Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/243

VI.] recorded history of Indo-European speech considerably higher than we have anywhere else attained. The exact date of its earliest monuments, the grand and unrivalled poems of Homer, the Iliad and Odyssey, cannot, it is true, be determined; but they go back, doubtless, to near the beginning of the thousand years before Christ's birth. From the different parts of Greece, too, as of Italy, we have received records of dialects that subsisted side by side through all the earlier periods of the country's history, until at length (about B.C. 300) the political importance and superior literature of Athens made her idiom, the later Attic, the common language of cultivated Greeks everywhere. The earlier Attic is found first in the writings of the great dramatists, beginning about five centuries before Christ: it is more nearly akin with the earlier Ionic of Homer and Hesiod (before 700 B.C.), and the later Ionic of Herodotus (about 400 B.C.), than with the Doric of Alcman, Pindar, and Theocritus (600-250 B.C.), or the Æolic of Alcæus and Sappho (about 600 B.C.). The differences of the Greek dialects are quite insignificant as compared with those of the Italic, yet they are of no small service to the historical student of the Greek language, since each brings to his knowledge some elements less corrupted and modernized than are to be found in the others, or in the later common tongue.

The modern Greek has also its dialects, respecting which little is known in detail; and it has, besides, its common tongue, the Romaic (as it is ordinarily styled), spoken and written by all the educated Greeks of the present day. This Romaic is very much less altered from the ancient classic language, as spoken by Plato and Demosthenes, than are the modern Romanic languages from the speech of Virgil and Cicero. The difference of the two is even so slight that a party in Greece are now engaged in making the somewhat pedantic and utopian effort to eliminate it altogether, to make the turbulent population of the present petty and insignificant kingdom talk and write as did their heroic forefathers, when, though feeble in numbers, they were the foremost community of the world. Small result is to be looked for from this experiment; should it prove successful, it will