Page:Christian Greece and Living Greek.djvu/82

 6o CHRISTIAN GREECE AND LIVING GREEK. hereafter in the Erasmian fashion. // is to be hoped that now, when the inscriptions can be studied by anybody, zvhen the history of Greece and of its entire language is better known, when there can be no more learned defence of Erasmian pronunciation, this pronunciation will be considered, as it should be, a jnonstrosity. It is high time that our learning and studying youth be saved the useless torture of the mind, their parents the useless expense, and citizens generally the unnecessary taxation for schools teaching unscientific pronunciation. Modern or living Greek, the literary language understood by all Greeks of to-day, is but Attic simplified and complemented by additional ele- ments taken from the old dialects or formed in strict conformit)^ with the old forms. Neither the language nor the pronunciation has changed materially these two thousand years. We have conclusive evidence from history that the lan- guage did not, and why it did not change. From the inscriptions, which, as a rule, were spelled phonetically, we know exactly how Greek was pronounced in all the centuries since the seventh B.C. The orthographic errors, the bad spelling found on inscriptions and in hand- writings of the Greeks from the time of the seventh century B.C. through all the centuries