Page:Christian Greece and Living Greek.djvu/96

 ^4 CHRISTIAN GREECE AND LIVING GREEK. Sunday from one end of Greece to the other in their original purity. With the establishment of schools and colleges the people's vernacular was gradually purified from the intermixture of foreign words, and now the language of the Athenian newspapers and of the government despatches differs very little from the language of the New Testament, which is, as you know, ancient Greek in a sim- plified form, commonly called the Alexandrine Greek. This is a wonderful achievement in sixty-five years, which is the length of the political life of Greece. Modern Greek is nothing else but ancient Greek in a modified form. The orthog- raphy, accents, aspirants, etc., are absolutely like the old Greek. It is now a complete lan- guage for the conveyance of human thought, and we have at present many prose writers and poets who have acquired a European reputation. You would be astonished to hear how pleasantly it sounds to one's ears, to hear the song of Hia- watha translated into modern Greek, as well as some of the plays of Shakespeare, like " King Lear," "Romeo and Juliet," and "Hamlet." Modern Greek is now spoken by ten millions of people, for, besides the present Greek king-