of the Greek Tongue, 241 



"has a distinctive third person plural in its verbs, it can scarcely 

 be accounted for on this principle, but rather seems to have 

 arisen from the circumstance that these neuters plural, always 

 terminating in a, and this being a common termination of 

 feminine nouns^ more especially in the Doric dialect, the ear, 

 which must have been the chief guide to the concords among 

 the primitive unlettered Greeks, early introduced this anomaly 

 and solecism amongst them, which afterwards, by use, conti- 

 nued to hold its place in the language as a beauty and pro- 

 priety of the tongue. 



I shall now close with observing, that it is obvious, from what 

 I have said above, that the nominative case singular of sub- 

 stantives, the masculine of adjectives, and the first person 

 present singular, not any of them being necessarily the radix 

 of their corresponding inflected parts, there is no occasion why 

 they should be specially selected to be, as it were, the repre- 

 sentatives of the other parts in the arrangement of dictionaries. 

 It is clear, that arriving at the root by the analysis, it would be 

 far better to construct the dictionaries on this principle, of 

 putting down the roots only in alphabetical order. This, in 

 nouns, for example, will assist immediately the student 

 in seven or eight cases out of ten — as this root is gene- 

 rally found, in its simphcity, occupying the first part of the 

 word in the oblique, and not consequently most numerous 

 cases, whereas it is commonly disguised in the nominative, and 

 consequently requires a somewhat tolerable acquaintance with 

 the language to be able even to make use of the dictionary. 

 The same holds good also in the verbs. It is obvious that the 

 object of a translating dictionary is to present the meaning of 

 the words of one language in those of another, which is sup- 

 posed to be understood by him that is to use the dictionary. 

 Now it is clear, that this intention could only be completely 

 fulfilled by inserting in the dictionary all the words of the lan- 

 guage, including therein every inflected part; as, however, this 

 would render the dictionaries too bulky and cumbersome, as 

 well as expensive, and as these inflections were connected 

 together according to a general rule, it was found to be a more 

 commodious way to put down only the leading words, from 

 which, as it was supposed, the others were formed according to 



