Greek Grammar by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

It is hardly possible to conceive a language more perfect than the Greek. / If you compare it with the modern European tongues, in the points of the / position and relative bearing of the vowels and consonants on each other, / and of the variety of terminations, it is incalculably before all in the / former particulars, and only equalled in the last by German. But it is in / variety of termination alone that the German surpasses the other modern / languages as to sound; for, as to position, Nature seems to have dropped an / acid into the language, when a-forming, which curdled the vowels, and made / all the consonants flow together. The Spanish is excellent for variety of / termination; the Italian, in this particular, the most deficient. Italian / prose is excessively monotonous.

It is very natural to have a dual, duality being a conception quite / distinct from plurality. Most very primitive languages have a dual, as the / Greek, Welch, and the native Chilese, as you will see in the Abbé Raynal.

The neuter plural governing, as they call it, a verb singular is one of the / many instances in Greek of the inward and metaphysic grammar resisting / successfully the tyranny of formal grammar. In truth, there may be / _Multeity_ in things; but there can only be _Plurality_ in persons.

Observe also that, in fact, a neuter noun in Greek has no real nominative / case, though it has a formal one, that is to say, the same word with the / accusative. The reason is -- a _thing_ has no subjectivity, or nominative / case: it exists only as an object in the accusative or oblique case.

It is extraordinary that the Germans should not have retained or assumed / the two beautifully discriminated sounds of the soft and hard _theta_; as / in _thy thoughts_ -- _the thin ether that_, &c. How particularly fine the / hard _theta_ is in an English termination, as in that grand word -- Death -- / for which the Germans gutturize a sound that puts you in mind of nothing / but a loathsome toad.