The Phœnician origin of Britons, Scots & Anglo-Saxons : discovered by Phœnician & Sumerian inscriptions in Britain, by preroman Briton coins & a mass of new history : with over one hundred illustrations and maps
BRITISH LANGUAGE, TROJAN OR:DORIC 177
it is a term entirely unknown to Homer as well as the early classic ‘“‘ Hellenic ’’ writers, although it is customary nowadays to call the latter “ Greek.” Geoffrey thus presumably, or a previous transcriber, employed in his translation this term “ Greek’ merely to render the old British textual name intelligible to his modern readers, at a time when Latin and Greek were the languages of the learned throughout Europe, and to convey to his readers the fact that this “ ancient British tongue ”’ belonged to the same family as the ancient Hellenic or so-called ‘‘ Greek” language, which was a leading branch of the Aryan Speech of civilized Europe.
The term ‘‘ Trojan,” on the other hand, as applied to this Early Briton language in Geoffrey’s translation, probably preserves, more or less, the general form of the name occurring in his old British text, in the sense of ‘* Doric.”
(‘ Trojan” or ‘' Troian”’ is the latinized word for the Hellenic Trées, a native of Troia (or Troy), as the people and their city are called by Homer. Now, the most ancient branch of the Aryans in Greece, who are incidentally referred to by Homer as the ‘‘ Dérices,’”’ the ‘‘ Dorians ” of the Latinist writers, were, I find, the original inhabitants of Troy, which would explain why the Dorians had their revenge on their distant kinsmen, the Achaians, who destroyed Troy (as described in the Iliad) by driving the latter out of Greece? in the eleventh century B.c. ; and secondly, the Homeric “‘ Troes’’ for Trojan is presumably a dialectic form of ‘‘ Doriees” or ‘‘ The Dorians ’’—for the interchange of the dentals T and D is common throughout the whole family of Aryan languages, and is especially common even at the present day in Greece and amongst the Greekspeaking people of Asia Minor, so that the modern guide-books to Greece and Asia Minor warn travellers* that the initial D of written or printed names is usually pronounced, in the colloquial, Th or 7. And the transposing of the o and 7 in spelling is not infrequent. |
The “ Doric’? language of the ancient Hellenes was distinguished from the later refined and polished “ Attic” of the classic ‘‘ Greeks’’ by its rough simplicity and the free use of broad vowel sounds. This “ Doric”’ character
* Details in my Avyan Origins.
* South Greece or Peloponnesus iscalled ‘“‘ The Dorian Island "’ by Pin-
dar, N., 3, 5; and by Sophocles, C.C., 6, 95, etc. 3 See MLH.A. [71].