It is hardly possible to conceive a language more perfect than the Greek.
If you compare it with the modern European tongues, in the points of the
position and relative bearing of the vowels and consonants on each other,
and of the variety of terminations, it is incalculably before all in the
former particulars, and only equalled in the last by German. But it is in
variety of termination alone that the German surpasses the other modern
languages as to sound; for, as to position, Nature seems to have dropped an
acid into the language, when a-forming, which curdled the vowels, and made
all the consonants flow together. The Spanish is excellent for variety of
termination; the Italian, in this particular, the most deficient. Italian
prose is excessively monotonous.
* * * * *
It is very natural to have a dual, duality being a conception quite
distinct from plurality. Most very primitive languages have a dual, as the
Greek, Welch, and the native Chilese, as you will see in the Abbé Raynal.
The neuter plural governing, as they call it, a verb singular is one of the
many instances in Greek of the inward and metaphysic grammar resisting
successfully the tyranny of formal grammar. In truth, there may be
_Multeity_ in things; but there can only be _Plurality_ in persons.
Observe also that, in fact, a neuter noun in Greek has no real nominative
case, though it has a formal one, that is to say, the same word with the
accusative. The reason is--a _thing_ has no subjectivity, or nominative
case: it exists only as an object in the accusative or oblique case.
It is extraordinary that the Germans should not have retained or assumed
the two beautifully discriminated sounds of the soft and hard _theta_; as
in _thy thoughts_--_the thin ether that_, &c. How particularly fine the
hard _theta_ is in an English termination, as in that grand word--Death--
for which the Germans gutturize a sound that puts you in mind of nothing
but a loathsome toad.
_July_ 8. 1832.