Literatūra ISSN 0258-0802 eISSN 1648-1143

2022, vol. 64(3), pp. 66–76 DOI: https://doi.org/10.15388/Litera.2022.64.3.6

The Antinomy of Philology (an Approach by Jules David)

Fatima Eloeva
Institute of English, Romance, and Classical Studies
Vilnius University
E-mail: fatima.eloeva@flf.vu.lt
ORCID ID 0000-0001-7467-9448

Abstract. The paper presents an attempt to reconstruct the original method of mastering the Modern Greek, created for classical philologists by a talented researcher and classical philologist Jules David. Jules David (Charles-Louis-Jules David, 1783–1854) was the son of Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), apparently the most successful and well paid artist in the entire history of France, the creator of neoclassicism. We will try to show that his scientific conception presents an interesting attempt to establish a connection between the ancient and modern state of the Greek continuum. Jules David’s linguo-didactic approach is innovative and unexpected – while discussing the standard of the Greek language, he managed to combine elegantly the descriptive and prescriptive aspects of the language analysis. His main work, the Comparative description of the Ancient Greek and Demotic Languages (Συνοπτικός παραλληλισμός της ελληνικής και γραικικής απλοελληνικής γλώσσης) is a fascinating attempt to establish the parallels of the Ancient Greek and Modern Greek languages. In addition Jules David set himself another and not trivial task indeed – to make classical philologists, dealing with the Ancient Greek, feel that they are dealing with a living language, and not with a dead scheme. We believe that this strategy of David, due to its originality, has not been fully understood by researchers and can be compared with the views of another outstanding neo-Hellenist and philosopher Nikolaj Bakhtin, the brother of philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1884–1950).
Keywords: Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, literary standard, diglossia, plurilingualism, the Age of Enlightment.

Filologijos antinomija (Jules’o Davido požiūris)

Anotacija. Straipsnyje siekiama rekonstruoti originalų naujosios graikų kalbos įvaldymo metodą, kurį klasikiniams filologams sukūrė talentingas klasikinės filologijos tyrėjas Žiulis Davidas (Charles-Louis Jules David, 1783–1854). Jis buvo neoklasicizmo kūrėjo Jacques’o-Louis Davido (1748–1825), bene sėkmingiausio ir geriausiai apmokamo menininko per visą Prancūzijos istoriją, sūnus. Šiandien Ž. Davido vardas beveik užmirštas, tačiau jo mokslinė koncepcija pateikia įdomų bandymą užmegzti ryšį tarp senosios ir šiuolaikinės graikų kalbų kontinuumo. Tyrėjo didaktinis požiūris yra naujoviškas ir netikėtas – diskutuodamas apie graikų kalbos standartą, Ž. Davidas gebėjo elegantiškai sujungti aprašomąjį ir preskriptyvinį kalbos analizės aspektus. Kelta ir dar viena, tikrai ne banali užduotis – skatinti klasikinius filologus, tiriančius senąją graikų kalbą, pajusti, kad jie susiduria su gyva kalba, o ne su mirusia schema. Galima manyti, kad ši Ž. Davido strategija, dėl originalumo tyrėjų iki galo nesuvokta, gali būti lyginama su kito iškilaus neohelenisto, filosofo Nikolajaus Bachtino, filosofo Michailo Bachtino (1884–1950) brolio, pažiūromis.
Reikšminiai žodžiai: senoji graikų kalba, šiuolaikinė graikų kalba, literatūros standartai, diglosija, daugiakalbystė, Apšvietos amžius.

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Received: 17/10/2022. Accepted: 17/11/2022.
Copyright © Fatima Eloeva, 2022. Published by Vilnius University Press.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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Classical studies as a knowledge of the ancient world can’t of course last forever – their material is exhaustible. What can’t be exhausted is the always – new adjustment every age makes to the classical world measuring itself across it. If we set the classicist the task to understand better his age by means of antiquity, then his task has no end. This is the antinomy of philology.
F. Nietzsche¹

 

It seems to be evident that the words of Nietzsche quoted above rarely correspond to the letter and spirit of the activity of a classical philologist. Nevertheless we believe that Jules David – an outstanding French philologist and classicist – presents a noteworthy exception to this rule, though his academic carrier by no means can be called successful.

The paper aims to reconstruct the original method of mastering the Modern Greek, created for classicists by a talented (and unfairly forgotten) researcher Jules David (1783–1854). In the article we will consider a number of issues that are closely related to each other – we will regard the specifics of the notorious Greek language question (Greek language controversy, Γλωσσικό ζήτημα), show the peculiarities of the humanistic context of philhellenism, which determined the activities of Jules David as well as some aspects of his biography and, last but not least, the innovative aspects of his linguistic attitudes. Thus, in this work, we follow the principle of a frame construction. Starting with a brief description of the main scientific works of Jules David, we will try to show the context in which they were created, and in conclusion will try to clarify the specificity and originality of his linguistic views and method. In a certain sense, our ultimate goal is to restore justice, because it seems to us that up to the present moment, David’s scientific conception has not been appreciated on its merits.

To appreciate the method of Jules David one has to be aware of the specifics of the famous Greek language question. The antinomy of philology described by Nietzsche seems to be ideally reflected by the whole history of Greek. The lexicon of the Modern Greek presents an extremely high level of conservatism, which seem to be a result of conscious language politics.

The Greeks were the first in the European tradition to realize the standard significance of their literary texts. They created and elaborated the perception of Attic speech as a prestigious ideal norm to which every educated person should orient. This tendency existed for centuries and had a strongest impact on the Greek lexicon. Since then the whole history of Greek can be regarded as a permanent conscious struggle in order to conserve the treasure of language; one should admit that in certain respects this struggle has turned to be quite successive (Browning 1983; Horrocks 1997).

Perhaps, one of the most important methodological issues in Modern Greek studies is the question how to regard Modern Greek – should we perceive it as a separate language or just as a phase of the linguistic continuum that has been developing for more than 3 500 years. Both approaches lead to fairly different, sometimes even alternative conclusions and hypotheses. Presumably there is no one-dimensional, unambiguous response to this question. Anyhow it is obvious that consideration of different linguistic levels would give us diverse answers. Consequently, lexicon and syntactic structure should be analyzed separately (Eloeva, Kisilier, Nikolaenkova 2019)².

The Greek lexicon is highly conservative. This is a striking feature of Greek that has been repeatedly pointed out by researchers. According to George Hatzidakis very few words of Greek had completely disappeared (Χαζιδάκης 1905, Ι, 332). Odysseas Elytis (1911–1996, Nobel prize for poetry 1979) noticed that uttering the words ουρανός «sky», θάλασσα «sea», ήλιος «sun», contemporary Greeks are aware of the fact that these are the same words that Archilochus and Sappho had once used (Ελύτης 1982, 28). Henry Mirambel wittily compared Greek lexicon with an archival book of a village, where only births are marked, while deaths are missing (Mirambel 1948, 5).

It seems that beginning from a very early stage Greek has been regarded as a man-made artifact, objet d’art. This tendency matches perfectly with the consistent line of anti-Cartesian and anti-Kantian philosophical trends established by Herder, Humboldt, Hamann, and Vossler who transformed the theory of the sign character of language into an expression of style by concentrating on the German term ‘Art’ as a sort of habitus. Especially Humboldt concentrated on the non-natural and non-functional character of language in defining it as a cultural product (Born-Bornstein 2014, 121–139).

Due to the high prestige of the learned language in the Greek cultural tradition, we are faced with a constant “return” to the usus of seemingly disappeared forms – this feature is related both to separate lexemes and whole grammatical categories. This phenomenon seems to be directly linked to the aesthetic function of the language (pointed out along with other language functions by R. Jakobson). Thus one can postulate for Greek the situation of certain control of the written tradition over the literary norm.

The unusual stability of the Greek lexicon is linked with another tendency responsible for the uniqueness of the Greek linguistic situation – the phenomenon of diglossia³, the origins of which apparently could be traced as early as in the 1^st century BC. Modern Greek has been used by Ferguson as a prototypical model for diglossia (Ferguson 1959, 325)⁴.

Greek writers of the late 18^th century used various versions of Greek, “ranging from the Classical Attic of the archaist Evgenios Voulgaris (1716–1806) at one extreme to the transcription of the spoken tongue by the vernacularist Dimitrios Katartzis (c. 1730–1807) at the other” (Mackridge 2009, 173). Most writers, however, as Mackridge remarks, used an amalgam of features belonging to Ancient and Modern Greek, in terms of both voca­bulary and grammar. They tended to impose most of the morphological rules of Ancient Greek (i.e., declension and conjugation patterns) on to a mixture of ancient and modern vocabulary, “while their syntax was generally modern and often influenced by the sentence structure of western European languages” (Mackridge 2009, 179).

Elsewhere Voulgaris gave the following definition to the idiom he used: “A language that is more Hellenic as regards its words [vocabulary], and approaching the peculiarity of European languages in its syntax and yfos [style]. Such a Dialect is used for the most part by our educated men, and this is what I have preferred to use for the present.”⁵

It is obvious that tangible traces of this language policy, or rather language attitude, which ultimately led to the amazing conservatism of the Modern Greek lexicon, can be observed right up to the present moment. This conservatism and the extraordinary richness of the lexicon (because, as Mirambel noted, ancient words never disappeared from Modern Greek) caused certain difficulties in mastering it, but at the same time simplified this task for classical philologists. It is likely that an outstanding French researcher Jules David came to these conclusions at the very beginning of his academic and teaching career.

Jules David (Charles-Louis-Jules David, 1783–1854) belonged to a famous family that played an important role in the political and cultural history of France. His father was Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), the most successful and highly paid artist in the history of France, the pioneer and master of neoclassicism and empire styles. Jules David’s mother was the daughter of the superintendent of royal buildings. Louis David, already at an early age, began fulfilling orders from the royal court, but subsequently went headlong into the revolution, became a Jacobin, the closest friend of Robespierre, was elected to the National Assembly in 1792, voted for the execution of Louis XVI. In 1794, after the Thermidorian coup and the execution of Robespierre, Louis David was arrested and spent several months in prison, but after the amnesty, a new stage in his life began – he becomes Napoleon’s favorite artist and the leading artist of France. His career was ruined with the fall of Napoleon in 1815. He ended his days in exile in Brussels.

The artistic tastes of Louis David changed as quickly as his political passions. The beginning of the artist’s career was marked by his penchant for the Rococo style and imi­tation of Boucher’s gallant painting, pretty soon he turned to neoclassicism, then empire and ultimately romanticism. Having finally received, after several unsuccessful attempts, an artistic scholarship in Rome, he left Paris for Rome. The frescoes, mosaics and sculptures of Pompeii and Herculaneum produced an enormous impression on Jacques-Louis David, the shock of meeting with “living” antiquity formed his very recognizable style.

He wrote: “It seemed to me that I had just gone through a cataract operation [...]. I realized that I could not improve my method, the very principle of which was false, and that I had to forget about everything that I considered beautiful and true” (quoted in de Nanteuil 1987, 17). Louis David acquires a European fame, his paintings attract attention of art critiques. The range of his activities is very wide: the artist becomes a famous trendsetter in France – in accordance to his designs the most successful furniture maker, Master Jacob, produces furniture that reproduces Pompeian patterns, French ladies from high society wear Greek hairstyles, stylized tunics are in fashion.

It is easy to imagine the atmosphere in which young Jules David was formed. His famous father’s interest in antiquity, his enthusiasm for the ideas of Winckelmann and Lessing, and finally, the fact that Jacques-Louis David actually created a new style – neoclassicism, where he tried to adopt the point of view of ancient masters, i.e. to look at modernity through the eyes of an ancient master (which reminds us of Nietzsche’s dream) – all this contributed to the formation of Jules David’s interest in Ancient Greece. He received an excellent education – firstly he studied classical philology in Göttingen, afterwards Modern Greek at the School of Oriental Languages in Paris (Medvedev 2003; Provata 2017; Pandeloglou 2019). During this period, Jules David entered the circle of French Hellenists and Greek scholars who settled in Paris. In that period Jules David met Adamantius Korais (1748–1833), whose influence in the life of the young scholar can hardly be overestimated.

Adamantius Korais (1748–1833) was apparently the most prominent figure in the Greek Enlightenment. Korais offered his own solution to the language issue, which he himself regarded as a kind of a compromise and called the “middle way”. Korais was born in Smyrna, a flourishing, cosmopolitic and rich city with mostly Greek population in the Ottoman Empire, into a wealthy merchant Greek family. The language spoken in the family was French and the first teachers of Korais were Protestant. Korais intensively studied Latin, and the Protestant influence determined his life attitudes throughout his life. At a very young age, he went to Amsterdam with the intention to study trade. In Ams­terdam, Korais was imbued with the ideas of the Enlightenment. He refuses to engage in trade and goes to the University of Montpellier with the intention to study medicine. But in reality his only passion is Ancient Greek culture and language. In 1788 (a year before the French Revolution, which he literally did not notice), Korais moved to Paris and stayed there until the end of his days. In Paris Korais immersed himself in intensive studies of classical philology. In spite of being a complete autodidact, the professional level of Korais was extremely high. Throughout his life Korais constantly edited and published the ancient authors. Macridge (2009, 109) notes that he was the first Greek to be officially recognized in Europe as a classical philologist. In the introductions to his publications (we are talking about an extended legacy in seventy volumes), Korais often set forth his vision of the formation of the literary standard of Greek. To abandon the spoken language, according to Korais, would be a manifestation of “tyranny”, but to make the language too vulgar meant to flirt with public opinion. Korais suggested taking the spoken language as a starting point, but at the same time subjecting it to some “archaistic polishing”. However, the purification of the spoken language, according to the conception of Korais, should not have been limited to the elimination of Turkish borrowings and obvious dialectisms, it also extended to phonetics, morphology and syntax. Purification and correction of the language, according to Korais, was the surest way to prepare future citizens of free Greece and thus guarantee the Greek freedom and prosperity.

For quite understandable reasons, the philhellene Jules David, a connoisseur of Ancient Greek, fluent in colloquial Greek, apparently impressed Korais as an excellent candidate for “enlightening the future free citizens of Greece”. But the young man had certain political ambitions: in Napoleonic times, he occupied a number of diplomatic and administrative positions (vice-consul in Civitavecchia and in Otranto in 1808, sub-prefect of the Stade district in the department of Bouches de l’Elbe in 1810–1814), however, after the fall of Napoleon, circumstances changed, and in 1815 Jules David accompanied his father to exile in Brussels (Monneret 1998; Medvedev 2003).

However, Korais, who still considered the enlightenment of Greece as his highest and noblest goal, was busy organizing schools – in particular, reorganizing the gymnasium in Chios. He invited Jules David to go to Chios to teach French at a school run by the famous figure of the Greek Enlightenment, the charismatic Neophytos Vamvas (1776–1885). Jules David accepted the proposal of Korais and went to Chios via Constantinople. Thus, in the heart of the Ottoman Empire, Korais implanted the spirit of liberty and Enlightenment (Lumières). Soon Korais received an enthusiastic letter from David, telling that his students are making progress, they are very enthusiastic about their studies (1979, 509–510). Jules David was really admired by his students – a few years later, his former student, the famous poet Panagiotis Soutsos, wrote a dedication to him Odes of a Young Greek (Odes d’un jeune Grec, 1828). However, pretty soon we lose the traces of Jules David for a while and find him again, married to a young and very pretty Greek woman, Marigo Kapinaki, in Smyrna. A letter from Korais has been preserved, where he writes about the need to find a new teacher for the school in Chios – but warns that the teacher should be provided by a wife beforehand, so as not to lose him like the previous one (cited in Caravolas 2005).

It is in his Greek period that Jules David started his academic research and created his most important works.

Today the name of Jules David is almost forgotten; meanwhile, as we will try to show, his scientific theory presents an interesting attempt to establish a connection between the ancient and modern state of the Greek continuum. Jules David’s linguo-didactic approach is innovative and unexpected – while discussing the standard of the Greek language, he managed to combine elegantly the descriptive and prescriptive aspects of the language analysis. His main work, the Comparative Description of the Ancient Greek and Demo­tic Languages (Συνοπτικός παραλληλισμός της ελληνικής και γραικικής απλοελληνικής γλώσσης) is a fascinating attempt to establish the parallels of the Ancient Greek and Modern Greek languages. In this brief and logically structured description, the scientist is guided mainly by didactic goals, confident that the classical philologists to whom he addresses his work, not being native Greek speakers, will be able to “recognize” Ancient Greek grammatical forms in Modern Greek paradigms and easily master a new idiom – colloquial spoken Greek. In addition, as we will try to show below, Jules David set himself another, not very trivial task – basing on the convergence of Modern Greek and Ancient Greek, to make classical philologists feel that they are dealing with a living language, and not with a dead scheme and hence to use the teaching of Modern Greek to classicists as a specific mode to improve their knowledge of the Ancient Greek.

We believe that this strategy of David, due to its originality, did not receive a proper response of the philological community and has not been fully understood by resear­chers. The ideology of the innovative approach of Jules David can be compared with the views of another outstanding neo-Hellenist and philosopher Nikolai Bakhtin, the brother of philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1884–1950). In his Introduction to the Study of Modern Greek N. Bakhtin developed a very similar approach, regarding the Modern Greek lexicon as a precious resource for studying Ancient Greek lexicology and finding etymologies for the peculiar vague cases (Bakhtin 1935). We must admit that Jules David was far (perhaps too far ahead) of his time.

A short course in the Modern Greek language (Méthode pour étudier la langue grecque moderne), was published by Jules David in 1821, when Modern Greek was perceived by most philologists as a barbaric (χυδαῖος) deviation of the ancient Greek language. The method can serve as an example of a linguistic description exemplary for its time, putting new emphasis in the history of Greek language. In addition, the Greek-French dictionary, which was not published during the life of the scientist, is of great interest for Greek lexicography and is still waiting for its researchers (Provata 2017).

The work of I. P. Medvedev, dedicated to Jules David, as far as we know, was one of the first attempts to highlight the scientific and pedagogical activities of an outstanding French linguist, neo-Hellenist and classical philologist (Medvedev 2003)⁶.

An interesting piece of evidence about Jules David was discovered by Medvedev in the correspondence of the outstanding Parisian classical philologist of German origin, Karl Benedict Gaza, with his St. Petersburg colleague and compatriot Philip Ivanovich Krug, one of the heralds of Byzantine studies in Russia (Medvedev 2003, 134). In their correspondence the German classicists mentions the willingness of Jules David to come to St. Petersburg and his prospects for teaching Ancient Greek in one of the St. Petersburg gymnasiums. Correspondents discuss the scientific temperament and plight of the young talented philologist, his outstanding abilities and readiness to come to St. Petersburg to teach ancient and, possibly, Modern Greek.

The Greek scholar Despina Provata defined Jules David’s unpublished French-Greek dictionary (on which he worked for a number of years) as “late evidence of the conti­nuation of the Enlightenment” in France (Provata 201, 82).

The dialogue between Hellenism and European culture, which began in the 17^th century and continued until the 19^th century, was undergoing transformations at each new stage. With the passage of time, the desire not only to copy, but to reconstruct and transform the spiritual culture of antiquity grew. The focus was on Hellenism, gradually replacing Roman models. Interest in archeology that dominated in France until the end of the 18^th century, was replaced by an emphasis on cultural anthropology. The books of Johann Winckelmann (1717–1768), a brilliant connoisseur of antique values and antiquary, and the works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) became model for Europe. We are all Greeks wrote in 1821 Percy Bysshe Shelley in the preface to his poem Hellas, dedi­cated to prince Alexander Mavrokordato (1792–1882) (Shelley 1881, 384: “We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece“). This cultural context is very important for an adequate assessment of the work of Jules David.

In the beginning of 20’s the situation in Smyrna became dangerous for David and he was forced to leave the city. In 1825, David arrives to Paris, where he gets a job as a teacher of Ancient and Modern Greek at the Sorbonne. The end of his life is rather sad – he never reached the position as a full-time teacher at the Sorbonne, his French-Ancient Greek Dictionary with extensive references to Modern Greek vocabulary, did not find a publisher. He died at the age of 71 in Paris in 1854 (Caravolas 2009). It cannot be said that Jules David was completely forgotten – the creator of the normative grammar of Demotic, Manolis Triantaphyllides, in his Historical Introduction (Triantaphyllides 1938, 617) described the Comparative Description as “an interesting work”.

Since 2002, when Caravolas published the first biographical note on Jules David, the number of works devoted to the French linguist has been increasing every year. However, it seems that David’s main, favorite thought – that of the extreme importance of Modern Greek for the classical philologists, since only the study of Modern Greek will give them the opportunity to feel what he calls τριβὴν τῆς γλώσσης, “practical use of the language, skill in using the language, precious ease”, – remained until now unacknowledged and unheard.

We refer the reader to the extremely expressive text of the introduction (Προλεγόμενα) in Comparative Description, reminiscent of a passionate scientific manifesto. David cons­tantly repeats that classical philologists can better feel and understand Ancient Greek by “knowing its likeness” (μίμημα). It seems that this idea, although not in such a categorical form, was also promoted by Korais. Anticipating the publications of ancient authors with his excitingly interesting and lively prefaces, Corais, in particular, tried to draw the attention of a wide circle of his readers to the similarity of Ancient and Modern Greek. At the same time, it is the linguistic problem of γλωσσσικό ζήτημα (Greek question), the issue of choosing between archaizing and colloquial norms, that remains important for Korais, while for David this question, as it seems, is not fundamental. At the time of writing Comparative Description, the problems of the language issue are only vaguely indicated, the Greek society lives in a state of polyglossia (or presumably panglossia), when the same speaker in different contexts uses different versions of the language. So, the text of the Comparative Description is written in the so-called απλή καθαρεύουσα (simple katharevusa), the language that could be defined as the spoken language of Smyrna. Jules David uses the high katharevusa (αρχαΐζουσα) in rare cases, although, obviously, he is fluent in it. He himself, being a foreigner who enjoyed immersing himself in the flood of the alive Greek language, easily, depending on the context, changes options, demonstrating an excellent knowledge of ancient Greek. Greek polyglossia seemed to fit his free spirit and his own polyglossia.

L. Pandeloglu devoted a separate article to Comparative Description. It is surprising that the Greek researcher perceives all of David’s reasoning exclusively within the framework of the logic of teaching Modern Greek as a foreign language (in international terminology E2) (Panteloglou 2019, 134). It should be noted that the Comparative Description itself is written in simple kafarevusa (the latter fact is noted by the researcher as well). Therefore, this is not the easiest reading for a foreign classical specialist. This does not mean that David does not address this audience, but choosing Greek as a metalanguage, he poses an obvious challenge to this audience. It seems that when David notes that he does not consider it possible to give advice and instructions to the Greeks concerning their way to speak Greek, he is somewhat cunning. David assumed that both native Greek speakers and (with some difficulty) classical philologists who were not familiar with katharevusa would be able to understand it. It is worth mentioning that nothing prevented David from writing his Comparative Description in French. David himself explicitly designates his audience as classical philologists and his Description does not fit at all into the framework of grammars for foreigners. The main, highest goal of David is to provide classical philologists with the opportunity to master their subject more deeply, his target field is classical philology.

L. Pandeloglou gives a brief outline of the history of the issue, starting with the grammars of the Sicilian Girolamo Germano (1622) and the native of Crete Simon Portius (1638), and integrates David’s activities into the framework of this direction – Greek Grammar for Foreigners.

It should be noted that most of the predecessors in this field evoke an extremely negative reaction of Jules David, while Jesuits and Italians cause his particular irritation (when these two qualities are combined in one person, which was the case of Gerolamo Germano, Jules David becomes especially indignant).

He is extremely critical of Catholic missionaries who “only camouflage their goals with educational activities, but in fact want to convert the Greeks to their faith” (David 1821, 13). Positively (ἄξιον μάλιστα ὑπολήψεως “worthy of respect”), but with some criticism, David speaks of the grandiose dictionary of Du Cange (1610–1668), nothing that he never left France and did not know colloquial Greek. Jules David speaks of Korais’ activities with visible admiration, calling him ο μέγας φιλόλογος φωτίζων τους Γραικούς (the great philologist, educator of the Greeks), and notes that he was the only one who began to compare Ancient Greek with Modern Greek, however, en passant he notes that Korais never wrote a general grammar. The linguistic activity of the famous poet Christopoulos, who wrote the grammar of the spoken language, which he designated as Eolodorian, is commented by David with a great deal of irony, stressing that this work is more reminiscent of a poetic work (ομοιάζει ποιητικόν πλάσμα μάλλον) than a scientific work (David 1821, 10–14). The facts mentioned above prove once again that David himself positioned himself separately from his predecessors, his Comparative Description poses a whole number of scientific and didactic tasks, but the main goal is to find new opportunities to improve the professional level for the specialists in the classical philology.

As it was mentioned above a topic of a separate study could be a comparison of the ideas of Jules David with the ideology of one of the founders of British neo-Hellenistics, the philosopher N. M. Bakhtin. The lines quoted by I. P. Medvedev from Comparative Description where Jules David lists rare words from ancient authors, which are easily etymologized on the basis of the Modern Greek language, surprisingly echo the ideas of N. M. Bakhtin.

All of the above confirms once again that David himself positioned himself separately from his predecessors, the main goal of his Comparative Description was to find new opportunities for the further development of classical philology, to help the classical philologists to perceive the Ancient Greek through a different angle, to give the scholars a precious chance to feel that they are dealing with a living language.

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