Knight preserves a rather diverting anecdote of a preacher who spoke in his sermon before Henry VIII. against the Greek tongue, and of a conference which Henry caused to be arranged after the discourse, at which in his presence the divine and More should take opposite sides, the former attacking, and the latter vindicating, the language. More did his part, but the other fell down on his knees and begged the King’s pardon, alleging that what he did was by the impulse of the Spirit. “Not the spirit of Christ,” says the King to him, “but the spirit of infatuation.” His majesty then asked him whether he had read anything of Erasmus, whom he assailed from the pulpit. He said “No.” “Why then,” says the King, “you are a very foolish fellow to censure what you never read.” “I have read,” says he, “something they call Moria.” “Yes,” says Richard Pace, “may it please your highness, such a subject is fit for such a reader.”
The end of it was that the preacher declared himself on reflection more reconciled to the Greek, because it was derived from the Hebrew, and that Henry dispensed with his further attendance upon the Court.
The feeling and taste for Greek culture which Lily, Erasmus, and others had introduced and encouraged, were promoted by the exertions of Sir John Cheke and Sir Thomas Smith at Cambridge, and by Dr. Kay or Caius; and a controversy, almost amounting to a quarrel, which Cheke had with Bishop Gardiner on Greek pronunciation, stimulated the movement by attracting public attention to the matter, and bringing into notice many Greek authors whose works had not hitherto been read.
The literary contest between Cheke and Gardiner was printed abroad in 1555, and only eleven years later a paraphrase of the Phœnissæ of Euripides by George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmersh was performed at Gray’s Inn.
III. The tract published by the learned John Kay in 1574 on the pronunciation of Greek and Latin is rather pertinent to the present movement for varying the old fashion in this respect. Kay instances the cases of substituting olli for illi, queis for quibus, mareito for marito, maxumè for maximè; and in Greek words, the ancients, says he, certainly said Achilles, Tydes, Theses, and Ulisses, not, as people sometimes now do, Achillews, Tudews, Thesews, and Ulussews. The author likewise refers to the employment of the aspirate in orthography, as in hydropisis, thermæ, Bathonia, and Hybernia, which used to be read ydropisis, termæ, Batonia, and Ivernia. He was clearly no advocate for the latter-day mode in England of hardening the g and the c as in Regina and Cicero.
But the fact is that, where there are no positive data for fixing the standard or laying down any general principle, there can never be an end of the conflicting views and theories on this subject, and the best of them amount to little more than guess-work.
The modes of pronouncing both the Greek and Latin languages have always probably varied, as they do yet, in different countries; and the Scots adhere to the Continental fashion as regards, at all events, the latter.
Experience and practical observation seem to shew that every locality has a tendency to adapt its rules for sounding the dead tongues to those in force for sounding its current vocabulary; as a Roumanian lad, for instance, in learning Latin, will instinctively follow his native associations in giving utterance to diphthongs, vowels, and compound words. The Greek language, in respect to this point of view, occupies an anomalous position, because it enjoys a partial survivorship in the Neo-Hellenic dialect; and it has been natural to seek in the method employed by their modern representatives and descendants a key to that employed by the inhabitants of ancient Hellas in pronouncing words and particles, and, in short, to the grammatical laws by which their speech was regulated.
It appears, however, that philologists have been disappointed in the results of this test, as the differences between the two idioms are often so wide and material. Yet, nevertheless, a Greek of the nineteenth century must be allowed to be a rather important witness in taking evidence on such a question, as the whole strength of received tradition and a primâ facie argument are on his side; and when we find that he gives to the long E or ητα the force of A, and to the diphthong οι that of E, we grow somewhat sceptical as to our right to impose on those particles a different function, especially seeing that the Ionic dialect and the metrical arrangement of the Iliad ostensibly support this interchange of phonetic values. I need scarcely advert to the favourite theory that, so far as the Greek long E is concerned, it had its source in the vocal intonation of the sheep, which is, after all, far from an invariable standard.
The Englishman, in dealing with such themes as foreign spelling and pronunciation, treads upon eggs, so to speak, as he lives within the knowledge of the whole world in a glass house of his own.