ng continue. During the two
millennia that separate the Greek of to-day from its classical prototype
the Koine gradually split up into a number of dialects. Now Greece is as
richly diversified in speech as in the time of Homer, though the present
local dialects, aside from those of Attica itself, are not the lineal
descendants of the old dialects of pre-Alexandrian days.[125] The
experience of Greece is not exceptional. Old dialects are being
continually wiped out only to make room for new ones. Languages can
change at so many points of phonetics, morphology, and vocabulary that
it is not surprising that once the linguistic community is broken it
should slip off in different directions. It would be too much to expect
a locally diversified language to develop along strictly parallel lines.
If once the speech of a locality has begun to drift on its own account,
it is practically certain to move further and further away from its
linguistic fellows. Failing the retarding effect of dialectic
interinfluences, which I have already touched upon, a group of dialects
is bound to diverge on the whole, each from all of the others.

[Footnote 124: It is doubtful if we have the right to speak of
linguistic uniformity even during the predominance of the Koine. It is
hardly conceivable that when the various groups of non-Attic Greeks took
on the Koine they did not at once tinge it with dialectic peculiarities
induced by their previous speech habits.]

[Footnote 125: The Zaconic dialect of Lacedaemon is the sole exception.
It is not derived from the Koine, but stems directly from the Doric
dialect of Sparta.]

In course of time each dialect itself splits up into sub-dialects, which
gradually take on the dignity of dialects proper while the primary
dialects develop into mutually unintelligible languages. And so the
budding process continues, until the divergences become so great that
none but a linguistic student, armed with his documentary evidence and
with his comparative or reconstructive method, would infer that the
languages in question were genealogically related, represented
independent lines of development, in other words, from a remote and
common starting point. Yet it is as certain as any historical fact can
be that languages so little resembling each other as Modern Irish,
English, Italian, Greek, Russian, Armenian, Persian, and Bengali are but
end-points in the present of drifts that converge to a meeting-point in
the dim