CHAPTER XI

THE FOREIGNER

§ 1. The Substratum Theory. § 2. French _u_ and Spanish _h_. § 3. Gothonic and Keltic. § 4. Etruscan and Indian Consonants. § 5. Gothonic Sound-shift. § 6. Natural and Specific Changes. § 7. Power of Substratum. § 8. Types of Race-mixture. § 9. Summary. § 10. General Theory of Loan-words. § 11. Classes of Loan-words. § 12. Influence on Grammar. § 13. Translation-loans.

XI.--§ 1. The Substratum Theory.

It seems evident that if we wish to find out the causes of linguistic change, a fundamental division must be into--

(1) Changes that are due to the transference of the language to new individuals, and

(2) Changes that are independent of such transference.

It may not be easy in practice to distinguish the two classes, as the very essence of the linguistic life of each individual is a continual give-and-take between him and those around him; still, the division is in the main clear, and will consequently be followed in the present work.

The first class falls again naturally into two heads, according as the new individual does not, or does already, possess a language. With the former, i.e. with the native child learning his ‘mother-tongue,’ we have dealt at length in Book II, and we now proceed to an examination of the influence exercised on a language through its transference to individuals who are already in possession of another language--let us, for the sake of shortness, call them foreigners.

While some earlier scholars denied categorically the existence of mixed languages, recent investigators have attached a very great importance to mixtures of languages, and have studied actually occurring mixtures of various degrees and characters with the greatest accuracy: I mention here only one name, that of Hugo Schuchardt, who combines profundity and width of knowledge with a truly philosophical spirit, though the form of his numerous scattered writings makes it difficult to gather a just idea of his views on many questions.

Many scholars have recently attached great importance to the subtler and more hidden influence exerted by one language on another in those cases in which a population abandons its original language and adopts that of another race, generally in consequence of military conquest. In these cases the theory is that people keep many of their speech-habits, especially with regard to articulation and accent, even while using the vocabulary, etc., of the new language, which thus to a large extent is tinged by the old language. There is thus created what is now generally termed a _substratum_ underlying the new language. As the original substratum modifying a language which gradually spreads over a large area varies according to the character of the tribes subjugated in different districts, this would account for many of those splittings-up of languages which we witness everywhere.

Hirt goes so far as to think it possible by the help of existing dialect boundaries to determine the extensions of aboriginal languages (Idg 19).

There is certainly something very plausible in this manner of viewing linguistic changes, for we all know from practical everyday experience that the average foreigner is apt to betray his nationality as soon as he opens his mouth: the Italian’s or the German’s English is just as different from the ‘real thing’ as, inversely, the Englishman’s Italian or German is different from the Italian or German of a native: the place of articulation, especially that of the tongue-tip consonants, the aspiration or want of aspiration of _p_, _t_, _k_, the voicing or non-voicing of _b_, _d_, _g_, the diphthongization or monophthongization of long vowels, the syllabification, various peculiarities in quantity and in tone-movements--all such things are apt to colour the whole acoustic impression of a foreigner’s speech in an acquired language, and it is, of course, a natural supposition that the aboriginal inhabitants of Europe and Asia were just as liable to transfer their speech habits to new languages as their descendants are nowadays. There is thus a priori a strong probability that linguistic substrata have exercised some influence on the development of conquering languages. But when we proceed to apply this natural inference to concrete examples of linguistic history, we shall see that the theory does not perhaps suffice to explain everything that its advocates would have it explain, and that there are certain difficulties which have not always been faced or appraised according to their real value. A consideration of these concrete examples will naturally lead up to a discussion of the general principles involved in the substratum theory.

XI.--§ 2. French _u_ and Spanish _h_.

First I shall mention Ascoli’s famous theory that French [y·] for Latin _u_, as in _dur_, etc., is due to Gallic influence, cf. Welsh _i_ in _din_ from _dun_, which presupposes a transition from _u_ to [y]. Ascoli found a proof in the fact that Dutch also has the pronunciation [y·], e.g. in _duur_, on the old Keltic soil of the Belgæ, to which Schuchardt (SlD 126) added his observation of [y] in dialectal South German (Breisgau), in a district in which there had formerly been a strong Keltic element. This looks very convincing at first blush. On closer inspection, doubts arise on many points. The French transition cannot with certainty be dated very early, for then _c_ in _cure_ would have been palatalized and changed as _c_ before _i_ (Lenz, KZ 39. 46); also the treatment of the vowel in French words taken over into English, where it is not identified with the native [y], but becomes [iu], is best explained on the assumption that about 1200 A.D. the sound had not advanced farther on its march towards the front position than, say, the Swedish ‘mixed-round’ sound in _hus_. The district in which [y] is found for _u_ is not coextensive with the Keltic possessions; there were very few Kelts in what is now Holland, and inversely South German [y] for _u_ does not cover the whole Keltic domain; [y] is found outside the French territory proper, namely, in Franco-Provençal (where the substratum was Ligurian) and in Provençal (where there were very few Galli; cf. Wechssler, L 113). Thus the province of [y] is here too small and there too large to make the argument conclusive. Even more fatal is the objection that the Gallic transition from _u_ to _y_ is very uncertain (Pedersen, GKS 1. § 353). So much is certain, that the fronting of _u_ was not a _common_ Keltic transition, for it is not found in the Gaelic (Goidelic) branch.[42] On the other hand, the transition from [u] to [y] occurs elsewhere, independent of Keltic influence, as in Old Greek (cf. also the Swedish sound in _hus_): why cannot it, then, be independent in French?

Another case adduced by Ascoli is initial _h_ instead of Latin _f_ in the country anciently occupied by the Iberians. Now, Basque has no _f_ sound at all in any connexion; if the same aversion to _f_ had been the cause of the Spanish substitution of _h_ for _f_, we should expect the substitution to have been made from the moment when Latin was first spoken in Hispania, and we should expect it to be found in all positions and connexions. But what do we find instead? First, that Old Spanish had _f_ in many cases where modern Spanish has _h_ (i.e. really no sound at all), and this cannot be altogether ascribed to ‘Latinizing scribes.’ On the contrary, the transition _f_ > _h_ seems to have taken place many centuries after the Roman invasion, since the Spanish-speaking Jews of Salonika, who emigrated from Spain about 1500, have to this day preserved the _f_ sound among other archaic traits (see F. Hanssen, _Span. Gramm._ 45; Wiener, _Modern Philology_, June 1903, p. 205). And secondly, that _f_ has been kept in certain connexions; thus, before [w], as in _fuí_, _fuiste_, _fué_, etc., before _r_ and _l_, as in _fruto_, _flor_, etc. This certainly is inexplicable if the cause of _f_ > _h_ had been the want of power on the part of the aborigines to produce the _f_ sound at all, while it is simple enough if we assume a later transition, taking place possibly at first between two vowels, with a subsequent generalization of the _f_-less forms. Diez is here, as not infrequently, more sensible than some of his successors (see _Gramm. d. roman. spr._, 4th ed., 1. 283 f., 373 f.).

XI.--§ 3. Gothonic and Keltic.

Feist (KI 480 ff.: cf. PBB 36. 307 ff., 37. 112 ff.) applies the substratum theory to the Gothonic (Germanic) languages. The Gothons are autochthonous in northern Europe, and very little mixed with other races; they must have immigrated just after the close of the glacial period. But the arrival of Aryan (Indogermanic) tribes cannot be placed earlier than about 2000 B.C.; they made the original inhabitants give up their own language. The nation that thus Aryanized the Gothons cannot have been other than the Kelts; their supremacy over the Gothons is proved by several loan-words for cultural ideas or state offices, such as Gothic _reiks_ ‘king,’ _andbahts_ ‘servant.’ The Aryan language which the Kelts taught the Gothons was subjected in the process to considerable changes, the old North Europeans pronouncing the new language in accordance with their previous speech habits; instead of taking over the free Aryan accent, they invariably stressed the initial syllable, and they made sad havoc of the Aryan flexion.

The theory does not bear close inspection. The number of Keltic loan-words is not great enough for us to infer such an overpowering ascendancy on the part of the Kelts as would force the subjected population to make a complete surrender of their own tongue. Neither in number nor in intrinsic significance can these loans be compared with the French loans in English: and yet the Normans did not succeed in substituting their own language for English. Besides, if the theory were true, we should not merely see a certain number of Keltic loan-words, but the whole speech, the complete vocabulary as well as the entire grammar, would be Keltic; yet as a matter of fact there is a wide gulf between Keltic and Gothonic, and many details, lexical and grammatical, in the latter group resemble other Aryan languages rather than Keltic. The stressing of the first syllable is said to be due to the aboriginal language. If that were so, it would mean that this population, in adopting the new speech, had at once transferred its own habit of stressing the first syllable to all the new words, very much as Icelanders are apt to do nowadays. But this is not in accordance with well established facts in the Gothonic languages: we know that when the consonant shift took place, it found the stress on the same syllables as in Sanskrit, and that it was this stress on many middle or final syllables that afterwards changed many of the shifted consonants from voiceless to voiced (Verner’s law).[43] This fact in itself suffices to prove that the consonant shift and the stress shift cannot have taken place simultaneously, and thus cannot be due to one and the same cause, as supposed by Feist. Nor can the havoc wrought in the old flexions be due to the inability of a new people to grasp the minute _nuances_ and intricate system of another language than its own; for in that case too we should have something like the formless ‘Pidgin English’ from the very beginning, whereas the oldest Gothonic languages still preserve a great many old flexions and subtle syntactical rules which have since disappeared. As a matter of fact, many of the flexions of primitive Aryan were much better preserved in Gothonic languages than in Keltic.

XI.--§ 4. Etruscan and Indian Consonants.

In another place in the same work (KI 373) Feist speaks of the Etruscan language, and says that this had only one kind of stop consonants, represented by the letters _k_ (_c_), _t_, _p_, besides the aspirated stops _kh_, _th_, _ph_, which in some instances correspond to Latin and Greek tenues. This, he says, reminds one very strongly of the sound system of High German (oberdeutschen) dialects, and more particularly of those spoken in the Alps. Feist here (and in PBB 36. 340 ff.) maintains that these sounds go back to a Pre-Gothonic Alpine population, which he identifies with the ancient Rhætians; and he sees in this a strong support of a linguistic connexion between the Rhætians and Etruscans. He finds further striking analogies between the Gothonic and the Armenian sound systems; the predilection for voiceless stops and aspirated sounds in Etruscan, in the domain of the ancient Rhætians and in Asia Minor is accordingly ascribed to the speech habits of one and the same aboriginal race.

Here, too, there are many points to which I must take exception. It is not quite certain that the usual interpretation of Etruscan letters is correct; in fact, much may be said in favour of the hypothesis that the letters rendered _p_, _t_, _k_ stand really for the sounds of _b_, _d_, _g_, and that those transcribed _ph_, _th_, _kh_ (or Greek φ, θ, χ) represent ordinary _p_, _t_, _k_. However this may be, Feist seems to be speaking here almost in the same breath of the first (or common Gothonic) shift and of the second (or specially High German) shift, although they are separated from each other by several centuries and neither cover the same geographical ground nor lead to the same phonetic result. Neither Armenian nor primitive Gothonic can be said to be averse to voiced stops, for in both we find voiced _b_, _d_, _g_ for the old ‘mediæ aspiratæ.’ And in both languages the old voiceless stops became at first probably not aspirates, but simply voiceless spirants, as in English _f_ather, _th_ing, and Scotch lo_ch_. Further, it should be noted that we do not find the tendency to unvoice stops and to pronounce affricates either in Rhæto-Romanic (Ladin) or in Tuscan Italian; both languages have unaspirated _p_, _t_, _k_ and voiced _b_, _d_, _g_, and the Tuscan pronunciation of _c_ between two vowels as [x], thus in _la casa_ [la xa·sa], but not in _a casa_ = [akka·sa], could not be termed ‘aspiration’ except by a non-phonetician; this pronunciation can hardly have anything to do with the old Etruscan language.

According to a theory which is very widely accepted, the Dravidian languages exerted a different influence on the Aryan languages when the Aryans first set foot on Indian soil, in making them adopt the ‘cacuminal’ (or ‘inverted’) sounds _ḍ_, _ṭ_, _ṇ_ with _ḍh_ and _ṭh_, which were not found in primitive Aryan. But even this theory does not seem to be quite proof against objections. It is easy to admit that natives accustomed to one place of articulation of their _d_, _t_, _n_ will unconsciously produce the _d_, _t_, _n_ of a new language they are learning in the same place; but then they will do it everywhere. Here, however, both Dravidian and Sanskrit possess pure dental _d_, _t_, _n_, pronounced with the tip of the tongue touching the upper teeth, besides cacuminal _ḍ_, _ṭ_, _ṇ_, in which it touches the gum or front part of the hard palate. In Sanskrit we find that the cacuminal articulation occurs only under very definite conditions, chiefly under the influence of _r_. Now, a trilled tongue-point _r_ in most languages, for purely physiological reasons which are easily accounted for, tends to be pronounced further back than ordinary dentals; and it is therefore quite natural that it should spontaneously exercise an influence on neighbouring dentals by drawing them back to its own point of articulation. This may have happened in India quite independently of the occurrence of the same sounds in other vernaculars, just as we find the same influence very pronouncedly in Swedish and in East Norwegian, where _d_, _t_, _n_, _s_ are cacuminal (supradental) in such words as _bord_, _kort_, _barn_, _först_, etc. According to Grandgent (_Neuere Sprachen_, 2. 447), _d_ in his own American English is pronounced further back than elsewhere before and after _r_, as in _dry_, _hard_; but in none of these cases need we conjure up an extinct native population to account for a perfectly natural development.

XI.--§ 5. Gothonic Sound-shift.

Since the time of Grimm the Gothonic consonant changes have harassed the minds of linguists; they became _the_ sound-shift and were considered as something _sui generis_, something out of the common, which required a different explanation from all other sound-shifts. Several explanations have been offered, to some of which we shall have to revert later; none, however, has been so popular as that which attributes the shift to an ethnic substratum. This explanation is accepted by Hirt, Feist, Meillet and others, though their agreement ceases when the question is asked: What nationality and what language can have been the cause of the change? While some cautiously content themselves with saying that there must have been an original population, others guess at Kelts, Finns, Rhætians or Etrurians--all fascinating names to minds of a speculative turn.

The latest treatment of the question that I have seen is by K. Wessely (in _Anthropos_, XII-XIII 540 ff., 1917). He assumes the following different substrata, beginning with the most recent: a Rhæto-Romanic for the Upper-German shift, a Keltic for the common High-German shift, and a Finnic for the first Germanic shift with the Vernerian law. This certainly has the merit of neatly separating sound-shifts that are chronologically apart, except with regard to the last-mentioned shift, for here the Finns are made responsible for two changes that were probably separated by centuries and had really no traits in common. It is curious to see the transition from _p_ to _f_ and from _t_ to _þ_--both important elements of the first shift--here ascribed to Finnic, for as a matter of fact the two sounds _f_ and _þ_ are not found in present-day Finnish, and were not found in primitive Ugro-Finnic.[44]

When Wessely thinks that the change discovered by Verner is also due to Finnic influence, his reasons are two: an alleged parallelism with the Finnic consonant change which he terms ‘Setälä’s law,’ and then the assumption that such a shift, conditioned by the place of the accent, is foreign to the Aryan race (p. 543). When, however, we find a closely analogous case only four hundred years ago in English, where a number of consonants were voiced according to the place of the stress,[45] are we also to say that it is foreign to the Anglo-Saxon race and therefore presupposes some non-Aryan substratum? As a matter of fact, the parallelism between the English and the old Gothonic shift is much closer than that between the latter and the Finnic consonant-gradation: in English and in old Gothonic the stress place is decisive, while in the Finnic shift it is very doubtful whether stress goes for anything; in both English and old Gothonic the same consonants are affected (spirants, in English also the combinations [tʃ, ks], but otherwise no stops), while in Finnic it is the stops that are primarily affected. In old Gothonic, as in English, the change is simply voicing, and we have nothing corresponding to the reduction of double consonants and of consonant groups in Finnic _pappi_ / _papin_, _otta_ / _otat_, _kukka_ / _kukan_, _parempi_ / _paremman_, _jalka_ / _jalan_, etc. On the whole, Wessely’s paper shows how much easier it is to advance hypotheses than to find truths.

XI.--§ 6. Natural and Specific Changes.

Meillet (MSL 19. 164 and 172; cf. _Bulletin_ 19. 50 and _Germ._ 18) thinks that we must distinguish between such phonetic changes as are natural, i.e. due to universal tendencies, and such as are peculiar to certain languages. In the former class he includes the opening and the voicing of intervocalic consonants; there is also a natural and universal tendency to shorten long words and to slur the pronunciation towards the end of a word. In the latter class (changes which are peculiar to and characteristic of a particular language) he reckons the consonant shifts in Gothonic and Armenian, the weakening of consonants in Greek and in Iranian, the tendency to unround back vowels in English and Slav. Such changes can only be accounted for on the supposition of a change of language: they must be due to people whose own language had habits foreign to Aryan. Unfortunately, Meillet cannot tell us how to measure the difference between natural and peculiar shifts; he admits that they cannot always be clearly separated; and when he says that there are some extreme cases ‘relativement nets,’ such as those named above, I must confess that I do not see why the change from the sharp tenuis, as in Fr. _p_, _t_, _k_, to a slightly aspirated sound, as in English (_Bulletin_ 19. 50),[46] or the relaxing of the closure which finally led to the sounds of [f, þ, x], should be less ‘natural’ than a hundred other changes and should require the calling in of a _deus ex machina_ in the shape of an aboriginal population. The unrounding of E. _u_ in _hut_, etc., to which he alludes, began about 1600--what ethnic substratum does that postulate, and is any such required, more than for, say, the diphthongizing of long _a_ and _o_?

Meillet (MSL 19. 172) also says that there are certain speech sounds which are, as it were, natural and are found in nearly all languages, thus _p_, _t_, _k_, _n_, _m_, and among the vowels _a_, _i_, _u_, while other sounds are found only in some languages, such as the two English _th_ sounds or, among the vowels, Fr. _u_ and Russian _y_. But when he infers that sounds of the former class are stable and remain unchanged for many centuries, whereas those of the latter are apt to change and disappear, the conclusion is not borne out by actual facts. The consonants _p_, _t_, _k_, _n_, _m_ are said to have remained unchanged in many Aryan languages from the oldest times till the present day--that is, only initially before vowels, which is a very important reservation and really amounts to an admission that in the vast majority of cases these sounds are just as unstable as most other things on this planet, especially if we remember that nothing could well be more unstable than _k_ before front vowels, as seen in It. [tʃ] and Sp. [þ] in _cielo_, Fr. [s] in _ciel_, and [ʃ] in _chien_, Eng. and Swedish [tʃ] in _chin_, _kind_, Norwegian [c] in _kind_, Russian [tʃ] in _četyre_ ‘four’ and [s] in _sto_ ‘hundred,’ etc. As an example of a typically unstable sound Meillet gives bilabial _f_, and it is true that this sound is so rare that it is difficult to find it represented in any language; the reason is simply that the upper teeth normally protrude above the lower jaw, and that consequently the lower lip articulates easily against the upper teeth, with the natural result that where we should theoretically expect the bilabial _f_ the labiodental _f_ takes its place. And _s_, which is found almost universally, and should therefore on Meillet’s theory be very stable, is often seen to change into _h_ or [x] or to disappear. On the whole, then, we see that it is not the ‘naturalness’ or universality of a consonant so much as its position in the syllable and word that decides the question ‘change or no change.’ The relation between stability and naturalness is seen, perhaps, most clearly in such an instance as long [a·]: this sound is so natural that English, from the oldest Aryan to present-day speech, has never been without it; yet at no time has it been stable, but as soon as one class of words with long [a·] is changed, a new class steps into its shoes: (1) Aryan _māter_, now _mother_; (2) lengthening of a short _a_ before _n_: _gās_, _brāhta_, now _goose_, _brought_; (3) levelling of _ai_: _stān_, now _stone_; (4) lengthening of short _a_: _cāld_, now _cold_; (5) later lengthening of _a_ in open syllable: _nāme_, now [neim]; (6) mod. _carve_, _calm_, _path_ and others from various sources; and (7) vulgar speech is now developing new levellings of diphthongs in [ma·l, pa·(ə)] for _mile_, _power_.

XI.--§ 7. Power of Substratum.

V. Bröndal has made the attempt to infuse new blood into the substratum theory through his book, _Substrater og Laan i Romansk og Germansk_ (Copenhagen, 1917). The effect of a substratum, according to him, is the establishment of a ‘constant idiom,’ working “without regard to place and time” (p. 76) and changing, for instance, Latin into Old French, Old French into Classical French, and Classical French into Modern French. His task, then, is to find out certain tendencies operating at these various periods; these are ascribed to the Keltic substratum, and Bröndal then passes in review a great many languages spoken in districts where Kelts are known to have lived in former times, in order to find the same tendencies there. If he succeeds in this to his own satisfaction, it is only because the ‘tendencies’ established are partly so vague that they will fit into any language, partly so ill-defined phonetically that it becomes possible to press different, nay, in some cases even directly contrary movements into the same class. But considerations of space forbid me to enter on a detailed criticism here. I must content myself with taking exception to the principle that the effect of the ethnic substratum may show itself several generations after the speech substitution took place. If Keltic ever had ‘a finger in the pie,’ it must have been immediately on the taking over of the new language. An influence exerted in such a time of transition may have far-reaching after-effects, like anything else in history, but this is not the same thing as asserting that a similar modification of the language may take place after the lapse of some centuries as an effect of the same cause. Suppose we have a series of manuscripts, A, B, C, D, etc., of which B is copied from A, C from B, etc., and that B has an error which is repeated in all the following copies; now, if M suddenly agrees with A (which the copyist has never seen), we infer that this reading is independent of A. In the same way with a language: each individual learns it from his contemporaries, but has no opportunity of hearing those who have died before his own time. It is possible that the transition from _a_ to _æ_, in Old English (as in _fæder_) is due to Keltic influence, but when we find, many centuries later, that _a_ is changed into [æ] (the present sound) in words which had not _æ_ in OE., e.g. _crab_, _hallow_, _act_, it is impossible to ascribe this, as Bröndal does, to a ‘constant Keltic idiom’ working through many generations who had never spoken or heard any Keltic. ‘Atavism,’ which skips over one or more generations, is unthinkable here, for words and sounds are nothing but habits acquired by imitation.

So far, then, our discussion of the substratum theory has brought us no very positive results. One of the reasons why the theories put forward of late years have been on the whole so unsatisfactory is that they deal with speech substitutions that have taken place so far back that absolutely nothing, or practically nothing, is known of those displaced languages which are supposed to have coloured languages now existing. What do we know beyond the mere name of Ligurians or Veneti or Iberians? Of the Pre-Germanic and Pre-Keltic peoples we know not even the names. As to the old Kelts who play such an eminent rôle in all these speculations, we know extremely little about their language at this distant date, and it is possible that in some cases, at any rate, the Kelts may have been only comparatively small armies conquering this or that country for a time, but leaving as few linguistic traces behind them as, say, the armies of Napoleon in Russia or the Cimbri and Teutoni in Italy. Linguists have turned from the ‘glottogonic’ speculations of Bopp and his disciples, only to indulge in dialectogonic speculations of exactly the same visionary type.

XI.--§ 8. Types of Race-mixture.

It would be a great mistake to suppose that the conditions, and consequently the linguistic results, are always the same, whenever two different races meet and assimilate. The chief classes of race-mixture have been thus described in a valuable paper by George Hempl (_Transactions of the American Philological Association_, XXIX, p. 31 ff., 1898).

(1) The conquerors are a comparatively small body, who become the ruling class, but are not numerous enough to impose their language on the country. They are forced to learn the language of their subjects, and their grandchildren may come to know that language better than they know the language of their ancestors. The language of the conquerors dies out, but bequeaths to the native language its terms pertaining to government, the army, and those other spheres of life that the conquerors had specially under their control. Historic examples are the cases of the Goths in Italy and Spain, the Franks in Gaul, the Normans in France and the Norman-French in England. Of course, the greater the number of the conquerors and the longer they had been close neighbours of the people they conquered, or maintained the bonds that united them to their mother-country, the greater was their influence. Thus the influence of the Franks on the language of France was greater than that of the Goths on the language of Spain, and the influence of the Norman-French in England was greater still. Yet in each case the minority ultimately succumbed.

(2_a_) The conquest is made by many bodies of invaders, who bring with them their whole households and are followed for a long period of time by similar hordes of their kinsmen. The conquerors constitute the upper and middle classes and a part of the lower classes of the new community. The natives recede before the conquerors or become their slaves: their speech is regarded as servile and is soon laid aside, except for a few terms pertaining to the humbler callings, the names of things peculiar to the country and place-names. Examples: Angles and Saxons in Britain and Europeans in America and Australia, though in the last case we can hardly speak of race-mixture between the natives and the immigrants.

(2_b_) A more powerful nation conquers the people and annexes its territory, which is made a province, to which not only governors and soldiers, but also merchants and even colonists are sent. These become the upper class and the influential part of the middle class. If centuries pass and the province is still subjected to the direct influence of the ruling country, it will more and more imitate the speech and the habits and customs of that country. Such was the history of Italy, Spain and Gaul under the Romans; similar, also, is the story of the Slavs of Eastern Germany and of the Dutch in New York State; such is the process going on to-day among the French in Louisiana and among the Germans in their original settlements in Pennsylvania.

(3) Immigrants come in scattered bands and at different times; they become servants or follow other humble callings. It is usually not to their advantage to associate with their fellow-countrymen, but rather to mingle with the native population. The better they learn to speak the native tongue, the faster they get on in the world. If their children in their dress or speech betray their foreign origin, they are ridiculed as ‘Dutch’ or Irish, or whatever it may be. They therefore take pains to rid themselves of all traces of their alien origin and avoid using the speech of their parents. In this way vast numbers of newcomers may be assimilated year by year till they constitute a large part of the new race, while their language makes practically no impression on the language of the country. This is the story of what is going on in all parts of the United States to-day.

It will be seen that in classes 1 and 3 the speech of the natives prevails, while in the two classes comprised under 2 it is that of the conqueror which eventually triumphs. Further, that, in all cases except type 2_b_, that language prevails which is spoken by what is at the time the majority.

Sound substitution is found in class 3 in the case of foreigners who come to America after they have learnt to speak, and of the children of foreigners who keep up their original language at home. If, however, while they are still young, they are chiefly thrown with English-speaking people, they usually gain a thorough mastery of the English language; thus most of the children, and practically all of the grandchildren, of immigrants, by the time they are grown-up, speak English without foreign taint. Their origin has thus no permanent influence on their adopted language. The same thing is true when a small ruling minority drops its foreign speech and learns that of the majority (class 1), and practically also (class 2_a_) when a native minority succumbs to a foreign majority, though here the ultimate language may be slightly influenced by the native dialect.

It is different with class 2_b_: when a whole population comes in the course of centuries to surrender its natural speech for that of a ruling minority, sound substitution plays an important part, and to a great extent determines the character and future of the language. Hempl here agrees with Hirt in seeing in this fact the explanation of much (N.B. not all!) of the difference between the Romanic languages and of the difference between natural High German and High German spoken in Low German territory, and he is therefore not surprised when he is told by Nissen that the dialects of modern Italy correspond geographically pretty closely to the non-Latin languages once spoken in the Peninsula. But he severely criticizes Hirt for going so far as to explain the differentiation of Aryan speech by the theory of sound substitution. Hirt assumes conditions like those in class 1, and yet thinks that the results would be like those of class 2_a_. “It is essential to Hirt’s theory that the conquering bodies of Indo-Europeans should be small compared with the number of the people they conquered.... If we wish to prove that the differentiation of Indo-European speech was like the differentiation of Romance speech, we must be able to show that the conditions under which the differentiations took place were alike or equivalent. But even a cursory examination of the manner in which the Romance countries were Romanized ... will make it clear that no parallel could possibly be drawn between the conditions under which the Romance languages arose and those that we can suppose to have existed while the Indo-European languages took shape.” Hempl also criticizes the way in which the Germanic consonant-shift is supposed by Hirt to be due to sound-substitution: when instead of the original

t th d dh

Germanic has

þ þ t ð,

these latter sounds, on Hirt’s theory, must be either the native sounds that the conquered people substituted for the original sounds, or else they have developed out of such sounds as the natives substituted. If the first be true, we ask ourselves why the conquered people did not use their _t_ for the Indo-European _t_, instead of substituting it for _d_, and then substituting _þ_ for the Indo-European _t_. If the second supposition be true, the native population introduced into the language sounds very similar to the original _t_, _th_, _d_, _dh_, and all the change from that slightly variant form to the one that we find in Germanic was of subsequent development--and must be explained by the usual methods after all.

I have dwelt so long on Hempl’s paper because, in spite of its (to my mind) fundamental importance, it has been generally overlooked by supporters of the substratum theory. To construct a true theory, it will be necessary to examine the largest possible number of facts with regard to race-mixture capable of being tested by scientific methods. In this connexion the observations of Lenz in South America and of Pușcariu in Rumania are especially valuable. The former found that the Spanish spoken in Chile was greatly influenced in its sounds by the speech of the native Araucanians (see _Zeitschr. f. roman. Philologie_, 17. 188 ff., 1893). Now, what were the facts in regard to the population speaking this language? The immigrants were chiefly men, who in many cases necessarily married native women and left the care of their children to a great extent in the hands of Indian servants. As the natives were more warlike than in many other parts of South America, there was for a very long time a continuous influx of Spanish soldiers, many of whom, after a short time, settled down peacefully in the country. More Spanish soldiers, indeed, arrived in Chile in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than in the whole of the rest of South America. Accordingly, by the beginning of the eighteenth century the Indians had been either driven back or else assimilated, and at the beginning of the War of Liberation early in the nineteenth century Chile was the only State in which there was a uniform Spanish-speaking population. In the greater part of Chile the population is denser than anywhere else in South America, and this population speaks nothing but Spanish, while in Peru and Bolivia nearly the whole rural population still speaks more or less exclusively Keshua or Aimará, and these languages are also used occasionally, or at any rate understood, by the whites. Chile is thus the only country in which a real Spanish people’s dialect could develop. (In Hempl’s classification this would be a typical case of class 2_a_.) In the other Spanish-American countries the Spanish-speakers are confined to the upper ruling class, there being practically no lower class with Spanish as its mother-tongue, except in a couple of big cities. Thus we understand that the Peruvian who has learnt his Spanish at school has a purer Castilian pronunciation than the Chilean; yet, apart from pronunciation, the educated Chilean’s Spanish is much more correct and fluent than that of the other South Americans, whose language is stiff and vocabulary scanty, because they have first learnt some Indian language in childhood. Lenz’s Chileans, who have often been invoked by the adherents of the unlimited substratum theory, thus really serve to show that sound substitution takes place only under certain well-defined conditions.

Pușcariu (in _Prinzipienfragen der romanischen Sprachwissenschaft_, _Beihefte zur Zschr. f. rom. Phil._, 1910) says that in a Saxon village which had been almost completely Rumanianized he had once talked for hours with a peasant without noticing that he was not a native Rumanian: he was, however, a Saxon, who spoke Saxon with his wife, but Rumanian with his son, because the latter language was easier to him, as he had acquired the Rumanian basis of articulation. Here, then, there was no sound substitution, and in general we may say that the less related two languages are, the fewer will be the traces of the original language left on the new language (p. 49). The reason must be that people who naturally speak a closely related language are easily understood even when their acquired speech has a tinge of dialect: there is thus no inducement for them to give up their pronunciation. Pușcariu also found that it was much more difficult for him to rid himself of his dialectal traits in Rumanian than to acquire a correct pronunciation of German or French. He therefore disbelieves in a direct influence exerted by the indigenous languages on the formation of the Romanic languages (and thus goes much further than Hempl). All these languages, and particularly Rumanian, during the first centuries of the Middle Ages underwent radical transformations not paralleled in the thousand years ensuing. This may have been partly due to an influence exerted by ethnic mixture on the whole character of the young nations and through that also on their language. But other factors have certainly also played an important rôle, especially the grouping round new centres with other political aims than those of ancient Rome, and consequent isolation from the rest of the Romanic peoples. Add to this the very important emancipation of the ordinary conversational language from the yoke of Latin. In the first Christian centuries the influence of Latin was so overpowering in official life and in the schools that it obstructed a natural development. But soon after the third century the educational level rapidly sank, and political events broke the power not only of Rome, but also of its language. The speech of the masses, which had been held in fetters for so long, now asserted itself in full freedom and with elemental violence, the result being those far-reaching changes by which the Romanic languages are marked off from Latin. Language and nation or race must not be confounded: witness Rumania, whose language shows very few dialectal variations, though the populations of its different provinces are ethnically quite distinct (ib. p. 51).

XI.--§ 9. Summary.

The general impression gathered from the preceding investigation must be that it is impossible to ascribe to an ethnic substratum all the changes and dialectal differentiations which some linguists explain as due to this sole cause. Many other influences must have been at work, among which an interruption of intercourse created by natural obstacles or social conditions of various kinds would be of prime importance. If we take ethnic substrata as the main or sole source of dialectal differentiation, it will be hard to account for the differences between Icelandic and Norwegian, for Iceland was very sparsely inhabited when the ‘land-taking’ took place, and still harder to account for the very great divergences that we witness between the dialects spoken in the Faroe Islands. A mere turning over the leaves of Bennike and Kristensen’s maps of Danish dialects (or the corresponding maps of France) will show the impossibility of explaining the crisscross of boundaries of various phonetic phenomena as entirely due to ethnical differences in the aborigines. On the other hand, the speech of Russian peasants is said to be remarkably free from dialectal divergences, in spite of the fact that it has spread in comparatively recent times over districts inhabited by populations with languages of totally different types (Finnic, Turkish, Tataric). I thus incline to think that sound substitution cannot have produced radical changes, but has only played a minor part in the development of languages. There are, perhaps, also interesting things to be learnt from conditions in Finland. Here Swedish has for many centuries been the language of the ruling minority, and it was only in the course of the nineteenth century that Finnish attained to the dignity of a literary language. The sound systems of Swedish and Finnish are extremely unlike: Finnish lacks many of the Swedish sounds, such as _b_, _d_ (what is written _d_ is either mute or else a kind of weak _r_), _g_ and _f_. No word can begin with more than one consonant, consequently Swedish _strand_ and _skräddare_, ‘tailor,’ are represented in the form of the loan-words _ranta_ and _räätäli_. Now, in spite of the fact that most Swedish-speaking people have probably spoken Finnish as children and have had Finnish servants and playfellows to teach them the language, none of these peculiarities have influenced their Swedish: what makes them recognizable as hailing from Finland (‘finska brytningen’) is not simplification of consonant groups or substitution of _p_ for _b_, etc., but such small things as the omission of the ‘compound tone,’ the tendency to lengthen the second consonant in groups like _ns_, and European (‘back’) _u_ instead of the Swedish mixed vowel.

But if sound substitution as a result of race-mixture and of conquest cannot have played any very considerable part in the differentiation of languages as wholes, there is another domain in which sound substitution is very important, that is, in the shape which loan-words take in the languages into which they are introduced. However good the pronunciation of the first introducer of a word may have been, it is clear that when a word is extensively used by people with no intimate and first-hand knowledge of the language from which it was taken, most of them will tend to pronounce it with the only sounds with which they are familiar, those of their own language. Thus we see that the English and Russians, who have no [y] in their own speech, substitute for it the combination [ju, iu] in recent loans from French. Scandinavians have no voiced [z] and [ʒ] and therefore, in such loans from French or English as _kusine_, _budget_, _jockey_, etc., substitute the voiceless [s] and [ʃj], or [sj]. The English will make a diphthong of the final vowels of such words as _bouquet_, _beau_ [bu·kei, bou], and will slur the _r_ of such French words as _boulevard_, etc. The same transference of speech habits from one’s native language also affects such important things as quantity, stress and tone: the English have no final short stressed vowels, such as are found in _bouquet_, _beau_; hence their tendency to lengthen as well as diphthongize these sounds, while the French will stress the final syllable of recent loans, such as _jury_, _reporter_. These phenomena are so universal and so well known that they need no further illustration.

The more familiar such loan-words are, the more unnatural it would be to pronounce them with foreign sounds or according to foreign rules of quantity and stress; for this means in each case a shunting of the whole speech-apparatus on to a different track for one or two words and then shifting back to the original ‘basis of articulation’--an effort that many speakers are quite incapable of and one that in any case interferes with the natural and easy flow of speech.

XI.--§ 10. General Theory of Loan-words.

In the last paragraphs we have already broached a very important subject, that of loan-words.[47] No language is entirely free from borrowed words, because no nation has ever been completely isolated. Contact with other nations inevitably leads to borrowings, though their number may vary very considerably. Here we meet with a fundamental principle, first formulated by E. Windisch (in his paper “Zur Theorie der Mischsprachen und Lehnwörter,” _Verh. d. sächsischen Gesellsch. d. Wissensch._, XLIX, 1897, p. 107 ff.): “It is not the foreign language a nation learns that turns into a mixed language, but its own native language becomes mixed under the influence of a foreign language.” When we try to learn and talk a foreign tongue we do not introduce into it words taken from our own language; our endeavour will always be to speak the other language as purely as possible, and generally we are painfully conscious of every native word that we intrude into phrases framed in the other tongue. But what we thus avoid in speaking a foreign language we very often do in our own. Frederick the Great prided himself on his good French, and in his French writings we do not find a single German word, but whenever he wrote German his sentences were full of French words and phrases. This being the general practice, we now understand why so few Keltic words were taken over into French and English. There was nothing to induce the ruling classes to learn the language of the inferior natives: it could never be fashionable for them to show an acquaintance with a despised tongue by using now and then a Keltic word. On the other hand, the Kelt would have to learn the language of his masters, and learn it well; and he would even among his comrades like to show off his knowledge by interlarding his speech with words and turns from the language of his betters. Loan-words always show a superiority of the nation from whose language they are borrowed, though this superiority may be of many different kinds.

In the first place, it need not be extensive: indeed, in some of the most typical cases it is of a very partial character and touches only on one very special point. I refer to those instances in which a district or a people is in possession of some special thing or product wanted by some other nation and not produced in that country. Here quite naturally the name used by the natives is taken over along with the thing. Obvious examples are the names of various drinks: _wine_ is a loan from Latin, _tea_ from Chinese, _coffee_ from Arabic, _chocolate_ from Mexican, and _punch_ from Hindustani. A certain type of carriage was introduced about 1500 from Hungary and is known in most European languages by its Magyar name: E. _coach_, G. _kutsche_, etc. _Moccasin_ is from Algonquin, _bamboo_ from Malay, _tulip_ and _turban_ (ultimately the same word) from Persian. A slightly different case is when some previously unknown plant or animal is made known through some foreign nation, as when we have taken the name of _jasmine_ from Persian, _chimpanzee_ from some African, and _tapir_ from some Brazilian language. It is characteristic of all words of this kind that only a few of them are taken from each foreign language, and that they have nearly all of them gone the round of all civilized languages, so that they are now known practically all over the world.

Other loan-words form larger groups and bear witness to the cultural superiority of some nation in some one specified sphere of activity or branch of knowledge: such are the Arabic words relating to mathematics and astronomy (_algebra_, _zero_, _cipher_, _azimuth_, _zenith_, in related fields _tariff_, _alkali_, _alcohol_), the Italian words relating to music (_piano_, _allegro_, _andante_, _solo_, _soprano_, etc.) and commerce (_bank_, _bankrupt_, _balance_, _traffic_, _ducat_, _florin_)--one need not accumulate examples, as everybody interested in the subject of this book will be able to supply a great many from his own reading. The most comprehensive groups of this kind are those French, Latin and Greek words that have flooded the whole world of Western civilization from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and have given a family-character to all those parts of the vocabularies of otherwise different languages which are concerned with the highest intellectual and technical activities. See the detailed discussion of these strata of loan-words in English in GS ch. v and vi.

When one nation has imbibed for centuries the cultural influence of another, its language may have become so infiltrated with words from the other language that these are found in most sentences, at any rate in nearly every sentence dealing with things above the simplest material necessities. The best-known examples are English since the influx of French and classical words, and Turkish with its wholesale importations from Arabic. Another example is Basque, in which nearly all expressions for religious and spiritual ideas are Romanic. Basque is naturally very poor in words for general ideas; it has names for special kinds of trees, but ‘tree’ is _arbolia_, from Spanish _árbol_, ‘animal’ is _animale_, ‘colour’ _colore_, ‘plant’ _planta_ or _landare_, ‘flower’ _lore_ or _lili_, ‘thing’ _gauza_, ‘time’ _dembora_. Thus also many of its names for utensils and garments, weights and measures, arms, etc., are borrowed; ‘king’ is _errege_, ‘law’ _lege_, _lage_, ‘master’ _maisu_, etc. (See _Zs. f. roman. Phil._, 17. 140 ff.)

In a great many cases linguistic borrowing must be considered a necessity, but this is not always so. When a nation has once got into the habit of borrowing words, people will very often use foreign words where it would have been perfectly possible to express their ideas by means of native speech-material, the reason for going out of one’s own language being in some cases the desire to be thought fashionable or refined through interlarding one’s speech with foreign words, in others simply laziness, as is very often the case when people are rendering thoughts they have heard or read in a foreign tongue. Translators are responsible for the great majority of these intrusive words, which might have been avoided by a resort to native composition or derivation, or very often by turning the sentence a little differently from the foreign text. The most thoroughgoing speech mixtures are due much less to real race-mixture than to continued cultural contact, especially of a literary character, as is seen very clearly in English, where the Romanic element is only to a very small extent referable to the Norman conquerors, and far more to the peaceful relations of the following centuries. That Greek and Latin words have come in through the medium of literature hardly needs saying. Many of these words are superfluous: “The native words _cold_, _cool_, _chilly_, _icy_, _frosty_, might have seemed sufficient for all purposes, without any necessity for importing _frigid_, _gelid_ and _algid_, which, as a matter of fact, are found neither in Shakespeare nor in the Authorized Version of the Bible nor in the poetical works of Milton, Pope, Cowper and Shelley” (GS § 136). But on the other hand it cannot be denied that the imported words have in many instances enriched the language through enabling its users to obtain greater variety and to find expressions for many subtle shades of thought. The question of the value of loan-words cannot be dismissed offhand, as the ‘purists’ in many countries are inclined to imagine, with the dictum that foreign words should be shunned like the plague, but requires for its solution a careful consideration of the merits and demerits of each separate foreign term viewed in connexion with the native resources for expressing that particular idea.

XI.--§ 11. Classes of Loan-words.

It is quite natural that there should be a much greater inclination everywhere to borrow ‘full’ words (substantives, adjectives, notional verbs) than ‘empty’ words (pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs), to which class most of the ‘grammatical’ words belong. But there is no hard-and-fast limit between the two classes. It is rare for a language to take such words as numerals from another language; yet examples are found here and there--thus, in connexion with special games, etc. Until comparatively recently, dicers and backgammon-players counted in England by means of the French words _ace_, _deuce_, _tray_, _cater_, _cinque_, _size_, and with the English game of lawn tennis the English way of counting (fifteen love, etc.) has been lately adopted in Russia and to some extent also in Denmark. In some parts of England Welsh numerals were until comparatively recent times used in the counting of sheep. Cattle-drivers in Jutland used to count from 20 to 90 in Low German learnt in Hamburg and Holstein, where they sold their cattle. In this case the clumsiness and want of perspicuity of the Danish expressions (_halvtredsindstyve_ for Low German _föfdix_, etc.) may have been one of the reasons for preferring the German words; in the same way the clumsiness of the Eskimo way of counting (“third toe on the second foot of the fourth man,” etc.) has favoured the introduction into Greenlandic of the Danish words for 100 and 1,000: with an Eskimo ending, _untritigdlit_ and _tusintigdlit_. Most Japanese numerals are Chinese. And of course _million_ and _milliard_ are used in most civilized countries.

Prepositions, too, are rarely borrowed by one language from another. Yet the Latin (Ital.) _per_ is used in English, German and Danish, and the French _à_ in the two latter languages, and both are extending their domain beyond the commercial language in which they were first used. The Greek _kata_, at first also commercial, has in Spanish found admission into the ordinary language and has become the pronoun _cada_ ‘each.’

Personal and demonstrative pronouns, articles and the like are scarcely ever taken over from one language to another. They are so definitely woven into the innermost texture of a language that no one would think of giving them up, however much he might like to adorn his speech with words from a foreign source. If, therefore, in one instance we find a case of a language borrowing words of this kind, we are justified in thinking that exceptional causes must have been at work, and such really proves to be the case in English, which has adopted the Scandinavian forms _they_, _them_, _their_. It is usual to speak of English as being a mixture of native Old English (‘Anglo-Saxon’) and French, but as a matter of fact the French influence, powerful as it is in the vocabulary and patent as it is to the eyes of everybody, is superficial in comparison with the influence exercised in a much subtler way by the Scandinavian settlers in the North of England. The French influence is different in extent, but not in kind, from the French influence on German or the old Gothonic influence on Finnic; it is perhaps best compared with the German influence on Danish in the Middle Ages. But the Scandinavian influence on English is of a different kind. The number of Danish and Norwegian settlers in England must have been very large, as is shown by the number of Scandinavian place-names; yet that does not account for everything. A most important factor was the great similarity of the two languages, in spite of numerous points of difference. Accordingly, when their fighting was over, the invaders and the original population would to some extent be able to make themselves understood by one another, like people talking two dialects of the same language, or like students from Copenhagen and from Lund nowadays. Many of the most common words were absolutely identical, and others differed only slightly. Hence it comes that in the Middle English texts we find a great many double forms of the same word, one English and the other Scandinavian, used side by side, some of these doublets even surviving till the present day, though now differentiated in sense (e.g. _whole_, _hale_; _no_, _nay_; _from_, _fro_; _shirt_, _skirt_), while in other cases one only of the two forms, either the native or the Scandinavian, has survived; thus the Scandinavian _sister_ and _egg_ have ousted the English _sweostor_ and _ey_. We find, therefore, a great many words adopted of a kind not usually borrowed; thus, everyday verbs and adjectives like _take_, _call_, _hit_, _die_, _ill_, _ugly_, _wrong_, and among substantives such non-technical ones as _fellow_, _sky_, _skin_, _wing_, etc. (For details see my GS ch. iv.) All this indicates an intimate fusion of the two races and of the two languages, such as is not provided for in any of the classes described by Hempl (above, § 8). In most speech-mixtures the various elements remain distinct and can be separated, just as after shuffling a pack of cards you can pick out the hearts, spades, etc.; but in the case of English and Scandinavian we have a subtler and more intimate fusion, very much as when you put a lump of sugar into a cup of tea and a few minutes afterwards are quite unable to say which is tea and which is sugar.

XI.--§ 12. Influence on Grammar.

The question has often been raised whether speech-mixture affects the grammar of a language which has borrowed largely from some other language. The older view is expressed pointedly by Whitney (L 199): “Such a thing as a language with a mixed grammatical apparatus has never come under the cognizance of linguistic students: it would be to them a monstrosity; it seems an impossibility.” This is an exaggeration, and cannot be justified, for the simple reason that the vocabulary of a language and its ‘grammatical apparatus’ cannot be nicely separated in the way presupposed: indeed, much of the borrowed material mentioned in our last paragraphs does belong to the grammatical apparatus. But there is, of course, some truth in Whitney’s dictum. When a word is borrowed it is not as a rule taken over with all the elaborate flexion which may belong to it in its original home; as a rule, one form only is adopted, it may be the nominative or some other case of a noun, the infinitive or the present or the naked stem of a verb. This form is then either used unchanged or with the endings of the adopting language, generally those of the most ‘regular’ declension or conjugation. It is an exceptional case when more than one flexional form is taken over, and this case does not occur in really popular loans. In learned usage we find in older Danish such case-flexion as gen. _Christi_, dat. _Christo_, by the side of nom. _Christus_, also, e.g., _i theatro_, and still sometimes in German we have the same usage: e.g. _mit den pronominibus_. In a somewhat greater number of instances the plural form is adopted as well as the singular form, as in English _fungi_, _formulæ_, _phenomena_, _seraphim_, etc., but the natural tendency is always towards using the native endings, _funguses_, _formulas_, etc., and this has prevailed in all popular words, e.g. _ideas_, _circuses_, _museums_. As the formation of cases, tenses, etc., in different languages is often very irregular, and the distinctive marks are often so intimately connected with the kernel of the word and so unsubstantial as not to be easily distinguished, it is quite natural that no one should think of borrowing such endings, etc., and applying them to native words. Schuchardt once thought that the English genitive ending _s_ had been adopted into Indo-Portuguese (in the East Indies), where _gobernadors casa_ stands for ‘governor’s house,’ but he now explains the form more correctly as originating in the possessive pronoun _su_: _gobernador su casa_ (dem g. sein haus, _Sitzungsber. der preuss. Akademie_, 1917, 524).

It was at one time commonly held that the English plural ending _s_, which in Old English was restricted in its application, owes its extension to the influence of French. This theory, I believe, was finally disposed of by the six decisive arguments I brought forward against it in 1891 (reprinted in ChE § 39). But after what has been said above on the Scandinavian influence, I incline to think that E. Classen is right in thinking that the Danes count for something in bringing about the final victory of _-s_ over its competitor _-n_, for the Danes had no plural in _-n_, and _-s_ reminded them of their own _-r_ (_Mod. Language Rev._ 14. 94; cf. also _-s_ in the third person of verbs, Scand. _-r_). Apart from this particular point, it is quite natural that the Scandinavians should have exercised a general levelling influence on the English language, as many niceties of grammar would easily be sacrificed where mutual intelligibility was so largely brought about by the common vocabulary. Accordingly, we find that in the regions in which the Danish settlements were thickest the wearing away of grammatical forms was a couple of centuries in advance of the same process in the southern parts of the country.

Derivative endings certainly belong to the ‘grammatical apparatus’ of a language; yet many such endings have been taken over into another language as parts of borrowed words and have then been freely combined with native speech-material. The phenomenon is extremely frequent in English, where we have, for instance, the Romanic endings _-ess_ (_shepherdess_, _seeress_), _-ment_ (_endearment_, _bewilderment_), _-age_ (_mileage_, _cleavage_, _shortage_), _-ance_ (_hindrance_, _forbearance_) and many more. In Danish and German the number of similar instances is much more restricted, yet we have, for instance, recent words in _-isme_, _-ismus_ and _-ianer_; cf. also older words like _bageri_, _bäckerei_, etc. It is the same with prefixes: English has formed many words with _de-_, _co-_, _inter-_, _pre-_, _anti-_ and other classical prefixes: _de-anglicize_, _co-godfather_, _inter-marriage_, _at pre-war prices_, _anti-slavery_, etc. (quotations in my GS § 124; cf. MEG ii. 14. 66). _Ex-_ has established itself in many languages: _ex-king_, _ex-roi_, _ex-konge_, _ex-könig_, etc. In Danish the prefix _be-_, borrowed from German, is used very extensively with native words: _bebrejde_, _bebo_, _bebygge_, and this is not the only German prefix that is productive in the Scandinavian languages.

With regard to syntax, very little can be said except in a general way: languages certainly do influence each other syntactically, and those who know a foreign language only imperfectly are apt to transfer to it methods of construction from their own tongue. Many instances of this have been collected by Schuchardt, SlD. But it is doubtful whether these syntactical influences have the same _permanent_ effects on any language as those exerted on one’s own language by the habit of translating foreign works into it: in this purely literary way a great many idioms and turns of phrases have been introduced into English, German and the Scandinavian languages from French and Latin, and into Danish and Swedish from German. The accusative and infinitive construction, which had only a very restricted use in Old English, has very considerably extended its domain through Latin influence, and the so-called ‘absolute construction’ (in my own grammatical terminology called ‘duplex subjunct’) seems to be entirely due to imitation of Latin syntax. In the Balkan tongues there are some interesting instances of syntactical agreement between various languages, which must be due to oral influence through the necessity imposed on border peoples of passing continually from one language to another: the infinitive has disappeared from Greek, Rumanian and Albanian, and the definite article is placed after the substantive in Rumanian, Albanian and Bulgarian.

XI.--§ 13. Translation-loans.

Besides direct borrowings we have also indirect borrowings or ‘translation loan-words,’ words modelled more or less closely on foreign ones, though consisting of native speech-material. I take some examples from the very full and able paper “Notes sur les Calques Linguistiques” contributed by Kr. Sandfeld to the _Festschrift Vilh. Thomsen_, 1912: _ædificatio_: G. erbauung, Dan. opbyggelse; _æquilibrium_: G. gleichgewicht, Dan. ligevægt; _beneficium_: G. wohltat, Dan. velgerning; _conscientia_: Goth. miþwissi, G. gewissen, Dan. samvittighed, Swed. samvete, Russ. soznanie; _omnipotens_: E. almighty, G. allmächtig, Dan. almægtig; _arrière-pensée_: hintergedanke, bagtanke; _bien-être_: wohlsein, velvære; _exposition_: austellung, udstilling; etc. Sandfeld gives many more examples, and as he has in most instances been able to give also corresponding words from various Slavonic languages as well as from Magyar, Finnic, etc., he rightly concludes that his collections serve to throw light on that community in thought and expression which Bally has well termed “la mentalité européenne.” (But it will be seen that English differs from most European languages in having a much greater propensity to swallowing foreign words raw, as it were, than to translating them.)

FOOTNOTES:

[42] Cf. against the assumption of Keltic influence in this instance Meyer-Lübke, _Die Romanischen Sprachen, Kultur der Gegenwart_, p. 457, and Ettmayer in Streitberg’s _Gesch._ 2. 265. H. Mutschmann, _Phonology of the North-Eastern Scotch Dialect_, 1909, p. 53, thinks that the fronting of _u_ in Scotch is similar to that of Latin _ū_ on Gallic territory, and like it is ascribable to the Keltic inhabitants: he forgets, however, that the corresponding fronting is not found in the Keltic spoken in Scotland. Moreover, the complicated Scotch phenomena cannot be compared with the French transition, for the sound of [u] remains in many cases, and [i] generally corresponds to earlier [o], whatever the explanation may be.

[43] Curiously enough, Feist uses this argument himself against Hirt in his earlier paper, PBB 37. 121.

[44] Feist, on the other hand (PBB 36. 329), makes the Kelts responsible for the shift from _p_ to _f_, because initial _p_ disappears in Keltic: but disappearance is not the same thing as being changed into a spirant, and there is no necessity for assuming that the sound before disappearing had been changed into _f_. Besides, it is characteristic of the Gothonic shift that it affects all stops equally, without regard to the place of articulation, while the Keltic change affects only the one sound _p_.

[45] ME. _knowleche_, _stonës_ [stɔ·nes], _off_, _with_ [wiþ] become MnE. _knowledge_, _stones_ [stounz], _of_ [ɔv, əv], _with_ [wið], etc.; cf. also _possess_, _discern_ with [z], _exert_ with [gz], but _exercise_ with [ks]. See my _Studier over eng. kasus_, 1891, 178 ff., now MEG i. 6. 5 ff., and (for the phonetic explanation) LPh p. 121.

[46] Sharp tenues and aspirated tenues may alternate even in the life of one individual, as I have observed in the case of my own son, who at the age of 1.9 used the sharp French sounds, but five months later substituted strongly aspirated _p_, _t_, _k_, with even stronger aspiration than the usual Danish sounds, which it took him ten or eleven months to learn with perfect certainty.

[47] I use the terms _loan-words_ and _borrowed words_ because they are convenient and firmly established, not because they are exact. There are two essential respects in which linguistic borrowing differs from the borrowing of, say, a knife or money: the lender does not deprive himself of the use of the word any more than if it had not been borrowed by the other party, and the borrower is under no obligation to return the word at any future time. Linguistic ‘borrowing’ is really nothing but imitation, and the only way in which it differs from a child’s imitation of its parents’ speech is that here something is imitated which forms a part of a speech that is not imitated as a whole.