Sirs,—In response to your request I have been excerpting for your Summaries the last—itself a summary—instalment of Glotta, VI. I find there so much belittling censure of my own studies that I am prompted to ask the privilege of a few words with your readers on the criteria of belief in etymology.

I. The etymologies susceptible to simple phonetic formulation and semantically obvious have, for the most part, been discovered long ago. But I cannot say semantically obvious without recording my conviction that semantic science is still in swaddling clothes. Readers of the Classical Quarterly will, I trust, find the following derivations interesting, as well as clear and semantically obvious.

I. In Skr. medín we have an Indo-Iranian -in derivative of a proethnic start-form met-sdos ‘co-sedens,’ whose initial s may have been lost by haplology, but cf. Av. mat ‘μετά.’ Homeric xs1F02oζoς ‘attendant’ is a like compound, meaning co-sedens and not ‘mitgänger’ , but has suffered psilosis. Out of composition, unless the ‘suffix’ conceals a posterius, we may have a further cognate in Lat. sodalis ‘boon-companion,’ wherein sodā- may have meant something like ‘session’.

Cicero, in his letters , writes the following sentence : memini in senatu disertum consularem ita eloqui: ‘hanc culpam maiorem an illam dicam?’ potuit obscenius? ‘non’ inquis ; ‘non enim ita sensit’ Wherein does the coarseness lie? Critics find in lam dicam a word ‘ landicam,’ which they define by ‘clitoris’. But possibly culpam is, whether by equivoque or by definition, the offending word.

In analyzing S0009838800019480_inline1 for composition I start in the most obvious way with S0009838800019480_inline2 in the sense of ‘gang’ , while S0009838800019480_inline3 must be a root-noun from *lew-s, and is perhaps immediately cognate with Skr. lu-nati ‘caedit.’1 This analysis makes S0009838800019480_inline4 mean something like ‘ uiam-muniens,’ i.e. a sort of ‘ ponti-fex.’ I think more particularly of the sacrificial leader, the S0009838800019480_inline5, the Rex Sacrificulus, who, while he may have been concerned with the making of ways on earth, also made (...) paths for man to the gods. But this aside, he who ‘ blazed the trail,’ who ‘ loosed’ or ‘ solved ’ the ‘ ways,’ was ‘ explorer, guide, leader,’ i.e. ‘dux.’. (shrink)

The following paper will undertake to demonstrate an I.E. root dyu ‘iungere,’ and its synonymous correlatives dyem/dyā , dyā-t-/dyat dyes/dyō[u]s.

In Am. Jr. Phil. 28, 413 I derived the suffix in Gothic fram-aps ‘alienus’, Latin com-et- ‘socius– and Greek τ ‘comites’ from the root et- ‘errare, ire’; and I proposed the name ‘confix’ for a suffix whose origin could be traced back to an original compounding element. I now find further evidence for the confix -et- in Latin interpret-, ‘go-between’; and I explain pr-et- as a fusion-product of the synonymous roots PER- and ET- ‘errare, ire’. Nor is this explanation in (...) conflict with the current comparison between interpres and Gothic frops ‘klug, verstandig’: it is simply that ‘go-between’ is nearer the meaning. The wisdom attributed to the wanderer, to the traveller in far lands,–an idea forever embalmed for English folk in Shakespeare's counter-turn. (shrink)

I. Latin interpres, miles etc. and the confix -et-, ‘errans,’ cf. -etum ‘allee.’In Am. Jr. Phil. 28, 413 I derived the suffix in Gothic fram-aps ‘alienus’, Latin com-et- ‘socius– and Greek τ ‘comites’ from the root et- ‘errare, ire’; and I proposed the name ‘confix’ for a suffix whose origin could be traced back to an original compounding element. I now find further evidence for the confix -et- in Latin interpret-, ‘go-between’; and I explain pr-et- as a fusion-product of the (...) synonymous roots PER- and ET- ‘errare, ire’. Nor is this explanation in conflict with the current comparison between interpres and Gothic frops ‘klug, verstandig’: it is simply that ‘go-between’ is nearer the meaning. The wisdom attributed to the wanderer, to the traveller in far lands,–an idea forever embalmed for English folk in Shakespeare's counter-turn. (shrink)

The present essay, reposing on phenomena of derivation and semantics, will attempt to establish a more objective basis for the syntax of the impersonals. As a matter of syntax, the subject is of vital interest for the living Germanic tongues, and with these the essay begins. It will continue with a discussion of the phenomena of the Latin impersonals, and seek, by the help of living English usage, to establish upon a correct psychological basis the definition and derivation of the (...) least elusive impersonals of emotion in Sanskrit and Latin. (shrink)

In the school study of syntax the results of etymology, however highly they may be valued in theory, are in effect neglected. I called attention to this, and specifically to the construction of credo with the dative, in an article in the Classical Quarterly, v. 193.

Latin ‘plvs.’—To begin somewhat remotely, I am not satisfied with the current explanation of Lat. plus. As regards pleores, to pass over Cuny's mistaken derivation in MSL. 16. 322, the explanation from plēyōses is correct— IE. plēyo. : plēyos–:: Sk. návya: compv. návyas, cf. pánya: pányas and távya: távyas. IE. plēyes also appears, not only in Sanskrit as prắyas and in πλε–ων , but, by a quite rigorous phonetic, in O.Norse fleiri, from a primate flaiz-an (...) ‘sow,’ borrowed from a North Germanic verb-stem sā–ya shrink)

It must have been shortly after I entered college in my middle ̓teens that I first heard of the grammatical doctrine that psychological opposites take the same construction. As a mnemonic, alone, the doctrine is immensely worth while and practically helps with categories like —which rouses a literary interest by recalling Thackeray's use of different to as a counter term to equal to, similar to, like to. And, to get back to grammar, for English folk it clarifies prope ab to (...) counter it with procul ab. By the doctrine of opposites we clarify even so elusive a matter as the ‘subjunctive of repudiation’ which I once sought to explain by partial obliquity , not mistaking therein, I am fain to believe, the valuable stylistic note of echo. In this subjunctive I now see a clear opposite to the concessive. It is a survival, on the cold page, of a speech form that owed its meaning to the speaker's mood (xs22EF ψυχικxs22EF διxs22EFθεσις, the pitch of his voice, all the things that manifest and betray emotion, and so far forth is ‘polemic’ It is often introduced by ut, utne, egone ut, where ut is exclamatory and interrogative at once, and the tone converts the concessive to an anticoncessive, indicating repudiation, disavowal. (shrink)

A. The Vestine Inscription with brat. T. Vetio | duno | didet | Herclo | Iovio | brat. | data. 1. This inscription, most easily consulted in Diehl's Alt-lat. Inschriften, No. 70, has been explained, beyond any reasonable doubt, by von Planta as follows: ‘ The entire inscription is accordingly to be rendered thus: T. Vettius donum dat Herculi Iouio; merito data, sc. est or sunt, according as the votive offering was feminine singular or neuter plural.’ The very abbreviation of (...) brat. favours a formulaic word such as merito. Von Planta accounts also for all other dialectic occurrences of the stem brato-, vindicating a sense of meritum for all of them. (shrink)

Les Dialectes Doriens, Phonétique et Morphologic. Thèse d'Agrégation presentée á la Faculté de Philosophic et Lettres de l'Université de Bruxelles, par Émile Boisacq, Docteur en Philosophie et Lettres. Paris, Érnest Thorin, 1891. 220 pages.Der Dialekt Megaras, und der Megarischen Colonien Friedrich von Köppner.—Besondere Abdruck aus dem achtzehnten Supplementbande der ‘Jahrbücher für classische Philologie.’ Leipzig, Teubner, 1891. Pp. 530–563. 1 Mk.

This verb is of quite general signification in Plautus ‘facit, reddit, comparat,’ and the like. Minuter definitions are given by the glossists, e.g. συνκᾱττúει ‘sews together’ , arte facit aut componit, conflectit; cf. also concinnatura κόλλσις . In view of Latin ciet ‘moves, stirs, shakes; excites, rouses; causes, occasions,’ and of Greek κινεȋ ‘sets in motion, moves, removes; changes, alters, sets agoing, causes, calls forth,’ we might define concinnat by ‘moves, draws, puts together, joins.’.