Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 76, No. 466, August, 1854

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No. CCCCLXVI.      AUGUST, 1854.      Vol. LXXVI.
Now, with regard to this point, Mr Tricoupi’s book furnishes the most decided and convincing evidence that the language of Aristotle and Plato yet survives in a state of the most perfect purity, the materials of which it is composed being genuine Greek, and the main difference between the style of Tricoupi and that of Xenophon consisting in the loss of a few superfluous verbal flexions, and the adoption of one or two new syntactical forms to compensate for the loss—the merest points of grammar, indeed, which to a schoolmaster great in Attic forms may appear mighty, but to the general scholar, and the practical linguist, are of no moment. A few such words of Turkish extraction, as ζάμιον, a mosque ; φιρμάνιον, a firman ; βεζιρης, a vizier ; γενίτσαρος, a janizary ; ραγιάδης, a rajah , so far from being any blot on the purity of Mr Tricoupi’s Greek, do in fact only prove his good sense; for even the ancient Greeks, ultra-national as they were in all their habits, never scrupled to adopt a foreign word—such as γάζα, παράδεισος, ἄγγαρος—when it came in their way, just as we have κοδράντης, κηνσος, σουδάριον, and a few other Latinisms in the New Testament. The fact is, that the modern Greeks are rather to be blamed for the affectation of extreme purity in their style, than for any undue admixture of foreign words, such as we find by scores in every German newspaper. But this is their affair. It is a vice that leans to virtue’s side, and springs manifestly from that strong and obstinate vitality of race which has survived the political revolutions of nearly two thousand years; and a vice, moreover, that may prove of the utmost use to our young scholars, who may have the sense and the enterprise to turn it to practical account. For, as the pure Greek of Mr Tricoupi’s book is no private invention of his own, but the very same dialect which is at present used as an organ of intellectual utterance by a large phalanx of talented professors in the University of Athens, and is in fact the language of polite intercourse over the whole of Greece, it follows that Greek, which is at present almost universally studied as a dead language, and that by a most laborious and tedious process of grammatical indoctrination, may be more readily picked up, like German or French, in the course of the living practice of a few months. It is worthy of serious consideration, indeed, how far the progress of our young men in an available knowledge of the finest language of the world may have been impeded by the perverse methods of teachers who could not speak, and who gave themselves no concern to speak, the language which they were teaching; who invented, also, an arbitrary system of pronouncing the language, which completely separated them from the nation who speak it. But this is a philological matter on which we have no vocation to enter here: we only drop a hint for the wise, who are able to inquire and to conclude for themselves.