Page:Christian Greece and Living Greek.djvu/60

38 CHRISTIAN GREECE AND LIVING GREEK. learned a little Greek in colleges in foreign lands. This could not be the case if some of the dialects had been adopted. The greatest of all advantages, the most important, is the marked similarity which exists between the literary lan- guage of to-day and the old Greek in regard to orthography and forms. For this reason the old Greek is not like a foreign language to the Greeks of to-day. How deplorable if it were otherwise, if the immortal treasures of the old literature were not their own ! They would not be if another system, if the Latin alphabet, which was tried during the Prankish reign, had been adopted. Let us once more take a look at the language question as it stood, and, as some will have it, as it stands perhaps among some querulous people to-day. There existed in Greece until the language question was firmly settled three parties : I. The Purists or AtticistS, xaOapinrai, or xadapiarai ri^? yXmffffrjq, as Korais Called them, who wish to carry purification to the extreme ; they recognize only those words which are found in the old Greek literature as entitled to be accepted in new Greek. It is plausible to any one that not all words which really existed in the old Greek