142 GREEK LANGUAGE 



of Liddell and Scott's Lexicon shows the following approximate 

 results : 



1 a 269 9 T 71 17 v 26 



2 ir 249 10 t; 58 18 7 22 



3 e 231 11 > 64 19 r? 19 



4 <r 152 12 x 45 20 p 16 



5 K 150 13 A 43 21 12 



6 o 83 14 31 22 ^ 11 



7 5 79 15 i 28 23 6 



8 M 77 16 27 24 | 5 



Summing up we may say that the phonetical apparatus of the 

 Greeks seems to stand midway between the consonantal languages 

 of Europe, such as Germanic and Slavic (especially Polish and Rus- 

 sian), and the essentially vocalic tongues, such as Italian, the mus- 

 ical character of which, due largely to its vocalic endings, has been 

 gained at the cost, as Pott has remarked, of the intellectual character 

 of the language. The point to which I desire to call attention in con- 

 nection with the question I have in hand is that in general the vocalic 

 languages are spoken by peoples which attach more importance 

 to form than to matter, and are sanguine and nervous, whereas 

 the consonantal languages are the property of those peoples that 

 emphasize matter over form and are melancholic or phlegmatic. 



Accent 



Accent, too, has its psychological value. Between the free play of 

 the accent of the Veda and the rigidity of Latin, Greek here again 

 has a middle range. The range of Indo-European accent has, indeed, 

 been restricted, but the restriction has been to the advantage of 

 euphony and symmetry. Thus, for bMramanas, bharamanasya 

 and ddiksamahi, ddiksadhvam, Greek has ^epo^evos, ^epo/xeVoio and 

 e'Sa/A0a, e8etacr0e. The freedom of Greek accentuation goes hand 

 in hand with its rich vowel system and its power of semasiological 

 differentiation through difference of form. Cf . <opos, <opo? ; TcpTrfo-9ai, 



TapTrrjvaL ; ^epecraK^s, cra/ce<r</>dpos ; TI/AI/, drt/xos ; r)6o<;, eury^es. It may not 



be an unjustified deduction to infer that peoples whose language is 

 chromatic in its accent are often those which attach greater import- 

 ance to form; while matter is more emphasized by those which, 

 like Latin, stress the penult or antepenult; or the radical syllable, 

 as the Germanic tongues, which thereby obliterate the suffixal 

 elements. 



The act of speaking is both physical and psychological. Only 

 the professional psychologist can answer the inquiry of the philologist 

 whether energy of emphasis is due to predominance of emotion or of 

 will. Certainly temperament must largely determine emphasis and 



