Ἡ ἀνακάλυψις τοῦ μεγάλου Κὼχ δίδει ἀφορμὴν εἰς τὰς ρωσσικὰς ἐφημερίδας νὰ ἐξετάσωσι πόσοι εἰσὶν οἱ πάσχοντες ἐκ τῆς νόσου ταύτης. Ἐκ τῶν 120,000,000 τῶν κατοίκων τῆς Ρωσσίας, ἂν ὑπολογίσῃ τις μόνον 5 ἐπὶ τοῖς (0)0 πάσχοντας ἐκ φθίσεως, 6,000,000 μόνον Ρῶσσοι ἔχουσι τὴν ἀνάγκην τῆς θεραπείας τοῦ περικλεοῦς καθηγητοῦ. Ὁ ἀριθμὸς εἶνε μάλιστα ἐν τούτοις ἀκριβής. Ἐν Ρωσσίᾳ καὶ ἰδίως εἰς τὰ βορειότερα αὐτῆς μέρη ἡ φθίσις κάμνει μεγίστην θραῦσιν. Ἐν Πετρουπόλει ὡς ἐκ τῆς ἀθλιότητος τοῦ κλίματος καὶ τῆς κακῆς διαίτης τάξεών τινων τῆς κοινωνίας ἡ φθίσις καταστρέφει φρικωδῶς. Ἑν ταῖς οἰκίαις ἀπομεμακρυσμένων τινῶν συνοικιῶν, εἰς οἰκίας εἰς ἃ σπανίως διεισδύει ἀκτὶς ἡλίου βλέπει τις νέας καὶ νέους ὠχροὺς αἱμοπτύοντας καὶ ἐκεῖ εἰς ἀνήλια δωμάτια ἀναμένοντας τὸν θάνατον. Μειδιάσατε δυστυχεῖς· ὁ Κῲχ ἐργάζεται ὅπως ἁρπάσῃ ἀπὸ τὰς χεῖρας τοῦ θανάτου ὅλα αὐτὰ τὰ ἑκατομμύρια τῶν ὑπάρξεων.
Any person who can read classical Greek without a dictionary will have no difficulty in understanding this passage; and, if he is familiar with the New Testament in the original, he will find that some of the principal peculiarities which distinguish the Greek used by the living political and public men of Athens, so far from being corruptions, are no less distinctive features of the κοινὴ διάλεκτος of the Greeks now than they were in the days of the Apostle Paul and the Evangelist John. But this is not all. It requires only a superficial acquaintance with the most patent facts of Greek literature to know that some of the most popular and the most profound teachers of Greek wisdom—Plato, Aristophanes and Xenophon—use the conversational style. The Greeks, in fact, were, as they are still, a lively and a talking people, and Socrates, their greatest name, cannot be better described than as a talking street preacher of reason and common sense. Well, then, on this double basis that Greek is a living language, and that the colloquial style is that in which its highest and best thoughts are expressed; and knowing, moreover, by large experience, that the most effective way to get a firm grasp of any language is to begin by speaking it, some twenty years ago I published a small volume of Greek and English dialogues,[2] which I used in my class in as far as it was possible to do so in such a multitudinous huddlement of untrained lads as the Scottish Universities, contrary to the practice of all educated nations, admit into the junior classes of the Faculty of Arts. The little book came to a second edition; but that it was in anywise generally used by classical teachers I have no reason to believe, partly because, of all classes of men, teachers are the most closely wedded to old bookish habits, and partly because Scotland is not a country to which the world, governed as it is by authority and by names, would look for anything worthy of imitation in the Greek line: “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?” This, as the world goes, was quite legitimate, and gave me no concern. But since that time, as a natural consequence of the great educational movement of the age, some very distinct voices have come to my ear, to the effect that there is something radically wrong in our way of dealing with languages, and that the method of teaching by rules and grammar mainly can no longer be tolerated. I therefore felt it my duty to appeal a second time to the public and to teachers on this important matter, the more so that my little book stood too far apart from the educational attitude of the teachers, and, if it was to find its way into general school use, required a more elementary book as an introduction. This elementary book I now send forth under the title of a Greek Primer, Colloquial and Constructive, indicating by this title that the lessons in talking go hand in hand with the grammatical forms naturally educed from them, each lesson being regulated talk, according to a natural progression from the more simple to the more complex forms in ordinary use. This progressive incorporation of the grammar is the feature which distinguishes the lessons of this introductory book from the dialogues in its predecessor; and the necessity of having constant reference to grammatical forms prevented me from giving that unity of subject to the dialogue as dialogue which belonged to the previous volume.
I have only further to state, with regard to the use of this little primer in the hands of a teacher, that I have no desire that he should bind himself slavishly to the text. The scraps of talk that are given under each lesson are meant to lend him a helping hand in the use of a new organ; and, to enable both teacher and learner to furnish themselves with a living vocabulary of Greek words in direct connection with their daily surroundings, I have added an alphabetical list of the names of the most familiar objects that belong to the field of life in town or country where the learner may happen to be. When the young Hellenist has stamped its Greek designation directly on every object that meets his eyes, and connected it with some single verb that belongs to its significance in familiar life, I would then suggest that the teacher, besides the daily repetition of certain forms of common conversation, should give a vivâ voce description of pictures hung on the wall two or three times a week, which the learner shall be called on to repeat without any written notes; the principle of the method being always to maintain the direct action of the mind on the object, through the instrumentality of the new sound, without the intervention of the mother tongue. As to when, and how far, and in what kind the usual furniture of elementary books of grammar, reading, and exercises should go parallel with colloquial practice, this I leave altogether in the hands of the practised teacher, being well assured that easy reading and accurate writing, so far from being inconsistent with, are the natural blossom and the ripe fruit of the root of living utterance from which I start.
One other matter requires special notice—a matter not necessarily connected with the colloquial method, but which may be wisely used as a help. To each lesson I have appended a short list of English words, either by family affinity, or by direct borrowing, or by indirect borrowing through the Latin, radically identical with the Greek. The habit of identifying such words under an English disguise will perform the double function of facilitating memory and giving a lesson on the transmutation of sounds and meaning, the tracing of which gives so peculiar a charm to comparative philology. In [Appendix I]. I have added some of the principles on which these transmutations depend, so far as they are suggested by the words used in the text.
But what of the pronunciation? After what has been shown of the living continuity of the Greek tongue, from Byzantium downwards to the present day, there cannot be the slightest doubt that Greek orthoepy should be treated in the same fashion that the orthoepy of French, German, or any other living tongue is treated. The pronunciation is ruled by the practice of the present, not by philological facts or fancies as to the pronunciation of the past. No doubt, as Heraclitus says, πάντα ῥεῖ, all things flow, as in the universe, so in language, there is no fixation—there is always change. But the changes which take place in living languages, like English or Greek, are of a very different kind from those which take place when a language like Latin becomes dead, and rises to a new life in the form of such specific varieties as Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. They are of the nature of a normal growth, and are at all events only exaggerations or expansions of a native tendency. To such exaggerations every spoken language is subject, and few more than our insular English, as any one may see who will compare the accentuation of English in the time of Chaucer with the orthoepy of the present hour. But in respect of accents at least Greek has been far more conservative than English, so much so indeed that the accentual marks placed on Greek words by the Alexandrian grammarians two hundred and fifty years before Christ, in the practice of the Greek Church and the Greek people still indicate the same dominance of voice on the accented syllable that the Athenian ear recognised as classic in the orations of Demosthenes and the apostolic eloquence of St. Paul. There can therefore be no greater barbarism than to disown this legitimate music of Greek speech, as is done both in England and Scotland, when we pronounce ἀγαθὸς ὁ θεός, like Latin or English, ἄγαθος ὁ θέος; not to mention the staring absurdity and loss of brain implied in the practice of the great English schools of first pronouncing the word with a false accentuation, and then stultifying the daily practice of the ear by learning a rule to say where the accent ought to have been placed! Nothing could more distinctly show the falseness of our habit of flinging the burden of learning languages on formulas of the understanding and leaving the living organ of linguistic practice altogether out of account. Therefore, by all means, either drop the accents out of the grammar, or use them whenever you give the written word voice in the air. As to the quantity of the vowels, which is the stumbling block with most English scholars, we have no lack of words, even in our own unmusical English, such as lándholder, in which, as in the Greek ἄνθρωπος, the antepenultimate has the rising inflexion, while the penult is long; and if the modern Greeks pronounce ἄνθρωπος as if written ἄνθροπος, that is only a natural curtailment of the unaccented syllable which lies in the nature of human speech, and will be found exemplified more or less in all languages. As to the vocal value of the separate vowels and consonants, this, no doubt, is a point in some cases of considerable difficulty; but it is quite certain that a, both in Latin and Greek, has the broad sound as in Italian and Scotch, not the sound of the English in pātent, that ι is the most slender of the vowel sounds, not the broad semi-diphthongal sound of the English in prime or sigh, that ου has the soft sound of oo in boom, not the bow-wow sound of ou as in howl; also that αι in all probability was pronounced as in the English vain, not as in the German Kaiser. On the whole matter of pronunciation, however, the English scholar should bear in mind that the poetry of the ancients was composed on musical principles, with a strict regard to the quantitative value of the vowel on which the rhythmical accent fell, a practice which necessarily caused the spoken accent to be dropped in verse, or very much subordinated; and again, if his ear should happen to be very much offended by the predominance of the slender sound of ι in the familiar πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης of Homer, there is no reason why he should not adopt a special vocalisation for the reading of the Greek poets, just as we in our reading of Chaucer must constantly put a final accent on words that, if applied to the spoken tongue, would render the speaker either ridiculous or unintelligible. But in whatever fashion the teacher of Greek in this country may choose to settle this delicate point, the matter of pronunciation has nothing radically to do with the great principle of linguistic practice which this little book inculcates. To start with the practice of speaking will facilitate the acquisition of a new language under any system of pronunciation; only this must distinctly be said, that the scholar who has learned to read Greek with a vocalisation and an accentuation invented by himself for himself has deliberately cut himself off from all intelligible communion with the people whose literary tradition he values so highly, and with whom to maintain a familiar intercourse, both in a political and a literary point of view, should be no secondary consideration with the wise.
In conclusion, I have great pleasure in returning thanks to the learned Hellenists who kindly undertook the task of revising the proofs of this little work as they came from the press, viz. Mr. Hardie, Balliol College, Oxford; Principal Geddes, Aberdeen; Principal Donaldson, St. Andrews; and Mr. Gardiner, Edinburgh Academy; and if I have not in every instance taken advantage of their suggestions, it is because on principle I have no sympathy with the nice sensibility which refuses the stamp of classicality to all forms and idioms unsanctioned by the usage of Attic writers, preferring to float my skiff freely on the great Catholic Greek of all ages, from Plato to Polybius, from Polybius to Chrysostom, and from Chrysostom to Thereianos and Paspati.
Edinburgh, April 1891.
CONTENTS
| PAGE | ||
| The Greek Letters | [ 3] | |
| Notes | [ 5] | |
| Accentuation and Quantity | [ 7] | |
| LESSON | ||
| I.— | Nouns: Nominative and Objective Case, | |
| First and Second Declension; | ||
| Singular, Present Indicative | [12] | |
| II.— | Cases, Genitive and Dative | [15] |
| III.— | Plurals, Numerals, Diminutives | [17] |
| IV.— | Third Declension, Singular | [19] |
| V.— | Third Declension, Plural | [25] |
| VI.— | Degrees of Comparison in Adjectives | [26] |
| VII.— | The Future Active | [28] |
| VIII.— | The Past Tense | [30] |
| IX.— | Infinitive Mood and Participles | [33] |
| X.— | The other Past Tenses | [35] |
| XI.— | Verbs in μι | [38] |
| XII.— | Compound Verbs | [40] |
| XIII.— | Moods: Subjunctive and Conditional | [42] |
| XIV.— | The Optative Mood | [44] |
| XV.— | The Particle ἄν | [47] |
| XVI.— | The Passive Voice | [48] |
| XVII.— | The Middle Voice | [51] |
| XVIII.— | Participles | [53] |
| APPENDIX | ||
| I.— | Elementary Hints on Etymology | [55] |
| II.— | Vocabularies | [57] |