The Greek Diminutive Suffix -lOxo- -lOy.tj-. 191 



Finally there are raptoTio? (Ptol. 3. 12. 22 ; Strabo 7. 330) a Ma- 

 cedonian city : Mac. ttoc yappa (?) 'rods,' and 'ApTKr/wO? (Herod. 4. 

 92) a tributary to the HeHos river in Thrace, which Pape trans- 

 lates ' Riemel,' but which probably also is not a Greek word at 

 all, as can be seen particularly from its accent. The comparative 

 productivity of these words in Macedonia and Thrace was evidently 

 a local pecuharity ; probably e. g. the Macedonian language had 

 words of its own like BspTiovtOv,^ in which the Greeks of those 

 regions recognized their own suffix -laxo- and formed other really 

 Greek place names like 'E}v£uQ>epta^o? by analogy. By all means, 

 then, the meanings ' belonging to ' etc. in these words can not be 

 used for establishing the semantic history of Greek -ktao-. 



98. When we come to the personal names in -loxo-, we find a 

 rather large productivity — I have found a hundred, mostly in 

 Pape's lexicon and Collitz-Bechtel— a productivity which begins 

 as early as Herodotus and Thucydides. The absence of these 

 names from the Lyric poets is probably accidental, since the 

 suffix occurs repeatedly in appellatives in the same poets, though 

 it may be that their productivity did not become large till the 

 end of the fifth cent. B. C. 



99. The large majority of these names show the two principle 

 uses of -1(7X0-, that of expressing similarity and the diminutive- 

 hypocoristic use. If there ever were any deterioratives among 

 them, they became hypocoristic by being humorously appHed to 

 little children, e. g. Au/icr/vO^ ' Wolfy ' may have contained the 

 notion of reprehensible greediness, but when given to a baby it 

 was used good-humoredly and affectionately. The border line 

 between the diminutives and those words in which the suffix was 

 an exponent of similarity was far from accurate. Since permanent 

 names are usually given shortly after birth, i. e. to very small 

 children, most of the follo^^'ing proper names could sometimes also 

 have been felt as diminutives, e. g. 'Apvi-Txc? could be ' little lamb ' 

 as well as ' lamb-like.' Since, however, the use of -icrxo- to des- 

 ignate similarity is its oldest use, and as familiar at all times as 

 the ' diminutive ' uses, we may assume that these proper names 

 were at least partly felt as showing this meaning, and that the 

 notion of small size was often in the background. 



1 The variants 'AQzrjaxos and TuQiqaxog for 'Aqticxos and TaQiaxog indicate 

 that the suffix was not quite the same as Gr. -caxo-, but was adapted. 



