Philosophy is the peculiar sphere of these adjectives in -κός and their adverbs. Plato has 347 of them in the dialogues accepted by Christ (391 according to Ast's lexicon), and Aristotle between six and seven hundred. The extant fragments of the early philosophers and sophists do not justify us in attributing the sudden prominence in literature of this class of words to the example set by some one individual of commanding influence.[1] It is due rather to the increased intellectual activity of the age and the consequent need of additional means for the expression of thought. The speculations of the philosophers and the growing tendency toward logical analysis demanded a more extended vocabulary.[2] The suffix -κός was among the available material which the language already possessed within itself, and, though before used comparatively little, it had great possibilities of productiveness, as its popularity in philosophic discourses and its free use in postclassic times prove.[3] Plato and Xenophon have in common 27 words in -κός that do not occur in the extant literature before their time so far as the Thesaurus shows, and Plato alone uses about 200 more that are not found in any earlier writer. In Campbell's list of 56 words from the Sophistes and 78 from the Politicus that are not used again by Plato, 44 in each group are words in -κός, and of this number 41 in each dialogue[4] are not found in the previous literature.
- ↑ Parmenides, Zeno, Anaxagoras, and Diogenes of Apollonia, all of whom came to Athens, have none of these words in their fragments. Protagoras, Prodicus, and Gorgias have one or two each, and Democritus, Philolaus, and Archytas from six to nine each. The Hippocratean tract on the art of medicine, entitled περὶ τέχνης, which Gomperz ascribes to Protagoras, has nothing more than the word ἰητρική. The only passage in which there is a suggestion of the heaping up of -κός forms is Philolaus fr. 11 (Diels), one sentence of which is γνωμικὰ γὰρ ἁ φύσις ἁ τῶ ἀριϑμῶ καὶ ἡγεμονικὰ καὶ διδασκαλικὰ τῶ ἀπορουμένω παντὸς καὶ ἀγνοουμένω παντί.
- ↑ A long list of derivative and compound words which may be assumed to have come into use shortly before Plato's time from the fact that they occur in Plato and no earlier writer, is given in Jowett and Campbell's Republic of Plato II 263–279, where Campbell remarks, "This effervescence of language is naturally correlated to the stir and eager alacrity of thought which the sophists set in motion and to which Socrates himself contributed."
- ↑ Budenz, on p. 7, estimates the total number of -κός forms in Greek to be about 2000. This number apparently includes derivatives from proper names also.
- ↑ Many of them are used to designate various τέχναι, since an effort is made to arrive at definitions of the sophist and statesman by the process of division and subdivision.
