But it will be found that the mixture will not easily affect single individuals, so as to transform their diction into a language made up of elements equally, or nearly equally, taken from either of the two conflicting languages. Even assuming that a person is perfectly master of both languages, and that he may pass from one to another with perfect ease, he will yet adhere to one language for the expression of a clause or a sentence. Each tongue may, however, exercise a modifying influence upon the other in the way of affecting its idioms, its accent, its intonations, etc. It may happen that the influence of one tongue may be predominant in particular areas of language, as we see that the English is in Lower Canada in matters of commerce. This leads to such expressions as jobbeur, cheurtine (shirting), sligne (sling), charger le jury, forger, cuisiner les comptes, etc.: see American Journal of Philology, vol. x., 2.[213] Of course, where one of two or more languages has been learnt as the mother tongue, this will always have more influence over foreign languages, however perfectly acquired, than the latter will have over the mother tongue; but we must not under-rate the influence which a foreign language may have upon the mother tongue, especially when it is looked upon as fashionable, or as the key to an important literature. The influence of the foreign tongue may obviously spread to persons who are wholly unacquainted with it, by the contact of these with persons who have adopted or assimilated the foreign elements.
The two principal ways in which a foreign idiom may influence the mother tongue are these. In the first place, foreign words may be adopted into the mother tongue and retained, commonly speaking, in a more or less altered form. The English language has borrowed words of this kind from numerous languages. Thus, from Dutch, we get the word sloop (sloep, itself a loan-word from Fr. shaloupe; whence we, again, have borrowed shallop), yacht: yam, from some African language, through the Portuguese: from Spanish—flotilla, cigar (Sp. cigarro), mosquito: from Italian—domino, casino, opera, stucco: from Persian—chess (Persian sháh, a king, through O.Fr. eschac), orange, shawl, rice, sugar. India gives us sepoy; Germany, meerschaum; Russia, a steppe; China, tea; etc.[214]
In the second place, the method of connecting and arranging the sentences, and the idioms used by the mother tongue may be taken from the foreign language, and this, even though the material of the language be maintained intact.
The chief cause for the adoption of foreign words into the mother tongue is, of course, the need felt for them in the mother tongue. Words are constantly adopted for ideas which have as yet no words to express them. The names of places and persons are the most common among such adopted words, to which may, of course, be added the names of foreign products, such as tea, sago, chocolate. The names of such products may be taken from the language of communities in a very low state of civilisation. On the other hand, when a language finds it necessary to introduce technical, scientific, religious, or political terms, it is fair to suppose that the language which lends the words must be that of a nation in a higher state of culture than the language of the nation which borrows them. There are many words relating to social subjects imported into English from French which may serve to give a good idea of the weak point of the nation which borrows, and of the strong point of the nation which supplies them. Such are numerous works having reference to ease in conversation, such as bon-mot, esprit, ‘wit;’ verve, ‘liveliness; ‘élan,’ spring;’ etc.; and it will be correspondingly found that the language whence such supplies are drawn is very rich in the qualities for which it possesses such abundance of names.
But languages may be tempted to borrow beyond their actual needs when the foreign language and culture is higher prized than the native, and when, accordingly, the usage of such words is considered fashionable or tasteful. Instances in point are the numerous Greek words introduced into classical Latin, such as techinæ (Plautus, Most., II. i. 23), and the numerous French words borrowed by German and English, such as étiquette, chaperon, à outrance.
If a speaker has an imperfect mastery of a foreign tongue, he will be apt to employ, when endeavouring to speak it, numerous loan-words from his mother tongue. He will, in fact, insert into the foreign tongue any number of words which may serve the purpose of expressing the idea which he feels necessary. Such loan-words, of course, take time before they become usual. They cannot become usual unless they are often repeated, and, as a rule, unless they proceed spontaneously from several individuals as the expression of a general need. Even then they may only become current in particular circles: as when, for instance, such technical terms as those applicable to music are borrowed. Such words, when fairly accepted by the language, are treated like other words in the language, and are regarded by the speakers of it as native, and inflected as such. Foreign words, when borrowed, are commonly treated thus. There are no two languages in which the two stocks of sounds are precisely identical. Consequently, the speaker will, as a rule, replace the foreign sounds by those which he conceives most nearly to represent them in his own language; and, in cases where the foreign language possesses sounds not known in his own, he will fail to pronounce these correctly, at least till after much practice. It is well known how very seldom any one masters a foreign tongue so as to speak it without some incorrect accent. Thus it happens that in the cases where a conquering language spreads over a nation speaking a different language, the original language of the conquered people must leave some traces in the production of sounds, and changes will occur in other ways as in accentuation, etc. Numerous instances might be cited of where such invasion of a conquering tongue has occurred on a large scale, as in the case of the Moorish invasion of Spain, the Latin invasion of Gaul, the Norman-French invasion of Saxon England.
In cases where one people merely comes into contact with another in the course of travel or of literary intercourse, the number of those who acquire the language of the foreign people will be necessarily small. The word will, therefore, from the outset, be pronounced imperfectly; the persons who first introduced the word or those who immediately accepted it will insert sounds with which they are familiar among the foreign ones. It thus happens that when a foreign word has once made its way into a language, it commonly exchanges its proper sounds for those native to the language which borrows it. Even those who know the foreign language most perfectly, and are aware of the proper pronunciation of the loan-word, have to conform to the pronunciation of the majority, at the risk of passing for affected or pedantic. For instance, in English, in spite of all the numerous loan-words which occur in the written language, very few new sounds have been introduced, such as the nasal m in employé; and even these sounds are dispensed with among the uneducated, and imperfectly reproduced by many of the better educated. One common result of the adoption of a foreign word into another language is that popular etymology begins to operate, causing the word to appear less strange to those who have borrowed it, as in the familiar instance rose des quatre saisons, ‘rose of the four seasons,’ transformed by English gardeners into quarter sessions rose.[215]
The changes which naturally affect foreign words upon their reception into the language, must of course be kept distinct from those which affect them after they have become an integral part of the language, when they change according to the laws of sound-change of the language into which they are adopted. In fact, it is often possible to tell the epoch at which a word has passed from one language into another, by noting whether it has or has not participated in certain laws of sound-change. Thus, where in Old High German the Latin t is represented sometimes by t, and sometimes by z (as tempal = templum), ‘temple’ as against ziagil (= tegula = ‘till’), the form with z represents an older stage of borrowing than the form in t; and, again, words in which the Old High German represents the Latin p by ph or f, must be held to represent an older stage of borrowing than those in which it is found as p or b: cf. pfeffer, ‘pepper;’ Pfingsten, ‘Pentecoste,’ as against pîna, (Lat. ‘pæna’): priester (Gk. ‘presbuteros’).
Similarly, such a word as chamber, or chant, must plainly have been borrowed before the period of sound-change when the sound of ch regularly took the place of the Latin c; and this we know to have been the history of the c sound in the dialect of the Ile de France, whence those and other similar forms come to us.
But foreign words are exposed, after their adoption, to the same assimilating forces as when they are first adopted: and one of the transforming forces which should be mentioned is the transference of the native system of accentuation to foreign words. In English, a study of Chaucer or Langland will show us how French words originally adopted and pronounced according to the French method of accentuation, by degrees, and not till after a period of vacillation, passed over to the system common in Teutonic languages: thus Chaucer has lánguage and langáge; fórtune and fortúne; báttaile and battáile; láboure and labóur: thus Pope accentuates gallánt. Of course, words may be so far phonetically modified as to become unrecognisable even by persons who know the language whence they are borrowed. Who, for instance, would recognise in the word pastans[216] the French passé-temps, our pastime; or in the common Scotch word ashet, the French assiette. Thus, in the same author, Gavin Douglas, we find veilys (calves), representing the old French word, véel (vitellus). The strangeness may be increased still more by changes which have occurred in the language from which the word is borrowed. Thus our word veal represents an older form of the French language than veau; and the German pronunciation of many French words is that of an older period of French pronunciation; as París, concért, offizíer. German words adopted by Romance languages have been even more violently transformed: who, in the French words tape, taper, would recognise the German zapfen; in the Italian toppo, the German zopf; in the French touaille, the South German zwehle; in the Italian drudo, the German traut? In the same way, the signification of the word in the parent speech may change; as in the case of the French emphase, ‘bombast,’ as against emphasis; biche (‘hind’), etc. Finally, it may disappear in the parent language and survive as a loan-word in the language which has borrowed it; as, for instance, the French word guerre, ‘war,’ in which survives the Old High German werra, ‘quarrel,’ the same word as our war.