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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: soul and its qualities, of virtue, power, wisdom, and the like, as feminine
or neuter? The usage of the English language does not admit of the former,
and yet the life and beauty of the style are impaired by the latter. Often
the translator will have recourse to the repetition of the word, or to the
ambiguous 'they,' 'their,' etc.; for fear of spoiling the effect of the
sentence by introducing 'it.' Collective nouns in Greek and English create
a similar but lesser awkwardness.
(4) To use of relation is far more extended in Greek than in English.
Partly the greater variety of genders and cases makes the connexion of
relative and antecedent less ambiguous: partly also the greater number of
demonstrative and relative pronouns, and the use of the article, make the
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