1G4 Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. [July, 



means a modern question. We know that among the Romans, Cicero 

 was very often in great distress for the want of Latin equivalents for 

 Greek scientific terms. The terms he required were for the most 

 part metaphysical ones, and the Disputationes Tusculanae and De 

 Officiis are full of words coined by him. In many cases, however, 

 Cicero retained the Greek terms, evidently despairing of the success of 

 Latin equivalents. How Cicero succeeded in passing off his new 

 coinage, is a historical fact. Notwithstanding his great authority as the 

 first of the Latin classics, he could scarcely prevail upon his countrymen 

 to accept a single one of his coinages. Language is the immediate result 

 of thought ; you may call it thought itself : and hence no man will 

 suffer his language being dictated to. Plutarch relates another curious 

 example. A freed slave of the name of Carvilius, who was the 

 first writing master in Rome during the first Punic war, wished to 

 make a difference in form between the letters C and G. For up to 

 his time and for several centuries after him, the Romans employed the 

 C alike for C and G. Although a distinction like this would have been 

 of the greatest practical benefit, Carvilius could not prevail upon his 

 countrymen to adopt it. Three hundred years after, he found a votary 

 for his proposed change in the Emperor Caligula, who was an amateur 

 philologist, and it appears that, soon after, the distinction proposed by 

 Carvilius was at last generally adopted. Here we have an example of a 

 practical and necessary change requiring more than three centuries to 

 become generally adopted. 



The examples of modern times are also striking. The French Aca- 

 demy, with its magnificent Dictionary, was not able to fix the classical, 

 character of many phrases proposed and sanctioned by that learned body. 

 The French language has since progressed independently of that diction- 

 ary. In Germany, about twenty years ago, a Society of respectable scho- 

 lars was founded in Potsdam, whose object was, to substitute for every 

 foreign word in the German language a good German equivalent, and to 

 do away with the apparently useless foreign terminology. The scheme 

 seined to stand a good chance ; for the power of the German language 

 of forming compounds is, as it is the case with the Sanscrit, almost mar- 

 vellous ; although these compounds are by no means so formidable and 

 unutterable, as the llon'blc Mr. Campbell, and some time ago Mr. 

 ]><'ame^ in an essay in our Journal, represented. The Potsdam 



