Every language is defective from the angle of vision of those of its 

 users whose range extends over other languages, and who, therefore, 

 borrow to supply their own deficiencies. Vocabulary has to follow 

 trade and an increasing acquaintance with nature. The national debt 

 of Greek presents a most instructive commentary on the character 

 of Greek thought and national consciousness, especially when com- 

 pared with other languages. Latin was an enormous borrower; 

 when the language was saturated with Hellenisms it was a mere 

 affectation of purism on the part of Tiberius to apologize for his 

 use of " monopolium. " A Chinese emperor in 1771 displaced over 

 5000 Chinese words in favor of a like number of Manchu origin. Of 

 all the tongues of Europe, which have the past as well as their con- 

 temporaries to draw from, French is the coyest to adopt new words. 

 English is said to show 13,230 Teutonic, 29,853 "classical" words; 

 but as English is a composite language, the preponderance of non- 

 Teutonic words is not altogether due to mere borrowing. Russian is 

 said to form new words readily from its own resources. 



The pronounced hostility of Greek to borrowed words is one of the 

 most remarkable features of that language, and the more remarkable 

 because it was spoken from the Black Sea to the Pillars of Hercules, 

 and because Greece itself was the home of thousands of barbarian 

 slaves. Chauvinism in a language may seem venial when a language 

 like Greek is possessed of a practically inexhaustible mine from 

 which to quarry the materials of thought. " Lingua mater," we may 

 say, " nova miracula suis ex visceribus numquam emittere cessabit." 

 But the ability of a language to meet all demands upon it for the 

 expression of its ideas is not an index of national resistance to ac- 

 quisitions from abroad. German, with all its splendid capacity for 

 compounding new words, would not repudiate many of the loan- 

 words (said to be at least 14,000) that were acquired during the 

 peculiar phases of its history. 



Apart from proper names, the number of borrowed words in Greek 

 for appellatives (for these only are borrowed) is much disputed, 

 but is, on any theory, small. The trend of opinion at present is that 

 A. Mviller, Muss-Arnolt, and Lewy have exaggerated the amount 

 of the debt to the Semitic languages. I hold no brief for Leo Meyer's 

 Worterbuch, which in many respects is a most unsatisfactory work; 

 but at all events it is not inclined to dogmatism about the words in 

 doubt. Down to the time of Aristotle, if my reading of the book is 

 accurate, Meyer accepts as certainly foreign only about 100 words, 

 while the origin of perhaps as many more which wear a foreign look 

 he cautiously classes as obscure. As the domain of natural science 

 was enlarged there was a constant increase in the vocabulary, chiefly 

 through the activity of the Peripatetics; and Aristotle and Theo- 

 phrastus (and later Dioscorides) show a considerable number of 



