II.— THE GREEK DIMINUTIVE SUFFIX -ISKO- -LSKH- 



I. ITS RELATION TO THE SAME SUFFIX OF OTHER LANGUAGES. 



1. The diminutive suftix -laxo- -ktxy]-, whatever we may say of 

 its ultimate origin, was fully developed in all its principal meanings 

 at the earliest periods of the Greek language as known to us. 

 Though not found in Homer, it does not follow that its develop- 

 ment was post-Homeric, nor are we justified in saying that its 

 origin was later than "diminutive" -lov for this reason. Its ab- 

 sence in Homer is explained by the Aeolic ground- work of the poems, 

 the suffix apparently not being found in any of the Aeolic documents, 

 while in the other dialects it appears in the very earliest sources, 

 e. g. in Alcman for the Doric, and Hipponax and Herodotus for 

 the Ionic. 1 Since these earhest occurrences show fully developed 

 "diminutive" meanings, it follows that almost the whole semantic 

 development has taken place in pre-literary times, and the problem 

 before us is to determine in what relation these resulting meanings 

 stand to the meanings of the same suffix in other languages and 

 the parent language. 



2. That -K7X0- is an Indo-European suffix,^ and not a purely 

 Greek conglutination, is made evident by the large number of 

 languages which have it in some use or other. Even if we omit 

 the Balto-Slavic -iszka- -Bszka-, which may possibly be a Germanic 

 borrowing,^ there are left to compare with the Greek both a few 

 Latin adjectives like priscus < *pri-iscus and mariscus, the Keltic 

 proper names like Taurisci, and the many Germanic adjectives in 

 -iska-, e. g. Goth, piudisks, so that I. E. -isko- occurs in at least 

 four, more probably five language branches. 



3. But although the suffix itself is thus certainly Indo-European, 

 it is quite uncertain just what its meaning was, or whether it formed 

 derivatives only from adjectives or also from substantives or whether 

 it was itself an adjective or substantive suffix or both, since the 

 languages in which it occurs vary widely in these respects. Thus 

 in Greek and Keltic it forms only substantives, in the Germanic 



1 On -laxo- in the Aeolic and the earhest Lyric poetry see p. 201 f. of 

 the writer's Greek Diminutives in -loy, Weimar 1910, cited after this by 

 the abbreviation " Gr. Dims." 



^ Cf. Brugmann, Gr. 2. i^. 501 ff. 



^ Cf. Brugmann, op. cit. 502. 



