Principles of Greek etymology Author:Georg Curtius Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: of tlie art's prime from, the rigid but clear-cut types of an earlier stage in which the art's foundations were laid. 23 But a return to that earlier stage is in... more »dispensable. The Greeks did not make their language themselves; they had a rich inheritance; and they marvellously transfigured it. So any one who wishes to penetrate at all to the origin of words must inquire throughout whether the related languages do not cast a peculiar light on the phenomena of the single language; and then only is he entitled to restrict himself to the single language; when he has sought in vain in the others. The older school of Etymology alternated between two views: one was that the forms met with in Greek had grown out of simpler and shorter ones; the other that by the reverse of this process they had shrunk from older; longer; and fuller forms by considerable abbreviations. The comparative method declares entirely for the second of these views. On finding, for instance, in Sanskrit the rost vas, in Latin ves (ves-ti-s), in Gothic vas (ga-vas-jwi) with the meaning of "to clothe/v, all doubt vanishes as to whether the above-mentioned forms can have been amplifications of the Greek e in ev-vv-pi,, or whether the reverse is the case; whether we are, in accordance with 'a view that is not yet completely exploded, to consider the / at the beginning of the Greek word as a parasitic modification of the initial letter, — as if a / could appear at pleasure — o'r rather as the remnant of the original form of the word. Vas is the oldest form, to which we here liave three-fold testimony, a form historically handed down to us, from which critical principles imperatively bid us start. On the conjjrary when we find in Sanskrit, Latin, Gothic, Lithuanian, and Slavonic the root i meaning go, and meet it again i...« less