Page:Christian Greece and Living Greek.djvu/63

PROPER PRONUNCIATION OF GREEK. 4 1 French language in Germany, England, Switzer- land, and Holland when Frenchmen were forced to emigrate after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and later still, during the French Revo- lution. With the introduction of the Greek language everywhere, Greek type was cast and editions of Greek authors were printed, most of them with learned notes and Latin translations. The students of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries preferred to learn the language by means of translations rather than by the aid of the lexicon. Europe had soon an immense number of Hel- lenists able to converse in the purest old Greek with their teachers, the Greeks from Constanti- nople, and later on the former became teachers themselves, surrounded by students. Among these Hellenists were Reuchlin, Melanchthon, Luther, and Erasmus. All had, of course, the Byzantine pronuncia- tion, which is essentially the same as that of the Greeks of to-day, and^^also that of the Attic With the end of the sixteenth century the -"-*'^ '-' pronunciation of Greek in the schools in the^ countries west of Greece became unsystematical, ,., ^ .. ..^ the language as it was then pronounced in the -c