Excerpt from The Sounds and Inflections of the Greek Dialects: Ionic The method that has been pursued in treating the forms as purely linguistic phenomena calls for a few words of explanation. As it has not been my purpose to write a Comparative Grammar from the point of view of Ionic, I have rarely endeavoured to trace the forms back to the pre-hellenic stage. Ionic has been compared throughout with other dialects, especially Attic. Because of its perpio'rns and Kowo'rqs, Attic is, and will continue to be, the standard by which philologians measure the manifold 'aberrations' of dialects less highly developed, or less adapted than itself to serve as vehicles for the expression of Hellenic thought. To the mention of difficult forms I have added brief explanations in the belief that these would prove of service to English and American students of Greek grammar. Many of these explanations refer to articles scattered up and down in the various journals or in monographs not always easy of access. The student may find here and there in the following pages a contribution to the solution of some of these difficulties, the existence of which has constantly been emphasized; but in crossing the frontier of disputed questions I have attempted only to bring the book to the level of the comparative grammar of to-day, and, while confessing my inability to arrive at a decision when the evidence seemed insufficient, to set forth briefly and criticize existing theories. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.