“Neque dubitamus quin Erasmus, si in tantam Græcæ pronuntiationis discrepantiam incidisset, vulgarem usum intactum et salvum reliquisset.”—Seyffarth.
“Ich gebe der neugriechischen Aus-sprache im Ganzen bei weitem den Vorzug.”—Thiersch.
“Neque enim de cœlo dilapsa ad nos pervenit Græcorum lingua, sed e patria sua una cum omnibus quæ habemus subsidiis, suo vestita cultu prodiit, quem tollere aut immutare velle esset imperium in linguam liberam exercere.”—Wetsten.
“Die sogenannte Erasmische Aus-sprache, wie es in Deutschland erscheint, ist völlig grundlos, ein Gebilde man weiss nicht von wannen es kam, ein Gemische welches jeder sich zustutzt nach eigner Lust und Willkühr.”—Liscov.
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 the Pronunciation 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 been allowed 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 the question;[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 learned Wetsten, 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 hereditary routine 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; I have 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 sermonis pronuntiatione, 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 even the 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 as European 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 than to 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. Force being the chief apparent power on the one side, it was naturally felt by those against whom it was exercised, that REASON was 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 for our 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 of Pennington already quoted, the German work of Liskov, and the Latin of Seyffarth.[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 the principle of a direct dramatic imitation of the sound signified. Thus the words dash, hash, smash, in our most significant Saxon tongue, evidently express an action producing sound, in which the strong vowel sound of a is combined with a sharp sound to which the aspirated s was considered the nearest approximation by the original framer of the word. So, in the names expressive of flowing water, the liquids l and r are observed to preponderate in all languages, these being the sounds which are actually given forth by the natural objects so signified: thus river, ῤέω, strom, flumen, purl, the Hebrew nahar and nahal, &c. And in the same manner, if the bird which we call cuckoo was called by the Latins cuculus, by the Greeks κόκκυξ, and by the Germans kukuk, 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 no longer 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 own bleat, the Latin balare, and the Greek βληχή, pronounced like a in mate, 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 cries Βή,” we should be most justly entitled to conclude, if not that the Greek B was pronounced exactly like the corresponding letter in our alphabet, (for the consonants are less easily fixed down in such imitations of inarticulate cries,) certainly that H had the sound of our ai; 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 rhetorical writers. 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]