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Excerpt from The Erasmian Pronunciation of Greek and Its Precursors, Jerome Aleander, Aldus Manutius, Antonio of Lebrixa: A Lecture But we have to consider him to-day not as a great educator or as a polymath, or as a theologian, but as a philologist, the discoverer of a new subject of philological inquiry, the ancient pronunciation of the two classical languages. His claim to priority is indisputable, as he had certainly announced his theory at least a quarter of a century before the appearance of the Dialogue of Erasmus. In our present dearth of biographical and bibliographical data, it is difficult to determine how and when the idea first dawned on him. As for the idea itself, no great power of divination was needed to discover it; it was a direct and natural corollary from the fundamental assumption of the New Learning. Once admitted that there was an ancient mode of writing, it was only natural to suppose that there must have been also an ancient mode of speaking; 'back to the ancients' meant a return to that, as well as a return to their language and style. As far as Latin was concerned, the question of the ancient pronunciation was inevitable; it was observed that each nation had its own pronunciation of Latin, and it was clear that they could not be all of them right, and also that no one of them spoke it in the way described by Quintilian as the normal and correct way. \vith Greek, however, there was 110 such diversity of pronunciations. It had come to the Westerns as an exotic language, with a conventional uniformity of pronunciation, a standard fixed by the speech of the learned Byzantines, who were the first teachers of the language in the West. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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