238 The Loom of Language

The Danish A A replaces the Swedish A, & and 0 replace the
German-Swedish A and O Other differences are

(a) General tendency of voiceless (P^ T, K) to assume the sound values

of the corresponding voiced consonants (b> d> g) Thus zkke is

pionounced like tgger in nigger,
(&) Terminal G3 final V after L3 and imtial H before V (where hv

leplaces wh of the English equivalent, e g hvad - what) are

silent,
(c) D is silent after L, N3 R3 e g holde (hold), finde (find) and like ft

when it follows a vowel

SOUND-CHANGES IN Tin? LATIN FAMILY
Most English words of Latin origin are of two kinds First come
words denved from the French of Normandy and Picaidy. These were
brought in by the Norman conquerors When this Norman and Picar-
dian French had ceased to be a spoken language in England^ the influx
of French words did not stop A second and even larger wave broke
over England This was partly due to the influence of Paris as a literary
centre in medieval tunes Thus bonowed French words of the period
between Chaucer and Caxton do not come from the same region
as the earlier Norman words and they aie more distinctively French
in the modern sense of the term Since Caxton's time the introduction
of Latin or Neo-Latin (French) roots has never ceased. There are
now about two thousand primary Latin roots in English, excluding
several times as many derivatives and the enormous variety of technical
terms not listed in an ordinary dictionary, Owing to the fact that words
of Latin origin have come into English directly from classical sources
and indirectly through French, our English vocabulary has a very large
number of doublets., illustrated by the list printed or* the next page,
French itself has suffered a similar fate. Legions of Classical Latin
words have marched into the French language since the sixteenth
century. The Roman grammarian Vaxo would have been unable to
identify Old French filzy larronj%&& conseil with Latin fihu^ latw» and
consihttm respectively, but would have had no difficulty in detecting the
Latin origin of the more modern words of the following list (p. 240)
There as elsewhere below the printed form of a Latxn noun or adjective
is usually the ablative singular *
* The case system had decayed in the daily speech (p* 3515) of the late Empire
and the ablative or dative is oftcxx the literary case form nearest to the colloquial
singular*