150 GREEK LANGUAGE 



Vocabulary 



It is possible to exaggerate the significance of national vocabulary. 

 Some, indeed, have said that were every external manifestation of 

 national achievement in the mechanical and other arts to be de- 

 stroyed, it would yet be possible to restore the entire state of a na- 

 tion's civilization by the aid of its vocabulary alone. But vocabulary, 

 though it may be called the mirror of national mind, the pulse of 

 national life, cannot alone reproduce the inner coloring of thought, 

 the subtle play of light and shadow, that resides in the combination 

 of words; and it is in the combination of words that the national 

 soul most subtly expresses itself. Vocabulary is then, after all, a 

 sketch, not an exact reproduction of nationality. Its wealth is 

 regulated by the intensity of interests that a people brings to bear 

 upon the outer world of things and the inner world of thought. The 

 national capacity of the Greeks for expression is not to be measured 

 along the periphery by mere wealth of words marking sensuous 

 or even intellectual ideas ; abundance of concrete words is not 

 a gauge of intellectual vitality (the fourteen words for the parts 

 of the Homeric ship do not in themselves differentiate the Hellene 

 from the Phosnician); it must be measured at the centre too, by 

 the definiteness with which intellectual and sensuous ideas are 

 expressed, by the inner significance attributed to these ideas. 



The Greeks were impelled by a propension to create, and their 

 language responded to this impulse without hesitation. New words 

 were born at inventive crises. Each new thought found for itself 

 adequate expression in a speech of marvelous copiousness and 

 plasticity. Every advance of civilization enriched the language 

 with new conceptions and infused new life into words already in use. 

 ova-ia acquires the meaning of "substance" from that of "property," 

 "possession"; p^w/xa, "root," in Empedocles becomes "element"; 

 KdT-rjyopia, " accusation," becomes "category"; <u'<ris, "natural consti- 

 tution," is used for "nature"; yvaXa the "convex swelling of the cui- 

 rass," for the "vault of heaven. " On the formal side the vitality of 

 the language is seen in the construction of new compounds rather 

 than in the formation of derivatives from single stems. It is but 

 seldom that two words have the same form but different meanings. 



I cannot attempt to set forth the achievements of the Greeks in 

 the construction of technical terminology. From the chaos of mere 

 words Aristotle and the Stoics brought forth order and laid the foun- 

 dations of the language of grammar. The Hindus, indeed, possessed 

 a like degree of acumen in this field, but it was the fortune of Diony- 

 sius the Thracian and not of Panini, to compose the book which, 

 next to the Bible, has had (as Delbriick says) a larger influence 

 on the thought of Europe than any other single volume. 



