Questo star la ultima affronta.’
This shows the tendency of language to degradation when not upheld by literary culture and elevated thought. Barbarism proved as efficacious in materialising the conception of the Latin races, as in sweeping away the niceties of their grammar. To this day the Spaniards say, tengo hambre, for esurio.”—R. G.
[140] See Wedgwood, p. xvii.
[141] Who would have thought à priori that the word “stranger” has its root in the single vowel e, the Latin preposition for “from”? Yet we see it to be so, “the moment that the intermediate links of the chain are submitted to our examination,—e, ex, extra, extraneus, étranger, stranger.”—Dugald Stewart, Philos. Es. p. 217, 4th ed.
[142] Adelung, Mithridates, iii. 6, p. 325.
[143] Benloew, De la Science Comp. des Langues, p. 22.
[144] Essay on English Dialects, p. 64.
[145] Still more strange are the variations presented by the root ἄω. See Leibnitz, Nouv. Ess. sur l’Entendement Humain, iii. 2. 2; and Donaldson’s New Crat. p. 476.
[146] New Crat. p. 80.
[147] The “lucus à non lucendo” principle, which explained various positive words as though they were derived from the absence of the quality they attributed, has long been given up by all sound scholars. Of course such names as Euxinus, Beneventum, Εὐμενίδες, “good folk,” “crétin,” “natural,” &c., arise in a totally different manner, as well as the name Parcæ, absurdly derived “a non parcendo.” The supposed instances of “Antiphrasis,” as the grammarians called it, are eminently absurd, e.g. Varro, L. L. iv. 8: “Cœlum, contrario nomine celatum, quod apertum est.” Donat. de Trop. p. 1778: “Bellum, hoc est minimè bellum.” They confused it with irony and euphemism. See Lersch, i. s. 132, 133.