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The pronunciation of Greek: accent and quantity
The pronunciation of Greek accent and quantity Author:John Stuart Blackie Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: dialogue, De recta Latini Grcecique sermonis pronun- tiatione, did not appear till the year 1528, by which time so strong a prescription had already run in favou... more »r of the received method, that it seems strange how even his learning and wit should have prevailed to overturn it. But there are periods in the history of the world when the minds of men are naturally disposed to receive all sorts of novelties; and the era of the Reformation was one of them. Erasmus, though a conservative in religion, (as many persons are who are conservative in nothing else,) pleased his free speculative whim with all sorts of imaginations ; and among other things fell—though, if what Wetsten tells be true, in a very strange way1—on thenotion of purging the pronunciation of the classical languages of all those defects which belonged to it, whether by degenerate tradition or perverse provincialism, and erecting in its stead an ideal pronunciation, made up of erudite conjecture and philosophical argumentation. Nothing was more easy than to prove that in the course of two thousand years the orthoepy of the language of the Greeks had declined considerably from the perfection in which its musical fulness had rolled like a river of gold from the mouth of Plato, or had been dashed like a thunderbolt of Jove from the indignant lips of Demosthenes ; yet more easy was it, and admirable game for such a fine spirit as Erasmus, to evoke the shades of Cicero and Quinctilian, and make mirth to them out of a Latin oration delivered before the Emperor Maximilian, by a twittering French courtier and a splay.mouthed Westphalian baron.1 It is certain also that there are in that dialogue many admirable observations on the blundering practices of the schoolmasters, and even the learned professors, his contemporaries, which ve...« less