to mere accidental similarity (e.g. Greek 'to sacrifice' — French , 'to kill'). In other areas, his arguments are of quite the same kind as those used by modern linguistics, e.g. where he argues on the basis of cross-dialectal correspondences within Greek that must have been a rather open e-sound, close to . Erasmus also took great pains to assign to the members in his reconstructed system plausible phonetic values. This was no easy task, as contemporary grammatical theory lacked the rich and precise terminology to describe such values. In order to overcome that problem, Erasmus drew upon his knowledge of the sound repertoires of contemporary living languages, for instance likening his reconstructed to Scots a (), his reconstructed to Dutch (), and his reconstructed to French (at that time pronounced ). Erasmus assigned to the Greek consonant letters , , the sounds of voiced plosives , , , while for the consonant letters , , and he advocated the use of fricatives , , as in Modern Greek (arguing, however, that this type of must have been different from that denoted by Latin ). The reception of Erasmus' idea among his contemporaries was mixed. Most prominent among those scholars who resisted his move was Philipp Melanchthon, a student of Reuchlin's. Debate in humanist circles continued up into the 17th century, but the situation remained undecided for several centuries. (See Pronunciation of Ancient Greek in teaching.) The 19th century A renewed interest in the issues of reconstructed pronunciation arose during the 19th century. On the one hand, the new science of historical linguistics, based on the method of comparative reconstruction, took a vivid interest in Greek. It soon established beyond any doubt that Greek was descended in parallel with many other languages from the common source of the Indo-European proto-language. This had important consequences for how its phonological system must be reconstructed. At the same time, continued work in philology and archeology was bringing to light an ever-growing corpus of non-standard, non-literary and non-classical Greek writings, e.g. inscriptions and later also papyri. These added considerably to what could be known about the development of the language. On the other hand, there was a revival of academic life in Greece after the establishment of the Greek state in 1830, and scholars in Greece were at first reluctant to accept the seemingly foreign idea that Greek should have been pronounced so differently