I will commence by stating that three reasons have moved me to bring this subject before the Society—(1) Because I found everywhere loose and even altogether false ideas possessing the public mind on the subject; (2) because I much fear that we, the academical teachers of the Greek language, are chiefly to blame for the currency of these false ideas; and (3) because, if Greek is a living and uncorrupted language, and dominating large districts of Europe and the Mediterranean, as influentially as French on the banks of the Seine and German on the Rhine, it follows that a radical reform must take place in our received methods of teaching this noble and most useful language. Now that the current language of the Greeks in Athens and elsewhere is not, in any sense, a new or a corrupt language, as Italian is a melodious and French a glittering corruption of Latin, may be gathered even a priori; for languages are slow to die, and the time that elapsed from the taking of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 and the establishment of the Venetian power in the Morea in 1204, to the resurrection of Greek political life in 1822, was not long enough to cause such a fusion of contrary elements as produced the English language from the permanent occupation of the British Isles by the Normans.
III.—Phases of the Living Greek Language