ylus or Sophocles or Pindar or
a great prose writer like Thucydides are guilty of taking unwarrantable
liberties with grammatical rules; it appears never to have occurred to
the inventors of them that these real 'conditores linguae Graecae' lived
in an age before grammar, when 'Greece also was living Greece.' It is
the anatomy, not the physiology of language, which grammar seeks to
describe: into the idiom and higher life of words it does not enter. The
ordinary Greek grammar gives a complete paradigm of the verb, without
suggesting that the double or treble forms of Perfects, Aorists, etc.
are hardly ever contemporaneous. It distinguishes Moods and Tenses,
without observing how much of the nature of one passes into the other.
It makes three Voices, Active, Passive, and Middle, but takes no notice
of the precarious existence and uncertain character of the last of the
three. Language is a thing of degrees and relations and associations
and exceptions: grammar ties it up in fixed rules. Language has many
varieties of usage: grammar tries to reduce them to a single one.
Grammar divides verbs into regular and irregular: it does not recognize
that the irregular, equally with the regular, are subject to law, and
that a language which had no exceptions would not be a natural growth:
for it could not have been subjected to the influences by which language
is ordinarily affected. It is always wanting to describe ancient
languages in the terms of a modern one. It has a favourite fiction that
one word is put in the place of another; the truth is that no word
is ever put for another. It has another fiction, that a word has been
omitted: words are omitted because they are no longer needed; and the
omission has ceased to be observed. The common explanation of kata or
some other preposition 'being understood' in a Greek sentence is another
fiction of the same kind, which tends to disguise the fact that under
cases were comprehended originally many more relations, and that
prepositions are used only to define the meaning of them with greater
precision. These instances are sufficient to show the sort of errors
which grammar introduces into language. We are not considering the
question of its utility to the beginner in the study. Even to him the
best grammar is the shortest and that in which he will have least to
unlearn. It may be said that the explanations here referred to are
already out of date, and that the study of Greek grammar has