consonants, because they are of less consequence in the controversy. I have already spoken incidentally about β, (p. 21 above), and I have no wish to write acomplete treatise. Detailed information on minute points of neo-Hellenic pronunciation may be found in Pennington’s work already quoted, and in a recent work by Corpe.[25]I now proceed to the matter ofaccent, which we shall find to be no less important, but happily much more easily settled.
“In the pronunciation of a Greek word,” saysJelf,[26]“regard ought to be had both to accent and quantity;” a most significant power lying in that wordOUGHT, as we know well that many teachers in this country pay a very irregular regard to quantity in reading, and very few, if any, pay any regard to accent.[27]But that the proposition laid down by Mr.Jelfis true, no scholar can doubt for a moment, though Mr.Pennington, in the year 1844, most evidently anticipated a great amount of stolidity, obstinacy, and scepticism, among his academic friends on this point; with such minute and scrupulous care, and breadth of philological preparation does heset himself to prove, what no man that had ever dipped into an ancient Greek grammar, or a common Latin work on rhetoric, would ever dream of denying. However, I gave myself some trouble to set forth this matter learnedly some years ago,[28]knowing that I might have to do with persons not always open to reason, and utterly impervious to nature and common sense; and the Fellow of King’s also might have had occasion to know that it is one thing to prick soft flesh with a pin, another to drive nails into a stone wall. The fact is, that the living Greek language having come down to us with most audible accentuation, and the signs of these accents being contained in all printed Greek books, and not only so, but commented on by a long series of grammarians, from Herodian and Arcadius, down through the Homeric bishop of Thessalonica, to Gaza and Lascaris; in this state of the case, if any man does not pronounce Greek according to accents, while I do, the burden of proof lies with him who throws off all established authority in the matter, not with me who acknowledge it. If there is no authority for accent in the ancient grammarians, then as little is there for quantity. The fact of the existence of the one as a living characteristic of the spokenand written language of ancient Greece, stands exactly on the same foundation as the other. So many ancient grammars, and comments on grammars have been published within the last fifty years by Bekker and other library-excavators, that the teacher who now requires to be taught formally that the ancients really used accents in their public elocution, is more worthy of a good flogging than the greatest dunce in his drill. But what were accents? Accents are anintensionandremission(ἐπίτασις and ἄνεσις) of the voice in articulate speech, whereby one syllable receives a marked predominance over the others, this predominance manifesting itself principally in a higher note or intonation given to the accented syllable.[29]This definition occurs fifty times if it occurs once in the works of the ancient grammarians and rhetoricians; so I need not trouble myself here by an array of erudite citations to prove it; and that such an accent is both possible and easy to bring out in the case of any Greek word, may be experienced by anybody who will pronounce κεφαλή with a marked rise of the voice on the last syllable, or νεφέλη with a similarintension of vocal utterance on the penult. That the living Greeks give a distinct prominence to these very syllables, any man may learn by seeking them out in Manchester or London, in both which places they have a chapel. Why then should Etonian schoolmasters, and Oxonian lecturers not do the same? Do they not teach the doctrine of accents? Have they not translatedGoettling? Do they not print all their books with those very marks which Aristophanes of Byzantium, two thousand years ago, with provident cunning, devised even for this purpose, that we, studious academic men, in the thenUltima Thuleof civilisation, should now have the pleasure of intoning a philosophic period as the divine Plato did, or a blast of patriotic indignation as Demosthenes? They say there are no accents properly so called in the French language. This I never could exactly understand; but do our academic men actually realize this peculiar form of levelled human enunciation, (the ὁμαλισμὸς of the old grammarians,) without intension or remission, by pronouncing Greek altogether unaccented? Believe it not. As if determined to produce a scholastic impersonation of every possible monstrosity with regard to the finest language in the world, they neglect the written accents which lie before their nose, and read according to those accents whichthey have borrowed from the Latin! and this directly in the teeth of the public declaration ofCiceroandQuinctilian, that Latin had one monotonous law of accentuation, Greek another and a much more rich and various one.[30]And, as if to place the top-stone on the pyramid of absurdities which they pile, after reading Greek with this Latin accent (which sounds to a Greek ear exactly as a rude Frenchman’s first attempts at English sound to an Englishman) for some half dozen years, they set seriously to cram their brain-chambers with rules how Greek accents should be placed, and exercise their memory and their eye, with a most villainous abuse of function, in doing that work which should have been done from the beginning by the ear! If consistency could have been looked for from men involved in such a labyrinth of bungling, there would have been something heroic in throwing away the marks altogether from their books and from their brains, as well as from their tongue; certainly this procedure would have saved many a peeping editor a great deal of trouble, and many a brisk young gentleman riding up in a Cambridge “coach” right into the possession of a snug tutorship in Trinity, would have travelled on a smoother road, and felt less seriously how theflowers of ancient literature are scarce to be enjoyed amid the thorns of modern grammar that besiege a man’s fingers and eyes from all sides.[31]But intellectual consistency is not to be expected from persons once involved in a gross error, any more than moral consistency is from thieves; and it is well for all parties that it is so; for by this wise arrangement of nature, as a thief’s story often discovers the theft it would conceal, so a philologer’s nonsense is most readily refuted by the remnants of incoherent sense that he had not wit or courage enough to eliminate. Besides, the dictum ofPorsonstood mighty over their heads;[32]and as for the young men, the more time that was wasted on a reasonless method of teaching Greek, the less danger would there be of that rude invasion ofBotany, Geology, History, and all the array of modern sciences which has long beenthe special terror of English academic men. So they went on, and so they go on now, teaching that people ought to accent κεφαλή on the last syllable, and yet actually accenting it on the first! The consequence of which perverse proceeding is not only that accents are one of the most difficult things to learn in Greek, and seldom thoroughly mastered even by those who are excellent scholars otherwise, (seeJelf, page 52,note), but an accomplished English scholar, when he makes his continental tour, as is common enough in these days, even with men who have not much money, finds that his perverse enunciation of the Greek vowels, combined with his utter neglect of accents, has put him in possession of a language of which he can make no use except in soliloquy, and which any person can understand sooner than a native of the country to which it belongs.[33]He then comes home belike and tells his English friends that the modernGreeks are a set of barbarians, who speak a “swallow’s jabber,” so corrupt that no scholar can understand a word they say! So true is the record which honest Thomas Fuller has left of the issue of the notable Hellenic controversy raised by Sir John Cheke—“Here Bishop Gardiner, chancellor of the university, interposed his power, affirming Cheke’s pronunciation, pretended to be ancient, to be antiquated. He imposed a penalty on all such as used this new pronunciation, which, notwithstanding, since hath prevailed, and whereby we Englishmen speak Greek and are able to understand one another,which nobody else can.”[34]
Let us now ask in a single sentence how all this mass of absurdity came about; for we may depend upon it a whole array of brave philologic hoplites cannot have stumbled on their way suddenly without the apparition of some real or imaginary ghost. The ghost that frightened them on the present occasion, and caused them to forswearspoken accent(for as we have seen they stuck to it onpaper) wasquantity; concerning which, therefore, we must now inquire, whether it be a real ghost or only a white sheet. Quantity,they say, cannot stand before Accent, or rather is swallowed up by it. Like hostile religious sects, or belligerent medical corporations, they cannot meet without quarrelling; so the public peace is consulted by getting rid of one of them, not in the way of violent murder, (for the law does not allow that,) but by what certain philosophical Chartist-Reformers used to call “painless extinction.” Therefore they who speak according to accent, are wont to remove quantity out of the way noiselessly; and they who speak according to quantity must treat accent in the same way. This is an old story. TheBearin Erasmus’ dialogue, (Havercamp, ii. 95,) speaking rare wisdom in a gruff Johnsonian sort of style, says, “Sunt quidam adeocrassiut non distinguant accentum a quantitate, quum sit longe diversa ratio.Aliud est enim acutum aliud diu tinnire: aliud intendi, aliud extendi.At eruditos novi qui, quum pronunciarent illudἀνέχου καὶ ἀπέχου,mediam syllabam, quoniam tonum habet acutum, quantum possent producerent, quum sit natura brevis vel brevissima potius.” Certain learned men, it appears, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, could not accent the word ἀνέχου on the penult, as it ought to be accented, without in the same breath making that syllable long, which it is not. To avoidthis blunder, the Etonians, Oxonians, and other famous modern teachers, omit the accent altogether on that syllable and on every syllable—of which the name is legion—similarly situated in the Greek language, and thus, by removing the cause, are sure of annihilating the effect. A very obvious, but surely a very clumsy expedient, and hardly worthy of the subtlety of the academic mind. A man by running too hard sometimes breaks his legs; and you forthwith vow to avoid his fate by sitting in your chair constantly and taking no exercise! Let us see how the case stands here. The accent, you say, lengthens the syllable. Take any English word in the first place, (as nonsense is not so transparent in a learned tongue,) and make the experiment. If a Scotsman saysvéesible, you will allow, I suppose, that the first syllable of that word is both long and accented: if an Englishman saysviśible, ’tis equally clear that the same syllable is still accented, but it is not now long. Accent, therefore, in English has no necessary power to lengthen the sound of the vowel of the syllable on which it is placed; and if some learned men on the banks of the Rhine, in the days of Erasmus, or on the banks of the Isis, in our day, cannot accent a syllable without at the same time lengthening it, this happens merely because, as the Bear says, they are “adeo crassi;”their ears are gross, and have lost—by the dust of the libraries, perhaps—the healthy power of discerning differences of modulation in the living human voice. Not a few persons have I met with among those who are, or would be scholars, in this country, who in this way assert that it is impossible to put the accent on the penult of a Greek word, and at the same time, as the law of the language requires, make the last syllable long. But these persons had got their ears confounded by the traditionary jargon of teachers inculcating from dead books a doctrine of which they had no living apprehension; and this, along with the utter neglect of musical and elocutionary culture so common among our classical devotees, had rendered them incapable of perceiving, without an act of special attention, the commonest phenomena of spoken language appealing to the ear. In the English wordsecho,primrose, and many other of the same description, the accent and quantity stand in that exact relation which is so characteristic of Greek, as in ἔχω, λόγῳ; while in the English wordsclód-pated,hoúsekeeper, we have that precise disposal of accent and quantity which occurs in the word ἄνθρωπος, and which has been so often quoted as a proof that it is impossible to give effect to accentwithout violating quantity.[35]A very slight elocutionary culture would put a stop to such vain talk; but we have, unfortunately, too many scholars who gather their crude notions on such subjects from a few phrases current in the schools, without ever questioning their own ears, the only proper witness of what is right or wrong in the matter of enunciation. Hence the cumbrous mass of erudite nonsense on accent and quantity under which our library shelves groan; hence the host of imaginary difficulties and impossibilities that birch-bearing men will raise when you tell them to perform the simplest act of perception of which an unsophisticated human ear is capable. “Vel abAsinislicebat hoc discrimen discere,” continues the learned Bear, “qui rudentes corripiunt acutam vocem, imam producunt.” Very true; a really wise man may learn much from an ass; but they who conceit themselves to be wise, when they are not, will learn from nobody. And so I conclude with regard to this whole matter ofquantity, that it is only an imaginary ghost after all; a white sheet which a single touch of the finger will turn aside,or only a white mist, perhaps, which, if a brave man will only march up to, he shall not know that it is there.
One thing, however, I will admit—by way of palliation for the enormous blunders that have been committed in this matter—that in words of two, three, or more syllables, where the accent is on a syllable naturally short, while the long syllable is unaccented, a careless speaker may readily slur over the long syllable so as to make it short, thus converting an anapæst accented on the first syllable, as
a very common vulgarism, as we all know. The unaccented syllable, indeed, is, in the very nature of things, placed in a position where it is not so likely to get its fair mass of sound as its accented neighbour. Thus, except in solemn speaking, the first syllable ofŌBĒDĬĔNTseldom gets full weight, though it is equally long with its accented sequent; and the second syllable ofeducationis vulgarized intoedication, purely from the want of the accent. But that such vulgarisms should form any bar in the way of academical men doing proper justice to the correct elocution of the Greeks is really too bad. The modern Greeks, indeed, we know, go a stepfarther;[36]they not only in their common conversation fail to give the due prolongation to their long syllables, when unaccented—making no distinction between ω and ο—but they actually giveextensionas well asintensionto all their accented syllables, and thus fall into the same sin as respects quantity that our academicians daily commit against accent. But there is not the slightest reason why we should imagine it necessary to imitate them in this idiosyncrasy. To do so would be for the sake of a superfluous compliment to the living, to cut off one great necessary organ, whereby the beautiful wisdom of the dead being made alive again becomes ours. The laws of accent are a most important element of the oratory of Pericles and Demosthenes; but without quantity the harmony of Homer’s numbers is unintelligible. There is no reason why we should sacrifice either the one or the other of these two great modulating principles of ancient Hellenic speech. The one, so far from destroying, does, in fact, regulate to a certain extent,[37]and beautifully vary the other. Quantity without accent werea monotonous level of dreary sing-song; accent without quantity can be likened only to a series of sharp parallel ridges, with steep narrow ravines interposed, but without the amplitude of grassy slope, flowering mead, and far-stretching fields of yellow-waving corn.