THE WAR OF GREEK INDEPENDENCE 1821 TO 1833 BY W.ALISON PHILLIPS 1897

THE GREEK LANGUAGE 17
which should combine, as far as possible, the best elements
of both the ancient and modern tongues. He
opposed equally those who, despising the idiom in common
use, wished to preserve classical Greek as the language
of the learned, and those who desired to raise
the vulgar patois to the dignity of a literary language.
His plan was to base his language
on the common
tongue, but to remove from it all foreign accretions,
and as far as possible restore all such ancient and pure
forms as had not become wholly obsolete. What
Luther's Bible had done for Germany, Korais's editions
of the classics, with their prefaces in modern
Greek, were to do for Greece.
His efforts were crowned with remarkable success.
The mixed patois is still the language of common life;
a Greek is used which
but, in the press and the schools,
differs, not in kind, but in degree only, from the tongue
of Homer; *
and the magnificent literary monuments
of Greece have thus been preserved as the common
property of the whole people.
By
this revival of the
tradition of the dead glories of Hellas a new motive
i One of the most essential differences between modern
and classical Greek: the pronunciation according to accent
instead of quantity, is apparent comparatively early in the
Christian era. Nonnus, an Egyptian-Greek poet, in the
fourth century A.D., is the first writer to reckon with accent.
See Prof. Murray's Ancient Greek Literature, p. 395.
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