Page:Christian Greece and Living Greek.djvu/57

AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF GREEK. 35 time of activity, of great national impulse when this language was thus officially adopted, this language which had been predestined by history. When Greece had regained her liberty after almost four centuries of Turkish bondage a regular government was to be erected. Count- less numbers of demands were made on the lan- guage. A new life, a culture of which there had been no idea before, appeared suddenly before the Greeks. The language had to keep pace with the many new political, scientific, technical, commercial, journalistic requirements. Another nation would certainly under such cir- cumstances simply have adopted with the for- eign ideas the words also of foreign people, and would have formed a half-French and half- hybrid language. Not so the Greeks. Their history, their national pride, led them to ex- clude foreign words, led them to take the neces- sary elements from the old Greek to create new symbols for new ideas. This was a gigantic work. Stephanos Kumanudes has enumerated thirty thousand words which have been created during the last hundred years. Let us illustrate how the work was done by a few examples: During the eighteenth century the foreign word azaixTtepia had been used to designate a printing