Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/28

6 similar signification make likewise a similar impression on the ear; whence each sentence obtains a certain symmetry and, even where the collocation of the words is involved, a clearness and regularity, which may be compared with the effect produced on the eye by the parts of a well-proportioned building; whereas, in the languages which have lost their grammatical forms, either the lively expression of the feeling is hindered by an unvarying and monotonous collocation of the words, or the hearer is compelled to strain his attention, in order to comprehend the mutual relation of the several parts of the sentence. Modern languages seem to attempt to win their way at once to the understanding without dwelling in the ear; while the classical languages of antiquity seek at the same time to produce a corresponding effect on the outward sense, and to assist the mind by previously filling the ear, as it were, with an imperfect consciousness of the meaning sought to be conveyed by the words.

§ 3. These remarks apply generally to the languages of the Indo-Germanic family, so far as they have been preserved in a state of integrity by literary works and have been cultivated by poets and orators. We shall now limit our regards to the Greek language alone, and shall attempt to exhibit its more prominent and characteristic features as compared with those of its sister tongues. In the sounds which were formed by the various articulation of the voice, the Greek language hits that happy medium which characterises all the mental productions of this people, in being equally removed, on the one hand, from the superabundant fulness, and, on the other, from the meagreness and tenuity of sound, by which other languages are variously deformed. If we compare the Greek with that language which comes next to it in fitness for a lofty and flowing style of poetry, viz., the Sanscrit, this latter certainly has some clashes of consonants not to be found in the Greek, the sounds of which it is almost impossible for an European mouth to imitate and distinguish: on the other hand, the Greek is much richer in short vowels than the Sanscrit, whose most harmonious poetry would weary our ears by the monotonous repetition of the A sound; and it possesses an astonishing abundance of diphthongs, and tones produced by the contraction of vowels, which a Greek mouth could alone distinguish with the requisite nicety, and which, therefore, are necessarily confounded by the modern European pronunciation. We may likewise perceive in the Greek the influence of the laws of harmony, which, in different nations, have caused the rejection of different combinations of vowels and consonants, and which have increased the softness and beauty of languages, though sometimes at the expense of their terminations and characteristic features. By the operation of the latter cause, the Greek has, in many places, lost its resemblance to the original type, which, although not now preserved in any one of the extant languages, maybe restored by conjecture from all of them; even here, however, it cannot be denied that the correct taste and feeling