1. The long or slender sound of the English a, (as in lane,) 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 French u, or German ü heard in Brüder, Bühne: a very delicate and elegant sound bordering closely on the slender sound of i, (ee, English,) into which it is sometimes attenuated by the Germans, and with which, by a poetical license, it is allowed to rhyme, (as Brüder—nieder,) but having no connection with the English sound of oo, (as in boom,) 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 as guid, bluid, attenuated by the Northerns into the slender sound of gueed, and bleed. The English sound of long u is, 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 of i is 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 from the 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 diphthong ai was pronounced like the same diphthong in our English word gain.[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 of ai in the German word kaiser, rhyming pretty nearly with our English word wiser.
2. The diphthong ei was pronounced in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus like the English ee in seen, or ea in beam.[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 German oe, from which it was by degrees softened into the French u, and lastly into the slender sound of i (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 that Liscov has produced evidence to shew that it was confounded with i so early as the time of Julius Cæsar, ΙΩΝΙΣΤΗΣ being found on a coin of the great dictator for οἰωνιστής. So in the coins of Emperors of the second century, ΟΙΚΟΣΤΟΥ frequently 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 case of ou, 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 Latin u; while the modern Greeks, with equal uniformity, agree in pronouncing their ου as the Italians pronounce u; that is to say, like the English oo in boom. Seyffarth classes this diphthong with a and i, o and e, as a sound about which there is no controversy.