Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1858 edition. Excerpt: ...in so many places of the Homeric versification. What this digamma might have been was disputed; but it was, almost insensibly perhaps, assumed to be some one letter or sound only. But as inquiry has made further advances, many forms of a lost letter or letters have been discovered: and it has also been made clear that the gaps ought to be filled up variously, and not by any one uniform expedient. To take very simple examples, there can be no doubt about the identity of e, exra, ts, with sex, septem, sus: nor any doubt about the essential identity of vSwp and sudor, Jou? and suavis, eKvpbs and socer: none therefore that the o-ought to be supplied, and not f, w, or v, in the passage (plXe eKvpe." While indeed a presumption arises0 from the German words schwicger and schwager, that a double or even treble loss may have occurred, and that the passage may have run plXe o-FeKvpe. Under these circumstances, in the case before us, where we have both forms represented, there can be no hesitation as to the identity of'EXXoJ and 2eXW: the first represented in "EXXay, "EXXijve?, n II. iii. 172. by Mr. James Yates, during the 0 I follow the acute and saga-year 1856, to the Philological cious notes of Professor Maiden Transactions: also Donaldson's to a valuable paper contributed Cratylus, p. 120.-EWticnrovros, and the 'EXXoTi-ta of Hesiod: the other and older one supported by SeXXe/?. There is another curious and instructive case, in which we have the older form of the word 2eXXot still remaining: besides that of Upoa-eXrjvoi, to which allusion has already been made in considering the case of the Pelasgian Arcadians. In the Birds of Aristophanes, the dramatist satirizes Athens and the Sicilian Expedition, under the name of a city...