152 GREEK LANGUAGE 



foreign words for animals, minerals, and plants. Most of the loan- 

 words of Greek are taken from the animal, the mineral, and (chiefly) 

 the vegetable kingdom; besides these, there are, especially, names for 

 materials of wearing apparel, woven goods, arms, measures, and 

 musical instruments. Scientific terms and words for the arts the 

 Greeks created for themselves. 



But I do not so much wish to call attention to the refusal of the 

 Greeks to adopt words of other languages as to emphasize their 

 attitude towards certain objects seen by them for the first time. 

 When an unknown object with a strange name becomes known to 

 most peoples the name is usually transferred mechanically (some- 

 times with a certain amount of resistance) into their own speech. 

 Sometimes the foreign word is retained for a time and later a desig- 

 nation of native manufacture is substituted for it. Of this latter 

 process there is no sure example in Greek. 



It is hard to discover the source of importations because more 

 than any other people the Greeks regarded a new object from the 

 point of view of its essential characteristic and found a name for 

 it by recourse to their own tongue. 1 Thus in many instances they 

 expanded or modified the current conception of a word already 

 existing; as in the case of Sopxas, gazelle, rpoxo's, potter's wheel, Aios 

 /ScLXavos, the sweet chestnut, fieyas trrpoS^os, ostrich, Hepo-i/cov (p^Xo*), 

 peach, KvSwviov (/x^Xov), quince, <f>a.(riav6s (opvis) pheasant. Sometimes 

 derivatives were formed, as uaiva, hyena (for which yAavos was 

 another name), Ixvevfuov, ichneumon (because it seeks out the eggs 

 of the crocodile) , Kpaveia, cornel-tree, Kepdna, St. John's bread. Finally 

 it was common to construct compounds, such as pivo*pws, orpei/'i- 



Kpo)5, Tnryapyos, KaTto/JAeVajv, KepKOTTiOrjKos, and poSoSe^Spov. 2 Even the 



Phoenician names of the letters of the alphabet have been trans- 

 formed and often made to end in alpha. This capacity of the Greeks 

 to create names would seem to hold true in the case of objects which 

 they themselves saw in foreign countries; and the process thus 

 described may well have coexisted with the adoption of foreign 

 names for things actually imported, or the knowledge of which 

 (notably of animals, plants, and minerals) was imported by the 

 Phoenicians before the Greeks displaced that people as the traders 

 of the Mediterranean. Examples are irdvOrjp from Sanskrit pundi- 



karas, irapSo? from prdakus; p:vppoi/, vapSo?, TreTrepi, a.\6rj ; cru7npos, 



The cases of folk-etymology are perhaps less common than in other 

 languages; as MetXi^os, " the mild (Zeus)" is Phoenician Melech or 



1 This occurs of course in other languages; cf. French sanglier from singularis 

 instead of a name derived from verres or aper. 



* See Weisp, Zeitschrift fur Volkerpsychologie, 13 (1881-82), 233 ff. To this 

 article (and the same author's Charakteristik der lateininchen Sprache) I am much 

 indebted. 



