A grammar of the Homeric dialect - Wilbourhall.org

386 APPENDIX.
A similar account is to be given of the forms which exhibit ei for
eu or ef, as -rrveiet breathes, 6eifiv to run, x W (Subj.) shall pour, TrXeiovrfs
sailing, K\iov passed
into -cfw and then -cw, the e was lengthened by the force of the
metre, and became ei. So the et of Keiavrcs (for Krjvavres or Krjavrcs, from
KCUGJ)
is to be attributed to the Attic i Aor. Part. Keas. But the
Verbs in -eiu ( 51, 3), or some of them, may be Verbs in -rjw :
e.g. oKvf}(*>, like JEolic TTO^O), dStKqw.
It is probable that in the same way the a of ({idea (Plur. of (pdos),
drjp, aetdoo, aWe, ai'oi/, aWa, aop, aXiarjs, &r)S, &C. represents au. The
lengthening cannot well be merely metrical, as in dddvaros &c. ( 386).
In some cases ci takes the place of an e which was long by Position :
and perhaps eifiap for eS-fap.
as Sei'SoiKa for 6evrai; evveia, i8pvs, TrdXetco?, and Genitives
in -K\CIOVS (H. Weir Smyth, The Vowel System of the Ionic Dialect,
in the Trans, of the Am. Phil. Ass. xx. p. 74 G. Meyer, Griech. Gr?
:
149). It is worth observing that these inscriptions belong to the
same period as the MSS. in which, as we gather from the criticism of
Aristarchus, such forms as redveiSyras, orW, jSeuo, &c. first found
their way into the text.
F, Fictfs theory of the Homeric dialect.
The theory put forward by Aug. Fick in his
two works on Homer
(Die homerische Odyssee in der ursprunglichen SpracJiform wiederhergestellt,
1883 Die homerische Ilias nach Hirer Entstehung betrachtet
:
und in der urspriinglichen SpracJiform wiederhergestellt, 1886) admits
of being stated in a very few words. He holds that the poems (with
certain exceptions) were originally composed in an ^olic dialect ;
that some three centuries later (about 540 B.C.) they were translated
into Ionic; and that in this process every ^Eolic word for which
there was no metrically equivalent form in Ionic was simply left
unchanged. Thus, in his view, was formed the Epic dialect of
literature, a dialect mainly Ionic, but with a considerable admixture
of JEolic forms.
The arguments which Fick advances in favour of this theory are
not entirely linguistic. The scene of the Iliad, he reminds us, is