Page:Christian Greece and Living Greek.djvu/85

 PROPER PRONUNCIATION OF GREEK. 63 in the literary language the same as did their ancestors of the classical period. It is a mis- representation, one of the inventions of some followers of Erasmus, to say that the Greeks of to-day have lost the old accentuation. If such were the case, would it not be probable that the change would have differed in various parts of Greece; if, for instance, the accentuation had been corrupted through the invasion of the Ro- mans, Huns, Avanes, Slavs, Franks, and Turks? Manifold accentuation, however, never has ex- isted; the educated Greeks of to-day, wherever they live, in all parts of the world, pronounce the words of their language according to rules which have stood the test of two thousand years. The Erasmian assertion of the loss of the old accentuation is one of those misstatements which contain a particle of truth and are therefore the more dangerous, the more deceiving. It is true that some words in the irregular, the people's, language are accentuated differently ; but this is nothing new. Similar deviations existed in the oldest times. Thus, even the people's language has made no change in this regard. At the time of Demosthenes, words in prose were pronounced according to accentuation, not according to metric quality. That such was