Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/255

 LANGUAGE AXD DIALECTS. 239 course, the varieties would have been much more numerous if he had given us the impressions of his ear in Eubcea, the Cy- clades, Massalia, Rhegium, and Olbia, all numbered as Greeks extract from Homer, Hekatseus, Herodotus, Hippocrates, etc.; to what living speech it made the nearest approach, amidst those divergences which the historian has made known to us, we cannot tell. Sappho and Alkseus in Lesbos, Myrtis and Korinna in Boeotia, were the great sources of reference for the Lesbian and Boeotian varieties of the -ZEolic dialect, of which there was a third variety, untouched by the poets, in Thessaly. 1 The analogy between the different manifestations of Doric and -ZEolic, as well as that between the Doric generally and the JEolic generally, contrasted with the Attic, is only to be taken as rough and approximative. But all these different dialects are nothing more than dialects, distinguished as modifications of one and the same language, and exhibiting evidence of certain laws and principles pervading them all. They seem capable of being traced back to a certain ideal mother-language, peculiar in itself and distinguishable from, though cognate with, the Latin ; a substantive member of what has been called the Indo-European family of languages. This truth has been brought out, in recent times, by the comparative examination applied to the Sanscrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, German, and Lithuanian languages, as well as by the more accurate analysis of the Greek language itself to which such studies have given rise, in a manner much more clear than could have been imagined by the ancients themselves. 2 It is needless to dwell upon the importance of this uniformity of language in holding to- gether the race, and in rendering the genius of its most favored members available to the civilization of all. Except in the rarest cases, the divergences of dialect were not such as to prevent 1 Respecting the three varieties of the JEolic dialect, differing considerably from each other, see the valuable work of Ahrcns, De Dial. JH.ol. sect. 2, 32, 50. not finished, on account of the early death of *he author.) presents an ingu- nious specimen of such analysis.
 * md as lonians. The Ionic dialect of the grammarians was an
 * The work of Albert Giese, Uebcr den ./Eolischen Dialekt (unhappily