PHILOLOGICAL GENIUS OF THE MODERN GREEK LANGUAGE. 53) 
&eBovddova, to unseal. 
&edovTila, to draw teeth. 
Ecxapdilo, to dishearten. 
Ecxappova, to take out nails. 
Ecpav0ava, to unlearn. 
Eeprvahilo, to put one’s brain out of shape—madden. 
Ecotrabova, to draw the sword. 
Eetpaxy ilo, to break one’s neck. 
Eapuxew, give up the ghost. 
Enwepove, the day breaks. 
Proposition X XIX.—In the above analysis I have made no allusion to one 
element of corruption, which from the analogy of Italian one might expect to 
find in the modern Greek dialect. I mean the element of adulteration from 
foreign sources. In the-purest modern languages, as in German, for instance, 
this adulteration is considerable, and, except on a principle of pedantic 
purism, to which utility and good taste are equally opposed, could not be 
dispensed with. But it is different with Greek. For not only do all nations 
borrow their scientific terminology from the language of ARISTOTLE and Hip- 
POCRATES, while the language of these great master-builders of early science 
borrows from no one, but the foreign elements which at different periods got 
into use as part of the current Hellenic, did so only by way of external attach- 
ment, so to speak, not by way of inoculation ; they did not infuse themselves 
into the blood, or, to use a legal simile, they were not fixtures. And thus it 
came to pass, that with the change of masters one adopted element was 
readily thrown off, and another as readily assumed, and as loosely retained. 
The colloquial style of the Byzantine Greeks thus became superficially Latinised, 
or spotted rather with Latinisms ; that of the Frankish chroniclers included a 
sprinkling of French words ; that of the Cretans flirted with Italian ; while that 
of the Acarnanian, Thessalian, and Epirotic Klephts was forced, for the sake 
of convenience, to tolerate a certain admixture of the Turkish element, which 
their most deeply rooted principles and their most powerful associations would 
have led them to disdain. But the number of these foreign words was at no 
time considerable ; and as one immediate result of the grand national resurrec- 
tion in 1821, the unseemly crusts and blotches of this foreign element instantly 
fell off like the scurf of a cutaneous disease, and the pure Hellenic came out 
of the caldron of a barbarous broth as clean and bright, and pure from all 
stain, as the god-like Ulysses out of his bath. In the current Greek news- 
papers which present the language in its ultimate type, not one of those Latin, 
Italian, Albanian, and Turkish words is to be found, which raise a not unfre- 
quent stumblingblock in the way of tlie student of medieval and Venetian 
VOL. XXVII. PART I. t 
