alone will not teach it to them. Neither will it teach them Homer's Greek. The difference of the two is in some directions so vast, that they may deserve to be called two languages as much as Portuguese and Spanish.
Much as I have written, a large side of the argument remains still untouched. The orthography of Homer was revolutionized in adapting it to Hellenic use, and in the process not only were the grammatical forms tampered with, but at least one consonant was suppressed. I am sure Mr Arnold has heard of the Digamma, though he does not see it in the current Homeric text. By the re-establishment of this letter, no small addition would be made to the 'oddity' of the sound to the ears of Sophocles. That the unlearned in Greek may understand this, I add, that what with us is written eoika, oikon, oinos, hekas, eorga, eeipe, eleliχθη, were with the poet wewoika, wīkon, wīnos, wekas (or swekas?), weworga, eweipe, eweliχθη[1]; and so with very many other words, in which either the metre or the grammatical formation helps us to detect a lost consonant, and the analogy of other dialects or languages assures us that it is
- ↑ By corrupting the past tenses of welisso into a false similarity to the past tenses of elelizo, the old editors superimposed a new and false sense on the latter verb; which still holds its place in our dictionaries, as it deceived the Greeks themselves.
