At 3:21 PM -0600 1/6/97, B Rocine wrote: > >By the way, when we coin Eng words from Gk. morphemes, done so often in >various branches of science, we do so with the same understanding of Gk >morpho-semantics any ancient Gk-speaker would have had. We then partake of >their propensity for "generate-from-within." > >The Eng tendency for borrowing from outside Eng makes our etymologies hard >to track or use. The Gk tendency for generating words from within Gk makes >the study of their etymologies clearer, more valid, more trackable than Eng. >I submit that when Eng borrows from Gk and/or Latin, even Eng etymologies >tend to be clear, valid, trackable, eg. _etymology_ << _etumon_(true sense) + >_logos_(study). With regard to the former paragraph I would point to the word "hypocrite" in English, which means exactly what hUPOKRITHS came to mean in Hellenistic Greek, although it would not at all be clear to one who didn't know the history of the word how it got to have this sense of "pretending to be what one isn't"--it was the word for "actor"--literally "answerer" in drama, from hUPOKRINOMAI, the older Attic form of the verb which Hellenistic speakers knew as APOKRINOMAI. With regard to the latter paragraph, a perusal of Plato's Cratylus could readily show how naive even Plato could be in applying etymology to word-meanings. Carl W. Conrad Department of Classics, Washington University One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130 (314) 935-4018 cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/