[49] Similarly the missionary G. Brown thought that tobi was a native word of the Duke of York Islands for ‘wash,’ till one day he accidentally discovered that it was their pronunciation of English soap.
[50] There are many specimens in Charles G. Leland, Pidgin-English Sing-Song, or Songs and Stories in the China-English Dialect, with a Vocabulary (5th ed., London, 1900), but they make the impression of being artificially made-up to amuse the readers, and contain a much larger proportion of Chinese words than the rest of my sources would warrant. Besides various articles in newspapers I have used W. Simpson, “China’s Future Place in Philology” (Macmillan’s Magazine, November 1873) and Dr. Legge’s article “Pigeon English” in Chambers’s Encyclopædia, 1901 (s.v. China). The chapters devoted to Pidgin in Karl Lentzner’s Dictionary of the Slang-English of Australia and of some Mixed Languages (Halle, 1892) give little else but wholesale reprints of passages from some of the sources mentioned above.
[51] See An International Idiom. A Manual of the Oregon Trade Language, or Chinook Jargon, by Horatio Hale (London, 1890). Besides this I have used a Vocabulary of the Jargon or Trade Language of Oregon [by Lionnet] published by the Smithsonian Institution (1853), and George Gibbs, A Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon (Smithsonian Inst., 1863). Lionnet spells the words according to the French fashion, while Gibbs and Hale spell them in the English way. I have given them with the continental values of the vowels in accordance with the indications in Hale’s glossary.
[52] See Martius, Beitr. zur Ethnogr. und Sprachenkunde Amerikas (Leipzig, 1867), i. 364 ff. and ii. 23 ff.
[53] “Ai is the man’s diphthong, and soundeth full: ei, the woman’s, and soundeth finish [i.e. fineish] in the same both sense, and vse, a woman is deintie, and feinteth soon, the man fainteth not bycause he is nothing daintie.” Thus what is now distinctive of refined as opposed to vulgar pronunciation was then characteristic of the fair sex.
[54] There are great differences with regard to swearing between different nations; but I think that in those countries and in those circles in which swearing is common it is found much more extensively among men than among women: this at any rate is true of Denmark. There is, however, a general social movement against swearing, and now there are many men who never swear. A friend writes to me: “The best English men hardly swear at all.... I imagine some of our fashionable women now swear as much as the men they consort with.”
[55] “Où femme y a, silence n’y a.” “Deux femmes font un plaid, trois un grand caquet, quatre un plein marché.” “Due donne e un’ oca fanno una fiera” (Venice). “The tongue is the sword of a woman, and she never lets it become rusty” (China). “The North Sea will sooner be found wanting in water than a woman at a loss for a word” (Jutland).
[56] The uniformity in the speech of the whole Roman Empire during the first centuries of our Christian era was kept up, among other things, through the habit of removing soldiers and officials from one country to the other. This ceased later, each district being left to shift more or less for itself.
[57] “Dass unsere ältesten vorfahren sich das sprechen erstaunlich unbequem gemacht haben,” Delbrück, E 155.
[58] Sometimes appearances may be deceptive: when [nr, mr] become [ndr, mbr], it looks on the paper as if something had been added and as if the transition therefore militated against the principle of ease: in reality, the old and the new combinations require exactly the same amount of muscular activity, and the change simply consists in want of precision in the movement of the velum palati, which comes a fraction of a second too soon. If anything, the new group is a trifle easier than the old. See LPh 5. 6 for explanation and examples (E. thunder from þunor sb., þunrian vb.; timber, cf. Goth. timrian, G. zimmer, etc.).