The pronunciation of Greek 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: notion of purging the pronunciation of the classical languages of all those defects which belonged to it, whether by degenerate tradition or perverse provin... more »cialism, 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 very many of them in thatday, and the great majority even now have wanted either sense or courage to attend to ; observations which, I doubt not, will yet bear fruit in the present age, if education is to be advanced in the only way possible, viz., by those whose profession it is to teach others, learning in the first place to teach themselves. But in one great point of his rich and various discourse, the learned Dutchman was more witty than wise, and achieved a success where he was altogether wrong, or only half-right, that has been denied to him where he is altogether right. While his admirable observations on accent and quantity, and many of his precepts on the practical art of teaching languages, have been...« less