GREECE (LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE) 207 1873) ; and the works of Fallmerayer, Prokesch- Osten, Villemain, Pouqueville, Finlay, Keight- ley, Emerson Tennent, Rizos-Nerulos, Sutsos, Gervinus, Tricupis, and Zinkeisen. GREECE, Language and Literature of. The Greek language is a branch of the Indo-Euro- pean family, and was spoken, probably as early as 15 centuries before our era, by the Greeks in Europe and Asia Minor, and subsequently in lower Italy, Sicily, and numerous colonies es- tablished on the coasts .of the Mediterranean and Black seas. It became afterward the reigning language of the Macedonian, Syrian, Egyptian, and Byzantine empires. Besides the dialects of modern Greece, remnants of it are found in lower Italy, at the southern ex- tremity of Calabria. The origin of the lan- guage and the degree of its relationship to other forms of Aryan speech have not been definitely established. The ancient Greeks and Romans speak of a Pelasgic race as the com- mon stock of both nations, but without fur- nishing sufficient information to place it within the reach of history. The conjectures of an- cient and modern writers have linked it to nearly every great nation of antiquity, but without a satisfactory result. Alstedius in the 17th century derives the Greek from the Hebrew, and the people from Javan, the son of Japheth ; Webb from the Chinese ; Mon- boddo from Egypt, believing that the Pelasgi were Goths. Martin and Buffier assert that the Phoenician Cadmus altered the language in the north, and the Phrygian Pelops in the south. Rudbeck and Ihre derive it from the Gothic, while Jamieson holds to the re- verse. Grote says that he cannot accept a hypothesis which implies that "the Hellenic language is a mere confluence of two foreign barbaric languages (Phoenician and Egyptian) with two or more internal barbaric languages, Pelasgian, Lelegian, &c.," and considers futile all inquiries in regard to the ante-Hellenic Pe- lasgians. George Rawlinson adopts the opin- ion of Niebuhr, Thirl wall, and K. O. Mtiller, that the relation of Greek to Pelasgian was like that of English to Anglo-Saxon. Glad- stone designates the Pelasgians as pure Aryan, and the Hellenes "as Aryan with a residue or mixture of Turanian elements." Geldart con- siders the popular notion of the Greeks them- selves, that the language of the modern Al- banians is that of the ancient Pelasgians, as nearest the truth. Cuno contends, in his Forschungen aufdem Gebiete der alien Volker- Icunde (Berlin, 1871), that the Greeks and Ro- mans used the term Pelasgian very nearly in the same sense in which modern linguists use the term Aryan or Indo-European, and that Greek is most closely related to the Lithuanian language, because it has retained the same ac- centuation and several forms of words which, though found in Sanskrit, have disappeared in the other languages derived from it. The be- lief that Latin is a daughter of Greek, which was common for centuries both in ancient and 374 VOL. vin. 14 modern times, has been rejected by many emi- nent scholars. The general opinion at present is that Greek is an elder sister of Latin. E. Curtius says that out of 500 Greek verbal roots only 30 reappear exclusively in Latin. Lott- ner says he has discovered that Greek has fewer words in common with Latin than Latin has with German, Slavic, and Lettic. Max Mtiller makes the following statement in re- gard to the affinity of the classical tongues of the Indo-European family : " No sound scholar would ever think of deriving any Greek or Latin word from Sanskrit. . . . Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin are sisters, varieties of one and the same type. They all point to some earlier stage, when they were less different from each other than they now are, but no more." The history of the Greek language is divided by Benfey, in his GeschicJite der SpracJi- wissenschaft (Munich, 1868), into three periods. The first is the period of its literary develop- ment from the time of epic poetry to the rise of the common tongue, the KOIVJJ or the Helle- nic of the Hellenes ; the second embraces the time during which the noivfj came to be the language of all civilized nations and educated persons, and the time during which it was gradually confined again to its original limits ; the third period begins with the fall of the Byzantine empire, and its principal feature is the gradual disregard of the literary language, and the rise of the popular forms of speech which finally produced the modern Greek. History becomes acquainted with the Greek language only after it had separated into nu- merous dialects. The dialectic differences were mainly of form and pronunciation, and but small in steins and roots. Two main classes predominate among all the dialect forms : the Doric (^ AupiKJ} or Awptf) and the Ionic ($ 'IUVIKTJ or 'Idf), which were spoken by the two princi- pal races, of which the Doric was the largest. Another principal dialect was that spoken by the ^Eolians of Asia Minor, Boeotia, and Thes- saly. E. Curtius, in his "History of Greece" (translated, London, 1868-'73), says: "There were Greeks who spoke neither Ionic nor Doric, and these were said to speak ^Eolic. But the ^Eolic is not a dialect, like the Doric and Ionic ; it commands no defined territory of language, and possesses no fixed character. The so-called jEolic Greek is rather to such an extent colored differently, according to the different regions in which it settled itself, that it is impossible to fix upon a universally prevalent type, upon a fixed law of sounds, and a system of gram- matical forms comprehending all its members. Speaking generally, and leaving out of the question certain more recent formations, it in- cluded those forms which, when compared with the cognate languages of Asia, we must recognize as the most ancient. The ^Eolic stands nearest to the original tongue of the Greeks, to that tongue which we must regard as the common mother of the various dialects among them, of the Grseco-Italic language;
