THE GREEK LANGUAGE: THE PROLIXITY OF PREPOSITIONAL PREFIXES.
In his translation of passages of Ancient Greek, Sabidius has become increasingly aware of the very large number of Greek words which begin with prepositional prefixes. In order to measure the proportion of such words, Sabidius has made use of the relevant pages in the Liddell and Scott abridged 'Greek English Lexicon (Oxford)', which contains 804 pages.
Prepositional prefixes and the number of relevant pages in the Lexicon are as follows:
ἀμφί 3, ἀνά 27, ἀντί 6, ἀπό 23, διά 15, εἰς 3, ἐκ 10, ἐμ' 4, ἐν 9, ἐπί 26, ἐξ 9, καθ' 2, κατά 18, μετά 6, παρά 16, περί 10, πρό 14, πρός 12, σύν 23, ὑπέρ 5, ὑπό 22.
The total number of relevant pages in the lexicon equals 266. 266/804 x 100 =33.1%, i.e. the number of words beginning with prepositional prefixes equals about a third of the words in the lexicon.
