20 PROFESSOR BLACKIE ON THE 
deep trenching. It is a well-known fact in the classical Greek language, that 
familiar words sometimes appear in two forms, the one differing from the other 
only by the addition of an appended letter or syllable-—an appendage which, 
when it appears in the front of the word, is technically called prosthetic, and 
when at. the end paragogic. Thus we have y@és and éy6és, xetvos and €éxéwos, 
pavpdo and dpavpdw, and not a few others. The same phenomenon appears 
largely in the comparison of different languages of the same family, as in dent, 
dd0rT, dppvs and our brow, aaryp (Gaelic, bruach), star, tara, teipea(Hom.) Now, 
though in many of these cases it is quite plain that curtailment has taken place, 
as when pater becomes athar in Gaelic, and plenus lan, it seems pretty certain 
that in others the taste or fashion of some particular time and place has added 
a letter to the original root. For this adhibition there may be various causes, 
demonstrative emphasis perhaps, as in the celui cz and celui la of the French, or 
mere euphony, as in the favourite habit of the Italian ear, which leads them to 
avoid a consonantal ending ; thus swnt becomes not son, but sono. To deter- 
mine the history and significance of these prosthetic and paragogic letters, is in 
many cases one of the most difficult tasks of scholarship ; and on some of these 
problems the masculine erudition of one of the greatest of German scholars has 
been not unworthily spent ;* but to enter into such discussions here would lead 
too far from the main purpose of this discourse ; so I shall merely set down a 
few of the more notable of these enlargements of the old Greek form which the 
existing popular dialect presents, without speculating curiously on their origin. 
In the first place, we have sometimes, though far from regularly, a vowel 
appended to the third person plural of the indicative mood, déyouve for héyour, 
ehéyave for eheyay, quite in the Italian fashion. Similarly, among the pronouns 
we meet frequently with rove for tov, just as the Athenians said otroci for 
obtos, and éexewoot for éxetvos; then for advrov we have avrovvod, for dutjs, avrnris, 
and atryvns Ths. Among the particles we have dvris for dvti, and ores for Tore. 
This final s appears in the imperative of certain verbs, as in eizés, by apocope ’zés, 
following the ancient analogy of dds and @¢s. The accusative of the pronouns 
of the first and second persons presents the lengthened forms of éuéa and 
éséva. The demonstrative, on the other hand, is lengthened only in the front, 
and 7r4vto becomes érouto. Totos is subject to a reduplication, and becomes 
térowos. A prosthetic . before two initial consonants, of which the first is o, is 
familiar to the student of the Romanic languages, and appears in the modern 
Greek foxy for oxia.t This initial o itself is added in some words, as in oxévn 
* Pathologia Greci Sermonis. Lobeck, Konigsberg, 1853. 
+ This prosthetic 7 appears regularly in Italian when the previous word ends in a consonant, as 
con isdegno for con sdegno. But this is only the occasional form of the word for the sake of euphony ; 
the rule is, that while in Italian the initial e or 7 in such cases is never added, but regularly rejected, in 
Provencal, Spanish, and early popular French, it is always prefixed, even where no traces of it are found 
in Latin. CornmwaLt Lewis on the “ Romanic Languages,” 2d edit., p. 107. 
