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 ἱερόν 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, were to be explained by Greek etymologies{ 257}.
‘Tartar’ is another word, of which it is at least possible that a wrongly assumed derivation has modified the spelling, and indeed not the spelling only, but the very shape in which we now possess it. To many among us it may be known that the people designated by this appellation are not properly ‘Tartars’, but ‘Tatars’; and you sometimes perhaps have noted the omission of the ‘r’ on the part of those who are curious in their spelling. How, then, it may be asked, did the form ‘Tartar’ arise? When the terrible hordes of middle Asia burst in upon civilized Europe in the thirteenth century, many beheld in the ravages of their innumerable cavalry a fulfilment of that prophetic word in the Revelation (chap. ix.) concerning the opening of the bottomless pit; and from this belief ensued the change of their name from ‘Tatars’ to ‘Tartars’, which was thus put into closer relation with ‘Tartarus’ or hell, out of which their multitudes were supposed to have proceeded{ 258}.
Another good example in the same kind is the German word ‘sündflut’, the Deluge, which is now so spelt as to signify a ‘sinflood’, the plague or _flood_ of waters brought on the world by the _sins_ of mankind; and probably some of us have before this admired the pregnant significance of the word. Yet the old High German word had originally no such intention; it was spelt ‘sinfluot’, that is, the great flood; and as late as Luther, indeed in Luther’s own translation of the Bible, is so spelt as to make plain that the notion of a ‘_sin_-flood’ had not yet found its way into, even as it had not affected the spelling of, the word{ 259}.