THE EARLY AGE OF GREECE VOL.I by W.Ridgeway 1901

I
THE HOMERIC DIALECT. 657
to speak their mothers' tongue, as was the ease with the
Pitcairu Islanders, the offspring of the mutineers of H.M.S.
Bounty and Tahitian women.
'
Indeed our phrase mother-tongue
is based on the fact
observed through long ages that the child learns its first words
from its mother, and thus takes after her in speech. This law
still holds good in modern days, and must have been far
stronger in earlier times, in countries where the tie of marriage
hardly existed and the child belonged to its mother's and not
to its father's tribe, as is still the case over wide regions of the
earth.
Let us now return to Arcadia. As the Arcadians were
neither coiKjuen.'d by the Acheans, nor conquered them, they
cannot fall under our first two categories. The third only
remains for them. But our iiKjuiries
showed that even under
fairly favourable conditions, as in Switzerland, there is no
tcndt'ucy on the part of any one canton to adopt the language
of any (jtiiei', whilst in the othei- cases national jealousies and
I'ace hatred serve as a strong additional check to any such
change of language. We may then reasonably conclude that
Arcadia was no excepti(Ui to the general law, esjjeciall}' as in
her case the antipathy to an invading and encroaching neighbour
must have Ijl'cu very strong.
Indeed it would appear that even in those parts of Pi'lojioiuiesus
where the Dorians held sway, the l)oi-ic
tongue made
but slow progress exci-pt in the (-ities. Stral)o' says that
" those nations of Peloponnesus, who like the Arcadians and
Kleaiis had little intercourse with the Dorians, used the Aeolic
dialect. The Arcadians ])eiiig coinj)letely mountaineers, escaju'd
in
the general partition
of J\'loponnesus, while the Eleans v/ere
con--i(lere'l as (ie(lieate(| to the sei'vice of Olympian Zeus, and
]i\cd for a long period m peace, pi'inci))ally because thev were
of Aeolic descent, and had admitted into their country the
aiMuy of ().\ylus
ahoiit the time of the return of the 1 lei'acleids.
The rest spake a mixed dialect of Aeolic and 1 )oric, some
keeping to a greater, some to a less degree the Aeolic. K\