Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/352

348 seems greatly to exceed that in the standard Greek and Latin lexicons, the difference is apparent rather than real. English dictionaries give every form in which a word may occur, slight variations only being excepted. The so-called irregular verbs fill only a few pages in the English grammars; yet they are usually recorded in the dictionaries. The irregularities of Greek and Latin verbs can, for the most part, not be found in the lexicons, and when recorded separately, make a large book. The latest edition of Stephanus's Greek lexicon fills nine volumes folio and more than ten thousand-pages, while the definitive Latin lexicon now in course of publication will be as large as the Oxford dictionary. Languages grow by incretion as well as by accretion. A new invention or a new discovery may be named by using current words. Thus "steamboat" and "railway" are compounds of obvious meaning because the sense of the constituent parts is already known and is not changed by the combination. It is true, "railway" is slightly misleading. The first tracks were made of wooden rails; when they were replaced with iron the earlier name was retained. In most of the continental languages the term "ironway" is in vogue, as railways were not introduced beyond the channel until wooden rails had been discarded, although the French still employs the monosyllable "rail" in its English sense. But not all words that have been compounded have an obvious signification; one or all of the parts entering into the combination sometimes lose their former meaning. To this class belong such terms as "stirrup-cup," "dog-watch," "monkey-wrench," "manof-war," "horse-raddish," and many more. A dog-fight is a fight between or among dogs, just as a cock-fight is a duel between two cocks; in a bull-fight the combatants are bulls, horses and men. When the vocabularly of a language grows by accretion it is either by the incorporation of words borrowed from others that designate the same object or by the modification of a foreign word to designate some object previously unknown. To the first class belong paper, parchment, hippopotamus and a host of others. To the second, amoeba, protoplasm, biogenesis, bacteria and a long list of technical terms. Horace has observed this process in his day, for he wrote

 New words will find acceptance, if they flow Forth from the Greek with just a twist or so.

It is by this method that science has constructed a language which has become, in a sense, international. One needs to know very little Italian, or French, or Spanish, in order to be able to read a scientific work intelligently. The translator of a well-known French medical book once told me that he had a mere smattering of the language, but as he was familiar with the subject he had no difficulty in comprehending the author's meaning. If this man had undertaken to translate selections from French literature or familiar conversation he would have