Each human language has its strengths and weaknesses and, like a musical instrument, is better designed to express certain information, thoughts, and feelings than others. A violin and a trombone have little in common; and though each can be drafted to sound the same melody, the melody will have a different texture and make a quite different impression on the hearer, depending on the instrument employed. Ancient Hebrew is tense and terse, a desert language of spare muscularity, as tightly economical in its movements and effects as a desert nomad, who, because of the constant threat of dehydration, must always think before he moves and think before he speaks, who never uses two words when one will do, who never uses one word when silence can express his meaning. (Not a little of the meaning of the Hebrew Bible is contained in its silences.) Ancient Latin is a language ideal for recordkeeping, simple maxims, and obvious subordinations, the perfect language for a tribe of parsimonious farmers who transformed themselves into land-grabbing real estate developers, then into colonial masters, and finally into imperialists who believed the whole world belonged to them by right. Only with immense exertions—by poets like Virgil, studiously imitating Homer—was Latin forged into an instrument fit for the emotional modulations of poetry and the subtleties of thought. With all that, no Latin dramatist ever came close to the Greek achievement; and the unoriginal Latin philosophers were all weak imitators of their Greek forebears.
Though ancient languages are notable for their modest vocabularies (the world still being young and the phenomena to be named far fewer than what we face today), Greek is an exception: the abundance of words in a dictionary of ancient Greek is staggering not only to the student but to the expert. The Spartans, the Achaeans, the Athenians, the Boeotians, the Aetolians, the Euboeans, the Thessalonians, the Macedonians, the Lydians, the Ionians, the speakers who hailed from the various Adriatic and Aegean islands, the colonists of Sicily, southern Italy, and the Black Sea—these and many more contributed their finely shaded regional vocabularies (not unlike their characteristic musical modes) to the whole language, which became like a vast orchestra of diverse instruments, able to produce modulations of extraordinary refinement.
— Thomas Cahill, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter
