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.)