dialect, in the vulgarized form known as the “Koine,” became the standard speech of all Greece.  But this linguistic uniformity[124] did not long 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 past.  There is naturally no reason to believe that this earliest “Indo-European” (or “Aryan”) prototype which we can in part reconstruct, in part but dimly guess at, is itself other than a single “dialect” of a group that has either become largely extinct or is now further represented by languages too divergent for us, with our limited means, to recognize as clear kin.[126]