PHILOLOGICAL GENIUS OF THE MODERN GREEK LANGUAGE. 9 
I answer this may be a very healthy limitation which a writer at a certain 
period of the adult growth of a language may choose to put on his choice of 
vocables; but it is to the eye of the philologer an arbitrary procedure of which 
science can take no account. To him claritudo, and gratitudo, and beatitudo 
are perfectly good Latin words, whether Cicero happens to use them or not ; 
and in such words what a nice Ciceronian of the Bembo school would brand as 
a departure from the norm of Latin purity, a philologer may often have cause 
to recognise a natural extension and fair enrichment of a meagre and inadequate 
medium of expression. If, therefore, Homer uses not only. yducds, but 
yducepos, there is no reason why a scholar should condemn as barbarous 
varieties of a similar description in the existing Greek tongue; and if the 
ancients, in their exuberant play of terminational affixes, chose to say dhyOiwds 
as well as a\nOys, shall it be forbidden to the modern Greek to say taywds as 
well as raxvs, and Bpwpepds as wellas Bpwyddns? So in English one writer may 
say kingliness and another kinglihood (TENNYSON), with equal right. But further, 
even in the case of corruptions properly so-called, that is not a new growth of 
the language, but a breaking down of the old structure from sheer carelessness, 
or the intrusion of some extraneous element, there is a great and vital distinc- 
tion to be made between those corruptions, which, to the eye of a philologer, 
look like a scar or a patch, and such as easily take their place and fit into 
the old structure of the language. Thus the word yeudro, from yéue, to be full, 
is a gross barbarism, for it attaches to a Greek root a Latin participial termina- 
tion, which is at once recognised as something foreign and incongruous. It is 
as if, instead of the word obesity, we should talk of the /atiosity of a corpulent 
person, a combination at once felt to be barbarous, though certainly our English 
tongue, through its loss of native terminations, has an excuse for incongruities 
of this kind, which could not be pleaded by the Greek. On the other hand, 
the modern Greek habit of substituting the diminutive for the simple word, 
and then cutting off the final or accented syllable, as when zaidiov is used 
for vais, and then modi for qadiov, is an offence against the ancient tradition 
readily condoned ; for by the emphasis of the accent on the accented syllable, 
the ear is already accustomed to the sound, which becomes final when the short 
ultimate syllable is dropped. In the same manner, the favourite diminutive 
termination dk, appearing in yepovTdxi, Kovrdkov, Sevdpax., and scores of other 
words, where analogically it is not the diminutive termination pertaining to such 
roots, passes lightly into the habit of the ear from the analogy of pepdkov, and 
other such words, where the ax is part of the root. Of superficial and false 
analogies of this kind, both in flexion and in syntax, the structure of all languages 
gives sufficient instances. 
ProposiT1on XII.—Following out the principles just stated, the first notice- 
VOL. XXVII. PART I. C 
