# Littell's Living Age/Volume 137/Issue 1768/Miscellany

​Greek Pronunciation. — Our classical and scholastic readers will be amused with the following very characteristic letter of Professor Blackie of Edinburgh to the editor of the Times: "I was sorry to observe from a report some time ago in your columns that my esteemed friend Mr. Gladstone, in the matter of the pronunciation of the language which he loves so much, still remains a heretic. The English pronunciation of Greek is a mere figment, a piece of incongruity, absurdity, perverseness, and practical inconvenience altogether indefensible, and I hope you will allow me, as a Scottish scholar, to enter my protest against the scholastic continuance of a practice disgraceful to the philological science of these islands. The vocalization of Greek I will let pass, presuming that by the admission of all scholars it cannot stand a single moment after the overthrow which the bastard Latin of the English schools has received from the strong arm of the editor of 'Lucretius.' But neither does the case stand a whit better in the matter of the accentuation. I never yet found an English scholar who could answer me the simple question, Why do you pronounce Latin with the Latin accents received by tradition from the Latinists of the Roman Church, while you refuse to pronounce Greek according to the combined traditions of the Greek Church, the Greek people, and the Alexandrian and Byzantine grammarians? Mr. Gladstone says, repeating in this the refrain of English scholars ready to catch at any straw in defence of their perversities, that Greek accent means 'musical pitch,' and ought not to be confounded with stress or emphasis, which we all understand. Now it is quite true that one element of the Greek accent is musical pitch, this pitch, however, being part of the common music of spoken language, not of singing or of intonation; but it also means emphasis or stress, as can easily be proved from the language of ancient grammarians and rhetoricians; and there is no contradiction between these two things. But, even supposing it meant only musical pitch and not emphasis at all, this would form not the slightest justification of the present practice of pronouncing Greek with the stress laid on Latin chords by the ancient Romans, rather than with the stress laid on Greek words by the living Greek people, an utterly unscientific and indefensible transference that arose out of mere scholastic carelessness and the want of all rhetorical culture in the great English schools, assisted, I believe, by a certain onesided hobby-horsicality about metres, which for a considerable period gave a peculiar and somewhat narrow character to English scholarship. There is nothing more natural and more easy than to pronounce at once with that elevation of the tone of the voice which is meant by musical pitch and that dominance of emphasis which is now the more commonly accepted meaning of the word accent. There is, therefore, no mystery in the matter; only the dogged conservatism of English scholarship, too lazy or too proud to abandon its old traditions, and eager to defend an untenable position by any sort of unpractical subtlety and artificial mystery. I have only to add that in my teaching I think it sufficient to insist on the stress being laid on the proper syllable, without insisting on the accompanying elevation of tone, partly because the ears of our students are so gross and their aesthetical culture so utterly neglected that I must fain be content to deal grossly with them, and partly also because the proper stress on the proper syllable is absolutely necessary to make the word intelligible to the ear. I should also wish to state my entire accordance with Dr. Schliemann, that it would be well in all cases that Greek were taught as a living and not as a dead language. The saving of time which this would effect is a most important consideration, and I offer myself, as a practical man, to prove publicly before any assembly of scholars in Oxford or Cambridge how this could be done easily, even on English ground, without the slightest prejudice to that minute accuracy and refined classical tone of which English Hellenism has always been proud to make her boast."