348 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



seems greatly to exceed that in the standard Greek and Latin lexicons, 

 the difference is apparent rather than real. English dictionaries give 

 every form in which a word may occur, slight variations only being ex- 

 cepted. The so-called irregular verbs fill only a few pages in the Eng- 

 lish grammars; yet they are usually recorded in the dictionaries. The 

 irregularities of Greek and Latin verbs can, for the most part, not be 

 found in the lexicons, and when recorded separately, make a large book. 

 The latest edition of Stephanus's Greek lexicon fills nine volumes folio 

 and more than ten thousand- pages, while the definitive Latin lexicon 

 now in course of publication will be as large as the Oxford dictionary. 

 Languages grow by incretion as well as by accretion. A new inven- 

 tion or a new discovery may be named by using current words. Thus 

 " steamboat " and " railway " are compounds of obvious meaning be- 

 cause the sense of the constituent parts is already known and is not 

 changed by the combination. It is true, " railway " is slightly mislead- 

 ing. The first tracks were made of wooden rails; when they were re- 

 placed with iron the earlier name was retained. In most of the con- 

 tinental languages the term " ironway " is in vogue, as railways were 

 not introduced beyond the channel until wooden rails had been dis- 

 carded, although the French still employs the monosyllable " rail " in 

 its English sense. But not all words that have been compounded have 

 an obvious signification; one or all of the parts entering into the com- 

 bination sometimes lose their former meaning. To this class belong 

 such terms as " stirrup-cup," " dog-watch," " monkey-wrench," " man- 

 of-war," " horse-raddish," and many more. A dog-fight is a fight be- 

 tween or among dogs, just as a cock-fight is a duel between two cocks; 

 in a bull-fight the combatants are bulls, horses and men. When the 

 vocabularly of a language grows by accretion it is either by the in- 

 corporation of words borrowed from others that designate the same 

 object or by the modification of a foreign word to designate some 

 object previously unknown. To the first class belong paper, parchment, 

 hippopotamus and a host of others. To the second, amoeba, proto- 

 plasm, biogenesis, bacteria and a long list of technical terms. Horace 

 has observed this process in his day, for he wrote 



New words will find acceptance, if they flow 

 Forth from the Greek with jnst a twist or so. 



It is by this method that science has constructed a language which 

 has become, in a sense, international. One needs to know very little 

 Italian, or French, or Spanish, in order to be able to read a scientific 

 work intelligently. The translator of a well-known French medical 

 book once told me that he had a mere smattering of the language, but 

 as he was familiar with the subject he had no difficulty in comprehend- 

 ing the author's meaning. If this man had undertaken to translate 

 selections from French literature or familiar conversation he would have 



