Page:Christian Greece and Living Greek.djvu/73

 PROPER PRONUNCIATION OF GREEK. 5 I completely refuted by Papadimitracopoulos. His book is the most exhaustive ever written on Greek pronunciation. It is true German philologists have at last acknowledged — thanks to the just and severe criticism of men like Papadimitracopoulos — that the Erasmian pronunciation is faulty. They have ceased to dispute about Erasmian and Reuchlinian methods; they study instead with admirable zeal the inscriptions and establish the times at which the pronunciation of the different written sounds were transformed into the pronunciation of the Greeks of to-day. They found that there has been no material change these two thousand years. Despite the fact that the stones tell the exact truth unmistak- ably, as we shall see presently, how Greek was pronounced in every century ever since the seventh before Christ ; despite the fact that the German schoolmasters, as well as the archaeol- ogists of all other countries, read this conclusive evidence about the only correct Greek pronun- ciation — this story sounds like a lie, but it must be true, otherwise it could not be told — they re- tain to this very day the Erasmian pronunciation in their schools, and many other schools in other countries do likewise.