Greek Primer, Colloquial and Constructive — John Stuart Blackie
GREEK PRIMER You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org . If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title : Greek primer, colloquial and constructive Author : John Stuart Blackie Release date : December 29, 2022 [eBook #69656] Most recently updated: October 19, 2024 Language : English Original publication : United Kingdom: Macmillan, 1891 Other information and formats : www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69656 Credits : deaurider and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) *** START OF STUART BLACKIE EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH Scribendo dicimus diligentius, dicendo scribimus facilius. Quinctilian. London MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1891 All rights reserved PREFACE PREFACE One cannot have moved much in the world without hearing complaints, both from parents and young persons, about the amount of time and brain spent in the learning of languages, and the little profit derived from this outlay. These complaints, no doubt, arise partly from the want of judgment on the part of the parents, and the want of capacity and inclination on the part of their young hopefuls: parents often acting thoughtlessly on the vulgar notion that far birds have fair feathers, and preferring what is foreign to what is native, and what lies at a great distance in time or space to what is near; and young persons being forced to submit themselves to a grammatical indoctrination in which they feel no interest, and from which they derive no benefit. But it is no less true that these complaints are due in no small measure to false methods of linguistic training generally, or to some cherished prejudices in favour of certain languages on the part of the teachers; and it becomes therefore, at the present day, a matter of great practical importance to inquire how far our traditional methods of teaching languages are in conformity with the method of Nature in her great art of thought-utterance, and how far they may justly be called on to submit themselves to a revision and a reconstitution. We say at the present day emphatically, because it is quite evident that education, following in the train of democratic reform, is one of the watchwords of the hour, to which every good citizen must lend an obedient ear; and not only so, but circumstances have so changed since our schooling received its traditional form, that the wants which were satisfied by our school curriculum and school practice in the days of Milton and Locke now demand an altogether different treatment. In particular, the so-called learned languages, two hundred years ago the only medium of culture to an accomplished English gentleman, have now become the luxury of the leisurely, or the arsenal of the professional few, while other languages, such as German, not named in those days, are now sought after as the keys to the most valuable storehouses of all sorts of knowledge. Add to this that Great Britain, which was then a secondary naval power, and following the French and the Spaniards slowly in the great world-transforming process of colonisation, is now mistress of a world-wide empire from the Ganges to Vancouver Isle, through which stretch she exercises a dominant influence, combining the political virtue of ancient Rome with the commercial activity of Carthage. In these circumstances it becomes the special duty of every British man to acquire a familiar knowledge of the languages of the various races with which he may be brought into political or commercial relations; and, as languages after all are not valuable in themselves, but only as tools by which effective work in certain fields falls to be performed, we ought to see to it, both that we get the proper tools for doing the work, and that we learn to use them in such fashion as to work pleasantly and profitably; and in this view it may be truly said that, while the wrong language in the wrong place is of no use at all, even the right language in the right place, when imperfectly learned, is a tool with which the best workman can do only bad work, and perhaps cut his own fingers in the process. As language is a function which belongs as much to every normal human creature as seeing or hearing, there can be no difficulty in finding out the method of Nature in its acquisition. We have to answer only two questions: first, What are the factors of the process by which the human babe, from being capable merely of inarticulate cries, like any of the lower animals, is developed into an easy and graceful manipulator of articulate speech? and again, How far, and in what respects, does this model require to be modified in order to enable the expert handlers of the mother tongue to use any second or third language with like expertness? That this cannot be a very difficult matter demands no far-sought induction to prove, as the fact lies before us; for from the Greeks in the South-East to the Highlanders in the North-West we find bilingual and trilingual peoples largely scattered over Europe. It is in fact as easy to learn two or three languages as to learn one, if only the learner be habitually submitted to the natural influences, and guided by the steps of a natural process. What then, in the first place, are the steps of the process which analysis presents as elevating the inarticulate babe to the significant-speaking boy or girl? There is (1) the direct connection of certain objects with certain sounds and gestures; (2) these objects are such as stand in the nearest relation to the learner, and are presented to him in an atmosphere of the most natural and most pleasant surroundings; (3) the imitative faculty, by which he appropriates the proper sounds, is encouraged and cherished by