now discussing. For instance, in an inscription mentioned by Dr. Wordsworth, the word expiwθήσετε is found for ἐκριζωθήσεται (he shall be rooted out).—Athens and Attica, Journal of a Residence there, by the Rev. C. Wordsworth, p. 145.

This will be cited by the modern Greeks, as many similar blunders have been, as proving that the E and the AI were pronounced alike; but we must always bear in mind that we are discussing the pure pronunciation of well-educated Greeks, and how can we be sure that any one so ignorant as to write the future passive with an E had not vulgarisms in his pronunciation, and particularly in that very syllable? It may perhaps at first appear somewhat arrogant to assume, that we know how Greek ought to have been written better than the Greek who wrote it; but the truth is, that a modern scholar, with the advantage of the whole treasure of ancient literature, and the collation of manuscripts, is a far better judge of the orthography of the language than ninety-nine out of a hundred of those who spoke it as a living language, without taking the trouble to study it. The inscription of Herodes Atticus, indeed, was not the work of an ignorant man; but it was carefully and even pedantically framed to represent the orthography of an age long gone by, and may, perhaps, have elaborately followed even the blunders of antiquity.

When I speak of a mistake in an inscription, I mean a substitution of one letter for another, which was in use at the time, and which would have been used by a well-educated man. In early inscriptions one letter was used, even by the learned, for two or more sounds, not from ignorance, but from poverty.

SOUNDS OF ANIMALS.

7. Another rule which will perhaps cause a smile, but of which the violation has so much tended to embarrass the subject as to make a few words on it of use, is to take as authority the. pronunciation of "men speaking articulately,' and not the sounds of birds and beasts; a rule, which, if it requires authority, is borne out by no less a master than Aristotle, who, in his definition of a primary or elementary sound, excludes the sounds of animals :Στοιχεῖον μὲν οὖν ἐστι φωνὴ . . . ἀδιαίρετος· οὐ πᾶσα δὲ, ἀλλ ̓ ἐξ ἧς πέφυκε συνετὴ γίνεσθαι φωνή· καὶ γὰρ τῶν θηρίων εἰσὶν ἀδιαίρετοι φωναὶ, ὧν οὐδεμίαν λέγω στοιχεῖον. -Aristot. Poet. s. 34. Not that the sounds of animals may not be imitated by the human voice, and so expressed in writing as to give us generally to understand what animal is intended; but we can scarcely learn, with any degree of precision, the sound of each letter of which such imitative word is compounded. For instance, when Aristophanes speaks of the кóKKU, which says KÓKKU, we can have little doubt that he is speak

ing of the same bird which we call the cuckoo ; but when we come to an inquiry into the sound of each letter, if we assume that the Greek word and the English word are both correct imitations of the same sound, and therefore exactly alike, we shall draw the conclusion that the Greek O was sounded like our U, and the Greek Y like our OO: both of which inferences may be shown to be utterly false. Here again, take modern language as an instance: Hotspur says,

I'd rather be a kitten and cry "mew."

First Part Hen. IV., act 2. sc. 1. Schlegel translates this "miau." Does then the English EW sound like the German IAU? Indeed, when we consider how imperfect our imitations of the sounds of animals must necessarily be, many of them being sportive imitations of the imitations of our children, we shall be surprised at the weight which has been given to them by philosophers and scholars. According to this reasoning, Bárpaxo in Aristophanes must mean ducks, as he makes them say coat, which, with the accent on the last syllable, is exactly quacks"; and av, aù, which he puts into the mouth of a dog, must be pronounced, wherever we meet with it, "bow wow," to say nothing of the interesting disquisition as to the species of dog in whose mouth these canine interjections are placed by the dramatist; the Erasmians being favourable to the theory that he must have been a growling mastiff, while their opponents

consider that this part of the dialogue was car

ried on by a yaffing cur. imitative of animals are

Again, these sounds found in the comic

writers, where they probably often, if not always, contained some allusion to passing events: we have handed down to us a single line of Cratinus, Ο δ' ἠλίθιος ὥσπερ πρόβατον βὴ βὴ λέγων βαδίζει. This line has been honoured with much notice by scholars its metre has been reformed by Porson, and its pronunciation discussed by Erasmus; the only thing in it which seems never to have been thought of is its meaning: can we suppose that Cratinus, who was not so inferior to Aristophanes as not to be generally classed with him, would have been content with so poor a joke as to describe a man saying ẞǹ like a sheep, unless there were some incident, either introduced in the context, or well known to the audience, which gave a point to the satire? And yet we have this insulated line gravely put forward by critics as a proof of the precise manner in which the B and the H were pronounced by the Athenians in the time of Cratinus. The correctness of the general imitation is not disputed: we might have understood, without the word πρόβατον, that the animal which said βή was probably a sheep, as an animal saying uù would most likely be an ox; but the question is, whether we can collect from it the exact manner of pronouncing either of the letters of which it is composed. These few observations having been

made upon the arguments drawn from the sounds of animals, it will not be necessary to make further mention of them; not because they are beneath our notice, for, supposing the question itself worth considering, so is everything which throws light on it, but because they would tend merely to mislead us.

PUNS.

8. Another consideration which has not been enough attended to, is, that we are inquiring into the exact sound which each letter ought to have, and we have not proved our point when we have found one something near it. Unluckily, with some of the writers on this subject a pun is as good as a treatise, and the Joe Millers of olden time of as high authority as the Horne Tookes. To give instances. Several writers, to prove that the EI diphthong ought to be sounded exactly like I, cite the two following jokes: the celebrated Thais, on her way to pay a visit to one whose nickname was Grason, or the Goat, being asked whither she was going, quoted in reply the verse of Euripides,

Αἰγεῖ συνοικήσουσα τῷ Πανδίονος.

Here the pun consists in the equivocation between Aiyeî (Egeus) and aiyi (the goat), or, as Eustathius somewhat pompously explains it, kata ὁμοφωνίαν παρηχητικὴν δύο πτώσεων δοτικών, ἤτοι τοῦ Αἰγεῖ ἡρωικῶς, καὶ τοῦ αἰγὶ ζωικῶς.Od. I.