GREEK PRIMER
GREEK PRIMER
COLLOQUIAL AND CONSTRUCTIVE
BY
J. 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
One cannot have moved much in the world without hearing complaints,both from parents and young persons, about the amount of time and brainspent in the learning of languages, and the little profit derived fromthis outlay. These complaints, no doubt, arise partly from the wantof judgment on the part of the parents, and the want of capacity andinclination on the part of their young hopefuls: parents often actingthoughtlessly on the vulgar notion that far birds have fair feathers,and preferring what is foreign to what is native, and what lies at agreat distance in time or space to what is near; and young personsbeing forced to submit themselves to a grammatical indoctrination inwhich they feel no interest, and from which they derive no benefit.But it is no less true that these complaints are due in no smallmeasure to false methods of linguistic training generally, or to somecherished prejudices in favour of certain languages on the part of theteachers; and it becomes therefore, at the present day, a matter ofgreat practical importance to inquire how far our traditional methodsof teaching languages are in conformity with the method of Nature inher great art of thought-utterance, and how far they may justly becalled on to submit themselves to a revision and a reconstitution. Wesay at the present day emphatically, because it is quite evident thateducation, following in the train of democratic reform, is one of the[Pg vi]watchwords of the hour, to which every good citizen must lend anobedient ear; and not only so, but circumstances have so changed sinceour schooling received its traditional form, that the wants which weresatisfied by our school curriculum and school practice in the daysof Milton and Locke now demand an altogether different treatment. Inparticular, the so-called learned languages, two hundred years ago theonly medium of culture to an accomplished English gentleman, have nowbecome the luxury of the leisurely, or the arsenal of the professionalfew, while other languages, such as German, not named in those days,are now sought after as the keys to the most valuable storehouses ofall sorts of knowledge. Add to this that Great Britain, which was thena secondary naval power, and following the French and the Spaniardsslowly in the great world-transforming process of colonisation, is nowmistress of a world-wide empire from the Ganges to Vancouver Isle,through which stretch she exercises a dominant influence, combiningthe political virtue of ancient Rome with the commercial activity ofCarthage. In these circumstances it becomes the special duty of everyBritish man to acquire a familiar knowledge of the languages of thevarious races with which he may be brought into political or commercialrelations; and, as languages after all are not valuable in themselves,but only as