ike, crave
to have these words not body only, but body and soul. What an
attestation, I say, of this lies in the fact that where a word in its
proper derivation is unintelligible to them, they will shape and mould
it into some other form, not enduring that it should be a mere inert
sound without sense in their ears; and if they do not know its right
origin, will rather put into it a wrong one, than that it should have
for them no meaning, and suggest no derivation at all{253}.

There is probably no language in which such a process has not been going
forward; in which it is not the explanation, in a vast number of
instances, of changes in spelling and even in form, which words have
undergone. I will offer a few examples of it from foreign tongues,
before adducing any from our own. 'Pyramid' is a word, the spelling of
which was affected in the Greek by an erroneous assumption of its
derivation; the consequences of this error surviving in our own word to
the present day. It is spelt by us with a 'y' in the first syllable, as
it was spelt with the {Greek: y} corresponding in the Greek. But why was
this? It was because the Greeks assumed that the pyramids were so named
from their having the appearance of _flame_ going up into a point{254},
and so they spelt 'pyramid', that they might find {Greek: pyr} or 'pyre'
in it; while in fact 'pyramid' has nothing to do with flame or fire at
all; being, as those best qualified to speak on the matter declare to
us, an Egyptian word of quite a different signification{255}, and the
Coptic letters being much better represented by the diphthong 'ei' than
by the letter 'y', as no doubt, but for this mistaken notion of what the
word was intended to mean, they would have been.

Once more--the form 'Hierosolyma', wherein the Greeks reproduced the
Hebrew 'Jerusalem', was intended in all probability to express that the
city so called was the _sacred_ city of the _Solymi_{256}. At all events
the intention not merely of reproducing the Hebrew word, but also of
making it significant in Greek, of finding {Greek: hieron} in it, is
plainly discernible. For indeed the Greeks were exceedingly intolerant
of foreign words, till they had laid aside their foreign appearance--of
all words which they could not thus quicken with a Greek soul; and, with
a very characteristic vanity, an ignoring of all other tongues but their
own, assumed with no apparent misgivings that all words, from whatever
quarter derived,