A Handbook to Modern Greek (Classic Reprint) - Tapa blanda

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Excerpt from A Handbook to Modern Greek

IT has always appeared to me a great mistake, and one of which our British Hellenists have good reason to be ashamed, that Greek in this country is always talked about as if it were a dead language, and Modern Greek, if mentioned at all, thrown aside as a patois, an acquaintance with which would rather hinder than advance the student in his mastery of the great classical tongue. This notion is both philo logically false and practically pernicious. Modern Greek is not a patois, a mongrel, hybrid, or degraded dialect in any legitimate sense of the word: it is the same language in which St. Paul delivered his discourse to the Athenians from the hill of Mars in the first century, with only such slight variations as the course of time naturally brings with it in the case of all spoken languages which have enjoyed an unbroken continuity of cultivated usage. N o doubt there do exist in Greece, and always have existed, certain local perversions of the cultivated speech, which may in a loose sense he called patois; just as we have a peculiar local type of English in Dorsetshire, another in Lancashire, and that.

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