§135. A Sampling of Greek Verb Roots
To illustrate our approach, let us take five different Greek verbs and show how a knowledge of their roots alone will help us understand a lot of English vocabulary. The present infinitive forms will also be listed, if only to prove that they are really irrelevant to English. Much more importantly, you’ll be given a few simple rules for creating Greek nouns and adjectives from verb roots. Though you will not gain any grammatical insight into the Greek verb, you will emerge from this short experiment with the basic equipment that you need to cope with Greek verb derivatives in English.
As always, the root is the minimal element of meaning. Though θε- and δο- could not stand alone in Greek speech, they were the sounds that made the Greek ear register the idea of “placing” and “giving,” respectively. The infinitives τιθεναι and διδοναι are examples of actual words formed from verb roots—you can see the two roots at their heart. One may well ask, however, whether there is any point in learning these complicated Greek forms (unless it is to recognize them when they occur in major English dictionaries). From our examples above, it would appear that the Greek present infinitive may end either in -ναι or in -ειν. Greek τιθεναι is the equivalent, in form and meaning, of Latin ponere, whereas Greek διδοναι corresponds with Latin dare. (The roots δο- and da- are cognate.)
We’ll completely ignore the question, “How did the Greeks use these roots to express verbal concepts?” Instead, let’s ask, “How did the Greeks form other parts of speech in which these verb roots have affected English?” Here is one answer. It was common practice in Greek to add the suffix -σις (-sis) to a verb root in order to create an abstract noun. Therefore Greek had a noun θεσις (the-sis) that meant “a placing.” We may compare it with its Latin parallel from ponere, the abstract noun positio (posit-io). Although they are not really synonyms, thesis and position—English words with the same etymological meaning—do have some semantic relationship. The Greek form may be adapted in English: δοσις (do-sis), “a giving,” is the etymon of English dose.
If θεσις means “a placing,” then συνθεσις (syn-thesis) is “a placing together,” ἀντιθεσις (anti-thesis) is “a placing against,” and ὑποθεσις (hypo-thesis) is “a placing beneath.” Would you agree that the Greek derivatives synthesis and hypothesis have semantic links with the parallel Latin derivatives composition and supposition? A metathesis is a “change” (μετα-) in placement—for instance, a transposition of two letters of the aplhabet—oops, I meant alphabet. A prosthesis (cf. §133) is something “placed in addition” (προσ-), like an artificial limb. We see two Greek prefixes at work in the noun παρενθεσις (par-en-thesis), a device for placing something in and beside.
Moving down our experimental list of verb roots, we can assume that the same noun suffix will be added to στα- to produce στασις, “a standing”;