Part 3

5. The diphthongs AU and EU follow; and in their case the contrast between the pronunciation of the living Greeks, and that of those who are taught only out of dead grammars and dictionaries, is so striking, that the contest has been peculiarly keen. Here, however, as is wont to be the case in more important matters, it may be that after much dusty discussion, erudite wrangling, and inky hostility, it shall turn out that both parties are in the right. On the first blush of the matter, it seems plain that such words as βασιλεύς, ναῦν, καλεῦνται, sound extremely harsh, and not according to the famous euphony of the Attic ear, if in them the second letter of the diphthong receive the consonantal sound of _v_ or _f_ given by the modern Greeks. =VASILEFS, NAFN, CALEFNTAE=—these are sounds which no chaste classic ear can tolerate, and which, among the phenomena of human articulation, are more naturally classed with such harsh Germanisms as _Pfingst_, _Probst_, &c., than with any sound that can be imagined to have been wedded euphoniously to Apollo’s lute. All this is very true; and yet, as modern German is not all harsh, so ancient Greek, it may be, was not all mellow; and no mere general talk about euphony or cacophony can, in so freakish a thing as human speech, be allowed to settle any question of orthoepy. Now, when we look into the matter an inch beyond the film of such shallow scholastic declamation, we find that so early as the time of Crassus, that is, in the first half of the first century before the Christian era, the diphthong _au_, which we pronounce _ou_, (as in _bound_,) and the English like the same vowel in their own language, (as in _vault_,) was actually enunciated consonantally like _av_ or _af_. For Cicero (Divinat. ii. 40) tells the anecdote how, when that unfortunate soldier was on his way to the East, and about embarking in a ship at Brundusium, he happened to meet a Greek on the quay calling out CAUNIAS! by which call the basket slung over his shoulder might have plainly indicated that he meant FIGS! figs of the best quality (worthy of a triumvir) from Caunus, in the south-west corner of Asia Minor; but the triumvir’s ear—dark destiny brooding in his soul—caught up the syllables separately, as _Cav’ ne eas_—=BEWARE HOW YOU GO!= Now, as no person pretends that the _v_ in _caveo_ was pronounced like the _u_ in _causa_, or could be so scanned in existing Latin poetry, it follows that the _au_ in Caunias was pronounced by a Greek of those times as a _v_ or _f_, exactly as the living Greeks pronounce it now. This is one example, among the many that we have adduced, shewing in a particularly striking way how impossible it is for modern schoolmasters, judging from mere abstract considerations, and bad scholastic habits, to say how the ancient Greeks might or might not have pronounced any particular combination of sounds. No doubt this Calabrian fig-merchant might not have pronounced that combination of letters exactly in the same way that Pericles did 400 years earlier, when, from the tribunal on the Athenian Pnyx, with the ominous roar of a thirty years’ war in his ear, “he lightened and thundered and confounded Greece;” but there is no reason, on the other hand, why a Greek fig-merchant and a Greek statesman should not have pronounced certain rough syllables in the same way, (for a great orator requires rough as well as smooth syllables;) and this much at least is certain, the anecdote proves that the modern pronunciation of αὐτός, _aftos_, is ancient as well as modern; and the talk of those who will have it that this, and other most characteristic sounds of the living orthoepy, were introduced by the Turks and the Venetians, or the Greeks themselves under their perverse influence, is mere talk—talk of that kind in which scholastic men are fond of indulging, when, knowing nothing, they wish to have it appear that they know everything. What was the real state of the pronunciation with regard to this and the other diphthong ευ in the days of Pericles or Plato, we have no means of knowing. Meanwhile the result which Seyffarth, after a long and learned investigation, brings out, that they were pronounced before a vowel as _v_, or the German _w_, and before a consonant as a real diphthong, seems probable enough. This agrees both with the natural laws of elocutional physiology, and explains how the imperial name FLAVIUS in Roman coins (_Liscov_, p. 51) came to be written sometimes =ΦΛΑΥΙΟΣ= and sometimes =ΦΛΑΒΙΟΣ=. However this be, there is no doubt that the consonantal pronunciation of these letters has for more than 1800 years been known among the Greeks. It has therefore all the claims that belong to a venerable conservatism; whereas, if we reject its title, we throw ourselves loose into an element of mere conjecture; as no person can tell us whether Demosthenes pronounced αυ in the Scotch or English way, (supposing one of the two to be right;) and as for ευ, what extraordinary feats the human tongue can play with it, we may learn from the Germans, who pronounce it like _oy_ in our _boy_—a rare lesson to the restorers of a lost pronunciation how much is to be learnt in such a field from mere argument and analogy!

Let us now collect the different points of this inquiry under a single glance. In the days of the first Emperors, and, in a majority of cases, as early as the first Ptolemies, the scale of Greek vocalization, according to the best evidence now obtainable, was as follows:—

Letter. Power. Long Α = _a_, as in _father_. Short Α = _a_, ” _hat_. Η = _ai_, ” _pain_. Ε = _e_, ” _get_. Ω = _o_, ” _pore_. Ο = _o_, ” _got_. Long Υ = _ü_, ” _Bühne_. Short Υ = the same shortened. Long I = _ee_, as in _green_. Short I = the same shortened. AI = _ai_, as in _pain_. EI = _ee_, ” _green_. OI = _ee_, ” _green_. OU = _oo_, ” _boom_. AU = _av_, _af_, or? EU = _ev_, _ef_, or?

Now, in stating the results thus, I wish it to be observed in the first place, that I throw no sort of doubt on the possibility that in the days of Herodotus and Pericles some of the diphthongal sounds here declared normal in the days of the Ptolemies and the Cæsars might have been pronounced otherwise. The theory of Pennington, also, (p. 51), that there might have co-existed in ancient times a system of orthoepy for reciting the old poets, considerably different from that used in common conversation, may be entertained by whosoever pleases, and is not without its uses; but in the present purely practical inquiry we must leave all mere theory out of view. It is also perfectly open to Liscov, or any philologist, working out a suggestion of the great Herman, to prove from the internal analogy of the language, and especially from a comparison of the most ancient dialects,[23] that _originally_ the diphthongs were pronounced differently from what they are now, and were in the days of Ptolemy Philadelphus, (Homer unquestionably said, παις—_païs_, and not _pace_. II. _Z_, 467;) but in the present investigation, as a practical man, I want something better than general probabilities and philosophical negations, or even isolated correct assertions; I want a complete scheme of Greek pronunciation, for some particular age, congruous within itself, and standing on something like historical evidence. This I find only in the pronunciation of the modern Greeks, or in that of the Ptolemies and Cæsars, which differs from the other only in a very few points. What then, we may ask, should hinder us from at once adopting this pronunciation? Nothing, I imagine, but the dull inertness of mere conservatism, (which in such matters is very potent,) the conceit of academical men, proud of their own clumsy invention, and the dread of ITACISM. Is it not monstrous, we hear it said, that half a dozen different vowels, or combinations of vowels, should be pronounced in the same way, and that in such a fashion as only curs yelp, and mice squeak, and tenuous shades with feeble whine flit through the airy paths that lead to Pluto’s unsubstantial hall? Now, I at once admit that the prevalence of the slender sound of _i_ (_ee_), is a corruption from the original purity of Hellenic vocalization, from which I have no doubt the Pelasgi, and the venerable patriarchs who put up the lions, now seen on the gates of Mycenæ, were free; but no language spoken by a polished people is free from some corruption of this kind; and this particular corruption, like the defects observable in men of great original genius, is characteristic. In such strongly marked men as Beethoven, Samuel Johnson, and John Hunter the physiologist, nothing is more easy than for the nice moralist to point out half a dozen points of character that he could have wished otherwise. So it is with language. Who, for instance, would not wish to reform the capriciousness of our English systemless system of spelling and pronunciation? Who can say that we have not too much of the sibilant sound of _s_ and _th_ in our language? who will not lament the want of body in our vocalization, and the tendency to the ineffective tribrachic and even proceleusmatic accent in the termination of our polysyllables? In German, again, who does not indulge in a spurt of indignation against “_Wenn Ich mich nicht_,” and other such common collocations of gutturals? and in Italian are we not so cloyed with _ōnes_ and _āres_, and other broad trochaic modulations, that we long for the resurrection of some Gothic Quinctilian to inoculate the luscious “_lingua Toscana in bocca Romana_,” with a few harsh solecisms; while the French, who for cleverness and refinement, (and some other things also,) are a sort of Greeks, do so clip and mince the stout old Roman lingo, which they have adopted, that except in the mouth of flower girls and ballet dancers, their dialect is altogether intolerable to many a masculine ear. All these things are true; but no sane man thinks of rebelling against such hereditary characteristics of a human language, any more than he would against the ingrained peculiarities of human character. We take these things as we find them; just as we must make the best of a snub nose, or a set of bad teeth in an otherwise pretty face. So also we must even attune our ears to the Itacism of the Greeks; otherwise we shall assuredly sin against a notable characteristic of the language, much more intimately connected with the genius of that singular people, than many a clipper of new Greek grammars and filcher of notes to old Attic plays imagines. What says QUINCTILIAN? _Non possumus esse tam_ GRACILES; _simus_ FORTIORES, (xii. 10.) Now, I ask the defenders of our modern system of pronouncing Greek in this country, which some of them perhaps call classical and Erasmian, but which is in fact, as has been proved, an incoherent jabber of barbarisms, what if the so much decried _Itacism_ were part of this _gracilitas_, this slenderness or tenuity of ancient Hellenic speech, by which it was to the ear of the greatest of Latin rhetoricians so strikingly distinguished from the Roman? Certain it is, that the rude Teutonic sounds of _ou_ and _i_, (English _i_ and _ai_ in _Kaiser_), that we hear so often in English Greek, do not answer to Quinctilian’s description. In fact, both English and Scotch, instead of preserving this natural contrast between Greek and Roman enunciation, have in this, and in other matters, (as we shall see presently, when we come to talk of accents,) done everything in their power to sweep it away; and of nothing am I more firmly convinced than of this, that a living conception of what the spoken Greek language really was in its best days, will never be attained by any scholar who has not the courage to kick all the Erasmian academic gear aside for a season, and take a free amble with some living Christopoulos, or Papadopoulos, on the banks of the Ilissus, or round the base of Lycabettus. This living experience of the language is indeed the only efficient way to argue against the learned prejudices of academic men; for, as THIERSCH well observes, every one laughs at that pronunciation to which he has not been accustomed, (_Sprachlehre_, sect. xvii. 3;) and no man can live at Athens for any time, without having his ears reconciled to a slight deviation from perfect euphony, or even coming to admire it, as one sometimes does the lisp of a pretty woman, or the squint of an arch humorist.[24]

[23] GODOFREDI HERMANI _de emendenda ratione Græcæ grammaticæ_, Lib. i. c. 2, quoted at length by LISCOV, p. 21.

[24] On revisal it strikes me I have given the enemies of Itacism an unfair advantage by not stating, that, while in any other language the attenuation of so many different sounds into one, might have proved a very grievous evil, there is such a richness of the full sound of α (which the English have effaced) and ω in Greek, that the blemish rarely offends. I have to mention also, that, while a certain prominence even of this slender sound seems necessary to the phonetic character of Greek, as distinguished from Latin, I have no objection, in reading Homer and the elder poets, (were it only for the sake of the often quoted πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης!) to pronounce οι, as _boy_ in English, and η, as we do it in Scotland; just as in reading Chaucer we may be forced to adopt some of the peculiarities of the pronunciation of his day. But in the common use of the prose language, I think it safer to stick by the tradition of so many centuries, than to venture on patches of classical restoration, where it is impossible to revive a consistent whole. I may say also, that if υ be pronounced uniformly like the French _u_, the itacism will be diminished by one letter, while the difference between that and the modern Greek pronunciation is so slight, that a Scotchman so speaking in Athens will be generally understood, whereas our broad Scotch _u_ (_oo_) besides being entirely without classical authority, recedes so far from the actual pronunciation of the Greeks, as to be a serious bar in the way of intelligibility.

So much for the vowel-sounds. I say nothing of the consonants, because they are of less consequence in the controversy. I have already spoken incidentally about β, (p. 21 above), and I have no wish to write a complete treatise. Detailed information on minute points of neo-Hellenic pronunciation may be found in Pennington’s work already quoted, and in a recent work by Corpe.[25] I now proceed to the matter of ACCENT, which we shall find to be no less important, but happily much more easily settled.

“In the pronunciation of a Greek word,” says JELF,[26] “regard ought to be had both to accent and quantity;” a most significant power lying in that word OUGHT, as we know well that many teachers in this country pay a very irregular regard to quantity in reading, and very few, if any, pay any regard to accent.[27] But that the proposition laid down by Mr. JELF is true, no scholar can doubt for a moment, though Mr. PENNINGTON, in the year 1844, most evidently anticipated a great amount of stolidity, obstinacy, and scepticism, among his academic friends on this point; with such minute and scrupulous care, and breadth of philological preparation does he set himself to prove, what no man that had ever dipped into an ancient Greek grammar, or a common Latin work on rhetoric, would ever dream of denying. However, I gave myself some trouble to set forth this matter learnedly some years ago,[28] knowing that I might have to do with persons not always open to reason, and utterly impervious to nature and common sense; and the Fellow of King’s also might have had occasion to know that it is one thing to prick soft flesh with a pin, another to drive nails into a stone wall. The fact is, that the living Greek language having come down to us with most audible accentuation, and the signs of these accents being contained in all printed Greek books, and not only so, but commented on by a long series of grammarians, from Herodian and Arcadius, down through the Homeric bishop of Thessalonica, to Gaza and Lascaris; in this state of the case, if any man does not pronounce Greek according to accents, while I do, the burden of proof lies with him who throws off all established authority in the matter, not with me who acknowledge it. If there is no authority for accent in the ancient grammarians, then as little is there for quantity. The fact of the existence of the one as a living characteristic of the spoken and written language of ancient Greece, stands exactly on the same foundation as the other. So many ancient grammars, and comments on grammars have been published within the last fifty years by Bekker and other library-excavators, that the teacher who now requires to be taught formally that the ancients really used accents in their public elocution, is more worthy of a good flogging than the greatest dunce in his drill. But what were accents? Accents are an _intension_ and _remission_ (ἐπίτασις and ἄνεσις) of the voice in articulate speech, whereby one syllable receives a marked predominance over the others, this predominance manifesting itself principally in a higher note or intonation given to the accented syllable.[29] This definition occurs fifty times if it occurs once in the works of the ancient grammarians and rhetoricians; so I need not trouble myself here by an array of erudite citations to prove it; and that such an accent is both possible and easy to bring out in the case of any Greek word, may be experienced by anybody who will pronounce κεφαλή with a marked rise of the voice on the last syllable, or νεφέλη with a similar intension of vocal utterance on the penult. That the living Greeks give a distinct prominence to these very syllables, any man may learn by seeking them out in Manchester or London, in both which places they have a chapel. Why then should Etonian schoolmasters, and Oxonian lecturers not do the same? Do they not teach the doctrine of accents? Have they not translated GOETTLING? Do they not print all their books with those very marks which Aristophanes of Byzantium, two thousand years ago, with provident cunning, devised even for this purpose, that we, studious academic men, in the then ULTIMA THULE of civilisation, should now have the pleasure of intoning a philosophic period as the divine Plato did, or a blast of patriotic indignation as Demosthenes? They say there are no accents properly so called in the French language. This I never could exactly understand; but do our academic men actually realize this peculiar form of levelled human enunciation, (the ὁμαλισμὸς of the old grammarians,) without intension or remission, by pronouncing Greek altogether unaccented? Believe it not. As if determined to produce a scholastic impersonation of every possible monstrosity with regard to the finest language in the world, they neglect the written accents which lie before their nose, and read according to those accents which they have borrowed from the Latin! and this directly in the teeth of the public declaration of CICERO and QUINCTILIAN, that Latin had one monotonous law of accentuation, Greek another and a much more rich and various one.[30] And, as if to place the top-stone on the pyramid of absurdities which they pile, after reading Greek with this Latin accent (which sounds to a Greek ear exactly as a rude Frenchman’s first attempts at English sound to an Englishman) for some half dozen years, they set seriously to cram their brain-chambers with rules how Greek accents should be placed, and exercise their memory and their eye, with a most villainous abuse of function, in doing that work which should have been done from the beginning by the ear! If consistency could have been looked for from men involved in such a labyrinth of bungling, there would have been something heroic in throwing away the marks altogether from their books and from their brains, as well as from their tongue; certainly this procedure would have saved many a peeping editor a great deal of trouble, and many a brisk young gentleman riding up in a Cambridge “coach” right into the possession of a snug tutorship in Trinity, would have travelled on a smoother road, and felt less seriously how the flowers of ancient literature are scarce to be enjoyed amid the thorns of modern grammar that besiege a man’s fingers and eyes from all sides.[31] But intellectual consistency is not to be expected from persons once involved in a gross error, any more than moral consistency is from thieves; and it is well for all parties that it is so; for by this wise arrangement of nature, as a thief’s story often discovers the theft it would conceal, so a philologer’s nonsense is most readily refuted by the remnants of incoherent sense that he had not wit or courage enough to eliminate. Besides, the dictum of PORSON stood mighty over their heads;[32] and as for the young men, the more time that was wasted on a reasonless method of teaching Greek, the less danger would there be of that rude invasion of BOTANY, GEOLOGY, HISTORY, and all the array of modern sciences which has long been the special terror of English academic men. So they went on, and so they go on now, teaching that people ought to accent κεφαλή on the last syllable, and yet actually accenting it on the first! The consequence of which perverse proceeding is not only that accents are one of the most difficult things to learn in Greek, and seldom thoroughly mastered even by those who are excellent scholars otherwise, (_see_ JELF, page 52, _note_), but an accomplished English scholar, when he makes his continental tour, as is common enough in these days, even with men who have not much money, finds that his perverse enunciation of the Greek vowels, combined with his utter neglect of accents, has put him in possession of a language of which he can make no use except in soliloquy, and which any person can understand sooner than a native of the country to which it belongs.[33] He then comes home belike and tells his English friends that the modern Greeks are a set of barbarians, who speak a “swallow’s jabber,” so corrupt that no scholar can understand a word they say! So true is the record which honest Thomas Fuller has left of the issue of the notable Hellenic controversy raised by Sir John Cheke—“Here Bishop Gardiner, chancellor of the university, interposed his power, affirming Cheke’s pronunciation, pretended to be ancient, to be antiquated. He imposed a penalty on all such as used this new pronunciation, which, notwithstanding, since hath prevailed, and whereby we Englishmen speak Greek and are able to understand one another, _which nobody else can_.”[34]

[25] CORPE’s Neo-Hellenic Greek Grammar. London, 1851. See also a notice of this work in the ATHENÆUM for last year, where I am happy to observe that the opinions advocated in this paper are supported.

[26] Greek Grammar. 1851, sect. 44, 45. DONALDSON (Greek Grammar, p. 17) says, ‘The accent is the sharp or elevated sound with which one of the last three syllables of a Greek word is _regularly_ pronounced. This “_regularly_” is as significant as Mr. JELF’s “_ought_.”’

[27] Of course I except Professor MASSON of Belfast, whose complete mastery of the living dialect of Greece is the object of admiration to all who know him.

[28] Classical Museum, vol. i. p. 338.

[29] There is also a greater _emphasis_ or _stress_ given to the accented syllable, as is manifest from the pronunciation of the modern Greeks, and from the striking fact that in the modern dialect, the unaccented syllable has sometimes been dropt, while the accented constitutes the whole modern word, as δὲν for οὐδὲν, μᾶς for ἡμᾶς.