The English language itself is distinguished from its cousins in the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family
by the very large number of words which have come into it from Latin and, to a lesser extent, from Greek; some
directly, others through French or Italian. People sometimes talk as if such words were always massive and
abstruse, like 'psychiatry' or 'prelapsarian', and indeed the vocabulary of abstract thought, of science and culture,
is especially full of such words. But the following sample of twenty-five may remind the reader that many short
and basic words have the same source; act, art, beauty, colour, crime, fact, fate, fork, hour, human, idea, justice,
language, law, matter, music, nature, number, place, reason, school, sense, sex, space, time.
Every generation approaches classical antiquity in a different way, draws different lessons from it, finds different
things about it interesting. It is hoped that this book will help contemporary readers to understand something of
its continuing significance and fascination.
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