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.’