HOMER AND THE STUDY OF GREEK



The Greek language is being ousted from education, here, in France,
and in America. The speech of the earliest democracies is not
democratic enough for modern anarchy. There is nothing to be
gained, it is said, by a knowledge of Greek. We have not to fight
the battle of life with Hellenic waiters; and, even if we had,
Romaic, or modern Greek, is much more easily learned than the old
classical tongue. The reason of this comparative ease will be plain
to any one who, retaining a vague memory of his Greek grammar, takes
up a modern Greek newspaper. He will find that the idioms of the
modern newspaper are the idioms of all newspapers, that the grammar
is the grammar of modern languages, that the opinions are expressed
in barbarous translations of barbarous French and English
journalistic cliches or commonplaces. This ugly and undignified
mixture of the ancient Greek characters, and of ancient Greek words
with modern grammar and idioms, and stereotyped phrases, is
extremely distasteful to the scholar. Modern Greek, as it is at
present printed, is not the natural spoken language of the peasants.
You can read a Greek leading article, though you can hardly make
sense of a Greek rural ballad. The peasant speech is a thing of
slow development; there is a basis of ancient Greek in it, with
large elements of Slavonic, Turkish, Italian, and other imposed or
imported languages. Modern literary Greek is a hybrid of revived
classical words, blended with the idioms of the speeches which have
arisen since the fall of the Roman Empire. Thus, thanks to the
modern and familiar element in it, modern Greek "as she is writ" is
much more easily learned than ancient Greek. Consequently, if any