156 GREEK LANGUAGE 



Greek prefers the direct reproduction of the words of another, 

 whereas Latin allows greater range to oratio obliqua. The Symposium 

 of Plato is herein a tour de force. 



The power of the participle gives variety to the sentence and reduces 

 to a brief compass a thought that otherwise might be expressed in 

 dragging subordinate clauses. (The addition of lw, <epa>v, aywv, etc., 

 that appears to us superfluous, gives vividness by sketching a situ- 

 ation.) Greek, Latin, and English are here nearer akin, though Greek 

 has a far wider range than either Latin or English; while German 

 lacks the use of the transitive participle, as it does that of the Greek 

 verbal adjective. In Greek the participle is readily substantivised, 

 and is sometimes petrified, as in yepwv, Gepd-n-wv. In German this is 

 rarely the case, as in Wind, that is, der wehende. 



Greek emphasizes the character of an action within the free range 

 of the tense-system, but in comparison to some languages, and 

 especially Latin, it is often careless of some of the exact distinctions 

 of time-relation; nor, it may be added, though not as a corollary, 

 did the Greeks, until the time of Timseus and Polybius, that is, long 

 after the period of their most marked individualism, develop the 

 essential virtue of the historian, the passion for exact chronology. 



The double tense-forms are not linguistic luxuries, though an 

 original differentiation may be relaxed, either momentarily, or ab- 

 solutely, as in a later stage of the language. Ordinary cases, such as 

 ?w and o-x^o-w, will occur to every one; let me call attention to the 

 differences of the dialects; e. g. dveyvwo-a alongside of dveyvwv, the 

 former having in Ionic the meaning "persuaded." From the point 

 of view of other languages Greek does seem to possess several lin- 

 guistic luxuries, as the future, /SouX^o-o/xai, with the infinitive, where 

 (3ovX.ofjLai would suffice. Many such delicacies of expression fell 

 out of use in course of time. But outworn distinctions may well 

 survive in a language that is subtle, as the evanescent distinction 

 between the present and future infinitive in the periphrastic con- 

 struction with /zc'AAo) as a verb of thinking. 



One delicate syntactical usage that has heretofore been regarded 

 as the distinct property of Latin has latterly been shown to exist in 

 Greek. The epistolary imperfect indicating the time of the reading 

 of a letter by its recipient is now known to occur in a Greek letter of 

 the fourth century B.C., so that this use in Latin, like the word 

 epistula, is in all probability borrowed from Greek. See Wilhelm, 

 Der aelteste griechische Brief, in the Jahreshefte d. oester. arch. Inst., 

 1904, pp. 94 ff. 



Order of Words 



A good arrangement of words marks the organic expression of 

 thought, and pleases the ear. The order of words in Greek illustrates 



