164 GREEK LANGUAGE 



restoration and interpretation of Greek works of all sorts. The 

 Optics ascribed to Euclid, the treatise of Apollonius on Conic Sections 

 with the use of coordinate axes, the invention of differentiation and 

 integration by Archimedes, and similar works, can be interpreted 

 only by Greek scholars competent to understand the subject-matter, 

 or, less satisfactorily, in collaboration with mathematicians. So the 

 Hellenist must support the investigator on the slippery field of 

 comparative linguistic, and must avail himself of all the light shed 

 from that source and be able to distinguish the light from the dark- 

 ness. 



To begin, then, at the beginning. The letters of the alphabet, 

 including tachygraphy, present too many problems to be so much 

 as named. The digamma alone presents a legion of problems. How 

 was Z pronounced? How the aspirated mutes, especially when two 

 stand together? And the diphthongs : when did the two syllables of 

 AeiTretv assume the same vowel sound, and what was that sound? 

 Was the future of 7rao-xo> identical with that of 7m'0o/Aai for Pericles? 

 If not, how was it for Demosthenes? When did (Andoc. Myst. 147) 



ov&' rjfji,d.pTr]TaL ouSev ovre r/fjuv eis vyu.Ss ovre vfuv is 'fjp.a 1 ; become ov8' i/iaprtre 



ouSev ovre lfj.lv is iftas OVTC Ifjuv is i//as? Such are some of the questions. 

 Then, it being assumed that the sounds represented by the letters are 

 known, numerous questions arise. There is still a question as to the 

 nature of accent, and there is actually a question whether the accent 

 was observed in reading poetry, and on the other hand the much 

 more reasonable question whether there was any metrical stress. The 



questions relating to i]/i\r] Aeis, KaraXoy^, irapa.KO.ra Aoyi?, TO. em;, /xe'Aos, 



etc., bring us into contact with metric, music, and dance, and the 

 analysis and performance of plays. All these must be passed over 

 here. .The analysis of a tragedy, thanks to Aristotle, is fairly well 

 settled, and that of a comedy has entered upon a new epoch, but 

 still has its problems, I might say, its warfare. 



Words present countless problems. The etymology and meaning 

 are in some instances unknown even when these seem as if they 

 ought to be obvious, such, for example, as the much-discussed 

 dp.ai[idKeTo<i and ^A.i/?aros. And even yXav/coJTri? : is it "gray-eyed," or 

 "of the gray water"? Or is it "owl-faced"? ("AiroXXov dTrorpoTreue ! ) 

 The Homeric poems alone furnish a considerable vocabulary of 

 unexplained words. Some whole classes of words have their problems. 

 When does rpets ^ticpcu mean three actual days and nights, and 

 when does it mean one day and two nights, or can it mean this at all? 

 If Sia TrevTT/pi'Sos means "every five years," how is it that a festival 

 celebrated every four years is called a TrevTtTT/pis? (Our lexicon has 

 a serious error on this word.) In short, when do numerals and their 

 compounds, applied to units of time, denote our cardinal numerals 

 and when our ordinal? Also the history of numeral notation is still 



