Part 11 (1/2)

When the early Germanic peoples of northern Europe first learned of wine-culture and of paved streets from their commercial or warlike contact with the Romans, it was only natural that they should adopt the Latin words for the strange beverage (_vinulish _wine_, German _Wein_) and the unfalish _street_, German _Strasse_) Later, when Christianity was introduced into England, a nuel_, found their way into English And so the process has continued uninterruptedly down to the present day, each cultural wave bringing to the language a new deposit of loan-words The careful study of such loan-words constitutes an interesting commentary on the history of culture One can almost estimate the role which various peoples have played in the develop note of the extent to which their vocabularies have filtered into those of other peoples When we realize that an educated japanese can hardly frale literary sentence without the use of Chinese resources, that to this day Siaian bear the unmistakable imprint of the Sanskrit and Pali that cao, or that whether we argue for or against the teaching of Latin and Greek our argument is sure to be studded ords that have co of what early Chinese culture and Buddhism and classical Mediterranean civilization have es that have had an overwhelnificance as carriers of culture They are classical Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Greek, and Latin In coes as Hebrew and French sink into a secondary position It is a little disappointing to learn that the general cultural influence of English has so far been all but negligible The English language itself is spreading because the English have colonized i to show that it is anywhere entering into the lexical heart of other languages as French has colored the English complexion or as Arabic has pernificant of the power of nationalis the last century There are now psychological resistances to borrowing, or rather to new sources of borrowing,[165] that were not greatly alive in the Middle Ages or during the Renaissance

[Footnote 165: For we still name our new scientific instruments and patent medicines from Greek and Latin]

Are there resistances of a enerally assu depend entirely on the historical facts of culture relation; that if Gerlish from Latin and French it is only because Gerland with the culture spheres of classical Rome and France This is true to a considerable extent, but it is not the whole truth We erate the physical inificance of the fact that Gerraphical position h the Middle Ages, to humanistic influences in the latter fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and again to the powerful French influences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

It seeical attitude of the borrowing language itself towards linguistic n words English has long been striving for the coardless of whether it is monosyllabic or polysyllabic Such words as _credible_, _certitude_, _intangible_ are entirely welcolish because each represents a unitary, well-nuanced idea and because their for-ible_) is not a necessary act of the unconscious -_ have no real existence in English cooodness_) A word like _intangible_, once it is accliical entity as any radical rasp_) In German, however, polysyllabic words strive to analyze thenificant elements Hence vast nuht of certain cultural influences, could not e Latin-German words like _kredibel_ ”credible” and French-Ger that the unconsciousand handling words It is as though this unconsciousto accept _kredibel_ if you will just tell enerally found it easier to create neords out of its own resources, as the necessity for thelish and Gern material is a contrast that uages of Aly varied cultural contacts, yet nowhere do we find that an Athabaskan dialect has borrowed at all freely[166] froes have always found it easier to create neords by co afresh elehly resistant to receiving the linguistic impress of the external cultural experiences of their speakers Cahly instructive contrast in their reaction to Sanskrit influence Both are analytic languages, each totally different froe of India

Ca, but, unlike Chinese, it contains ical analysis does not lish, therefore, in its relation to French and Latin, it welcomed immense numbers of Sanskrit loan-words, ical resistance to them Classical Tibetan literature was a slavish adaptation of Hindu Buddhist literature and nowhere has Buddhise ho Sanskrit words have found their way into the language Tibetan was highly resistant to the polysyllabic words of Sanskrit because they could not autonificant syllables, as they should have in order to satisfy the Tibetan feeling for forreat majority of these Sanskrit words into native equivalents The Tibetan craving for forn terenuine Tibetan idioinals were carefully translated, elearbha_ ”Sun-boso-po_ ”Sun-of heart-the, the heart (or essence) of the sun” The study of how a language reacts to the presence of foreign words--rejecting the theht on its innate forht all but say, ”has borrowed at all”]

The borrowing of foreign words always entails their phonetic n sounds or accentual peculiarities that do not fit the native phonetic habits They are then so changed as to do as little violence as possible to these habits

Frequently we have phonetic colish word as the recently introduced _cae_, as now ordinarily pronounced, corresponds to the typical phonetic usage of neither English nor French

The aspirated _k_, the obscure vowel of the second syllable, the precise quality of the _l_ and of the last _a_, and, above all, the strong accent on the first syllable, are all the results of unconscious assilish habits of pronunciation They differentiate our _cae_ clearly from the same word as pronounced by the French On the other hand, the long, heavy vowel in the third syllable and the final position of the ”zh” sound (like _z_ in _azure_) are distinctly un-English, just as, in Middle English, the initial _j_ and _v_[167] must have been felt at first as not strictly in accord with English usage, though the strangeness has worn off by now In all four of these cases--initial _j_, initial _v_, final ”zh,” and unaccented _a_ of _father_--English has not taken on a new sound but has merely extended the use of an old one

[Footnote 167: See page 206]

[Transcriber's note: Footnote 167 refers to the paragraph beginning on line 6329]

Occasionally a new sound is introduced, but it is likely to lo-Saxon _u_ (written _y_) had long become unrounded to _i_, but a new set of _u_-vowels had come in from the French (in such words as _due_, _value_, _nature_) The new _u_ did not long hold its own; it becaamated with the native _iw_ of words like _new_ and _slew_

Eventually this diphthong appears as _yu_, with change of stress--_dew_ (frolo-Saxon _deaw_) like _due_ (Chaucerian _du_) Facts like these sho stubbornly a language resists radical ta with its phonetic pattern

Nevertheless, we know that languages do influence each other in phonetic respects, and that quite aside fron sounds with borroords One of the uistics has to note is the occurrence of striking phonetic parallels in totally unrelated or very reraphical area These parallels become especially impressive when they are seen contrastively from a wide phonetic perspective Here are a few exaes as a whole have not developed nasalized vowels Certain Upper German (Suabian) dialects, however, have now nasalized vowels in lieu of the older vowel + nasal consonant (_n_) Is it only accidental that these dialects are spoken in proximity to French, which ain, there are certain general phonetic features that mark off Dutch and Flemish in contrast, say, to North German and Scandinavian dialects One of these is the presence of unaspirated voiceless stops (_p_, _t_, _k_), which have a precise,French sounds, but which contrast with the stronger, aspirated stops of English, North German, and Danish Even if we assume that the unaspirated stops are more archaic, that they are the unmodified descendants of the old Gernificant historical fact that the Dutch dialects, neighbors of French, were inhibited fro these consonants in accordance hat seeeneral Ger than these instances is the peculiar resemblance, in certain special phonetic respects, of Russian and other Slavic languages to the unrelated Ural-Altaic languages[168] of the Volga region The peculiar, dull vowel, for instance, known in Russian as ”yeri”[169] has Ural-Altaic analogues, but is entirely wanting in Germanic, Greek, Areners of Slavic We may at least suspect that the Slavic vowel is not historically unconnected with its Ural-Altaic parallels One of thecases of phonetic parallelises spoken west of the Rockies Even at the most radical estiuistic stocks represented in the region from southern Alaska to central California Nevertheless all, or practically all, the languages of this immense area have some important phonetic features in colottalized” series of stopped consonants of very distinctive formation and of quite unusual acoustic effect[170] In the northern part of the area all the languages, whether related or not, also possess various voiceless _l_-sounds and a series of ”velar”

(back-guttural) stopped consonants which are etyically distinct from the ordinary _k_-series It is difficult to believe that three such peculiar phonetic features as I have roups of languages

[Footnote 168: Ugro-Finnic and Turkish (Tartar)]

[Footnote 169: Probably, in Sweet's terh-back (or, better, between back and ”enerally corresponds to an Indo-European long _u_]

[Footnote 170: There seeous sounds in certain languages of the Caucasus]

How are we to explain these and hundreds of siences? In particular cases we enetic relationshi+p that it is beyond our present power to deet us far It must be ruled entirely out of court, for instance, in two of the three European examples I have instanced; both nasalized vowels and the Slavic ”yeri” are dein in Indo-European However we envisage the process in detail, we cannot avoid the inference that there is a tendency for speech sounds or certain distinctive manners of articulation to spread over a continuous area in soeographical center We uistic borderlands--whether by the unconscious suggestive influence of foreign speech habits or by the actual transfer of foreign sounds into the speech of bilingual individuals--have gradually been incorporated into the phonetic drift of a language So long as its main phonetic concern is the preservation of its sound patterning, not of its sounds as such, there is really no reason why a language n sounds that have succeeded in woramut of individual variations, provided always that these new variations (or reinforced old variations) are in the direction of the native drift

A siht on this conception Let us suppose that two neighboring and unrelated languages, A and B, each possess voiceless _l_-sounds (compare Welsh _ll_) We surmise that this is not an accident Perhaps coe A the voiceless _l_-sounds correspond to a sibilant series in other related languages, that an old alternation _s_: _sh_ has been shi+fted to the new alternation _l_ (voiceless): _s_[171] Does it follow that the voiceless _l_ of language B has had the sa tendency toward audible breath release at the end of a word, so that the final _l_, like a final voas originally followed by a marked aspiration Individuals perhaps tended to anticipate a little the voiceless release and to ”unvoice” the latter part of the final _l_-sound (very lish words like _felt_ tends to be partly voiceless in anticipation of the voicelessness of the _t_) Yet this final _l_ with its latent tendency to unvoicing ht never have actually developed into a fully voiceless _l_ had not the presence of voiceless _l_-sounds in A acted as an unconscious stie in the line of B's own drift Once the final voiceless _l_ eed, its alternation in related words with ical spread The result would be that both A and B have an important phonetic trait in coed as ht even becoh this is an extrenificant thing about such phonetic interinfluencings is the strong tendency of each language to keep its phonetic pattern intact So long as the respective align as they have differing ”values” and ”weights” in the unrelated languages, these languages cannot be said to have diverged materially from the line of their inherent drift In phonetics, as in vocabulary, we uistic influences

[Footnote 171: This can actually be demonstrated for one of the Athabaskan dialects of the Yukon]

I have already pointed out in passing that English has taken over a certain nulish also uses a number of affixes that are derived fron elements, like the _-ize_ of _materialize_ or the _-able_ of _breakable_, are even productive to-day Such exaical influence exerted by one language on another Setting aside the fact that they belong to the sphere of derivational concepts and do not touch the central ical problem of the expression of relational ideas, they have added nothing to the structural peculiarities of our language English was already prepared for the relation of _pity_ to _piteous_ by such a native pair as _luck_ and _lucky_; _material_ and _materialize_ merely swelled the ranks of a form pattern familiar from such instances as _wide_ and _widen_ In other words, the lish, if it is to be gauged by such examples as I have cited, is hardly different in kind fro of words The introduction of the suffix _-ize_ uage than did the iven nulish evolved a new future on the model of the synthetic future in French or had it borrowed from Latin and Greek their eo_: _tetigi_; Greek _leipo_: _leloipa_), we should have the right to speak of trueinfluences are not delish language we can hardly point to one ie that was not deterh here and there we estive influence of French forms[172]

[Footnote 172: In the sphere of syntax one may point to certain French and Latin influences, but it is doubtful if they ever reached deeper than the written language Much of this type of influence belongs rather to literary style than to y proper]

It is iical developlish and the very modest extent to which its fundamental build has been affected by influences froe has soh it relapsed into a kind of chaos on the arrival of the Norlo-Saxon tradition Students areanalytic developn influence as English was subjected to is clear frolish in certain leveling tendencies English may be conveniently used as an _a fortiori_ test It was flooded with French loan-words during the later Middle Ages, at a time when its drift toward the analytic type was especially strong It was therefore changing rapidly both within and on the surface The wonder, then, is not that it took on a nuical features, mere accretions on its concrete inventory, but that, exposed as it was to re influences, it remained so true to its own type and historic drift The experience gained frothened by all that we know of docuuistic history Nowhere do we find any but superficial s We s froical influence is not, perhaps, impossible, but that its operation is so slow that it has hardly ever had the chance to incorporate itself in the relatively suistic history that lies open to inspection; or that there are certain favorable conditions that ical disturbances frouistic type or an unusual degree of cultural contact, conditions that do not happen to be realized in our docuht to assuical influence on another