Excerpt from A Short and Easy Modern Greek Grammar: With Grammatical and Conversational Exercises, Idiomatic, Proverbial Phrases, and Full Vocabulary

The future of the Greek language will be watched with the utmost interest it is exposed to most serious danger; for there is some doubt whether it is strong enough to survive the attempt at a classical and artificial renovation that is now being made an attempt not only to reject all words of foreign origin, but to return to the accidence and the idiom of classical times. Such a rude amputation of the growth of 2000 years cannot safely be performed. Should the advocates of classical revival attain their object in Greece, then Greeks will cease to be mutually intelligible throughout the Levant, except in an artificially constructed dialect and no people has ever yet consciously invented a language, or restored a dead one to the life of popular' speech, after it had followed the ordinary course of decay and ana lytical regeneration which has produced nearly all the languages spoken in Europe at the present day. Many of the best edu cated Greeks are fully aware that any reform and purification of the Romaic tongue must start from the language now learnt by the people at their mother's knee, and enrich its vocabulary without altering its essential nature and it is to be hoped that the more moderate counsels of this body may prevail over the rash experiment of the extreme purists.

The analogy of another language that has passed through the same stage is instructive. In the days of Dante there were many purists who despised the vulgar tongue of Italy, and thought that ancient Latin was the only language fit for an educated man to speak or write. Had not the monumental work of the great Florentine at once raised the vernacular to a literary language, it is even possible that a frigid pseudo-classical Latin might have first strangled the popular tongue and then died a natural death. In Greece there are many songs and ballads, and even some prose works written in the true language'ill be very rapid; Modern Greek only requires a little Lnisation and academic acknowledgment on the part of ated Greeks to take its due place among the analytical ern languages of Europe: and then its position will be lue, bearing as it does almost the same relation to Ancient ek which the Romance languages bear to Latin.

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