Primers for the Age of Plenty No. 3

THE LOOM OF

LANGUAGE

PRIMERS FOR THE AGE OF PLENTY edited by LANCELOT HOGBEN

1. Mathematics for the Million by Lancelot Hogben

2. Science for the Citizen by Lancelot Hogben

3* The Loom of Language by Frederick Bodmer

4. History of the Homeland -by Henry Hamilton (forthcoming)

THE LOOM OF

LANGUAGE

A Guide to Foreign Languages for the Home Student

by

FREDERICK BODMER

edited and arranged by LANCELOT HOGBEN

London

GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD

FIRST PUBLISHED IN JANUARY IO44 SECOND IMPRESSION FEBRUARY 1944 THIRD impression APRIL 194 c fourth impression may 1946

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

printed in GREAT m io~Point Plantin BY UNWIN BROTHERS WOKING

Britain

Type

LIMITED

Up to the very present day, the irons, change life as no Alexanders, no Caesars, ^ of from the

have ever done. You can see e g rajj the battleship and

S^r8 Y?u ^ tht ?emp^ng and obliging akd com^men

to change their ways of 1^e/ndo^e7IttaTan^tterI1oef Site secondary were no particular tron-minde pe P* ^ individuals concerned, what importance to eye^one but di g g ... But the new history

ding of languages gives a new Wist and often as much

inunity’s mental processes. .. ■ * ■ W social consequences;

“ roe'r&tn' as a meed ot a maclune does thinga to yon. I.

makes new precision and also new errors possibl .

tt /-« TOTT7Y T C Tm

u,-..,- ** t9> virr ^ ^

The evolution of language has been-dn.es. » £

of an embryo. He (man) grasps, efther nor his relatives

fascinating but gnarled product o ev technique of communication

and teachers considering a. dl <h « »*£¥£ ot ^ ^

he is learning is modem. He m P ^ & first lie can

just discovered he can ride a bicycle and rushes off to buy ^ ^ &

find, irrespective of whether it is n enough. He takes it, with

bicycle and gets him along someh , _ unconsidered end-product all its defects. The language ancestors,

of an evolution from die soun nuicklv the entities they '

The immemorial jwb Q?ten extremely misleading assis-

represent, until ro-day we Quantity of philosophizing upon

S^1tSp“^S5. Uusc that was (pethap.) rid ritst

instrument used for the purpose, ,

J, G. CROWTHER, Outline of the Universe

CONTENTS

PAGE

Editor’s Foreword II

CHAPTER

I.	Introduction	15
	Part I
	THE NATURAL HISTORY OF
	LANGUAGE
II.	The Story of the Alphabet	47
III.	Accidence — The Table Manners of Lan¬
	guage	89
IV.	Syntax — The Traffic Rules of Language	129
V.	The Classification of Languages	176
	Part II
	OUR HYBRID HERITAGE
VI.	How to Learn the Basic Word List	219
VII.	Bird’s-Eye View of Teutonic Grammar	261
VIII.	The Latin Legacy	309
IX.	Modem Descendants of Latin	349

Part III

THE WORLD LANGUAGE PROBLEM

X. The Diseases of Language

XI. Pioneers of Language Planning

XII. Language Planning for a New Order

405

443

481

8	The Loom of Language Part IV LANGUAGE MUSEUM
appendix	PAGE
I.	Basic Vocabularies for the Teutonic Lan¬
	guages	516
II.	Basic Vocabularies for the Romance Lan¬
III.	guages	577
Greek Roots in Common Use for Technical
Index	Words of International Currency	636 660

list of figures

PAGE

FIG.

1

2

3

4

5

6

The Rosetta Stone aCW^

Inscription from Mine Shaft in the Sinai Penins a Old Persian Cuneiform Syllabary

Cuneiform Tablet Recording Babylonian Legend of the Deluge . .

Bilingual Seal of King Arnuwandas II, a Hittite King

British Traffic Signs

Pictographic Writing of Aztec Civilization in Mexico Ideograms of the Eighteen Twenty-Day Months of the rikndsr of the Ancient Maya Civilization of Central

America . .

Ancient Picture Writing of the Hittites from an Inscription

at Hama in Syria .

Discus of Phaestos showing as yet PlC °“

graphic Writing of the Ancient Cretan Civilization

Consonant Symbols of some Contemporary Alphabets

Vowel Symbols of Some Contemporary Alphabets

The Ancient Cypriotic Syllabary .

Stone Inscription from Paphos (Eighth Century B.c.) faang Some Signs from Early Alphabets

Early and Later Form of Some Greek and Latin Letters Key to Runic and Ogam Scripts ' r , .

Semaphore, Morse and Braille Codes .

Facsimile Note in Pitman’s Shorthand by Bernard Shaw The Directives of Place The Directives of Motion The Instrumental Directives The Directives of Time Associative Directives

Coin of Maccabean Times with Early Hebrew Characters Three Verses from the Old Testament in the Oldest Da«abk

MS of the Hebrew Bible 1 . 6

28 Page from the “Codex Argenteus” now in Uppsala facing

xo

n

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20 21 22

23

24

25

26

27

10

18

22

30

36

49

52

54

56

59

60 62 64 64 70 72

75

76 78 86 142

144

145

146

147 196

204

228

10

The Loom of Language

PAGE

FIG,

29

3°

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

Runic Stone in National Park of Stockholm facing

Earliest Teutonic Inscription

Cutting from Icelandic Newspaper Showing the Two th Symbols \ (as in thin) and 6 (as in them )

Cutting from a Norwegian Newspaper Showing the Scandi¬ navian Vowel Symbols 0 and a

Very Early (6th Century b.c.) Latin Inscription on a Fibula (clasp or brooch)

The Oldest Roman Stone Inscription — The Lapis Niger from the Forum (about 600 B.c.) facing

Funeral Inscription of the Consul L. Cornelius Scipio in an Early Latin Script (259 b.c.)

Oscan Inscription from Pompeii

Inscription in Early (about 590 b.c.) Greek Lettering from Egypt Chipped on the Statuary of a Rock Temple by Ionic Mercenaries

Stone Slab from Lemnos with Early Greek Lettering

Stone with Celtic Inscription in Ogam Signs from Aboyne near Aberdeen in Scotland facing

Postage Stamp of Kemal Atatiirk Teaching the Turks to Use the Roman Alphabet facing

Mongols Learning the Latin ABC facing

Compound Chinese Characters with Two Meaning Compo¬ nents

Compound Chinese Characters with Meaning and Phonetic Component

Parent Chinese Characters of the Katakana (older) Japanese Syllabary

Parent Chinese Characters of the Hiragana (later) Japanese Syllabary

Japanese Katakana Syllabary

238

265

278

281

311

312

321

325

334

340

414

415 415

426

427

435

439

440

Fig. i.-

-—The Rosetta Stone

, • „,uirh c-imc to light during Napoleon’

This inscription, ^'cipher the ancient picture writi

SSoil ™ » S«»ph«'.='Pt * »“ «"**

character (see pages 58-61).

s campaign in Egypt, ng (top third) of the bottom. The middle gyptian writing, fhe had lost their pictorial

EDITOR’S FOREWORD

Dmmc, the past fifteen years inarucitartn S

undergone a drastic rcunentauon in . d institutions of

aim is to consolidate and to promote the ^ a„ the totalitarian state. During the ^ ^ educauonal system

ostensibly democratic lorm g t0 piomote the democratic

feigned n-ith e^glen^OdPJ^n j, ^ butoarh of taste

way of life. g Scandinavia, university education is a

privilege. In Britain, as &om ^ cathoEc authoritarian

S^fof^e^pe. party of vocano^spedaiines relnc-

tandy added ® elementary school

The basic defect of British ecmca * function as an

level— at which it has an mtelhgi that selection and

insurance poEcy agamst natipnal ^ $ most relevaQt t0 the

presentation of materials for teac : g ’ ^ ^ hands of experts

constructive tasks of modern ^ otlier experts like themselves, whose main preoccupation is to ; pr rence tQ its scientific appE-

We learn our mathematics wi , regard to the impact of

-o»s. Wo loam SSL We smtg|o with

scientific discovery on t £ ty^ ^ indifference t0 the part

one or more modern langu S _ -dine fuel for international

which language differences pay P concern for the problem of misunderstanding and without plenty,

communication on a planetary scale m g P 1 project of

Like that of its

The Loom of Language is based o Education Movement

. studies in our schools, «** does not provide a sufficient equxpm ^ ^ scope md metil0ds

society in which we Eve, ffiMra^h^ ^ wraimed sodal progress,

of education are a neeessary c _ . about unless there is a

that such educauonal reform - mere precept or contro-

vigorous popular demand for ^ demand for reform

versial criticism is not likely t h tial examples of instruction

«— ft. plain ““‘STSlr* prime* for

vitalized by a new infusion of social reievan ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

the Age of Plenty, The Loom of Lang * superficial interest

number of popular books written to stimulate P

12

The Loom of Language

among curio hunters, to promote unnecessary veneration for professors, to provide material for light conversation at cocktail parties, or to mitigate the inconvenience of insomnia. First and foremost it is a self-educator for the home student, a book which members of the Adult Education Movement can use as a basis for sustained study, and a book from which teachers alert to the need for a new orientation to meet the needs of the ordinary citizen in a progressive democratic society can get helpful suggestions with a direct bearing on their daily task.

An attempt of this land needs no apology on account of its novelty or break with traditional methods of school teaching. Less than a century ago, the introduction of modern languages into schools where language teaching had been circumscribed by translation from classical authors of antiquity, was greeted as a welcome innovation. It seemed at last as if the teaching of languages had been brought to life. After two generations of experiment, educationists are not convinced that the results of school-teaching justify the time devoted to them in English- speaking countries. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the prevailing attitude among American educationists is one of alarm at the poverty of return for effort put into the task. Subsidized by the Carnegie Corporation, the American Council of Education has under¬ taken a survey of methods and results in order to review the current situation in American schools. The published report is an honest admission of dismal failure.

Years ago, when Dr. Bodmer was my colleague on the staff of the University of Cape Town, we discussed the twin project of Science for the Citizen and The Loom of Language in a preliminary way. Shortly before the war we drew up a detailed plan based on joint discussion, chiefly in Enghsh country pubs during the course of a motor trip from Aberdeen to London via the Yorkshire moors and Suffolk, back again y way of the Lake district. There, as I expected, my job as editor finished, at least till I read the page , proofs. In reality collaboration has been closer, and the author has urged me to explain the extent of it. During .the writing of the book Dr. Bodmer lived in a small croft which I used to rent on Deeside. So I saw him during the week-ends continuously. I read the first drafts of each chapter, and was able to suggest how to get round difficulties of ordinary people who are hke myself poor linguists. I shall always be grateful for what was ahighly educative experience and one which kept me intellectually alive during a period of somewhat curtailed opportunities for my own

Editor’s Foreword

13

As time passed the task became more and more a co-operative effort in wbs“ I^ted as a sieve, or, if you like it, as a W

Dr Bodmer submitted to suggestions for the en e

fad languages as formidable as I do with more mate

f m Wi10 have a normal modicum of egotism a

5S%iS“aS5

^ — in a

foreword. merits of the two predecessors of The

the co-operation ot scores 01 wu . author’s slips or to

Science for the Citizen , its mon is ^ c language. What aesthetic

does not touch on tl? hope-will continue to fad,

merits some people find, .and y P faSofaes which beset

in their home bulges fave fade to * fa.

S^ald « of communication on a pUnefay scale in an

age of potential plenty. LANCELOT HOGBEN

TORPHINS, ABERDEENSHIRE

October 1941

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

What language we habitually speak depends upon a geographical

SSul Ttos Lung to do with the composition of *. hunran

_ rtf the human eea A rhiM grows up to speak or to write the sperm or eg*. ^ ^ & biUngml country lt

language used sth , without any formal instruction m

may grow up to use two la & African children do

either Many Welsh* Breton* Belgian* and South Atnca

»?hera^ nothing to suggest to the chtotnosomcs of

s°. me Q r Arcane have an extra share of genes

SUto,dy ^ ^ 8. -* ■* « «

have any rational basis for laneuage-phobia exists, it must

“ By die same token it is no. difficult to nndcrarand why Scanffinavdana

tod, sdoy the reputation of being good kns««.

or the Dutch enjoy i f specialist textbooks

P*»ble ,0 produce ton. Thus to ^ M or giti who hop^ a^«on g-*

• :o o Icnamipe lesson. Translation of the bngnsn, wcrmou cinema is a languag t-ue narrative proceeds.

T^rthetw barriers°which linguistic isolation impose^ on a

Salfsptb community we have

and a stronger impulse to travel. In ^ » er need t0 study

European speech commumnes expenen g , .

foreign languages and ^^^a distaste for linguistic

16 The Loom of Language

of linguistic contacts. Another is that formal education fails to supply a compelling reason for a. pursuit which has little connexion with the needs of everyday life. Reasons commonly given for learning foreign languages are manifestly insincere* or* to put it more charitably* are out of date. For instance* it is obviously easy to exaggerate the utility of linguistic accomplishments for foreign travel. Only relatively pros¬ perous people' can continue to travel after marriage; and tourist facili¬ ties for young people of modest means rarely* if ever* take them into situations where nobody understands Anglo-American. There is even less sincerity in the plea for linguistic proficiency as a key to the treasure- house of the world’s literature. American and British publishers scour the Continent for translation rights of new authors. So the doors of the treasure-house are wide open. Indeed, any intelligent adolescent with access to a modem lending library can catch out the teacher who enthuses about the pleasures of reading Thomas Mann or Anatole France in the original. People who do so are content to get their know¬ ledge of Scandinavian drama* the Russian novel or the Icelandic Sagas from American or British translations.

In spite of all obstacles* anyone who has been brought up to speak the Anglo-American language enjoys a peculiarly favoured position. It is a hybrid. It has a basic stratum of words derived from the same stock as German* Dutch* and the Scandinavian languages. It has assimilated thousands of Latin origin. It has also incorporated an impressive battery of Greek roots. A random sample of one word from each of the first thousand pages of the Concise Oxford Dictionary gives the following figures: words of Romance (Latin* French* Italian* Spanish) origin 53*6 %* Teutonic (Old English* Scandinavian* Dutch* German) 31*1%* Greek 10*8%. With a little knowledge of the evolution of English itself* of the parallel evolution of the Teutonic languages and of the modem descendants of Latin* as set forth in the second part of this book; the American or the Briton has therefore a key to ten living European languages. No one outside the Anglo- American speech community enjoys this privilege; and no one who knows how to take full advantage of it need despair of getting a good working knowledge of the languages which our nearest neighbours speak.

Though each of us is entitled to a personal distaste* as each of u$ is entitled to a personal preference* for study of this sort* the usefulness of learning languages is not merely a personal affair. Linguistic differ¬ ences are a perpetual source of international misunderstanding* a well-

Introduction

17

nigh inexhaustible supply of inflammable material which warmongers can use for their own evil ends. Some knowledge about the languages people speak is therefore one prerequisite of keeping the world’s peace. Keeping the world’s peace is everybody’s proper business; but keeping the world’s peace is not the only reason why study of languages concerns all of us as citizens. Linguistic differences lead to a vast leakage of intellectual energy which might be enlisted to make the potential plenty of modem science available to all mankind.

Human beings are unique in two ways. Man is a tool-bearing animal and a talkative animal. In the pursuit of their tool-bearing activities, men and women have learned to co-operate on a planetary scale;' but such co-operation is perpetually thwarted by local limitations of their speech habits. What is characteristic of the intellectual achievements of mankind in the age of hydro-electricity, magnesium-aluminium alloys, broadcasting, aviation, synthetic plastics, and chemotherapy is a com¬ mon possession of all nations which encourage scientific research, but nations have no common idiom through which workers by brain or hand can communicate results of research or collaborate in applying them to human welfare. Modem technology is a supemational culture which ministers to the common needs of human beings, while language limps behind the human endeavour to satisfy needs which all human beings share.

To canalize the interest of intelligent men and women into the constructive task of devising or of adopting an auxiliary medium to supplement existing national languages is therefore one of the foremost needs of our time. This concerns us all, and it calls for a lively knowledge of the limitations imposed on languages by the laws of their growth. It will therefore be one of the tasks of The Loom of Lan¬ guage to trace the history of the languages in which the technical resources of our age have been recorded. It will not be a record of deliberate and intelligent prevision. It is partly a story of confusion resulting from a continuous record of slovenliness and of obstinate complacency towards the mistakes of our grand-parents. It is also a story of ancestor-worship, and of makeshifts to conserve the ineptitudes of a supposedly heroic past. It affects us more intimately than the fate of the Dinosaurs. It unearths remains not less dramatic than the jaw-bone of the ape-man of Java. It points the way down dim paths of prehistory from which we return with imagination fired by a vista of future possibilities.

This docs not mean that The Loom of Language is first and foremost

if]

[III]

. 0 Slid *'WUM M1WJU V UAJUWJUL UJL ULLUC*

consuming. If the states of Europe are ever united under common democratic government* with its own air service, many of us who had never expected to travel far afield may hope to see more of the world

Fig. z . Inscription from Mine Shaft in the Sinai Peninsula

Tracings on a mine shaft in the Sinai Peninsula made by a workman who signs himself as Number 4 and gives his name as sahmilax.

before we die. Inevitably we shall become more interested in the speech habits 'of our neighbours. Though a knowledge, of foreign languages is not indispensable to an American or an Englishman who wishes to travel, it adds to the fun of it and promotes a more friendly under-

standing with people one may meet.

The literary arguments for language study are manifestly bogus when based on the claims of fiction or drama for which cheap translations are readily accessible. None the less, some types of literature are acces¬ sible only to people who know languages other than their own. A large

Introduction 19

volume of scientific publications which record new discoveries in physics, medicine, chemistry, agriculture, and engineering appear in many different languages. Their contents do not become accessible in books till several years have elapsed. Professional scientific workers are therefore handicapped if they have no knowledge of such languages as German, French, or Spanish. What is more important from the standpoint of the wider public which The Loom of Language may reach is this. Challenging statistics of social welfare from foreign countries may never find their way into the columns of our newspapers. So the only way of getting a thorough first-hand knowledge of foreign affairs is to read year-books and periodicals published in other countries.

For these and other reasons many people who have little or no knowledge of foreign languages, would like to have more; and many would study them, if they were not discouraged by the very poor results which years of study at school or in college produce. One thing The Loom of Language aims at doing is to show that there is no real reason for being discouraged. Though the difficulties of learning languages are real, they are also easy to exaggerate. Generally, the adult has more to show after a three months’ course at a Commercial Institute than an adolescent after three years’ study of a foreign language in a British secondary or American high school. One reason for this is that the adult pupil is clear about why he or she is taking the course. Another is that the teacher is usually clear about why he or she is giving it.

This is not the whole story. To sins of omission we have to add all the positive obstacles which early formal education places in the way of those who have no strong personal inclination for linguistic studies. The greatest impediment, common to most branches of school and university education, is the dead hand of Plato. We have not yet got away from education designed for the sons of gentlemen. Educational Platonism sacrifices realizable proficiency by encouraging the pursuit of unattainable perfection. The child or the immigrant learns a language by blundering his or her way into greater self-confidence. Adults accept the mistakes of children with tolerant good-humour, and the genial flow of social intercourse is not interrupted by a barrage of pedantic protests. The common sense of ordinary parents or customs officials recognizes that commonplace communication unhampered by the sting of grammatical guilt must precede real progress .in the arts of verbal precision. Most of us could leam languages more easily if we could leam to forgive our own linguistic trespasses.

Where perfectionist pedantry has .insetted the sting of grammatical

20

The Loom of Language

guilt a sense of social inferiority rubs salt into the wound. According to the standards of educated adults, very few adolescents can speak an write the home language with fluency and grammatical precision before eighteen years of age. To be able to speak more than two new anguages without any trace of foreign accent or idiom is a life-work, o nguistic polish is a perquisite of prosperous people whose formal education has been supplemented by the attentions of foreign governesses and by frequent trips abroad. It is the cultural trade- “fure class- Indeed no type Of knowledge has more osten-

'° ^ * f0rd6n tog”ase can

rely upon tins book or on any other. Its aim is to lighten the burden

of learning for the home student who is less ambitious. One of the

r ::tts recf 1 a?mpts to devise d^m-

lup has been to show how educational practice, dictated by anti¬ social theories which gratify the itch for Id sure-class ostentation

SET TH “C%arisi^. ** “*insic characteristics’

effort ^tfended VfttlnS1C d^CuIties dcpcnd 011 ^ large amount of effort expended before tangible results of self-expression or compre-

Deriodnof?g:

period of unreqmted effort to a minimum. Pioneers of international communication such as C. K. Ogden, the inventor of Basic English, made a special study of this, because the success of their work

Srne? wh^f* ^ 3 kngUage for worid-wide use can be

luZn^d r? w “ Pr°P0SalS Pr°Sper OT M1> thcy havc revo- lutiomzed die problem of learmng existing languages.

J55 f c simple, direct, and easily

^med toguage for world-citizenship have not yet found their way most grammar-books, and the reader who starts to learn a foreign kug^ge can get all the fun of tackling a new problem by applying them. To understand the essential peculiarities or similarities of anguages most closely related to one another does not demand a special study of each. If you compare the following equivalents of a^t whrch occurs in the w, Prnyer, you L « dl for

Gib uns heute unser taglich Brot Geef ons heden ons dagelijksch brood Giv os 1 Dag vort daglige Bred Giv oss i dag vto dagliga brod

Gef oss i dag vort daglegt brand

(German) (Dutch) (Danish) (Swedish) r (Icelandic)

Introduction , 2 1

Now compare these with the following translations of the same petition in Latin and its daughter languages :

Da nobis hodie panem nostrum quotidianum (Latin) Donne-nous aujourd’hui notre pain quotidien (French)

Danos hoy nuestro pan cotidiano (Spanish)

Dacci oggi il nostro pane cotidiano (Italian)

O pao nosso de cada dia dai-nos hoje (Portuguese)

By the time you have read through the first five, you will probably have realized without recourse to a dictionary that they correspond to the English sentence: Give us this day our daily bread. That the next five mean the same might also be obvious to a Frenchman, though it may not be obvious to us if we do not already know French, or a language like French. If we are told that all ten sentences mean the same thing, it is not difficult to see that German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, and Icelandic share with English common features which English does not share with the other five languages, and that French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese share with Latin common features which they do not share widi the Germanic group.

It is a common belief that learning two languages calls for twice as much effort as learning one. This may be roughly true, if the two languages are not more alike than French and German, and if the beginner’s aim is to speak either like a native. If they belong to the same family, and if the beginner has a more modest end in view, it is not true. Many people will find that the effort spent on building up a small, workmanlike vocabulary and getting a grasp of essential grammatical peculiarities of four closely related languages is not much greater than the effort spent on getting an equivalent knowledge of one alone. The reason for this is obvious if we approach learning languages as a problem of applied biology. The ease with which we remember things depends on being able to associate one thing with another. In many branches of knowledge, a iitde learning is a difficult thing.

As an isolated act it is difficult, because extremely tedious, to memor¬ ize the peculiarities of each individual bone of a rabbit. When we realize that bones are the alphabet of the written record of evolution in the sedimentary rocks, the study of their peculiarities is full of interest. Biologists with experience of elementary teaching know that it is far more satisfying — and therefore more easy— to learn the essential peculiarities of the bones of representative types from all the various classes of vertebrates than to memorize in great detail the skeleton of

22

The Loom of Language

a single isolated specimen. So it may well be that many people with a now e ge of Anglo-American would benefit by trying to learn German along with Dutch, which is a half-way house between ^

SIGN	SOUND	sign"	SOUND SIGN	SOUND SIGN	SOUND
Y7T	a		ja	k-T	ba	f tT- | Tf	wi
M>— IT	i		ji	T«	fa	£eT	ra
<1?	u	^Tff	ta		na	Hi	ru
T^r	ka	m-	tu	# TT	mi	ny	la
<T	ktx	t>~ - w	da	HyT	ma	Tie	sa
<TT>-	ga	fen	di	TT	mi	Vr.	za
	gu	KteT	du		mu	1 <<■	:;h:t
«TT	ha	T<T	tha	r«-	ya	y	thra
t> — TT-	cha	^ — • TT - -	pa		wa	<C<	ba
		Ideog	rams
w . — - — — — -	shayathiya KING	«<	burn] LAND
o — w w	<<TT	dahyu PROVINCE	KR [	auramazda WIE OP A GOD'

vlu AJiKSIAN CUNEIFORM SYLLABARY

characteristics m *tbe ' impress^f af weteair”^8 °WIS its distinctive syllabaries of the same fl* wedge-shaped tool on soft clay. Related

about 2000 B.c. Elanrites^Bl^w, doy .diStrlbuted the Middle East scripts. KSl Babylomans’ Synans and Hittites all had cuneiform

S1hKS11' Jlery grammatical rule ton becomes a fresh

Introduction 23

This suggestion may not appeal to everyone or suit every type of home student. Still, most people who find it difficult to learn a foreign language can relieve themselves of some of their difficulties, if they start with a little knowledge of how languages have evolved. Part of the task which The Loom of Language has undertaken is to bring the dead bones to life with this elixir. Some people may say that the difficulties are too great, because we start with so little raw material for com¬ parison. 1 hey will say that it is possible to give the general reader an intelligible account of organic evolution, only because any intelligent person who first meets a text-book definition of such words as fish, amphibian, reptile, bird, mammal, can already give several examples of each class. Indeed, most of us can subdivide some of them, as when we speak of dogs and cats as camivors, mice and rabbits as rodents, or sheep and cattle as ruminants. Most of us could also give some outstanding anatomical peculiarities which serve to distinguish species placed in a particular group, as when we define ruminants as beasts which chew the cud and divide the hoof.

Admittedly, there is no such common basis of universal knowledge about language species and their anatomical peculiarities. Most Britons and most Americans speak or read only one language. At best, very few well-educated people can read more than three. Those we usually learn are not recognizably of a kind; and there are no Public Language Museums with attractive and instructive exhibits. All the samp, it is hot impossible for an intelligent person who has had no training in foreign languages to get some insight into the way in which languages evolve. There are no straight lines in biological evolution, and there are no straight lines in the evolution of languages. We can recognize similar processes in the growth of all languages. We can see characteristics which predominate in languages so far apart as Chinese, Hungarian, and Greek competing for mastery in the growth of Anglo-American from the English of Alfred the Great.

When we begin to take the problem of language planning for world peace seriously, we shall have public language museums in our centres of culture, and they will be essential instruments of civic education. In the meantime we have to be content with something less comprehensive. For the reader of this book. Part IV is a language museum in miniature. The home student who loiters in its corridors will be able to get a prospect of the family likeness of languages most closely allied to our own, and will find opportunities of applying rules which lighten the tedium of learning lists, as the exhibits in a good.

24

The Loom of Language

museum of natural history lighten the tedium of learning names for the bones of the skeleton.

WHAT LEAKNING A LANGUAGE INVOLVES

If supplemented by technical terms which are the same, or almost die same, in nearly all modem languages, a basic vocabulary of seventeen hundred nauve words is abundant for ordinary conversation and intelli¬ gent discussion of senous subjects in any European language. According

recmdv?n St “ encydoPaedia of medicine published

recently m the Soviet Union, contains 80,000 technical terms, and it is

afe to say that during his professional .training a medical student has to master a new vocabulary of at least ten thousand new words. Indeed

S~°naI.rtUlary °f m°dem SdenCC 38 a Wh0le is

m± thc nUmbcr of words ^d rules which we have to G Ore 0311 express ourselves in a foreign language with free

thenSSr fTt WOrW-wide use- This fa« does not prevent SplS fm SS r Y f ^ V°1Ume °f g°°d Popdar ^oks which nXS t enCflt °f any reader with average intelligence basic f ™ aud tnteresung facts dealt with in natural sciences. With the

P of the exhibits in our own language museum (Part IV) there is no reason why interesting facts about the way in which languages grow,

, fy m wkch PeoPle use them, the diseases from which they suffer,

them

_ ^ * . , , accessible to us. There is no reason why we should

SZZZT* ^ I”' t0 UghtCn ^ drUdgery of ass«ng

rtperon lnformatlon by sheer effort of memory and tedious

.Helpful tricks which emerge from a comparative studv of language as

turn3 un inrrh Tu Ung 3 kngUage of world-dmenship\riIl

a latef«r t ° ?WUlg chapters, and will be set forth collectively at

drudaei? whm?i? ^ 0ne apPaUcd bY the amount of

encofm™. h learnmg a language supposedly entails can get some

Z ZZZn^r°mr S0UrCeS- 0ne iS Aat n0 exPenditurc

a corresnnnHPnt T^USi 7°U <?n get from spontaneous intercourse with has s3?rd 5 rfthe.latter 15 interested in what you have to say, and has something interesting to contribute to a discussion. The other is

aS iS mUCh l£SS than most of us oppose;

and it need not be dull, if we fortify our efforts by scientific curiosity

, °u . e reiative defects and merits of the language we are studvine abou, . - «, la^e, wHch peopl s™

Introduction 25

social agencies which have affected its growth or about circumstances

which have moulded its character in the course of history.

In short* we can stiffen self-confidence by recognizing at ' the outset that the difficulties of learning a language* though real* are far less than most of us usually suppose. One great obstacle to language¬ learning is that usual methods of instruction take no account of the fact that learning any language involves at least three kinds of skill as different as arithmetic* algebra and geometry. One is learning to read easily. One is learning to express oneself in speech or in writing. The third is being able to follow the course of ordinary conversation among people who use a language habitually. This distinction helps to resolve some of the greatest difficulties which confront beginners. Whether it is best to concentrate on one to the exclusion of others in the initial stages of learning depends partly on the temperament of the beginner* partly on how the foreign one resembles the home language* and partly on the social circumstances which control opportunities for study or use. We can best see what these circumstances are* if we first get clear about the separate problems which arise in reading* in self-expression* and in oral recognition* about the several uses to which we can put our knowledge of a language* and about the various opportunities for getting practice in using it.

Most educated people find that oral recognition of ordinary conversa¬ tion is the last stage in mastering a language* and does not come unless they have spent at least a few weeks or months in a country where it is habitually spoken. It then comes quickly to anyone who can read and write it. The reason why it demands a skill quite different from the skill of learning to read quickly or to write and to speak correctly* Is that no one pronounces distinctly the separate words of a sentence as one writes it* and as a beginner or a child speaks it. In speaking* people fuse one word with another* and blur syllables which form an essential part of the visual picture of the individual word. What we recognize is not a succession of separate units* but a composite pattern of which the character is partly determined by emphasis and rhythm.

This difficulty does not arise in reading or writing a foreign language. When we are learning to read or to write a language* we concentrate on the individual words as separate visual symbols* and when we are learning to speak* we concentrate our attention on the sound values and stresses of each syllable. So it is possible to detect the meaning or to pronounce flawlessly the individual words of I am kind of fond of you baby without recognizing it when it impinges on the ear as ymkynna-

26

The Loom of Language

fonembaybee. Of course, the extent of the difficulties which the beginner has to face depends partly on personal make-up, and partly on that of the language. Some people with histrionic gifts pick up word-patterns quickly, and may therefore benefit more than others from gramophone records, which are an invaluable help for getting good pronunciation. Some languages are more staccato than others. Individual words as spoken are more clear-cut. People who speak them habitually do not slough off syllables. Stress is evenly distributed. In this sense, German is more staccato than English, and English far more so than French. From knowledge of the written language, it is a small step for the student of German to follow a conversation or a broadcast. From a good reading knowledge of French to an understanding of what a French taxi-driver says when he is quarrelling with the policeman is a much longer road.

Formal instruction is at best a very laborious way of surmounting these difficulties. The element of curiosity which plays such a large part in moulding everyday speech is stifled by the certainty that the teacher is not saying anything particularly interesting, . or, if inter¬ esting, anything which he or she could not explain with less trouble in a language we already understand. The same remark also applies to formal instruction in writing, to exercises in translation, or to conver¬ sational instruction. The teacher then plays the role of critic in a situation which proffers no vital problem for solution. Though this is not true of wireless which gives us opportunities for getting a new slant on foreign affairs, the time we can devote to a foreign broadcast is generally short. Radio does not impose on us the sheer necessity of proficiency, as do the disadvantages of failing to reserve a seat in a railway carriage, or the need to replace a broken collar stud. Worst of all, it will not repeat itself for the benefit of the listener.

Since the need for oral recognition does not arise in an acute form unless we are living in a foreign country, these difficulties are not as discouraging as they seem. If occasion arises, any one who can read and write or speak can quickly learn to understand a language when he or she hears it spoken incessantly. So the best advice for most of us is to concentrate on reading, writing, and speaking, with what help we can get from listening-in, till we go abroad. Opportunities for conversation with children are often reassuring, when we first do so. In large English and American cities there are colonies of foreigners, many of than, tradespeople, who do not mind if we add to our purchases a bit of talk, however defective in grammar and pronunciation.

Introduction , 27

From a practical point of view, it is more important to be clear about the difference between what is involved in learning to read, and what is involved in learning to speak or to write a language. When engaged in ordinary conversation or letter-writing the vocabulary of most people, even highly educated people, is very small in comparison with the vocabulary of a newspaper or of a novel. In his professional capacity the journalist himself, or the novelist herself, uses many more words than suffice for the needs of everyday life, and the vocabulary of one author differs very, much from that of another. If only for these reasons, the vocabulary which suffices for fluent self-expression is much smaller than the vocabulary needed for indiscriminate reading. There' are many other reasons why this is so. One is the fact that ordinary speech rings the changes on a large assortment of common synonym and common expressions which are for practical purposes interchange¬ able. Such equivocations are innumerable. In everyday life, few of us pay much attention to the different shades of meaning in such expres¬ sions as: he would like to, he wants to, he prefers to, he desires to, he wishes to, he would rather .

Another important distinction is connected with the use of idiom, ie. expressions of which the meaning cannot be inferred from the usual significance of the individiial words and a knowledge of the grammatical rules for arranging them. How do you do? is an obvious example of idiomatic speech; but everyday speech is saturated with idioms which are not obvious as such. In English, the fact that a cat is in the room can also be expressed by saying there is a cat in the room . We could not infer this from the customary meaning of the word then and the other words in die sentence, as given in a pocket dictionary.

From the standpoint of a person learning a foreign language, there is a big difference between the two forms of statement. We can translate the first word for word into Dutch, German, Swedish, or Danish. The expression there is must be translated by idiomatic combinations which do not literally, ie. in the usual sense of the separate words, mean the same in any two of them. In French we have to translate there is by ily which literally means it there has. In die same context, the German would write es ist, literally it is. The Swede would say detfinns, i.e, it is found . We could not use the German es ist, as we could still use the Danish der er, if we had to translate there are no snakes in Iceland , The English idiom there is would make way for es gibt, or literally it gives .

To read a language with ease we therefore need to have a relatively Mg battery of synonyms and idioms with which we can dispense in

28

The Loom of Language

speaking or writing. To some extent, similar remarks apply to gram¬ matical conventions. In modem English it is never obligatory to use what is called the genitive case-form of the words father or day, as in my father’s hat, or his day’s wages. When speaking or writing English we are at liberty to say, the hat of my father, or his wages for the day. So we do not need to knqw the grammatical rule which tells us how to form the singular genitive father’s, or the plural genitive fathers’. A foreigner (i.e. one who does not speak the Anglo-American language) does not need to know that it is our custom to apply the rule only to names of animate objects, astronomical or calendrical terms and measures.

To this extent, it looks as if self-expression is much easier to master than a good reading knowledge of a language. In other ways it is more difficult. On the debit side of our account we have to reckon with two other features of the art of learning. One is that our knowledge of the words we use in expressing ourselves is not prompted by the situation, as our recognition of words on a printed page is helped by the context. Though the number of words and expressions we need is fewer, we need to know them so thoroughly, that we can recall them without Prompting. Another circumstance makes reading more easy than writing or speaking. Most languages carry a load of grammatical conventions which have no more value than the coccyx (vestigial tail) of the human skeleton. The rule that we add -5 to the stem of the English verb, if preceded by he, she, or it, as when we say he needs, is a convention of usage. We make no distinction between the form of the verb when we say I need, you need, we need, they need. Though we should correct a child (or a foreigner), we should know what he or she meant by saying: the tram leave at 11.15. So it contributes nothing to our facility in getting at the meaning of a sentence. From this point of view, proficient oral self-expression makes less demands than writing. Many grammatical conventions such as the apostrophe in fathers’ have no phonetic value. That is to say, we do not recognize them as sounds. This is specially true of French.

What The Loom of Language has to say about phonetics, i.e. principles of pronunciation, and the practical hints it gives, will be of little use to anyone who hopes to speak a foreign language intelligibly, unless supplemented by other sources of instruction. We can surmount the particular difficulties of oral expression painlessly with the use of gramophone (p. 260) records, if we have the money to buy them. Whether speaking or writing is easier when the gramophone is avail-

Introduction 29

able, depends chiefly on the individual. People who are good mimics will make more progress in speaking with the same expenditure of effort. Individuals of the visual or motor types, i.e. those who learn best by eye or touch, will get on better at writing. For many of us the choice is limited by whether we can find a willing correspondent or an accessible acquaintance through business connexions, or through some such organization as the educational department of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers in New York. No teacher can supply the stimulus that comes from communication which is spontaneously gratifying, because novel, to both parties.

We may sum up the essential differences between the skill required for wide reading and the skill required for proficient self-expression in this way. To express ourselves correctly we need to have a ready knowledge of a relatively small number of words — fifteen hundred or two thousand at most — and a precise knowledge of the essential gram¬ matical conventions of straightforward statement. To read widely without a dictionary, we need a nodding acquaintance with a relatively large vocabulary (fifteen thousand words may be given as a rough estimate), and a general familiarity with a wide range of grammatical conventions, which we can recognize at sight, if meaningful. We can waste an immense amount of time, if we are not clear at the outset about what this distinction implies, or if we proceed on the assump¬ tion that learning how to read is the same job as learning to express ourselves.

THE BASIC VOCABULARY

When we are reading a thriller or a historical novel, we continually meet unfamiliar words for articles of clothing and inaccessible items of a menu list. We also meet forbidding technical terms for architectural features, nautical expressions, hayseed dialects, and military slang. The fact that we should hesitate to attempt a precise definition of them does not bother us. We do not keep a dictionary at the bedside, and rarely ask a friend the meaning of a word which we have not met before. If we do meet a word for the first time, we often notice it several times during the course of the ensuing week. Sooner or later the context in which we meet it will reveal its meaning. In this way, the vocabulary of our home language continually grows without deliberate effort. In the aamr way we can acquire a good reading knowledge of a foreign language when we have mastered a few essentials. It is discouraging and wasteful to torture the meaning of every word of a foreign novel page by page.

3° The Loom of Language

and so destroy the enjoyment which the narrative supplies. To get to . this sta£e ^th the minimum of effort involves realizing clearly what the bare minimum of essential knowledge is.

Analogous remarks apply to self-expression. When we realize what is the essential minimum for one or the other, we can decide on what we have to memorize deliberately , and what we can leave to look after itself. For self-expression or for reading, the essentials are of two kinds, a minimum vocabulary of individual words, and a minimum of grammatical rules, i.e. rules about how words change and how to arrange them in a sentence. Till recently, language text-books paid little attention to the problem of how to build up this minimum vocabu¬ lary. More modern ones have faced it and tackled it by basing selection on words which are used most frequently.

There are several objections to the method of extracting from the contents of a dictionary the thousand or so words which occur most often in printed matter. One is that many of the commonest words are synonyms. So while it is true that we can express ourselves clearly with a little circumlocution if we know about fifteen hundred words of any language (i.e. about five months’ work at the rate of only ten new words a day), we might have to learn the fifteen thousand most common words before we had at our disposal all the fifteen hundred words we actually need. At best, word-frequency is a good recipe for the first step towards reading, as opposed to writing or to speaking. Even so, it is not a very satisfactory one, because the relative frequency of words varies so much in accordance with the kind of material we intend to read. Words such as hares and hawthorn, byre and bilberry, plough and pigsty, are the verbal stuffing of Nobel Prize novels. They rarely intrude into business correspondence, or even into the news columns.

The statistical method used in compiling word-lists given in the most modem text-books for teaching foreign languages evades the essence of our problem. If we want to get a speaking or writing equip¬ ment with the minimum of effort, fuss and bother, we need to know how to pick the assortment of words which suffice to convey the mean¬ ing of any plain statement. Any one who has purchased one of the inexpensive little books* on Basic English will find that C. K. Ogden has solved this problem for us. The essential list of only 850 words goes on a single sheet. Mr. Ogden did not choose these words by first asking the irrelevant question: which words occur most often in Nobel Prize novels or in Presidential orations? The question he set himself was:

* Especially Banc English: A General Introduction and Brighter Basic.

Cuneiform Tablet Recording Babylonian Legend of the Deluge

Introduction 31

what other words do we need in order to define something when we do not already know the right word for it?

For example, we can define a plough as the machine we make use of to get the ground ready for the seed. For ordinary circumstances this

will make sufficiently clear what we are talking or writing about. If not, we can elaborate our definition by using other general words like machine, or verbs like make and get, which serve for all sorts of definitions. In Basic English there are only sixteen of these verbs to learn. If We use only words in the 850-word list, it may take us a little longer than otherwise to explain what we mean; but the result is still correct, simple and • lucid English. Indeed, the fact that we have to examine the precise meaning of words which do not occur in the list compels us to be more precise than we might otherwise be.

It is possible to go so far with so few words in good English because a large number of words which belong to the verb class are not essential. We do not need bum, finish, err, because we can make a fire of, make an end of, make a mistake about. We do not need to fly in an aeroplane, drive in a cab, cycle on a bicycle, travel in a train, ride on a horse, or walk. It is enough to say that we go on foot, on a horse, or in a vehicle. For straightforward, intelligible and correct statement in other' Euro- * pean languages, we have to add between 300 and 600 words of the verb class to our list of essential words. This thrifty use of verbs is a peculiar characteristic of English and of the Celtic group among European languages. Where a Swede uses a different verb, when a child goes in a train, and when a train goes, or when an aviator goes up, and when he goes across the road, one English word suffices. If we also make allowance for the usefulness of having single ordinary names for common objects not included in the Basic Word-List, a vocabulary of less than two thousand words is sufficient for fluent self-expression in any European, tongue. This is less than a tenth of the vocabulary which we meet when reading novels indiscriminately. So reading is a very laborious way of getting the thorough knowledge of the relatively few words we need when speaking or writing.

One of the reasons why Basic is so thrifty in its use of verbs is that we can do much in English by combining some verbs with another class of words called directives , We do so when we substitute go in for enter, go up for ascend, go on for continue, go by for pass, go through for traverse, go off for leave, and go away 'for depart In modern European languages, these words recur constantly. There is a relatively small number of them. Unlike nouns (name-words), such as train or auto-

32 The Loom of Language

mobile, which are sometimes the same and often similar in different languages, they are difficult to guess. The same remarks apply to link- words such as and, but, when, because, or-, and to a large class of words called adverbs, such as often, again, perhaps, soon, here, forward. These three groups of words together make up the class which grammarians call particles. Since they are essential words for clear statement, and are not the sort of words of which we can guess the meaning, it is interest¬ ing to know how many of them there are, and how frequently they occur.

Comparison of two passages printed below illustrates a type of experiment which the reader can repeat with other materials, if or when able to recognize words put in this class. The first (a) is from the Dream of John Ball, by William Morris. The second ( b ) is from Elementary Mathematical Astronomy, by Barlow and Bryan. So the sources represent widely different types of expression and charac¬ teristics of our language. In describing the arrival of one of Wycliffe’s poor preachers, Morris tries to follow the essentially Teutonic idiom of the people for whom Wydiffe translated the Bible. The text-book specimen uses many words which are entirely foreign to the English of Wycliffe’s Bible, or to the later version dedicated to James I. They come, directly or indirectly, from Latin or Greek sources, chiefly from the former. In each passage, words which cannot be traced back to the blending of Teutonic dialects in English before the Norman Conquest^ are in italics.

(а) BUT WHEN John Ball FIRST mounted the steps OF the cross,

a lad AT some one’s bidding had run OFF TO stop the ringers, AND SO PRESENTLY the voice OF the bells fell dead, leaving ON men’s minds that sense OF blankness OR EVEN disappointment which is ALWAYS caused BY the sudden stopping OF a sound one has got used TO AND found pleasant. BUT a great expectation had fallen BY NOW ON all that throng, AND NO word was spoken EVEN IN a whisper, AND all hearts AND eyes were fixed UPON the dark figure standing straight UP NOW BY the tall white shaft OF the cross , his hands stretched OUT BEFORE him, one palm laid UPON the other. AND FOR me AS (I) made ready TO hearken, (I) felt a joy IN my soul that I had NEVER YET felt.

(б) AS the result OF observations extending OVER a large number

OF lunar months, it is found that the moon does NOT describe EXACTLY the same ellipse OVER AND OVER AGAIN, AND that THEREFORE the laws stated are ONLY approxi-

Introduction 33

mate . EVEN IN a single month the departure FROM simple elliptic motion is QUITE appreciable , OWING CHIEFLY TO

the disturbance called the Variation. The disturbance known AS the Evection causes the eccentricity TO change APPRE¬ CIABLY FROM month TO month. FURTHER, the motions described cause the roughly elliptical orbit TO change its position. The complete investigation OF these changes belongs TO the domain OF gravitational astronomy. It will be necessary HERE TO enumerate the chief perturbations ON account OF the important part they play IN determining the circumstances OF eclipses.

In these selections words belonging to the class called particles are

in capital letters. If you count the various classes of words, you can tabulate your results as foEows:

Dream of Mathematical

John Ball Astronomy

Words of Latin or Greek origin . . n per cent 30 per cent

Particles . . . . . . . . 31 per cent 27 per cent

Though the sources of the figures are so different in content, and though they use such a different stock in trade of words, they contain almost exactly the same number of particles, i.e. 29 ± 2 per cent, or nearly a third of the total. A similar estimate would not be far out for languages spoken by our nearest European neighbours. Since more than a quarter of the words we meet on the printed page are particles, it is interesting to ask how many essential, and how many common, particles we need or meet. For two reasons it is impossible to cite absolute figures. One is that people who speak some languages make distinctions which others do not recognize. Thus a Swede or a Frenchman has to use different words for the English before according as it signifies at an earlier time than, or in front of. Apart from this, some common particles are synonymous in a particular context, as when we substitute as or since for the more explicit link-word because. With due aMowance to these considerations, we may put the number of essential particles at less than one hundred, and the total number which we commonly meet in speech or reading at less than two hundred.

This leads us to a very simple recipe for getting .ahead quickly with the task of building up a word-list which will suffice for self-expression. It also shows us how to reduce by more than 25 per cent the tedium of continual reference to a dictionary when we first begin to read. Our first concern, and it is usually the last thing grammar books help us to do, should be what a foreigner has to do when he starts to learn Basic English. We should begin our study of a modem European language

B

34 The Loom of Language

by committing to memory the essential particles ; and a very small class of exceedingly common words., such as /, kims who> called pronouns (pages 96-102). At the same time we should familiarize ourselves with the less essential particles so that we recognize them when we meet them. That is to say, we should begin by learning the foreign equivalents for the eighty or so most essential ones, and, since it is always easier to recognize a foreign word we have previously met than to recall it, the English equivalent for about a hundred and fifty other most common foreign synonyms of this class. How we should choose our basic particles and pronouns, how it is best to set about memorizing them, and what we should then do, will turn up later.

ESSENTIAL GRAMMAR

First we have to decide what to do about grammar, and tins means that we must be clear about what is meant by the grammar of a language. Having a list of words of which we know the usual meaning does not get us very far unless we have knowledge of another kind. We cannot rely on the best dictionary to help us out of all our difficulties.

To begin with, most dictionaries leave out many words which we can construct according to more or less general rules from those included in them. A Spaniard who wants to learn English will not find the words father’s , fathers , or fathers’ . In their place, the dictionary would give the single word father , An ordinary dictionary does not tell you another thing which you need to know. It does not tell you how to arrange words, or the circumstances in which you choose between certain words which are closely related. If a German tried to learn English with a dictionary, he might compose the following sentence: probably will the girl to the shop come if it knows that its sweetheart there be wilL A German does not arrange words in a sentence as we do, and his choice of words equivalent to he, she , and it does not depend upon anatomy, as in our own language. So we should have some difficulty in recognizing this assertion as his own way of stating; the girl will probably come to the shop if she knows that her sweetheart will be there .

There are three kinds of rules which we need to guide us when learning a language, whether to read, to write, to speak, or to listen intelligently. We need rules for forming word derivatives/ rules for the

* Here and elsewhere derivative means any word derived from some dic¬ tionary item according to rules given in grammar books. So defined, its use in this book is the editor’s suggestion, to which the author assents with some misgiving, because philologists employ it in a more restricted sense. The justification for the meaning it has in The Loom is the absence of any other explicit word for all it signifies. '

Introduction 35

arrangement of words, and rules about which, of several related words we have to use in a particular situation. Closely allied European languages differ very much with respect to the relative importance of such rules, the difficulties which they put in the way of a beginner, and how far they are essential to a reading, writing, or speaking knowledge. Bible English has very simple and very rigid rules about arranging words, and these rules, which are nearly the same as those of Scandinavian languages, are totally different from the less simple but rigid rules of German or Dutch. Word order does not count for so much in the study of Latin and Greek authors. Latin and Greek writing abounds with derivatives comparable to loves or loved , from love, or father’s from father in English. The connexion between words of a statement depends less on arrangement than on the idiomatic (p. 201) use of derivatives. Thus it is impossible to read these languages without an immense number of rules about derivative words.

If we aim at learning a language with as little effort as possible, rules of one kind or another may be more or less important from another point of view. In English we use the derivative speaks after he, she, or it, instead of speak after I, you, we, or they. Since we pronounce the final -s, it is important for a foreigner, who wishes to conform to our customs, to know how to use this rule in speaking as well as in writing. When we use he, she, or it, we do not add an -s to spoke. So the -s is not really essential to the meaning of a statement, and a foreigner would still be able to understand a written sentence if he did not know the rule. French has more complicated rules about these endings. Their useful¬ ness depends on whether we are talking, writing or reading. If a Frenchman wants to write I speak, you speak, we speak, they speak, he uses different endings for each. The French equivalents of what is called the “present tense” (p. 103) of speak, are:

Je park I speak. Nous parlons we speak.

Tu parks you speak. Vous parlez you speak.

II park he speaks. Ils paxkwr they speak.

None of these endings adds anything to the meaning of a statement. They are just there as vestiges from the time when Romans did not use words such as I, we, they, in front of a verb, but indicated them by the ending. As such they are not relevant to a reading knowledge of French. Four of the six, italicized because they are vestiges in another sense, are not audibly distinct. They have no real existence in the spoken language. Thus some rules about derivative words are important only

3^ The Loom of Language

for writing, some for writing and speaking, others for reading as well. That many rules about correct writing deal with vestiges which have ceased to have any function in the living language does not that writing demands a knowledge of more grammar than reading. It signifies that it calls for more knowledge of a particular type. Compli¬ cated rules for the use of many French derivatives are not essential for self-expression because we can dispense with them as we dispense with the English derivative day's. For reading we need a nodding acquaintance with many rules which we are not compelled to use when writing or speaking.

The difficulties of learning the essential minimum of rules which are helpful from any point of view have been multiplied a thousandfold

Fig. 5- Bilingual Seal of King Tarqumuwa, a Hixxixe King

The Hittite language was probably Aryan. The seal shows cuneiform syllabic signs round the margin and pictograms in the centre. (See also Fig. 9.)

by a practice which has its roots in the Latin scholarship of the human¬ ists, and m the teaching of Greek in schools of the Reformation. As explained in Chapter III, Latin and Greek form large classes of derivative words of two main types called conjugations (p. 107) and declensions (p. X15). The rules embodied in these conjugations and declensions tell you much you need to know in order to translate classical authors with the help of a dictionary. Grammarians who had spent their lives in learning them, and using them, carried over the same trick into the teaching of languages of a different type. They ransacked the literature of living languages to find examples of similarities which they could also arrange in systems of declensions and conjugations, and they did so without regard to whether we really need to know them, or if so, m what circumstances. The words which do not form such derivatives.

Introduction

37

that is to say^ the particles which play such a large part in modem speech, were pushed into the background except in so far as they affected the endings (see p. 262) of words placed next to them. Any special class of derivatives characteristic of a particular language was neglected (see p. 272), The effect of this was to burden the memory with an immense store of unnecessary luggage without furnishing rules which make the task of learning easier.*

When sensible people began to see the absurdity of this system, still preserved in many grammar-books, there was a swing of the pendulum from the perfectionist to the nudist (or direct) method of teaching a language by conversation and pictures, without any rules. The alleged justification for this is that children first leam to speak without any rules, and acquire grammar rules governing the home language, if at all, when they are word-perfect. This argument is based on several misconceptions. A child’s experience is slight. Its vocabulary is pro¬ portionately small. Its idiom is necessarily more stereotyped, and its need for grammar is limited by its ability to communicate complicated statements about a large variety of things and their relations to one another. Apart from this, the child is in continuous contact with per¬ sons who can use the home language according to approved standards, and has no other means of coimnunicating intelligibly with them. So neither the conditions of, nor the motives for, learning are those of an older person making intermittent efforts to acquire a language which is neither heard nor used during the greater part of the day.

’ Since The Loom of Language is not a children’s book, there is no need to dwell on the ludicrous excesses of educational theorists who

* For the benefit of the reader who already knows some French, the follow¬ ing quotation from Dimnet (French Grammar Made Clear) emphasizes lack of common sense in text-books still used in the schools:

“Are the four conjugations equally important? Most grammars very unwisely lead the student to imagine that it is so. In reality there are (according to Hatzfeld and Darmester’s well-known Dictionary) only 20 verbs in -OIR, some 80 in -RE, 300 in -IR, and all the other verbs (about 4,000) end in -ER. Whenever the French invent or adopt a new verb, they conjugate it like aimer (in a few cases like firdr) and for this reason the two conjugations in -ER or -IR are called ‘living/ while the less important con¬ jugations in -OIR and -RE are termed ‘dead/ The conjugation in -ER is the easiest of the four, and has only two irregular verbs in daily use.”

To this we may add that there are only four common verbs which behave like recevoira the type specimen of the so-oiled third conjugation of the “regular” verbs in the school-books. The -re verbs of the fourth conjugation of “regular” verbs include four distinct types and a miscellaneous collection of others.

3^ The Loom of Language

adverted the direct method* and fooled some teachers into taking it

fro mha2TaaPPatefTeaSOaf0rkS VOgueis *arit exei*pts the teacher ^™ihgent understanding of the language which he or

niHr ?“?S' Common experience shows that adult immigrants left to

St2£ fsr of ' **, t •» -

to speak or to write correctly; and adults who wish to learn the i«n of another connrey rarely have leisnre m

type give, in „rban wha° inS

BecLe tHLdX tedi™ rf rep"i,ivc “>™=t»tio„.

voo ^ of grammar you most need depends purely on how

you intend to use a language, it is impossible to give a general retine for writmg a compact and useful grLmar-boof. The leaner who

ff far « J«wWe ™th as little inconvenience wTSv ta to ptefc and choose tan books which contain tnoieXa iSf, 7

“ *.« « ** a e“eaT£wl0ta!

judges curler, I he relative importance of nf 3

among other rhinga,„n whedter ta ^ is^Zv P

less closelv rpcfrwinUo „ , one is learning more or

in Itot °' S °™ “ mMte mastered, and if so,

of »^o™77d 7 ““ “ *“«=• ** Pannn«

«5SZf„ e?““d » Chap® III and IV

fewer than comparatively small number of rules, far

“a&= r 7 *■ *-* *» Scopt

the fact that Aar*r» tides already mentioned depends on

tor forming such denvauves as father’s rules

sS“^Tis^7w“^

out by He^Swew S\&f9T meth°d when tried out on adults was pointed

the adult posWon^of anhrfam wwTh™1- meth°d “ that il' puts utilizing, and, at the same time, doel not dK “ “° ,longcr caPaWe of special advantages. These advantages are af t0 *Rake use of his own

analysis and generalization-in shon the noweTof 80en’ the powcr of dictionary.” orl’ lne power of using a grammar and a

Introduction

39

the spelling or pronunciation of a word in one of them differs from the spelling or pronunciation of a corresponding word in another. For example, the SH in the English ship becomes SK in the Swedish skepp* which means the same thing. Similarly the Swedish for to shine is att skina . The vowel symbol JU in Swedish generally becomes I in corresponding English words. Thus att sjunga* with the ending -a common to all Swedish verbs, preceded by att (to) means to sing . In English, all verbs which change as sing to sang and sung are old Teutonic words. So we expect to find them in Swedish, which is also a Teutonic language, and can guess correctly that the Swedish equivalent of to sink would be att sjunka .

It is essential to know one thing about the use of words before we can begin to make a basic word-list. Correspondence between the use of words in different languages is never perfect. It is more or less complete according to the grammatical class to which words , are assigned. Thus numerals and name-words or nouns such as father* bird * or ship* offer little difficulty when we consult a dictionary. The greatest 'trouble arises with particles, especially directives* i.e. such words as in* on* to* at There is never absolute correspondence between such words in any two languages, even when they are very closely related as are Swedish and Danish. The English word in usually corresponds to the Swedish i* and the English on to Swedish pd* but the British expres¬ sion, in the street* is translated by pd gatan . A Swede might get into difficulties if he gave bis English hostess a word-for-word translation of en kuinnajag trdjfade (a lady I met) pd gatan .

The dictionary usually gives several synonyms for each foreign equivalent of any directive, and leaves us to find out for ourselves when to use one or the other. To tell us how to do so is one of the most important tasks of practical grammar. Thus it is quite useless to have a list of basic particles unless we know the distinctive use of each. If we are clear about this, we can recognize them when we are using a par¬ ticle of our own language in an idiomatic sense. If we do not know the correct idiomatic equivalent in another language, we can paraphrase the expression in which it occurs without using it (see p. 139).

When making our word-list for another language, we have also to be wary about one of the defects of English overcome by the small number of verbs, in Ogden’s Basic. Idiomatic English, as usually - spoken and written, has a large number of very common verbs which we should not include in the English column of our word-lists. Try* which is one of them, means in different contexts the same as (a)

40

The Loom of Language

tXb)Zdeavow^ test ’ {d)judge • Anoiba ver? common a***

I a u’ t mean: (a) luestion, (1) request, (c) invite. So an Enghsh- twor tn?€ Eng^h'Frenf dictionary wiU °ot give one equivalent for

four and foTr? ^ u "5 **** W°rds Y°U ^ find for the first svnonvms Th S£“nd*ree fordSn substitutes which are not true L . y . • Jh?.“0ra) 0f **“* ls: do not incIude such words as ask or

™rLw C mn °f “ essential word-list- In place of them put each of the more explicit words given above.

*foreif laf^may have a fixed word-order like our own, or a fixed word-order which is quite different. If the order of words is vay different from what we are accustomed to, rules of word-order

to eTcoffiT m°St “T® rUl£S °f kS grammar5 and ir is ^possible used to T 1 m Speaking> or “ rill we have got

^ie stages of learning an unfamiliar pattern of

_rwise be That is why German and Dutch, though closely related o Enghsh, offer greater difficulties to an Englishman or an American

habh f^P8 W rules of this kind is to make a

h bit of twisting an Enghsh sentence into the Germanic word-order

‘r ^ "”** “ *■»* nZZZSZ

bz an^hT ^ ; In German word-°rder> the last few words would

oe. and that makes it easier them to learn.

In the chapters which follow we shall first look at the way languages ffiffer from and resemble one another. This will help us to get Set ut the best way to begin learning any particular one. We shall then be in a position to judge whether it is best to concentrate on speaking

°f ^ “ Ae s^8> -d to decide wh^ course m P^sue m writing or speaking in order to fix the minimum vocabulary

^CS WC haVC t0 use- In 80 doing we shall also recog-

shonld f WhlCh WC °Ught not t0 Perpetuate, and merits which we should incorporate, in a language of world-citizenship.

HOW TO READ THIS BOOK

rpfT0Rl 0the" thin^ The Loom of Language aims at giving the pean neighbours, a working knowledge of the indispensable elements

maSriSv2fto^Sl\VOCabUlary f°r Self-exPression- Much of the rriini ? the subject-matter of the two chapters (VII and IX) p manly devoted to this is in tabular form. The tables illustrate asneni o the natural history of language discussed elsewhere. To get the^est

Introduction 41

out of it as a self-educator, the wisest plan is to read it through quickly. After getting a bird’s-eye view, the reader can then setde down to detailed study with pen, paper, and a book-marker for reference backwards or forwards to tables printed in some other context, as indicated by the cross-references throughout the succeeding chapters. Pen (or pencil) and paper are essential helps. We are most apt to forget what we take in by ear, least likely to forget what we learn by touch. No one who has learned to swim or cycle forgets the trick of doing so.

The languages which we shall study in greatest detail to illustrate the way in which languages grow belong to the Teutonic and Romance groups, placed in the great Indo-European family. The latter also con¬ tains the Slavonic group to which Russian belongs, the Celtic , in which Welsh and Erse are placed, and the Indo-Iranian group, which inrlufips Persian and numerous languages of India. The Teutonic group is made up of German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian dialects. The Romance languages, such as French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian, are all descendants of Latin. English is essentially a Teutonic language which has assimilated an enormous number of words of Latin origin. So Teutonic or Romance languages have most in common with English. Fortunately for us they include all the languages spoken by the nearest neighbours of English-speaking peoples on the continents of Europe and America.

The reader, who has not yet realized how languages, like different species of animals or plants, differ from and resemble one another, will find it helpful to browse among the exhibits set out as tables throughout The Loom. Above all, the home student will find it helpful to loiter in the corridors of the home museum which makes up the fourth part of the book. On its shelves there is ample material for getting clear insight into the characteristics which French, Spanish, and Italian share with their Latin parent, as also of features common to the Teutonic family. One shelf of exhibits shows Greek words which are the bricks of an international vocabulary of technical terms in the age of hydroelectricity and synthetic plastics. The diversion which the reader of the Loom can get from noticing differences and detecting essential word simi¬ larities in adjacent columns in the light of laws of language growth set forth elsewhere (Chapters V and VI) will help to fix items of an essential vocabulary with a minimum of tedium and effort.

One of the difficulties which besets the home student who starts to learn a new language is the large number of grammatical terms used in most text-books. The object of the four chapters that follow is to show

B*

42 The Loom of Language

how languages grow, and the reader who does not know many gram¬ matical terms will discover the use of important ones. The reader who already knows the sort of grammar taught in schools and colleges may make the discovery that grammar is not intrinsically dull, and may learn something about the principles which must motivate a rational judgment about language-planning for a world at peace.

The popular myth that it is more difficult for an adult than for a child to learn languages has been disproved by experimental research carried out by modern educationists. Much of the effort put into early education is defeated by the limitations of the child’s experi¬ ence and interests. The ease with which we remember things depends largely on the ease with which we can link them up to things we know already. Since the adult’s experience of life and the adult’s vocabulary are necessarily more varied than those of the child, the mental equip¬ ment of the adult provides a far broader basis of association for fresh facts. Thus an intelligent grown-up person approaches the study of a new language with knowledge of social customs and of history, with a world picture of change and growth gained by general reading or study, and with a stock of foreign words, foreign idioms or derivatives of borrowed roots gleaned from daily reading about international affairs (cf. canard , demarche. Quad d’Orsay, Wilhdmstrasse, blitzkrieg), adver¬ tisements of proprietary products (glaxo, aspirin, cutex, innoxa, oval- tine), or technical innovations ( cyanamide , carbide, hydrogenation, radio-therapy, calories, vitamins, selenium ). Children learn their own language and a foreign one pari passu. The adult can capitalize the knowledge of his or her own language as a basis for learning a new one related to it. Above all, an adult can visualize a distant goal more easily than a child.

One of the difficulties with which a child has to contend is the haphazard way in which we pick up the home language. Children acquire a vocabulary with little deliberate elucidation from parents or from brothers and sisters, and they do so in a restricted environment Which exempts them from dangers of misunderstanding in a larger, less intimate one. Before school age our language diet is nobody’s business. So the power of definition and substitution, so essential to rapid progress in a foreign language, comes late in life, if at all. Indeed most of us never realize the inherent irrationalities and obscurities of natural language until we begin to grapple with a foreign one. The discovery may then come as a shock, discouraging further effort.

Many difficulties which beset the beginner are due to the fact that

Introduction 43

few of us are alert to tricks of expression peculiar to our own language. In fact we need to know something about the language we habitually speak before we can learn another one with the minimum of effort. The object of Chapter IV of The Loom is to give first aid to the home student who is not as yet language-conscious in this sense. The reader who intends to use it as a preliminary to the study of a new language will find helpful hints in it to repay what has been an exploit of endur¬ ance for the publisher and type-setter. The reader who is on the look¬ out for a bright book for the bedside will do well to give it the go-by or drink an old-fashioned one before getting down to it.

PART I

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF LANGUAGE

CHAPTER 11

THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET

Language implies more than learning to signal like a firefly or to talk like a parrot. It means more than the unique combination which we call human speech It also includes how man can communicate across continents and down the ages through the impersonal and permanent record which we call writing . One difference between speech and writing is important to anyone who is trying to learn a foreign language* especially if it is closely related to a language already familiar.

.The spoken language of a speech community is continually changing. Where unfformity exists* local dialects crop up. In less than a thousand years what was a local dialect may become the official speech of a nation which cannot communicate with its neighbours without the help of interpreter or translator. Writing does not respond quickly to this process. It may not respond at all. The written word is more conservative than speech. It perpetuates similarities which are no longer recognizable when people speak* and where two languages have split apart in comparatively recent times* it is often easy to guess the meaning of written words in one of them* if we know the meaning of corresponding words in the other. Indeed we can go far beyond guess¬ work* if we know something about the history of sound correspondence (Chapter V* p. 185). To make the best of our knowledge we should also know something about the evolution of writing itself.

The reader will meet illustrations of this again and again in subse¬ quent chapters (especially Chapter VI)* and will be able to make good use of rules given in them while wandering about the corridors of the miniature language museum of Part IV. One example must suffice for the present. The German word for water is Wasser * which looks like its English equivalent on paper. As uttered* it does not. The Ger¬ man letter W stands now for our sound % as the German V in Voter (father) stands for our / sound. The reason for tins is that the pro¬ nunciation of the sound represented by W in older German dialects (including Old English) has changed since what is now called German became a written language. Before German became a written language another change of pronunciation was taking place in the region of southern and middle Germany. Spelling incorporated this change of

4-8 The Loom of Language

the t-sound to a hiss represented by ss, as also various other changes (p. 231) which took place about the same time.

Thus the home student of living languages can reduce the difficulties of learning by getting to know:

(d) how similarities of spelling which do not correspond to similarities of pronunciation may conserve identity of words in related languages that have drifted far apart;

(b) how to recognize borrowed words by spelling conventions charac¬

teristic of the language from which they came;

(c) how different ways of spelling equivalent words, once identical,

reflect changes of pronunciation which involve nearly all words at a certain stage in die divergence of two languages with a common ancestry.

Broadly speaking, we may distinguish between two different kinds of writing. One includes picture writing and logographic writing. The others sound or phonetic writing. We can divide the latter into syllable writing and alphabet writing. Picture writing and logographic writing have no direct connexion with sounds we make. That is to say, people can communicate by picture writing or logographic writing without being able to understand one another when they talk. This is not true of Old Persian cuneiform (Fig. 3), of the writing of ancient Cyprus (Figs. 13 and 14), or of modem Japanese Kana (Figs. 44 and 45). Such writing is made up of symbols which stand for the sounds we make when we separate words into syllables . They do not stand for separate objects or directions, as do the symbols of picture or logographic writing. Individually, they have no significance when isolated from the context in which they occur. The same is true of alphabet writing, which is a simplified form of syllable writing. The* dissection of the words has gone much further, and the number of elementary symbols is less. So it is easier to master.

This fact about the alphabet is of great social importance. In com¬ munities which now use alphabets, ability to learn to write and to read what is written is generally accepted as the limit of normal intelligence. We regard people who cannot be taught to do so as mentally defective. This is another way of saying that the alphabet has made the record of human knowledge accessible to mankind as a whole. The use of picture or logographic scripts, like early syllable writing, has always been the prerogative of a privileged caste of priests or scholars. The invention of the alphabet made it possible to democratize reading, as the invention of the number 0 made it possible to democratize the art of calculation. Unlike* the invention of zero, tins liberating innovation has only * Mathematics for the Million » pp. 65, 286, 332.

The Story of the Alphabet 49

happened once In the history of mankind. Available evidence seems to show that all the alphabets of the world are traceable to one source.

Fig. 6, — British Traffic Signs

Nos. 3, 4, 6, 7, S show pictograms. No. 5 is an ideogram (logogram) No, x contains an ideogram with alphabetic writing. No. 2 shows a pictogram ideogram, and alphabetic writing.

5° The Loom of Language

They came into use about three thousand years ago; but the inherent possibilities of an invention which wc now recognize as one of the out¬ standing cultural achievements of mankind incubated slowly during the. course of successive millenia. The first peoples who used alpha¬ betic writing did so for short inscriptions in which individual letters might be written upside down or reversed sideways, with little con¬ sideration for the reader (Fig. 38). Even when a secular literature spread through the Greek and Roman world, the written language remained a highly artificial product remote from daily speech. Greek writing was never adapted to rapid reading, because Greek scribes never consistently separated words. The practice of doing so did not become universal among Roman writers. It became a general custom about the tenth century of our own era. When printing began, crafts¬ men took pride in the ready recognition of the written word, and punctuation marks, which individual writers had used sporadically without agreement, came into their own. Typographers first adopted an agreed system of punctuation, attributed to Aldus Manutius, in the sixteen* century. In the ancient world *e reader had to be his own palaeographer. To appreciate *e gap between modern and ancient reading, compare *e sentences printed below:

KINGCHAIlIESWALICEDANDTALKEDI'IALFANIIOUKAFTERIilSHEADWASClJTOFF.

King Charles walked and talked. Half an hour after his head was

cut off.

To do justice to the story of the alphabet we must start by examining

*e meaning of a few technical terms. Word is itself a technical term. It is not easy to define what we mean by a separate word in all cir¬ cumstances. So let us imagine what a traveller would do if he came to live wi* an illiterate tribe in *e interior of Borneo. By pointing at things around he might soon learn which sounds stand for picturable objects. By comparing similar things he might also learn to recognize sounds signifying qualities such as red, rough, or round. By watching people togeffier he could also detect sounds which are signals of action like. James! Here! Come! Hurry! All this would not make a complete inventory of *e elements of a continuous conversation. If the language contained words corresponding to and, during, mean¬ while, for, or according, he would take a long while to decide how to use *em, because they never stand by *emselvcs. For the same reason it would also be difficult to decide whether to regard them as separate words.

The Story of the Alphabet 51

The difficulty of arriving at a definition of what we call separate words is also complicated by the fact that languages are not static. Elements of speech once recognized as distinct entities become fused* as when we condense I am to Fm, or do not to don't* So long as you write 1 am in the form Fm, you signify that it is to be regarded as two separate words glued together. When you write it in the form Im, as Bernard Shaw writes it* you signify that we do not break it up when we say it. Thus we can distinguish between words of three kinds, Some are the smallest elements of speech of which ordinary people can recognize the meaning. Some* separated by careful study* are products of grammatical comparison of situations in which they recur. People of a pre-literate community would not recognize them as separate elements of speech. We recognize others as separate* merely because of the usual conventions of writing. The ’missionary or trader who first commits the speech of a non-literate people to script has to use his own judgment about what are separate words* and his judgment is necessarily influenced by his own language.

For the present* we had better content ourselves with the statement that words are what are listed in dictionaries . According to the conven¬ tions of most English dictionaries* godfather, father, and god are different words* and apples is a derivative (footnote, p. 34) of the word apple. We shall see later why dictionaries do' in fact list some noises as words* and omit other equally common noises* i.e. derivatives in the sense defined on p. 34. Since dictionaries are our usual source of accessible necessary information* when we set out to learn a language we shall put up with their vagaries for the time being.

When highbrows want a word for all pronounceable constituents of a printed page* each with a distinct meaning or usage of its own* they may speak of them as vocables , Vocables include words listed in dictionaries* and derivatives which are not. We do not necessarily pronounce two vocables in a /different way. Thus several vocables correspond to the spelling and "pronunciation of bay, as in dogs that bay at the moon, a wreath of bay leaves, or the Bay of Biscay . Such vocables which have the same sound* but do not mean the same thing* are called homophones. We do not speak of them as homophones if derived from the same word which once had a more restricted mean¬ ing. Thus boy, meaning immature male of the human species* and boy, meaning juvenile male employee* are not homophones in the strict sense of the term* as .are sun and son.

To discuss scripts intelligibly we need to have some labels for parts

52 The Loom of Language

Fxg. 7. PicTOGRAPfflc Writing of Aztec Civilization in Mexico

53

The Story of the Alphabet

of words. When we separate a word with a succession of vowels into the bricks which come apart most easily as units of pronunciation, we call each brick a syllable . A syllable usually contains a vowel. Thus manager is a tri-syllabic word made up of the syllables ma-, -na-, -ger, or, if you prefer it otherwise: man-, - ag -, and -er. Syllables need have no recognizable meaning when they stand by themselves. It is an accident that the syllables man and age in the word manage have a meaning when they stand by themselves. It has nothing to do with the past history of the word, of which the first syllable is connected with the Latin mams for hand, hence manual . If we break up manliness into man-, -U-, and -ness, the fact that man has a meaning is not an accident* It is the foundation-brick of the word, which was originally built up as follows :

man + ly = manly

manly + ness = manliness

Such syllables which have a meaning relevant to the meaning of the whole word are called roots, though root-words are not necessarily single syllables. The part -ly, common to many English vocables, comes from the Old English word (lie) for like . Originally it stuck to names as compounds signifying qualities, i.e. manly is man-like , Later the process extended to many other words (e.g. normal — normally ) long after -ly had lost identity as a separate element of speech. We do not call syllables of this sort roots. We call them prefixes or suffixes according as they occur like un- in unmanly , at the beginning, or like -ly, at the end. Suffixes or prefixes may be made up of more than one syllable either because they came from words of more than one syllable (e.g. anti-), or because the process of adding an affix (prefix or suffix) has happened more than once. Thus manliness has a bi-syllabic suffix.

The suffix -ly in unmanly reminds us that the line between an affix and a root is not a clear-cut one. Affixes are the product of growth. In this process of growth three things occur. We call one of them agglutination^ or gluing of native words together. A second is analo¬ gical extension . The third, which is self-explanatory, is borrowing words like pre or anti from another language.

The same native word may combine with several others to form a class of compound words like churchyard or brickyard, in which the two roots contribute to the whole meaning. At a later stage, the ori-

* Agglutination has also a more restricted meaning (p. 93) which is not important in this context.

54

The Loom of Language

(See also Mathematics for the Million , p. 331, and Science fjr the Cit:

The Story of the Alphabet 55

ginal meaning of one root may begin to lose its sharp outline. People may then attach it to other roots without recalling its precise meaning when it stands alone. This process* which is the beginning of ana¬ logical extension, goes on after the original meaning of an affix has ceased to be dimly recognizable. The affix may tack itself on to roots merely because people expect by analogy that words of a particular sort must end or begin in a particular way. The large class of English words such as durable and commendable, or frightful and soulful, are in an early stage of the process. The suffix - able has not yet lost its individuality as a separate vocable* though it has a less clear-cut mean¬ ing than it had* when the habit of gluing it on to other words began. The suiiix - fid is still recognizable as a contraction of full, which preserves its literal value in handful

Such words as friendship or horsemanship illustrate a further stage of the process. They belong to a large class of Teutonic words such as the German Wissenschaft, Swedish vetenskap, or Danish videnskab, which have glued on them a suffix formed from a common Teutonic root word meaning shape. Thus the Swedish vetenskap, Danish Videnskab, or German Wissenschaft, for which we now use the Latin science, is really wit-shape . In such words a suffix signifying shape or form jn a more or less metaphorical sense of the word has tacked itself on to roots to confer a more abstract meaning. The - head in godhead and maidenhead has no more connexion with the anatomical term than the - ship in lordship has to do with ocean transport. Like the - hood in widowhood , it is equivalent to. the German -Jieit, Swedish -het, and Danish -hed in a large class of abstract words for which the English equivalents often have the Latin suffix -ity. In the oldest known Teutonic language* Gothic* haiduz (manner) was still a separate word.

The ultimate bricks of a vocable are represented, by the vowel symbols (in English script a, e, i, o, u) and the consonants which correspond to the remaining letters of our Roman alphabet. In com¬ parison with other European languages* spoken English is astonishingly rich in simple consonants. In fact we have twenty-three simple con¬ sonants in the spoken language for which only sixteen symbols are available. Three of them (Q* C* X) are supernumerary and one (J) stands for a compound sound. English dialects have at least twelve simple vowels. For these we have five symbols supplemented by w after (as in saw), or y before any one of them (as in yet). A complete Anglo-American alphabet with a symbol for each simple vowel and

56 The Loom of Language

consonant would demand between forty and fifty symbols to accom¬ modate the range found in all the dialects taken together.

Fig. 9.— ■Ancient Picture Writing of the Hittites from an

Inscription at Hama in Syria

PICTURE WRITING AND SYLLABLE WRITING

In so far as the difficulties of modern spelling arise from the fact that we have too few symbols, the difficulties of the earliest peoples were opposite to ours. The earliest scripts consisted of separate symbols for individual vocables, and were therefore excessively cumbersome. These word symbols, of which the earliest Egyptian and Chinese writing is made up, were of two kinds: pictograms and

The Story of the Alphabet 57

logograms. A pictogram is a more or less simplified picture of an object which can be so represented. A logogram may be: (i) a pictorial symbol substituted for something which we cannot easily represent by a picture; (ii) any sign used to indicate an attribute of a group (red, age, movement, noise, wet), or a direction for action, such as Halt!, Major Road Ahead!, or Go Slow!

British traffic signs (Fig. 6) for motorists illustrate all such symbols. A thick line for the main road with a thinner one crossing it is a pictogram for a cross-road. The conventionalized picture of the torch of learning is a pictorial logogram which stands for school. The triangle and circle which stands for Stop! has no obvious association with any other picturable object. Like the number 4, it is a pure logogram. We still use some logograms in printed books. Besides numbers, we have signs such as &, £, and $. The signs <J, $, and ^ in books on astronomy stand for Mars, Venus, and Mercury. In books on biology they stand for male, female, and hermaphrodite. The plural forms are (males), etc. Similarly the Chinese use the sign * for tree, and write £ for forest. Such signs as <J, ?, mean the same to astronomers and biologists all over the world, whether they do or do not speak the same language.

The expression picture-writing, in contradistinction to logographic writing, is a little misleading. Anything which we can properly call writing, in contradistinction to cave-painting, sculpture, or other ways of recording events visibly, must be made up of something more than conventional drawings of picturable objects. When we speak of picture-writing as the most primitive level of script (Figs. 5 and 7-10), we mean a more or less explicit record or instruction set forth in symbols, most of which are either pictograms or logograms of the School Ahead type. If it is not possible to represent elements of speech by simple pictures, it may be possible to suggest them represented by the picture of an object which we associate with them. Thus we hopefully associate (Fig. 6) the torch of learning with a building used for scholastic purposes. The Chinese sign for not is %, originally a line drawn over the top of a plant. This suggests that something got in the way of its growth — obstruction, not progress, not getting bigger, just not.

When we speak of logographic writing, we mean writing in which symbols for picturable objects, general characteristics, or directions for action have lost their explicit pictorial meaning. We can no longer guess what they do mean unless we have some key. This does not

58 The Loom of Language

mean that all logograms start by being pictures of definite objects. At least one class of logograms (or ideograms , as some people call them) is as old as the art of writing. It seems clear that the chief practical advantages of die art of writing at a primitive level of human culture are twofold. One is to put on record necessary information which we should otherwise forget. The other is to convey directions or information to a distance when the carrier might forget them or betray them. The former is almost certainly the older of the two. The priesdy caste, as the custodian of a calendar based on centuries of precise observation, appear on the scene at the dawn of Egyptian civilization. Men began to keep accurate records of the seasons as soon as there was settled agriculture; and it is unlikely that the need for written messages arose before man began to establish setried grain¬ growing communities. As man progressed from a primitive hunting or food-gathering stage to herdmanship and skilled agriculture, the need for counting his flocks and keeping track of seasonal pursuits forced him to prime his memory by cutting notches on sticks or making knots in cords.

We may thus take it for granted that one dass of logograms, the number symbols, are as old as, and possibly much older, than any other elements of the most ancient forms of writing. The most ancient number symbols are pictorial in the sense that the first four Roman numerals (I, II, III, IIII) are just notches on the tally stick. Comparison of the relics of the temple civilizations of Central America, Mesopo¬ tamia, and Egypt, indicates that the impulse to record social events was mixed up with the primary function of the priests as calendar- makers at a time when the person of the priest-king was the focus of an elaborate astronomical magic and calendar ritual. Thus picture- writing was necessarily the secret lore of a priestly caste and, as such, a jealously guarded secret. Since picture-writing is too cumbersome to convey more than the memory can easily retain, its further elabora¬ tion to serve the needs of communication at a distance may have been due to the advantages of secrecy. Whether this is or is not true, the fact that writing was originally a closely guarded secret had important consequences for its subsequent evolution.

The ancient calendar priesthoods had a vested interest in keeping knowledge from the common people. The impulse to preserve secrecy possibly encouraged the gradual degradation of conventional pictures into logograms, which, like the elements of modem Chinese writing, have lost their power to suggest what they stand for. In Chinese scripts

The Story of the Alphabet 59

we have examples of logographic writing still largely the monopoly of a scholar caste. Scripts of this class share one important characteristic with picture-writing. The individual symbols have no necessary con¬ nexion with the sounds associated with them . This is not difficult to understand if you recall one class of logograms which still survive on

Fig. xo.— Discus of Phaestos showing as yet Undeciphered Pictographic Writing op the Ancient Cretan Civilization

the printed page. The Englishman associates with the ideogram 4 the noise which we write as four with our imperfect alphabet, or fo: in modern phonetic script (p. 83). The Frenchman writes it quatrey standing for the sound katr. The Englishman and the Frenchman both recognise its meaning, though they associate it with different sounds, and a Frenchman could learn to interpret the English traffic signs from a French book without knowing a word of English. In the same way.

6o

The Loom of Language

— T	— nr				I German. 1
	(;nv...k 6	Invotnc	Irish	Latin'	blade letter
	B hetk	Bp A:/')	B6	h	B	S b
d	"T ddldk	AS dclu	An	6	D	'£> h
{		<j> phi.		E	F
8 h	5 qimeL rr u	Fy gamma	r r	5 ll	G H	f •? 5 1)
k	kzf	Kk Zappa	Kk	c	C	St t
l	bmi	AX lambda.	JI ji	U	Ju	ii l
111	tS Ttrni	M p mu	Mm	111	M	9R m
n	J mui	N V TILL	Hh	Tin	N	91 n
p	£> pe	Htt pi	rin	P	Y	%*
s	5 samk	Z<s;$ sipnvi	Cc		S	fc> j j?
t	Jl tan	T T tdll	Tt	t:	T	Tt
v	1 vm	dkimmi	B B		,, ...	3} 0
w		—		(V)	-- ....
z	^ zm/iw	z? Z	3s		Z
/•	s yod	,	— —			91 r
for	lh"l resh	P 0 rh 0	Pp	Rp	R
s	tJf slu.Il	1	in m	-	. -	Gcf),frf)
D "5	z z		DKw	z	z	W* ....
0 4	■ . - “	0 0 ihdec	.	—	---
0 if	mm w mm —	M ,»» . m- -mm	w— —	---
	— —	Hh
-ps		Xljj psi	---	— -
Mi	TT chetii	X x chi.	XT A X	... ...		Cl), cl)
jh	| w,	....	Hfm	...»		X a-
hs	„	Zl f xi			X
ts	V tsdud&	.....	IU	... . ,		3 >
Jew	r p qjmf	«... «			QV	r fju i ,

Fig, ii. — Consonant Symbols of some Contemporary Alitiabeis

Pronunciation changes in the course of centuries. So it is somewhat arbitrary to give, fixed values to Greek symbols which have retained roughly the same shape for two thousand five hundred years. It seems clear that <j> originally stood for an aspirated p rendered as PH in Latin transcription. The symbol for p (7 r) replaces in the first syllable of the reduplicated past tense form of verbs

The Story of the Alphabet 61

people from different parts of China can read the same books without being able to utter any mutually intelligible words.

Eventually the priestly scripts of Egypt incorporated a third class of signs as phonograms. The learned people began to make puns. That is to say, they sometimes used their picture symbols to build up words of syllables which had the sound associated with them. With a code of such pictograms we can combine for lee with & for leaf to suggest the word belief by putting a frame round them thus:

This is just what the Egyptians sometimes did. The constituents of this compound symbol have now no connexion with the meaning of the word. We can know the meaning of the word only if we know what it sounds like when spoken.

A trick of this sort may be a stage in the development of one kind of phonetic script called syllable smiting. The characteristic of syllable writing is that each symbol, like the letters of our alphabet, stands for a sound which has no necessary meaning by itself. Syllable writing in this sense did not evolve directly out of Egyptian picture scripts. Whether the first step towards phonetic combinations of this kind was part of the priestly game of preserving script as a secret code, whether the highbrow pastime of making puns and puzzles encouraged it, we do not know. Either because they lacked a sufficient social motive for simplifying their script, or because the intrinsic difficulties were too great, the Egyptian priests never took the decisive step to a consistent system of phonetic writing.

There is no reason to suppose that peoples who have taken this step have done so because they are particularly intelligent or enter¬ prising. Many useful innovations are the reward of ignorance. When illiterate people, ignorant of its language, come into contact with a community equipped with script, they may point at the signs and listen to the sounds the more cultured foreigner makes when he utters

which betrin with the latter (cf. Aucu == I loose and XcXvko. = I have loosed with Spat to 5 1 declare and rr e<f>paica = I have declared). This ph sound drifted to¬ wards / which takes its place in many Latin words of common i Aryanances i ry, e.g. sLa> - -- fero (I carry) and foax np = fr?* (clansman, brother). With the/ value it had in late Roman times, in technical terms from Greek roots and 1 modern Greek, it went into the Slavonic alphabet. By then the sound corre¬ sponding to 8 had drifted towards our v, its value m modem Greek. The symbol F occurs only in early Greek, probably with a value eqmvalent to W> though evidently akin to the Hebrew vau and Latin t.

62 The Loom of Language

them in his own language. In this way they learn the signs as symbols of sounds without any separate meaning. Imagine what might have happened if the English had used public notices in picture writing during the wars of Edward III. Let us also suppose that the French had been wholly illiterate at the time. When a Frenchman pointed to the pictogram the informative Englishman would utter - the sound cock, corresponding to the French coq. When he pointed at the logogram he would get the response lord, sufficiently near to the French vocable lourdc, which means heavy. Without knowing precisely what significance an Englishman attached to the symbols, he might proceed to make up the combination ■m standing

VOWELS’-

Slavonic	A a. Bs	Eel-lw	li	OoYy	10 10	Si*	M bi
(yredc _	Aoc1	Ee2H93	It4	Oo'Cluf	Uuy
Roman- -	A	E	I	0	V
InsL	a	e	J	o	u
(jerraaiv ...	2F a	<£e		£) _	Hu
1 alpha.	43 rf	b micron	(hf!h’<y L '//	piult Ul>	• l J

Hebrew. symbols with $akph Xtayin U'tk

no equivalents m our i < , J

alphabets . throat sounds

Fig. i2.— Vowel Symbols op Some Contemporary Alphabets

for coquelourde (meaning a Pasque-flower) in the belief that he was learning the new English trick of writing things down.

Needless to say, this is a parable. We must not take it too literally. We know next to nothing about what the living languages of dead civilizations were like; but one thing is certain. Transition from a cumbersome script of logograms, or from a muddle of pictograms, logograms, and phonographic puns, to the relative simplicity of syllable writing, demands an effort which no privileged class of scholar-priests has ever been able to make. It has happened when illiterate people with no traditional prejudices about the correct way of doing things have come into contact with an already literate culture. Whether they can succeed in doing so depends on a lock and key relation between the structure of the living languages involved in the contact between a literate and non-literate culture. They can succeed if, and only if,

The Story of the Alphabet 63

it is easy to break up most words they use into bricks with roughly the same sounds as whole words in the language equipped with the parent logographic script.

Our most precise information about this lock and key relationship is based on adaptation of Chinese script by the Japanese. In order to understand it the first thing to be clear about is the range of possible combinations of elementary sounds. In round numbers, a language such as ours requires twenty distinct consonants and twenty vowels including diphrhongs. This means that if our language were made up entirely of monosyllabic words of the same open type as me, or exclu¬ sively of the same open type as at, we could have a vocabulary of 20 x 20, or four hundred words, without using any compound con¬ sonants such as st, tr, or kw. To a large extent Chinese vernaculars (p. 423) consist of open syllables like rny and so. The Chinese have to do everything with about four hundred and twenty basic words.

The small size of its vocabulary is not a necessary consequence of the fact that Chinese is monosyllabic. If a language consisted exclu¬ sively of monosyllabic words belonging to the closed type such as bed, more common in English, we could make roughly 20 x 20 x 20, or eight thousand words, without using double consonants. A language such as English can therefore be immensely rich in monosyllables without being exclusively made up of them. Chinese is able to express so much with about four hundred and twenty monosyllables, partly because it makes combinations like the under-graduate slang god-box for church, partly because it is extremely rich in homophones like our words flea-fiee or right-mite, and pardy because it is able to dis¬ tinguish some homophones by nuances of tone such as we make when we say “yes” as a symbol of deliberate assent, interrogation, suspense or fryrjrpmftnt, ironical agreement or boredom. The number of homo¬ phones in the Chinese language is enormous, and this is inevitable because of the small number of available vocables. A Chinese dic¬ tionary lists no less than ninety-eight different meanings for the sound group, represented by CHI. Of these ninety eight, no less than forty eight have the same rising tone corresponding roughly to our questioning “ye-es?”.

‘The Chinese way of representing a grove or forest by combining the picture symbols for tree illustrates one device by which a com¬ paratively rich equipment of written words is built up by pairing a relatively small battery-Le. 214 in all-of elementary logograms called radicals (see Fig. 42)- Mere juxtaposition of the picture symbol

64 The Loom of Language

for each of them may represent a quality or an activity common to two objects. Thus the logogram for the word MING, which can mean bright , is made up of the character for the moon next to the character for the sun. Originally the characters were recognizable picture symbols, and the composite sign would then have been something

Combined with	a	e	t	0	“ I
Alone	. *	*	X	ZL	sy\ rp
K |	t i	f	r	n a	X X )Tc
T 1	jpswMwp wwwwj	i i!i		F ^7\	Tfr Jf)
P |	4= cj:	5		5 OvA	<& UL
r 1 v\ n	8 RA	LnrJ^ ^	4-	/TTn XC\
R			(a	&X°<	lc \c )!
M	JC	X*	M T		*
N	_	iji jsj ^	# £	\X?r	pkc®
J	0 ZN	1 \
F.V		nr	X	7 f 7
S	S> b		* 7	& Y •	Dk
Z	X	X <?>		55
X !	X<«	e e

Fig. 13.-— The Ancient Cyfriotic Syllabary Showing the five vowel signs in the top row and the symbols for open syllables made by combining any or all of them with the consonant sound represented by the letter in the left hand vertical column* Thus the symbols of the second row run: ka9 ke} ki3 ko3 ku .

like this: 0 G In the course of centuries the basic picture symbols have become more and more conventionalized* partly owing to chanees in the use of writing instruments (style* brush* wood blocks), or of materials (bone* ink* paper),

A second sort, of compound characters (Fig. 43) is a half-hearted step towards sound writing* based on the time-honoured device of punning.

Fig 14. _ Stone Inscription from Paphos (Eighth Century b.c.)

The language is a Greek dialect. The script is Cypriotic (Fig. 13). To represent the compound consonants of Greek words., the practice was to use two syllables with the two appropriate consonants and die same vowel value, e tr the equivalent for the name Smsikmtes in which we have st and kr was sa . ta . si . ha . ra . te . sc. The difficulties and ambiguities arising from the use of a syllable script as the written medium of an Aryan language come out in the first six lines.

CYPRIOTIC SYLLABARY

GREEK SCRIPT

’ A vSfio i v rvyja Aoyapm

Xapjradu)i> Za> Fap X/syaXuOeo) <PtXoSap«>

'a£af>Fo)v Z(»F opal

Andro in (good) fortune. The reckoning of the torches was the business of ZovarV. Megalotheos and Philodamos; that of what had been gathered by collection the business of Zovoros. , . .

a-to-ro i-tu-ka-i e-se-lo-ka-ri-ja la-pa-to-ne zo-va-ra- mi-ka-la-te-o pi-lo-ta a-za-rci-vo-ne zo-vo-ro

The Story of the Alphabet 65

One member of the pair suggests the meaning of the character in a general way. The other stands for a homophone, that is to say a word which has (or originally had) the same sound as the word represented by the pair taken together. A fictitious example, based on two English words which have familiar homophones, illustrates this trick. Suppose we represent the words sun and buoy respectively by the picture symbols O and as biologists use the character <J for male . What the Chinese do by this method would then be equivalent to using the combination $ O for our word son (which has the same sound as sun) or for boy . It is not certain how this practice arose. One possibility is that it developed in response to the way in which a word widens its meaning by the process called metaphorical extension . What this means is illustrated by our word %, which originally meant -a sexually immature male of the human species, and may also mean a son or a juvenile employee.

All this has led to the accumulation of an immense number of complex signs. There are between four and seven thousand relatively common ones. Anyone who wants to be an accomplished scholar of Chinese must learn them. Among the four thousand used most com¬ monly, about three-quarters consist of a homophone ^element and a classifier analogous to the symbol for male in the hypothetical model cited above. Owing to changes of pronunciation in the course of cen¬ turies, the homophone part, which was once a sort of phonogram, or sound symbol, may have lost its significance as such. It no longer then gives a due to the spoken word. To-day Chinese script is almost purely logo- graphic. People who have the time to master it associate the characters with the vocables they themselves utter. These vocables are now very different in different parts of China, and have changed beyond recog¬ nition since the script came into use many centuries back. So educated Chinese who cannot converse in the same tongue can read the same notices in shops, or the same writings of moralists and poets who lived more than a thousand years ago.

The remarkable thing about Chinese script is not so much that it is cumbersome according to our standards, as that it is possible to reproduce the content of the living language in this way. This is so because the living language is not like that of any European people, except the British (p. 122). The Chinese word is invariable, like our “verb” must It does not form a cluster of derivatives like lusts, lusted , lusting, lusty * What we call the grammar of an Indo-European language is largely about the form and choice of such derivatives, and it would

c

66 The Loom of Language

be utterly impossible to learn a logographic script with enough characters to accommodate all of them. A large proportion of the affixes of such derivatives are useless, e.g. the -s in lusts (see p. 96). So presumably they would have no place in a logographic script. A large proportion of our affixes do the same job, as illustrated by paternity, fatherhood, reproduction, guardianship. The same character would therefore serve for a single cluster. Hence a logographic script in which Frenchmen or Germans could communicate with their fellow citizens would be a code based on conventions quite different from the grammar of the spoken language.

The Japanese, who got their script from China, speak a language which is totally different from Chinese dialects. They use symbols (Figs. 44 and 45) for syllables, i.e. for the sounds of affixes which go to make up their words, and not merely for objects, directions, qualities, and other categories of meaning represented by separate vocables. The sounds corresponding to these symbols are more complex than those represented by our own letters, with four of which (a, e, m, t) we can make up eleven monosyllables (a, am, at, ate, eat, mate, meat, me, mat, met, tame, tea, team). So syllable writing calls for a larger battery of symbols than an alphabet, reformed or otherwise. None the less, it is much easier to learn a syllable script than a logographic script in which the words have individual signs. The surprising thing about Japanese script is the small number of characters which make up its syllabary.

We have examined the essential characteristics of the Chinese key. Let us now examine the Japanese lock, that is to say, the word-pattern into which symbols corresponding to Chinese root words had to fit. We can do this best, if we compare Japanese with English. If all English words were made up like father, we could equip it with a syllable script from the logographic or picture scripts of any language with a sufficiently rich collection of open monosyllables like fa: (far) and 5a (the). This would take at most about four hundred signs. The same would be true if all English words were built to the same design as adage (ad + age) in which two open syllables with a final consonant combine. The problem is immensely more complicated if a language contains a high proportion of words like handsome or mandrill. If there are twenty consonants and twenty vowels all pronounceable closed monosyllables then exceed eight thousand. This means that the word-pattern of the language which borrows its script decides whether the language itself can assimilate a syllabary which is not too cumbersome for use.

The Story of the Alphabet 67

Japanese* like Ymrmh and Hungarian* has its place in a dass called agglutinating languages. We shall leam more about their characteristics in later chapters. Here it is enough to say that agglutinating languages are languages of which root words can attach to themselves a relatively small range of affixed syllables (pp. 196-200). The significance of the affixes is easy to recognize* and the affixes themselves are relatively few and regular . Thus words derived from the same roots grow by' addition of a limited number of fixed syllables like the 4ng which we add to lovey haveygoy bind and thinky in loving * havings goings binding * and thinking . They do not admit of the great variety among corresponding derivatives of another class such as lovedy had9 gone * bounds thought This* of course*means that the word-pattern of an agglutimtinglanguage is necessarily more1' simple than that of such languages as our own.

The sound pattern of Japanese words is much simpler and more regular than that of English for another and more significant reason. Affixes of Japanese words are all simple vowels or open monosyllables consisting like pea of a simple consonant followed by a simple vowel. The only exception to this rale is that some syllables* like some Chinese words* end in n. Thus the familiar place names yo-ko-ha-ma or pu-ji-ya-ma are typical of the language as a whole. We can split up all Japanese words in this way* and the number of possible syllables is limited by the narrow range of dear-cut consonants and vowels— fifteen of the former and five of the latter. This accounts for the possible existence of seventy-five syllables* to which we must add five vowels standing alone* like the last syllable in to-ki-o* and the terminal «* making a complete battery of eighty-one (Fig. 46).

Thus the Japanese are able to represent all their words by com¬ bining the signs for 'a small number of Chinese (see Figs. 44 and 45) vocables. Though their writing is based on syllables* the Japanese use a script which need not contain many more signs than the letters of an alphabet reformed to represent all English simple consonants and vowels by individual symbols.* At first* the Japanese used their Kana

* “In Amharic (an Ethiopian language) which is printed syilabically there are 33 consonantal sounds* each of which may combine with any of the seven vowels. Hence to print a page of an Amharic book* 7 x 33, or 231 different types are required : instead of the 40 types which would suffice on an alphabet method. In Japanese this difficulty is less formidable than in^ many other languages* owing to the simplicity of the phonetic system which possesses only 5 vowel sounds and 15 consonantal sounds. There are therefore only 75 possible syllabic combinations of a consonant followed by a vowel. Several of these potential combinations do not occur in the language* and hence it is possible' with somewhat less than $0 distinct syllabic signs to write down any Japanese word.” — Taylor: The Alphabet * vol. i, p. 35.

68

The Loom of Language

or syllable signs exclusively, and still do so, for telegrams or in school¬ books for the young. Otherwise (p. 438) they have gone back to the old school tradition. In books printed to-day they generally use Chinese characters for root words, with Kana signs for the affixes.

We do not certainly know whether the people who first made up Japanese syllable writing were scholars. Like the Oriental traders who revolutionized our number system by using a dot for the modern zero sign to signify the empty column of the counting-frame, they may well have been practical men who earned a livelihood in the cpunting- house, or as pilots on ships. Scholars naturally favour the view that they were men of learning directly skilled in the use of Chinese. Un¬ doubtedly such men existed in Japan, when it adapted Chinese symbols to its own use somewhere about a.d. 750 ; but if it was a scholar who first hit on the trick, it is quite possible that he learned it from the mistakes of his pupils. From what we do know we may be certain of this. Those who introduced Japanese kana were men who had no sacrosanct national tradition of writing in this way, and therefore brought to their task the unsophisticated attitude of the Island Greeks who absorbed the practical advantages of Egyptian or Semitic learning without assimilating all the superstitions of their teachers. In the ancient world and in medieval times, mankind had not got used to rapid change. Great innovations were possible only when circumstances conspired to , force people to face new problems without the handicap of old habits. The Japanese had to take this step because their language* was poly¬ syllabic and comparatively rich in derivative words. They were able to take it because the affixes of their derivative words were few, and because the sound values of individual syllables correspond to those of Chinese words.

When the Chinese is up against a situation comparable to that of the Japanese at the time when they first got their syllabic scripts, he treats his own characters in the same way. For foreign names the Chinese use their characters purely as sound syllables, as we might write 3.40 to suggest the sound three for tea. This emphasizes how favourable combinations of unusual circumstances influence the possi¬ bility of rapid advance or retardation in the cultural evolution of different communities. It is one of the many reasons why we should be suspicious when people attribute one or the other to national and racial genius or defect. The simplicity of the Chinese language made it easy for the Chinese to develop a more consistent and workable system of picture-writing than any other nation at an early stage

The Story of the Alphabet 69

in its history. Since then it has been a cultural millstone round their necks.

If* the Russians, the Germans, or any other Aryan-speaking people had come into contact with Chinese script while they were still bar¬ barians, they could not have used the Chinese symbols to make up a satisfactory battery of affixes for two reasons. One reason for this is that the total number of affixes in derivative words of an Indo-European language is far greater than the number of Japanese affixes. A second is that Chinese has no sounds corresponding to the large class of dosed monosyllables which occur as affixes, such as the -ness in manliness. A third is that words of the Aryan languages are rich in consonant clusters. So a European people would have reaped little advantage by using Chinese characters as symbols of sound instead of as symbols of meaning. That transition from logographic script to sound-writing depends on the lock as well as on the key is easy to test. Make a table of English monosyllabic words of the open type and use it to build up English, French, or German polysyllables with the aid of a dictionary. You will then discover this. The possibility of achieving a more simple method of writing for such languages as English, French, or German involved another unique combination of circumstances.

THE COMING OF THE ALPHABET

In the ancient Mediterranean world, syllable scripts were in use among Semitic peoples, Cypriots, and Persians. They got the bricks, as the Japanese got their syllabaries from the Chinese, from their neigh¬ bours of Mesopotamia and Egypt, where forms of picture-writing first appeared. None of these syllabaries has survived. All have made way for the alphabet.

The dissection of a word into syllables — especially the words of an agglutinating language — is not a very difficult achievement. The split¬ ting of the syllable into consonants and vowels was a much more difficult step to take. The fact that all true alphabets have an unmis¬ takable family likeness if we trace them back far enough forces us to believe that mankind has once only taken this step (Fig. 15). We know roughly when this happened, who were responsible, and in what cir¬ cumstances it took place. Through inscriptions in the mines of the Sinai peninsula (Fig. 2) about 1500 B.C., and in other places between this date and about 1000 B.C., archaeologists can trace the transforma¬ tion of a battery of about twenty Egyptian pictograms into the symbols

Semitic roof-words nearly always have the form which such proper names as Moses, Rachel, David, Moloch, Balak or Laban recall. They

Awdmt Bgtjptim hjjzvogjbf- pines-	Smal script	Moahib Shane •seals	E&rljr Phoeni¬ cian	It Istizm Cfmch	EarTjr Latin	Oldest In dian
a		4c	ki	A, oc	A	>
no L—d	□p<3	1	$	fr,B	B	□
TT			tv	v,r,Y	V	JL
/VV¥W%	yWV	y	n	AV/*	M	5
		y		A<A	N	1
-<£Z»~		0	0	O	0	s>
	a	A	y	dap	KR	5
	+	X t	+	T	T	/
	m	oil

Fig. 15. — Some Signs from Eahly Alphabets (Adapted from Firth’s The Tongues of Men •)

are made up of three consonants separated by two intervening vowels, and the three consonants in a particular order are characteristic of a particular root. This means that if cordite (ko:dait) were a Hebrew word, all possible combinations which we can make by putting dif¬ ferent vowels between k and d or d and t would have something to do with the explosive denoted by the usual spelling. This unique regu-

The Story of the Alphabet 71

larity of word-pattern led the old Rabbinical scholars to speak of the consonants as the body and the vowel as the soul of the word. In so far as we can recognize bodies without theological assistance the metaphor is appropriate. Consonants are in fact the most tangible part of the written word. A comparison of the next two lines in which the same sentence is written* first without consonants* and then without vowels* is instructive from this point of view:

. . e . e a . e . u . . . o . e ea . y . o .ea.

Then turn the page upside down and read this :

P *‘l *3. ‘S‘ * *JT UI tp*UI *J- 'S’Tfl

If you carry out experiments of this kind you will discover two things. One is that it is easy to read a passage without vowels in English if there is something to show where the vowels should be* as in the above. The other is that it is much less easy to do so if there is nothing to show where the vowels ought to come . Thus it would be difficult to interpret:: ^ r mch

mi s t rd

Owing to the build-up of Semitic root-words, we have no need of dots to give us this information. Once we know the consonants, we hold the key to their meaning. Any syllabary basecl on twenty-odd open monosyllables with a different consonant would therefore meet all the needs of a script capable of representing the typical root-words of a Semitic language. The Semitic trading peoples of the Mediterranean took twenty-two syllable signs from Egyptian priestly writing, as the Japanese took over the Chinese monosyllabic logograms. They used them to represent the sounds for which they stood, instead of to repre¬ sent what the sounds stood for in the parent language. Because they did not need to bother about the vowels, they used twenty-one of the Egyptian symbols to represent the consonant sounds of the root, without paying attention to the vowel originally attached.

Thus the alphabet began as an alphabet of consonants (Fig. 15). Such an alphabet, or B-C-D, was only workable in the hands of the Semitic peoples. If we had no English vowel symbols, the succession of consonants represented by mlch could stand for milch (in milch cow), or for the Bible name Moloch. Similarly vst could stand for vest or visit, and pts could stand for pities or Patsy. This was tire dilemma of the Aryan-speaking colonizers and traders of Island Greece who came into contact with the syllable writing of Cyprus (Figs. 13 and 14) and

72 The Loom of Language

the consonant writing of the Phoenicians. They used a language which was extremely rich in consonant combinations. The Greek word for man is avdpanros, from which we get philanthropy and anthropology. If you write the consonants only in phonetic script (p. 83), this is nflrps. There is nothing in the word-pattern of the Greek language to exclude all the possible arrangements whichgwe can make by filling

Old Classical

- . Thoznmm Qveek	Izitin	( "fmeh	iMiti
a	A	t>	A	D
A	IV	<c	r	G
L	Ik	JL	A	L
?		PP	n	P
	AP	R	p	R
W		*	£	S

Fig. 16.— -Early and Later Form of Some Greek and Latin Letters The reader should compare these with the writing in Figs. 35-38

up each of the blanks indicated below with each of a dozen simple or compound vowel sounds ;

. n . 6 . r . p . s

The number of pronounceable arrangements of twelve different vowel sounds in combination with this range of consonants is about 3,000,000. It would be surprising if some of them were not true vocables. So it is easy to see that the same succession of consonants might stand for several different Greek words. It is equally easy to see why the syllable script of Cyprus (Figs. 13 and 14) was an unsatisfactory way of dealing with the same difficulty.

To adapt the Phoenician alphabet to their own use, the Greeks had to introduce vowels, which were probably monosyllables, like our own words a or I, taken from syllabaries of other peoples, such as the Cypri-

The Story of the Alphabet 73

otes, with whom they came in contact. This step was momentous. The primitive Semitic alphabets which had, no vowels were good enough for simple inscriptions or for Holy Writ to be read again and again. They could not convey the grammatical niceties which result from internal vowel change of the sort illustrated by sing-sangsung. Since Semitic languages abound in tricks of this sort* the ancient Semitic scripts were not well adapted to produce the rich secular literature which germinated in the Greek world.

The Greek alphabet (Figs, n and 12) had seven vowel symbols, namely, a e r) 1 v <0 o. The Italian peoples who got their alphabet from the Greeks also spoke dialects poor in vowels, and they discarded two of the Greek signs, i.e. rj and <0. Divergence of the form of the symbols which make up the classical Greek and Latin alphabets came about owing to a variety of circumstances. The first people to use alphabetic writing did not write at length and were not fussy about whether they wrote from right to left or from top to bottom. Quite ephemeral reasons would influence the choice, as for example the advantage of inscribing a short epitaph vertically on a pole or hori¬ zontally on a flat stone. Thus the orientation of letters underwent local change through the whims of scribes or stone-masons, so that the same symbols were twisted about vertically or laterally, as illustrated in Fig. 16, which shows the divergence of the Greek and Latin symbols for D, L, G, P, R. While the art of writing and reading was still the privilege of the few, the need for speedy recognition was not compelling, and the urge for standardization was weak.

In one or other of the earliest specimens (Figs. 37 and 38) of Island Greek writing of the sixth or seventh centuries B.c., we can find any one of the old Phoenician consonant symbols unchanged. The absence of printing type to standardize the use of letter symbols, the effect of the writing materials on the ease with which they could be written, the limitation of primitive writing to short messages, records, or inscrip¬ tions, the small size of the reading public, and the fact that pronuncia¬ tion changes in the course of several generations and varies among people still able to converse with difficulty in their own dialects, were other circumstances which contributed to the divergence of the alpha¬ bets: So there is now no recognizable resemblance between the classical Hebrew and Greek alphabets (Figs. 11 and 12) which came from the same Semitic source. Though Arabic is a Semitic language with a script written like Hebrew from right to left, the symbols of the Arabic consonants have no obvious resemblance to those of Hebrew. In the

. c*

74 The Loom of Language

five different Arabic scripts, only the symbols for L, M, and S are now recognizable derivatives of their Phoenician ancestors.

Throughout the East, an enormous variety of alphabetic scripts do service for peoples with languages which, like Persian or many of those spoken in India, belong to the great Indo-European family, and like Burmese or Tibetan belong to the same family as Chinese* They are also in use among peoples with other languages, e.g. Manehu, Korean, Turkish, or Javanese. These belong to none of the three great language families which have been the chief custodians of knowledge and literature. Most scholars now believe that all these alphabetic scripts were offshoots of those used by Semitic pedlars who set forth across the great trade routes bridging the gull; between Eastern and Western culture in ancient times. To a Western eye, familiar with the simple lines and curves of the printed page in contradistinction to ordinary writing, they have a superficial resemblance due to the complex curva¬ ture of die symbols. It is not likely that any of these cursive scripts will overcome the direct appeal of the simpler signs, which printing and typewriting have now standardized in all highly industrialized, countries.

Towards the end of the Middle Ages, when the Chinese invention of printing came into Europe, several forms of the Latin alphabet were in use in different countries. The more rectilinear Italian symbols, being better adapted to movable type, eventually superseded the more cursive variants such as the German Black Letters (Fig. u) of the monkish missals. -Partly perhaps because the Lutheran Bible was printed in this script, it persisted in Germany, where it has been fostered by nationalism. Before the Nazis took over, one newspaper had begun to follow the practice of scientific text-books, drama, and modern novels in step with Western civilization. The brown shirts brought back the black letters.

Circumstances which have influenced die choice and character of scripts in use may be material on the one hand, and social on the other. Among die material circumstances arc the nature of the surface (stone, bone, day, ivory, wax, parchment, paper), and the nature of the instru¬ ment (chisel, style, brush, pen, wood block, or lead type), used for the process of transcription. Among social circumstances of first-rate importance we have to reckon with the range of sounds which a speech community habitually uses at the time when it gets its script, and the range of sounds represented by the parent alphabet. Intelligent plan- , ning based on die ease with which it is possible to adapt an alien script to the speech of an illiterate people played little, if any, part in selection

The Story of the Alphabet 75

before Kemal Atatiirk introduced the Roman alphabet in Turkey (Fig. 40). Missionary enterprise has been the single most significant social agency which has influenced choice. This circumstance has left a permanent impress on the study of speech habits.

Conquests, political, religious, or both, have imposed scripts on languages ill-adapted for them. This is true of Burmese and Siamese which have Sanskrit and Pali scripts. It is even more true of Arabic script, which Islam has forced upon communities with languages of a phonetic structure quite different from that of the Semitic family, e.g. Berber, Persian, Baluchi, Sindhi, Malay, Turkish, Swahili, etc. The

K <L t k q th b l v 3 it y

•-TTTormr''

t . Jk v* ... n ... 1

22i g* Jtg- ■ s r £ a. o n e i

Scm.Sna.vkn. Tunic & Ogmt Symbols'

Fig. 17.— Key to Runic and Ogam Scripts Compare with Runic and Ogam inscriptions of Figs. 18 and 29.

The Runic symbols lie above the Roman equivalents, the Ogam below them.

secular impetus which trading gave to the spread of writing among the Mediterranean civilizations of classical antiquity extended to Northern Europe without having a permanent influence upon it. Before they adopted Roman Christianity, and with it the Roman alphabet, some Teutonic peoples were already literate. In various parts of Northern Europe, and especially in Scandinavian countries, there are inscriptions in symbols like those which pre-Christian invaders from the Continent also brought to Britain. This Runic script (Figs. 17 and 29) has no straightforward similarity to any other. Supposedly it is a degenerate form of Greek or Roman writing carried across Europe by migratory Germanic (Goths) and probably also by Celtic tribes, who learned it

j6 The Loom of Language

from trade contacts. It probably reached Scandinavia during the third century a.d. The letters illustrate the influence of the materials used. They are the sort of marks which are easy to chip on wood. We can rdcognize them as such in some of the Runic clog almanacs still in existence. The first surviving specimen (Fig. 30) of Runic comes from Gallehus in Schleswig. It is an inscription on a horn, and is worth quoting to illustrate the modest beginnings of writing for secular use: ek hlewagastir holtingar homa tawido — I LUIGAST THE HOLTING MADE (this) HORN.

There are inscriptions of another type (Figs. 17, x 8, and 39) on stone monuments in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The script is pre-Christian

C\/N0C-( N 1 .. — -1U — IU9U1UI.

Fig. 18.— Bilingual Inscription in Latin (Roman Letters) and Celtic (Ogam Signs) from a Church at Trallong in Ireland

The Celtic reads from right to left.

but probably not older than the beginning of the Roman occupation of Britain. This Ogam writing, as it is called, has an alphabet of twenty letters. Each letter is a fixed number of from one to five strokes, with a definite orientation to a base line which was usually the edge of the stone. Five letters (b, d, t, k, q) are represented by one to five vertical strokes above the line; five (b, 1, v, s, n) by one to five vertical strokes below the line; five (a, 0, u, e, i) by vertical strokes across the line; and five (m, g, ng, z, r) by one to five strokes across the line sloping upward from left to right. One surmise is that the number of strokes has some¬ thing to do with the order of the letters in the Roman alphabet, as the people who made this script received them. What led Celtic peoples to devise this system we do not know. It is clear that the Ogam signs are not degenerate representatives of Greek or Roman symbols, as are the Runic letters. Ogam script is a sort of code substitute for the Latin alphabet, analogous to the Morse code used in telegraphy. Like the latter, it was probably adopted because it was most suitable for the instruments and for the materials available.

The meaning of such inscriptions long remained a mystery like that of others in dead languages still undedphered. Among the latter

The Story of the Alphabet 77

Etruscan and Cretan (Fig. 10) are a sealed book to this day. The story of the Rosetta Stone discloses the clues which have made it possible for scholars to decipher (Figs, i, 5, and 18) lost languages. It is told in the following quotation from Griffith’s helpful book, The Story of Letters

and Numbers i

“There were strange stories and fictions about the learning of the Egyptians, so that for a long time men had a strong desire to get back a clear knowledge of the writings. They had nothing to go on; there were no word-books or other helps. Then in 1799, by the best of good chances, a man in the French Army, working under Napoleon, saw an old stone in a wall at Rosetta on one of the branches of the river Nile, with three sorts of writing on it. One was the old Egyptian picture¬ writing, which was the same as the writing on the walls of buildings; the second was another of which men had no knowledge, but the third was in Greek, clear and simple. The reading of this was no trouble to men of letters. From the Greek it was seen that the stone gave an account of a king named ptolemaios, and of the good things which he had done as a mark of his respect for the religion of Egypt. The last line of the Greek says that ‘a copy of the writing is to be made on hard stone in the old writing of the men of religion, and in the writing of the country, and in Greek.’ The year this was done was 196 B.c. So it was certain that the two strange writings were in Egyptian, but in different sorts of letters, and that the Greek gave the sense of the Egyptian.

“In the Greek, the name ptolemaios comes eight or nine times, sometimes by itself, and sometimes with the words loved of ptah in addition. Part of the top of the stone, where the picture-writing comes, is broken off, but fourteen lines are there, and in these are five groups of letters or pictures with a line round them, having two long parallel sides and curved ends with a short upright line at one end. This seems to have been the Egyptian way of ‘underlining’ important words. Three of the groups are shorter than the other two, but the longer ones are started with the same, or almost the same, letters or pictures. So it seems probable that the outlined words are ptolemaios and ptolemaios loved of ptah. Ptah was one of the higher beings of the religion of Egypt.

“On other stones to the memory of the great dead, groups of letters are to be seen with the line round them, which makes us more certain that such outlined words are the names of Kings and Queens. One such name on an old stone was Kleopatra, the name of a Queen who was living in Egypt two hundred years before the Cleopatra of Shake¬ speare’s Antony and Cleopatra. ...

“This much and a little more was the discovery of Dr. Thomas Young, an English man of science, who made, in addition, some attempt at reading the second form of the Egyptian writing on the stone. The reading of the picture-writing in full was the work of J, F. Champolion,

78 The Loom of Language

a Frenchman. He was able to do this as lie had a good knowledge of the Coptic language. The Copts were, and still are, Egyptian Christians, and in the old days their language was Egyptian. In time small changes came about, as is natural. Their writing was in Greek, with seven special letters for sounds which are not in Greek. In Coptic churches to this day the books of religion are in Coptic, though only a small number, even of the readers, have knowledge of the language. It went out of common use five hundred years back. With the help of this language, Champollion was able to make out the other signs after the name ptolm :s, and much more, for the Copts had word-books giving Egyptian words in the Coptic writing.”

The preceding account does not expose all the relevant circumstances

Semaphore

4 v "l 1 4 *1 4* *'p

Morse (lights, written dots 1 dash-

es, needle movement)

BRAlhLE

:• :• > 9 ; : ;;

PROS A 1 L Y

Fig. 19. — Semaphore, Morse and Braille Codes (By kind permission of Mr. I. J. Pitman.)

which led to this discovery. The reader will find further details in Science for the Citizen (p. ro8o). On his expedition to Egypt, Napoleon took with him a staff of savants, including some of the greatest men of science of that time. A discovery which may seem remote from useful knowledge, if we overlook the deplorable social consequences of arrogantly dismissing the cultural debt of any favoured race or nation to the rest of mainland, was the direct outcome of encouraging research with a practical end in view. We may hope for greater progress incur knowledge of the evolution of languages when there are fewer scholars who cherish their trade-mark of gentlemanly uselessness, and more real humanists who, like Sweet, Jesperscn, Ogden, or Sapir, modestly accept their responsibility as citizens, co-operating in the task of making language an instrument for peaceful collaboration between nations. A civilization which produces poison gas and thermite has no need for humanists who are merely grammarians. What we now need is the grammarian who is truly a humanist.

RATIONAL SPILLING

The fact that all alphabets come from one source has an important

The Story of the Alphabet 79

bearing on the imperfection of all existing systems of spelling. Although there are perhaps about a dozen simple consonants and half a dozen vowels approximately equivalent in most varieties of human speech, the range of speech sounds is rarely the same in closely related languages. Thus the Scots trilled r, the U in guid> and the throaty CH in “it’s a braw bricht munelicht nicht the nicht” are absent in other Anglo- American dialects. When a pre-literate community with a language of its own adopts the alphabetic symbols of an alien culture it will often happen that there will be no symbols for some of its sounds, or no sounds for some of the symbols available. English spelling illus¬ trates what then happens.

(i) Scribes may invent new letters. Thus Old English, like modem Icelandic (Fig. 31), had the two symbols p (thorn) and 5 (ethd) for the two sounds respectively represented by TH in thin and then. Our letter J is not in the Latin alphabet, which is the basis of Western European scripts. It has acquired different values in different languages. In Teutonic languages (e.g. in Norwegian and in German) it is equi¬ valent to our Y in Yule (Scandinavian Jul). In French it is the peculiar consonant represented by S or SI in pleasure , treasure , measure , or vision , incision , division . In English it stands for a compound con¬ sonant made by saying d softly before the French J. The initial w (cf. wait) in Teutonic words was represented by uu (oo-oo-ait). Eventu¬ ally the two m fused to form a single letter. In Welsh spelling w stands for a vowel sound. It is now a signpost pointing to the Old English origin of a word.

(ii) Scribes may give arbitrary combinations of old symbols a special value. This is true of the two TH sounds, the SH or TI sound in short or nation , and the NG in singer (as contrasted with hunger). Aside from these arbitrary combinations for simple consonants, we use ch for a combination of t followed by sL

These combinations and their vagaries are valuable signposts for. the home student. Neither of the sounds represented by th exists in Latin or French, the soft one (5) exists only in Teutonic languages and the hard one (p) only in Teutonic languages and in Greek, among languages which chiefly supply the roots of our vocabulary. The SH sound so spelt is Teutonic. The SH sound spelt as TI (e.g . nation) is always of French- Latin origin.

For; this reason many words carry the hall-mark of their origin. There is another way in which the irregularities of English spelling help us to recognize the source of a word. Pronunciation may change in

80 The Loom of Language

the course of a hundred years, while writing lags behind for centuries. This explains the behaviour of our capricious GH, which is usually silent and sometimes like an /. It survives from a period when the pronunciation of light was more like the Scots lichi, in which there is a rasping sound represented by % in phonetic symbols. In such words the earlier English conventional GH stands for a sound which was once common in the Teutonic languages, and is still common in Ger¬ man. When we meet GH, we know that the word in which it occurs is a word* of Teutonic origin; and it is a safe bet that the equivalent German word will correspond closely to the Scots form. Thus the German for light is Licht, for brought brachte, for eight acht, for night Nacht, for right Recht and for might Macht. English is not the only language which has changed in this way. At one time the German W, now pronounced like an English V, stood for a softer sound, more like ours. So phonetic spelling would make it more difficult to recognize the meaning of Wind, Wasser, und Wetter (wind, water, and weather).

A third way in which spelling gets out of step with speech is con¬ nected with how grammar evolves. Like other languages in the same great Indo-European or Aryan family, English was once rich in endings like the ’$ in father's. Separate words have now taken over the function of such endings, as when we say of my father, instead of my father’s. Having ceased to have any use, the endings have decayed; and because writing changes more slowly than speech, they have left behind in the written language, relics which have no existence in the spoken. This process of simplification, dealt with in Chapter III, has gone much further in English than in her sister languages On this account written English is particularly rich in vowel endings which are not audible.

This way in which pronunciation changes in the course of time is responsible for spelling anomalies in most European languages. Two English examples illustrate it forcibly. On paper there is a very simple rule which tells us how to form the plural (i.e. the derivative we use when we speak of more than one object or person) of the overwhelming majority of modern English norms. We add -r. There is also a simple paper rule which usually tells us how to form the past form of most English verbs. We add ~ed, or -d (if the dictionary form ends in -e), as when we make the change from part to parted, or love to loved. Nowa¬ days we rarely pronounce the final -ED unless it follows d or t. Till comparatively recently it was always audible as a separate syllable. Sometimes we still pronounce it as such in poetic drama. If we are

* Notable exceptions are haughty (French haul) and delight-

8i

The Story of the Alphabet

church addicts* we may also do so in religious ritual. All of us do so when we speak of a belo ved husband or a learned wife. In Chaucer’s English the plural -s was preceded by a vowel* and the combination -es was audibly distinct as a separate syllable. When fusion of the final -5 of the plural* and -ed of the past with the preceding consonant of the noun or verb-stem took place* necessary changes occurred. We pronounce cats as hats and cads as kadz. We pronounce sobbed as sobd, and helped as helpL Thus the grammatical rules of English would be a little more complicated* if we spelt all words as we pronounce them. We should have a large new class of plurals in ~z, and many more past forms of the verb ending* like slept, in ~L

The reason why these changes had to occur is that certain combina¬ tions of consonants are difficult to make* when we speak without effort. When we do speak without effort* we invariably replace them by others according to simple rules. Such rules can shed some light on the stage of evolution a language had reached when master printers* heads of publishing houses* or scholars settled its spelling conventions. One simple rule of this kind is that many consonants which combine easily with s or t do not combine easily with z or d, and vice versa. We can arrange them as follows:

p f k th (p) ch (t J) sh (/) “voiceless”

Wotd} b V S th(P) j (d3) Si (3) “voiced"

This rule is easy to test. Compare, for instance, the way you pronounce writhed (8d) and thrived (vd), with the way you pronounce {without effort) pithed (fit) and laughed (ft). In the same way, compare the pro¬ nunciation of the final consonants in crabs and traps , crabbed and trapped , or notice the difference between the final -s in lives and wife’s.

Vowels illustrate sources of irregularity in the spelling conventions of European languages more forcibly than do the consonants, because Italic-Latin which bequeathed its alphabet to the West of Europe had a very narrow range of vowel sounds, for which five symbols suffice. This is one reason why Italian spelling is so much more regular than that of other European languages, except the newest Norwegian re¬ formed rettskrivning. Another reason is that Italian pronunciation and grammar have changed little since Dante’s time. In English dialects we have generally about twelve simple and about ten compound vowels (diphthongs) for which the five Roman vowel signs are supplemented by

82

The Loom of Language

a Teutonic W and a Greek Y. The situation is much the same with most other European languages, except Spanish which stands close to Italian. Several devices are in use to deal with shortage of vowel symbols.

(i) Introduction of new vowel symbols. Thus modern Norwegian (Fig. 32) has two, the 0 of Danish and the a of Swedish. The Russian alphabet, based on the Greek, has nine instead of seven vowel symbols, of which four correspond precisely to the Greek models.

(ii) Introduction of accents, such as the dots placed above S or d in Swedish and German, or those used to distinguish the two French sounds 6, i.

(iii) Use of combinations such as aa to distinguish the long a of father from the short a of fat in bazaar is specially characteristic of Dutch spelling. On this account Dutch words look rather long. The same plan (see table of vowels on p. 84) would meet all the needs of a reformed English spelling. As things stand we have only three combinations which we use consistently— aw (in claw), ee (in meet), and oi or ay (in soil, joy). The last is a signpost of Norman-French origin.

(iv) The more characteristically English trick of using a silent e after a succeeding consonant to distinguish the preceding vowel, as in mad- made, Sam-same, pin-pine, win-wine. A silent h may also lengthen the preceding vowel in German, as in our words ah!, eh!, oh!

(v) The use of a double consonant to indicate that the foregoing vowel is short. German and the newest Norwegian spelling (1938) rely on this consistently.

From rhymes in poems, we have good reason to believe that English spelling was regular at the time of the Norman Conquest. The present chaos, especially with reference to the vowels, is partly due to the prac¬ tice of Norman scribes when a large number of French words invaded English during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This coincided more or less with a profound change in the pronunication of English vowels, and the decay of endings. In other words, the spelling conven¬ tions we now use became current coinage at a time when the sound values of English words were in a state of flux. The Norman scribes were responsible for several important changes affecting the consonants as well as the vowels. They introduced J for a new sound which came with the Conquest. The Old English C became K. The symbols y and 8 for two sounds which do not occur in French disappeared in favour Of TH and Y. After a time the Y (as in the solecism ye aide tea shoppe)

The Story of the Alphabet 83

acquired a new use, and TH served for both sounds. At a later date the breach between spelling and speech widened through the interference of classical scholars in the light of current and often mistaken views about word origin. Thus debt though derived directly from the French word dette> sucked in a silent b to indicate the common origin of both from the Latin debitum . For what regularities do exist we owe far more to the printers than to the scholars. Printing checked individual prac¬ tices to which scribes — like stenographers — were prone, when the art of writing was still (like stenography) a learned profession.

ENGLISH CONSONANTS IN PHONETIC SCRIPT

1.	b	as	in	bib	13*	t		as	in	ten
2,	d	30	33	did	14.	v		3.3	>3	vet
3-	f	33	33	fed	15.	w		33	33	wet
4.	%	33	33	get	16.	z		33	33	zest
5*	h	33	33	bit	17.	3	T	33	33	yet
6.	k	33	33	kit	18.	J -	sh	33	3?	shin
7*	1	33	33	lit	19*	3 —	si	33	33	vision
8.	m	33	33	men	20.	8 =	th	33	3?	thin
9-	n	33	33	nib	21.	0 =	th	33	33	then
10.	P	33	33	pit	22.	*) =	ng	33	33	sing
11.	r	33	33	red	23.	d3 =	)	33	33	jam
12.	s	33	33	'sit	24.	tj =	■ ch	33	33	chat

Even when two languages which share the same alphabet enjoy the benefit of a comparatively regular system of spelling as do Norwegian, German, and Spanish, many of the symbols have different values when we pass from one to another. So spelling is never a reliable guide to pronunciation of a foreign language. For this reason linguists have devised a reformed alphabet for use as a key to help us to pronounce words of any language with at least sufficient accuracy to make intel¬ ligible communication possible without recourse to personal instruc¬ tion. In this international alphabet, sixteen of the consonant symbols (see .above) have their characteristic English values common to European usage in so far as a specific sound, usually corresponds to one alone. With these good European symbols are others which do not occur in the Latin alphabet. One of them, /, stands for the sound it repre¬ sents (our initial Y) in Scandinavian languages and in German. Three of the supplementary ones are taken from the Greek, Irish, and Ice¬ landic scripts (Fig. n). The remainder are inventions.

84 The Loom of Language

In oux table of English vowels In phonetic script, some of the indi¬ vidual symbols which stand for simple vowel sounds in other European languages occur only in compounds (diphthongs). Other symbols such as those which stand for the French nasal vowels do not occur at all. The majority of the consonant sounds of European languages are approximately alike. For that reason many of the consonant signs of different scripts exhibited on p. 60 correspond with one another, and with the equivalent symbols of the international script devised for

ENGLISH VOWELS IN PHONETIC SCRIPT

a a: e i

i:

D

d: u u:

A 0

o;

all .nations. So the symbols for the consonants are less difficult to handle, and a few hours’ practice will suffice for proficiency in using them. With the help of the tables you can translate the following sentence, and thereafter write out others:

firm 5a teiblz ov vauolz n konsononts ju Jd bi eibl to fo:m o klioro d3Ad^mint obaut do tji;f ri:znz fo 0ato me3oz if wi wont o hapi soI(j)u:Jh ov auo preznt speliq difikltiz.

•sopjnotjjip 2ut|fods itiosord rno jo uoprqos Addaq b wbm oai jr somsBoin qSnoioqj ioj suosboi jorqo oqi moqe luoraSpnC lomop b unoj oi ojqB oq pjnoqs noX suxbuosuoo puB spMOA jo sofqB* otp

SIMPLE ■ DIPHTHONGS

=	a	as	in	liat	ai	=5	ei	as	in	Einstein
ss=	aa	3,	33	bazaar	au	s==	ow	33	33	how
—	e	33	33	bed	ei	=	ai	33	33	bait
	1	35	33	bid	eo	—	air	33	33	pair
=	ee	33	33	meet	io	5=	ier	33	33	pier
=	0	33	33	hot	oi	=	oi	33	33	boil
=	au	33	33	aught	ou	=	oa	33	33	moat
=	00	33	33	foot	ju	=S	ew	33	33	hew
SBS	ou	33	33	boot
=5	u	33	33	cut
sss	er	33	33	work er
=	or	33	33	worker

Because. the same symbols may have different values. in different languages—^ stands for 0 in Spanish, and for ts in German— the larger dictionaries use phonetic alphabets in which a symbol represents one sound and one only; For each word listed the phonetic spelling is printed

The Story of the Alphabet 85

side by side with the ordinary one. Once you have mastered the key to this phonetic spelling you know how to pronounce a foreign word, however fantastic its spelling may be. If your dictionary uses the International Phonetic Alphabet you may find at the beginning a list incorporating the two on pp. 83 and 84 respectively. With the help of this key you are able to pronounce the following French words even if you do not know any French :

b£te	(be:t)	commerce	(komsrs)
bord	(bo :r)	mbit	(federe)
chaine	(Js:n)	plaine	(ple:n)
clocher	(klaje)	prix	(pri)

toute (tut)

EYE AND GESTURE LANGUAGE IN THE WORLD TO-DAY

A bird’s-eye view of visual language, in contradistinction to that of the ear, would be distorted if it took in nothing but the evolution of signs used in ancient stone inscriptions, manuscripts or modem books, and newspapers. Visual communication may be of two kinds, transient or persistent. The first includes gesture which reinforces daily speech, and the several types of gestural language respectively used for communication between deaf and dumb people, or in military and naval signalling. Signalling may be of two types. Like deaf and dumb gesture language, it may depend on human movements which recall symbols used in alphabetic writing. Signalling by flag-displays based on codes is like logographic writing. The signs used by bookies or hotel porters are a logographic gesture-script. /

Codes used in telegraphy overlap the territories of audible communi¬ cation, visual communication which is transient, and visual communi¬ cation for permanent record. Like the Ogam script, it depends on the alphabet; and, since each alphabet symbol is made up of long or short strokes like prolonged or sharp taps, the same system serves equally well for recognition by eye, ear, or tactile sensation, A two-stroke system of this kind is a mechanical necessity dictated by the design of the first telegraphs to take advantage of the fact that a magnetic needle turns right or left in accordance with the direction of an electric current. The inventors of the telegraphic codes lived in a less leisurely age than the Ogam stone-masons, and took full advantage of the possibility of varying the order in which it is possible to arrange a limited number of strokes of two different types (Fig. 19). Like Ogam script a telegraphic code is suitable for purely tactile recognition by the blind, who were

86

The Loom of Language

cut off from access to the written record when parchment, papyrus, or paper took die place of stone, wax, or clay tablets as writing material. In practice, the Braille script, based on different arrange¬ ments of raised dots, is more satisfactory, because it takes up less

space.

Within the narrower limits of the permanent record different types of scripts may serve different ends. Apart from cryptographic scripts

i

1 1

\ " ^ ^ " c •

L

Z 9

r

* S

.)

/ \ /)* WA v v .

Fig. 20.— Facsimile Note in Pitman's Shorthand by Bernard Shaw

Mr, Shaw has told us^that much of his writing has been done in trains, and that practically all of it is written in shorthand for subsequent transcription by secretary typist. The specimen of his shorthand reproduced here reads: “This the way I write. I could of course substitute (here follows an abbreviation) with an apparent gain in brevity, but as a matter of fact it takes longer to contract. Writing shorthand with the maximum of contraction is like cutting telegrams : unless one is in constant practice it takes longer to devise the contractions than to write in full; and I now never think of contracting except by ordinary logograms.”

devised for secret inventions and recipes, political messages or military dispatches, we can broadly distinguish two types. In books, periodicals, and correspondence, the convenience of the reader is the main desidera¬ tum, and ready visual recognition is all-important. What is most impor¬ tant about a script for habitual and personal use is whether it is adapted to rapid transcription. For this reason an increasing proportion of transcription in commerce, law-courts, and conference is taken down in scripts which are not based on the alphabet, and have been designed for speedy writing. For such purposes ready recognition by anyone except the writer is of secondary usefulness.

Roman writers of the age of Gcero were alive to the inconvenience

The Story of the Alphabet 87

of alphabetic writing from this point of view, and used various abbre¬ viations for particles and other common elements of speech. A con¬ sistent system of shorthand is an English invention. The first attempt was made by Timothy Bright, who dedicated his book called Charac- tene, the art of short, swift and secret writing to Elizabeth in 1588. Timothy Bright’s system, which was very difficult to memorize, paved the way for others, notably Willis’s Art of Stenography (1602). In 1837, when Sir Isaac Pitman perfected what is still the most successful short¬ hand script “for the diffusion of knowledge among the middle classes of society,” about two hundred different sorts of shorthand had been put forward. Shorthand as we know it to-day is the product of many experiments in which some of the most enlightened linguists of the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries took a hand. It is the fruit of close study of the merits or demerits of different systems of writing and typography in general use.

Modern shorthand, like Japanese script, is a synthesis. In so far as the basic stratum is alphabetic, advantages of speed are due to the combination of three principles, two of them suggested by charac¬ teristics of Semitic scripts. One is that the letter symbols are simple strokes, easily joined. We recognize them by direction as opposed to shape. A second is that the vowels are detached from the consonants, so that we can leave them out, when doing so would lead to no doubt about the identity of a word. The third is that arbitrary combinations of consonants or vowels give place to a complete battery of single signs in a consistently phonetic system. This phonetic alphabet is only part of the set-up. There are syllable signs for affixes which constantly recur, and logograms for common words or phrases.

No tracts about the Real Presence, treatises on marginal utility and table-turning, or expositions of the Hegelian dialectic and the Aryan virtues are accessible in Morse Code or Shorthand editions. Still, students of language-planning for the Age of Plenty have some¬ thing to learn from the work of those who have contributed to such inventions and from the efforts of those who have worked to make the written record available to the deaf and blind. Of the two fore¬ most pioneers of language-planning in the seventeenth century, one, George Dalgamo, was the inventor of a deaf-and-dumb alphabet ; the other. Bishop Wilkins, put forward an early system of phonetic shorthand. One result of early controversies over shorthand systems was a lively interest in the defects of spelling, and hence in the sound- composition of words. An evolutionary attitude to*language was not

88

The Loom of Language

possible until students of language began to study how the sound of a word changes in the course of a few generations.

To organize prosperity on a world-wide scale* we need to supplement the languages of local speech-communities with an international medium of discourse. Whether such a world-wide language will eventually displace all others* we cannot say. What is certain is that such a change will not happen till many centuries have elapsed. In the meantime* the most we can aim at is to make every citizen of the Age of Plenty bilingual* that is to say* equally fluent in a home language* and in the common language of world citizenship* or of some unit larger than the sovereign states of the present day. Hardly less important is another need. Few but experts realize the Babel of scripts in the modem world. Many of them are ill-suited for their purpose* laborious to learn, and space-consuming, Non-exploitive collaboration between East and West requires international adoption of the Roman alphabet* supplemented where necessary by additional symbols, Lenin said this ' to comrade Agamaly-Ogly* president of the Central pan-Soviet Com¬ mittee of National Alphabets: Romanization * there lies the great reoolu* tion of the East .

Regularization of script on a world-wide scale is alike prerequisite to liquidation of illiteracy in the Orient and worth-while spelling reform in the West. Spelling reform is long overdue; but it is not a purely national affair* nor merely the task of devising consistent rules based on a priori principles*. It must necessarily be a compromise between conflicting claims— -recognition of language affinities in the form of the written word* preservation of structural uniformities* such as our plural -s9 which transgress phonetic proprieties* the disadvantage of an unwieldy battery of signs and the undesirability of setting up an arbitrary norm without due regard to dialed: differences^

FURTHER READING

GRIFFITH

LLOYD JAMES

JENSEN

KARLGREN

RIPMAN

TAYLOR

THOMPSON

The Story of Letters and Numbers . Our Spoken Language .

Geschichte der Schrift.

Sound and Symbol in Chinese * English Phonetics.

The Alphabet.

The AB C of our Alphabet ,

* .The International' Institute of Intellectual Co-operation has published a report (1934)3 profaned by Jespersen* on the promotion of the use of the Roman alphabet among peoples with unsuitable scripts or no script at all.

CHAPTER III

ACCIDENCE— THE TABLE MANNERS OF LANGUAGE

Men built hotels for celestial visitors before they devoted much in¬ genuity to their own housing problems. The temple observatories of the calendar priests, and the' palaces of their supposedly sky-born rulers, are among the earliest and are certainly the most enduring monuments of architecture. In the dawn of civilization, when agri¬ culture had become an established practice, the impulse to leave a record in building and in decoration went hand in hand with the need for a store-house of nightly observations on the stars and a record of the flocks and crops. So writing of some sort is the signal that civiliza¬ tion has begun. The beginning of writing is also the beginning of our first-hand knowledge of language.

Our fragmentary information about the speech-habits of mankind extends over about 4,000 of the 80,000 or more years since true speech began. We know nothing about human speech between the time when the upright ape first used sounds to co-operate in work or defence, and the timefwhen people began to write. It is therefore unwise to draw conclusions about the birth of language from the very short period which furnishes us with facts. We can be certain of one thing. If we had necessary information for tracing the evolution of human speech in relation to human needs and man’s changing social environment, we should not approach the task of classifying sounds as the orthodox grammarian does. The recognition of words as units of speech has grown hand in hand with the elaboration of script. In the preliterate millennia of the human story, social needs which prompted men to take statements to pieces would arise only in connexion with difficulties of young children, and through contacts with migrant or warring tribes. We can be quite sure that primitive man used gestures liberally to convey his meaning. So a classification of the elements of language appropriate to* a primitive level of human communication might plausibly take shape in a fourfold division as follows;*

* Grammarians have oscillated between two views. According to one, primi¬ tive speech was made up of discrete monosyllables like Chinese. Tender the influence of Jespersen and his disciples, the pendulum has now swung to the

9° The Loom of Language

(a) Substantives , or individual words used for distinct objects or events

which can be indicated by pointing at things, i.e. such as our words dog or thunder, and at a later stage, for qualities of a group, such as red or noisy.

(b) Vocatives, or short signals used to call forth some response, such as

our words where?, stop , run, come, pull!, and names of indi¬ viduals.

(c) Demonstratives , or gesture substitutes which direct the attention

of the listener to a particular point in the situation, e.g. that, here , behind, in front.

(d) Incorporatives, or recitative combinations of sound used in ritual

incantations without any recognition of separate elements corresponding to what we should call words.

From a biological point of view, it is reasonable to guess that the last antedate anything we can properly call speech, that they take us back to the monkey-chorus of sundown when the mosquitoes are about, that they persisted long after the recognition of separate words emerged out of active co-operation in hunting, fishing, or building, and that they were later refined into sequences of meaningful words by a process as adventitious as the insertion of the vocables into such a nursery rhyme* sequence as "Hickory, dickory, dock! The mouse ran up the clock. . . ” Perhaps we can recognize the first separate vocables in warning signals of the pack leader. If so, the second class, or vocatives, are the oldest sound elements of co-operation in mutually beneficial activities. What seems almost certain is this. Until writing forced people to examine more closely the significance of the sounds they used, the recognition of words was confined to sounds which they could associate with gesture.

opposite extreme, and primitive speech is supposed to be holophrastic, i.e. without discrete words. This sing-song view, like nonsense written at one time about so-called incorporate languages (e.g. those of the Mexicans or Greenland Esquimaux), and now disproved by the work of Sapir, is essentially a concoction of the study. It is the product of academic preoccupation with the works of poets or other forms of sacred composition. Practical biologists or psychologists have to give consideration: (a) to how children, travellers, or immigrants learn a language without recourse to interpreters and grammar- books, (6) to how human speech differs from the chatter of monkeys or the mimetic exploits of parrots. In contradistinction to such animal noises, hnmnr. speech is above all an^ instrument of co-operation in productive work or mutual defence, and as such is partly made up of discrete signals for individual actions and manipulation of separate objects. To this extent (see p. 51) the recognition of some sounds as words is presumably as old as the first flint instruments. Conversely, other formal elements which we also call words are products of grammatical comparison. They do not emerge from the speech matrix before the written record compels closer analysis. (Editor)

Accidence — The Table Manners of Language 91

Here we are on speculative ground. It will not be possible to get any further light on the early evolution of speech till anthropologists have, made more progress in researches for which Professor Malinowski has made an eloquent plea :*

The point of view of the philologist who deals only with remnants of. dead languages must differ from that of the ethnographer who, de¬ prived of the ossified, feed data of inscriptions, has to rely on the living reality of spoken language in fluxu. The former has to reconstruct the general situation, Le. the culture of a past people, from the extant state¬ ments; tire latter can study directly the conditions and situations charac¬ teristic of a culture and interpret the statements through them. Now I claim that the ethnographer’s perspective is the one relevant and real for the formation of fundamental linguistic conceptions and for the study of the life of languages. . . . For language in its origins has been merely the free, spoken sum total of utterances such as we find now in a savage tongue.

Study of speech in backward communities from this point of view is still in its infancy. Many years must elapse before it influences the tradition of language-teaching in our schools and universities. Mean¬ while, the infant science of language carries a load of unnecessary intellectual luggage from its parental preoccupation with sacred texts or ancient wisdom. Grammar, as the classification of speech and writing habits, did not begin because human beings were curious about their social equipment. What originally prompted the study of Semitic (p. 421), Hindu (p. 408)— and to a large extent that of European — grammar was the requirements of ritual. Though the impact of bio¬ logical discovery has now forced European scholars to look at language from an evolutionary point of view, academic tradition has never out¬ grown the limitations imposed on it by the circumstances of its origin.

Modem European grammar began about the time when the Pro¬ testant Reformation was in progress. Scholars were busy producing an open Bible for the common people, or translations of texts by the political apologists of the Greek city state. Those who did so were primarily interested in finding tricks of expression corresponding to Greek and Latin models in modem European languages. Usually they had no knowledge of non-European languages, and, if they also knew languages now placed in the Semitic group, gained their knowledge by applying the classical yardstick. It goes without saying that they did not classify ways of using words as they would have done if they had been interested in finding out how English has changed since the time * Vide The Meaning of Meaning, by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards.

92 The Loom of Language

of Alfred the Great. Since then a language, which once had many of the most characteristic features of Latin or Greek, has changed past recognition. It now shares some of the most remarkable peculiarities of Chinese.

What schools used to teach as English grammar was really an intro¬ duction to the idiosyncrasies of Latin. It was not concerned with the outstanding characteristics of the English language; and most educa¬ tionists in America or England now condemn time wasted in the mental confusion resulting from trying to fit the tricks of our own terse idiom into this foreign mould. Without doubt learning grammar is not of much help to a person who wants to write modem English. None the less, the so-called English grammar of thirty years ago had its use. Other European languages which belong to the same great Indo- European family as Bible English and Latin and Greek, have not travelled so far on the road which English has traversed. So knowledge of old-fashioned grammar did make it a little easier to learn some peculiarities of French, German, or other languages which are still used. Anyone who starts to learn one of them without some knowledge of grammatical terms meets a large class of unnecessary difficulties. The proper remedy for this is not to go back to grammar of the old-fashioned type, but to get a more general grasp of how English resembles and ' differs from other languages, what vestiges of speech-habits character¬ istic of its nearest neighbours persist in it, and what advantages or disadvantages result from the way in which it has diverged from them. To do this we shall need to equip ourselves with some technical terms. They are almost indispensable if we want to learn foreign languages.

HOW WORDS GROW

None of us needs to be told that we cannot write a foreign language, or even translate from one with accuracy, by using a dictionary or learning its contents by heart. From a practical point of view, we can define grammar as the rules we need to know before m can use a dic¬ tionary with profit. So we shall take the dictionary as our foundation stone in this chapter and the next. We have already seen that dic¬ tionaries of languages do not contain all vocables we commonly use. They include certain classes of derivative* words, and exclude others,

* It is often impossible to say what is root and what is affix, but many English words can be derived by adding affixes like -s, -ed or -ing to the dic¬ tionary form. In what follows the Editor suggests that we should speak of them as derivatives of the latter. As explained in the footnote on p. 34, this is not precisely the way in which linguists use the word derivative.

Accidence — The Table Manners of Language 93

Thus an ordinary English dictionary which contains behave and beha¬ viour., does not list behaved , behaves , or behaving. The part of grammar called accidence consists of rules for detecting how to form such deriva¬ tives and how they affect the meaning of a dictionary word which shares the same root. Our first task must therefore be to recall (p. 53) how single words can grow. ^ %

First of all, they can do so by fusing with one another or with meaning¬ ful affixes:

(a) Because the meaning of the compound word (e.g. brickyard) so

formed is sufficiently suggested by the ordinary meaning of its separate parts in a given context. This is a trick specially charac¬ teristic of Teutonic languages, Greek and Chinese.

(b) Because two native words constantly occur in the same context

and get glued together through slipshod pronunciation, as in the shortened forms dont, wont, cant, shant for do not, will not, can not, shall not, as also don (= do on) and doff (= do off).

(c) Because an affix (p. 53) borrowed from another language is

attached to them, as the Latin ante- (before) is used in antenatal clinic, or the Greek anti- (against) in anti-fascist, anti-comint em, and <27U/-anything-else-which-we-do-not-like.

It is useful to distinguish fusion due to speech-habits, i.e. (b) from fusion associated with meaning, i.e. (a) and (c). The word agglutination refers to the former, i.e. to fusion arising from context and pronunciation without regard to meaning. Once fusion has begun another process begins to work. The meaning like the form of a word part becomes blurred. People get careless about the meaning of an affix. We expect a word to end (or to begin) in the same way, when we have made a habit of using similar words with the same affix in a similar context. This leads to a habit of tacking on the same affix to new words without regard to its original meaning. Having made a word mastodon , we add the -s of mastodons because we are used to treating animals in this way.

What grammarians call analogical extension includes this process of extending the use of an affix by analogy with pre-existing words built up in the same way. Children and immigrants (see p. 168), as well as native adults, take a hand in the way languages change for better or for worse. For instance, an American or British child who is accustomed to saying I caught, when he means that he has made his catch, may also say the eggs haught for the eggs hatched-, or, being more accustomed to adding -ed, may say I catched for I caught . This process is immensely important (see p. 203) in building up new words or in changing old ones. We should therefore recognize its limitations at the outset.

94 The Loom of Language

Analogical extension may explain what is responsible for the origin of the majority of word-derivatives of a particular type. It cannot explain how the habit of building them up began.

People who make dictionaries do not leave out all derivatives formed according to simple rules. The reason why some derivatives of the word bake, such as bake-house , baker, or bakery are in English diction¬ aries* while bakes, baking , or baked are not, has nothing to do with whether the rales for adding -house, -er, or -ery are more easy to apply than the rules for adding -s* ring, or -(e)d. We can tack the ending -er, now common to an enormous class of Danish*, German* and English vocables* on the dictionary words write, fish, sing, or teach; but we can add the suffix -ed only to the second (cf, wrote, fished, sang, or taught). Since the way in which the meaning of a word is affected by both affixes is obvious* the fact that -er derivatives are in our dictionaries* and that we do not find the -ed derivatives in them* shows that people who compile dictionaries do not decide to leave out a vocable because the meaning of the ■ root or dictionary form and that of its affix are equally clear. The real reason has to do with the original Job the gram¬ marians had to undertake. Broadly speaking* it is this,. Vocables are put in grammar books instead of in dictionaries because they correspond to the class of derivatives most common in Latin or Greek.

Grammarians call such derivatives* or their affixes* flexions. Flexion is of two kinds* internal (root inflexion) and external (affixation)^ The change from bind to bound, or foot to feet illustrates one type of internal flexion* i.e. root vowel change. External flexion* or true flexion* which is more common* is simply change of meaning by affixes* like the -ed in baked . We do not speak of affixes as flexions when they are recog¬ nizable as borrowed elements or relics of separate native words* as in the enormous class of English derivatives with the common affix 4y in happily or probably, corresponding to -tick in German* -lijkjm Dutch, -lik in' Swedish* -lig in' Danish or Norwegian. Whether derivatives formed by adding affixes are called flexions depends largely on whether they correspond to derivatives formed from a: root with the same meaning in Latin or Greek.

According to the way in which derivatives modify its meaning, or are dictated by the context of* a root* grammarians refer to different classes most characteristic of the. sacred Indo-European' languages* ie. Latin* .Greek* and Sanskrit* as flexions of number * tense, 'person, comparison, voice, case, mood, and gender. We can classify root' words of Latin* .Greek* and Sanskrit 'according to which of two or more classes of

Accidence — The Table Manners of Language 95

these derivatives they form. Thus nouns and pronouns have number and case flexion; verbs have tense, person, voice, and mood flexions. Words which do not have, such derivatives are called particles . The distinction between these classes would be meaningless, if we tried

to apply it to Chinese. For reasons which we shall now see, it is almost meaningless when we try to classify English words in the slime way.

The number of flexional derivatives in the older languages of the Indo-European family is enormous. In English comparable derivatives are relatively few, and are chiefly confined to flexions of number, time, person, and comparison. Formation of the derivative houses (external) or lice (internal) from house or louse illustrates flexion of number. The derivatives bound (internal) and loved (external) from bind and love illustrate tense flexion. Person flexion turns up only in the addition of -s to a verb e.g. the change as from bind to binds. Comparison is the derivation of happier and happiest* or wiser and wisest* from happy and wise. English has a few relics of case (e.g. he* him* his)* and a trace of mood (p. xi 9) flexion. Flexion of gender has disappeared altogether, and voice flexion never existed in our own language.

Knowing the names for the flexions does not help us to speak or to write correct English, because few survive, and we learn these few in childhood. What it does help us to do is to learn languages in which the flexional system of the old Indo-European languages has decayed far less than in English or in its Eastern counterpart, modem Persian. The study of how they have arisen, and of circumstances which have contri¬ buted to their decay, also helps us to see characteristics to incorporate in a world medium which is easy to leam without being liable to mis¬ understanding.

FLEXION OF PERSON

It is best to start with flexions of person and tense, because we have more information about the way in which such flexions have arisen or can arise than we have about the origin of number, case, gender, and comparison. Person flexion is probably the older of the ' two,. Since something of the same sort is cropping up again (p. 99), it is easy to guess how it began. Unlike tense, voice, number, and comparison, flexion of person is absolutely useless in many modem European lan¬ guages, All that remains of it in our own language is the final s of a verb which follows certain words such as he* she, it* or the names of single things, living beings, groups or equalities, e.g. in such more or less intelligible statements as he bakes* she types* or love conquers all. The

9^ The Loom of Language

derivative forms bakes, types, or conquers, are dictated by context in accordance with the conventions of our language. The final -s adds nothing necessary to the meaning of a statement.

This flexion is our only surviving relic of a much more complicated system in the English of Alfred the Great, and still extant in most European languages. To understand its importance in connexion with correct usage in many other languages, we have to distinguish a class of words called personal pronouns. Since the number of them is small, this is not difficult. Excluding the possessive forms mine , ours , etc., the personal pronouns are:—/ or me, we or us, you, he or him, she or her, it, and they or them I or me and we or us are modestly called pronouns of the first person, you is the English pronoun of the second person, and he or him, she or her, it, they or them are pronouns of the third person. The pronouns of the first person stand for, or include, the person making a statement. The pronoun of the second person stands for the person or persons whom we address, and the pronouns of the third person stand for the persons or things about whom or about which we make a statement or ask a question.

To make room for all the flexions of person in foreign languages, we have to go a stage further in classifying pronouns. If the statement is about one person or thing, the pronoun which stands for it is singular ; if it is about more than one person or thing, the pronoun is said to be plural. Thus I and me are pronouns of the first person singular; we and us pronouns of first person plural. He and him, she and her, together with it, are pronouns of the third person singular, and they or them are pronouns of the third person plural. In modern English or, as we ought to say and as we shall say in future when we want to distinguish it from Bible English, in Anglo-American, there is only one pronoun of the second person singular or plural.’ In the Bible English of Mayflower days there were two. Thou and thee were the pronouns of the second person singular, and ye was for converse with more than one person. Thou is de rigueur in churches as the pronoun of address for a threefold deity. Orthodox members of the Society of Friends use thee when speaking to one another. When ordinary people still used thou, there was another flexion of person. They said thou speakest, in contra¬ distinction to you speak or he speaks.

Qassification of the personal pronouns in this way would be quite pointless if everybody used Anglo-American. We can appreciate its usefulness if we compare Anglo-American and French equivalents on P- 35- The simple English rule for the surviving -s flexion is this.

Academe — The Table Manners of Language 97

We use it only when a word such as speak, love, type, write, bake, or conquer follows he9 she3 or it9 or the name of any single person, quality, group, or thing which can be replaced by it. The example on p. 35 shows that there are five different personal forms of the French verb, or class to which such words as love belong. In more old-fashioned languages the verb root has all six different derivatives corresponding to the singular and plural forms of all the persona] pronouns or to the names they can replace. Thus the corresponding forms of the equivalent Italian verb are:

(io) do I give (noi) diamo we give

(tu) dai thou givest (voi) date you give

(egli) dii he gives (essi) danno they give

The Danish equivalent for all these derivative forms of the Italian root da- present in our words donation or dative is giver. This is just the same whether the Danish (or Norwegian) equivalent of I, we, thou, you, he, she, it, ox they stands in front of, or as in a question, immediately after it. Since Danes, who produce good beer and good bacon, have no personal flexions, and since Benjamin Franklin could discuss electricity with only one, it is not obvious that the five of Voltaire’s French are really necessary tools. If we do not wish to encourage the accumulation of unnecessary linguistic luggage, it is therefore instructive to know how people collected them. The first step is to go back to the common ancestor of French and Italian. The table on p. 98 furnishes a clue.

One thing the table exhibits is this. It was not customary to use the personal pronoun equivalent to I, he, we, etc., in the older languages of the Indo-European family. The ending attached to the verb really had a use. It had to do the job now done by putting the pronoun in front of it. So the ending in modern descendants of such languages is merely the relic of what once did the job of the pronoun. This leads us to ask how tne ending came to do so. A clue to a satisfactory answer Is also in the table, which exposes a striking family resemblance among the endings of the older verbs of the Indo-European family. Of the five older representatives, four have the suffix MI for the form of the verb which corresponds to the first person singular* This at once reminds you of the English pronoun me, which replaces the first person I when it comes after the verb in a plain statement. Our table (p. 99) of

. *T,ht is.^at“ with the terminal -O. The Latin I is ego, shortened

in Italian to to, Spanish yo.

D

98

The Loom oj Language

pH

H

t

O

co

&

W

Ph

o

Z'

o

£

a

p

>

w

*

a

o

g

o

r8

to

5? JW _ *"i *»* 43 W OT 4-J
-ICAL ENG I give thou give (etc.) give we give ye give they give		u u u u $h in K p <u 4> <u «l> 53 ^ Si 5b So'S’S’S < W 3 C3 V <u <l> Q <U 'fj cd ^ TJ TJ Xk
9 £ « ^
►v co jH 3 r-( 00 *»» S co 4-» t3 d s ■§ -3-3 -§.§•§		t! s t-i cn p< 4> p 4> O d) <y w > .&* S> > oo’S*S‘S*S’S f* M 3 4) <U 3 O O 43 fe O fl> »J >'» ^ >'*43 O ^ s
. — . — , . . . .
OLD SLAV dami dasi dasti damn daste dadanti	3 0 < | D	s •»!$§ Iff B 8» 60 S> So & 4 ^ :5S*!3 *g 3 *5*
	!
	0
K ’§ <* r, b a a 1 ■§ •§•§•§•§ -8 ° •5:3:Si,-3:g	m	h , a a § -s „ P Hr! ‘fi ff <P ‘P <s 3 a &> an a & H 60 S3 d ' U u u a Pss
i ,* 3 i iis j 2 j a mm 0		CO ^ 0 S 0 0 s s 5 1 1 § § g | 5** O 0 O 0 0 0 .8 B ^ g s 1 | p w d >
H M »*H tyj illllll		9 2 g § 0* | a -8 •8 3 lit fcj -231111

m

* The ipeliing conventions follow Bopp, Vergkick. Gramm., vol. 2,

Accidence The Table Manners of Language 99

corresponding pronouns of several languages placed in the Indo- European group encourages us to believe' that the correspondence between the English pronoun ME and the ending MI is not a mere accident

The meaning of this coincidence would be more difficult to under- FAMILY RESEMBLANCE OF ARYAN PRONOUNS

		SCOTS
		GAELIC	RUSSIAN	ITALIAN*	LATIN	EARLY GREEK*	ICELANDIC
1			YA	10	EGO	EGO	EG or JEG
ME	Acc.	- MI	MENYA !	| me	ME	ME	MIG
Dat.		MNE	MIHI	MOI	MJER
THOU		"	TI	TU	TU	TU	THU
THEE	Acc.	- TU	TEBYA	j* TE j	TE I	TE	THIG
Dat,		■ TEBE	TIBI	TOI	thjer
WE		)	MI		j- NOS	1	VJER
	Acc.	L SINN	NAS	- NOI	> NO
US	Dat.	1 I	NAM	NOBIS	J NON	| OSS

stand if it were not due to a process which we can see at work in Anglo- American at the present day. When we speak quickly, we do not say I am, you are, he is. We say I’m, you’re, he’s; and Bernard Shaw spells them as the single words Im,youre, hes. The fact that the agglutinating or gluing on of the pronoun, takes place in this order need not bother us, because the habit of invariably putting the pronoun before the verb is a new one. In Bible English we commonly meet with constructions such as thus spake he. Even in modem speech we say see you. In certain circumstances this inversion generally occurs in other Teutonic lan¬ guages as in Bible English. It was once a traffic rule of the Aryan family;

* The Italian forms are the stressed ones (p. 363). The later Gtwlr ^

tu, te, toi were a* *, sai. The Greek no, ZmdaJK ^

corresponding plural forms in Doric Greek were hemes, heme, hemm The 1st

is comparable to the Russian mi and to the first person plural terminal of the Greek, Latin, or Sanskrit verb. F terminal ot the

100

The Loom of Language

and it is still customary in one group of Aryan languages. This group, called the Celtic family, furnishes suggestive evidence for the belief that the personal flexions which do the work of the absent pronoun m

Latin or Greek were originally separate pronouns placed after the

verb*

The Celtic languages, which include Welsh, Gaelic, Irish, and Breton, have several peculiarities (p. 4l6) which distinguish them from all other members of the Indo-European group. In Celtic languages, words which are equivalent to a Latin “verb” may or may not have personal flexions. In Old Irish, as, which corresponds to our is (spelt m the same way in Erse, Le. modem Irish) has two forms, one used with the pronoun placed after it, and a contracted form corresponding to our pm (= His me who) in which we can recognize the agglutinated part as we still recognize the not in dont, shant, wont, or cant. The two forms are in the table below:

		OLD IRISH
LITHUANIAN esmi essi esti	SANSKRIT asmi asi asti	r“ 1 Extended Form as me as tu as c	Contracted am at as or is	BIBLE ENGLISH 1 am thou art he is

We must not conclude that the Celtic verb is more primitive than the Sanskrit Sir George Grierson has shown that modern Indie dialects have sloughed off person flexions and subsequently replaced them by new pronoun suffixes. Since pronouns are the most conservattve words of the Indo-European fund of vocables, the result may be very much like the preceding inflected form. The English am and is do not come directly from the speech of the early Britons. Our English IS is one form of a common Aryan root, IS, ES, or AS, which also turns up m Greek and in Latin, as in Sanskrit and Lithuanian. In Welsh it is not inflected when spelt CES. There must have been several primitive Aryan 'root-words corresponding to what grammarians call parts of the verb to be” (in English, am, is, are, was, were, be, being, been). The TWlkh or Erse am or im is an agglutinative contraction from the ES root, like the German sind (Latin sunt). The BE-BA-BO-BU root of being and been turns up again in Russian, Welsh, or Gaelic, and in the German and Dutch ich bin or ik hen (I am). The AR-ER root which

TEUTONIC BE VERB

Accidence — The Table Manners of Language ioi

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102

turns up in are. Is the single uninflected form er of the Danish or Norwegian “present tense” given above. We meet it again in the Latin imperfect (p. 105). What is most characteristic of the Teutonic group is die WAS-WAR root corresponding to our English was and were.

The moden to English are

are on p. 18; to the earliest Bible trail, slat

sharp contrast between the forms used in contemporary Teutonic and Romance languages is blurred. The next table shows this:

FOSSIL FORMS OF THE PRESENT TENSE OF TO BE

I am	LATIN sum	GOTHIC im	OLD HORSJ era	E i OLD am	ENGLISH or biom (beo) bist
thou art	es	is	est	arp is
he is	est	1st	es	bip
we are	sumus	sijum	erom	\ sint	1
you arc	estis	sijup	crop	> or	> biop
they are	sunt	sind	etc	J aron

Agglutination of pronouns to other words is a very characteristic feature of the Celtic languages. In all of them pronouns also form contracted derivatives by fusion with directives (prepositions), ix. such words as mth9in, to , from, Welsh has two forms . of the first personal pronoun, mi and recognizable in corresponding personal flexions of the prepositions, e.g.:

I {to or into) 4* mi im (to me)

at (fp or towards) 4- fi ™ ataf (to me)

The tenses of the old Aryan be verb in its Welsh form (BOD) have two corresponding types of flexion in the first person singular. We recognize them without difficulty in the endings of:

bum I was byddaf « I shall be

' Any doubt about the meaning of this coincidence disappears when we compare them with the corresponding forms of the second person plural The Welsh fox you is chwi and the Welsh for they is hwynt. The aggluti¬ native character of the personal flexion is therefore unmistakable in:

danoch* under you buoch^j on were hyddwch* you will be

danynt) under them burnt, they were . byddant,' they will be

Accidence — The Table Manners of Language 103

Though the Welsh use their verb to be of the written language with¬ out a separate pronoun, they usually insert a pronoun after it in speech. The necessities of daily intercourse compensate for the supposititious merits of a flexional system when its agglutinative origin is no longer recognizable to anybody except the grammarian. The need is greater when a language is imposed on a conquered people, or adopted by its conquerors. The absent pronoun of written Latin has come back in its daughter dialect, French.

TENSE FLEXION

Tense flexion, illustrated by the derivative forms loved or gave , may be external or internal. We call the English dictionary form (e.g. love or give) the present in contradistinction to the derivative past form. The words past and present suggest that tense flexion dates an occurrence. This would be a true description of what the French future tense (p. 105) endings do. It is not an accurate description of what the choice of our English present tense form does in she plays the piano . If we want to date the occurrence as present , we do not use the so-called present tense form. We resort to the roundabout expression: she is playing the piano. In reality the tense forms of a verb have no single clear-cut function. To a greater or less extent in different European languages two distinct functions blend. One is the time distinction between past, present, and future. The other, more prominent in English, especially in Russian and in Celtic languages, is what gram¬ marians call aspect. Aspect includes the distinction between what is habitual or is going on (: imperfect ) and what is over and done with {perfect). This is the essential difference involved in the choice of tense forms in the following :

(a) the earth moves round the sun (imperfect)

(&) he moved the pawn to queen four (perfect)

The last two examples might suggest that the distinction between the meaning of the simple present and past tense forms of English is straightforward. This is not true. We imply future action when we use the present tense form in: I sail for Nantucket at noon. We imply know¬ ledge of the past when we use the present in he often goes to Paris. The particle often and the expression at noon date the action or tell us whether it is a habitual occurrence. In fact we rely, and those who speak other European languages rely more and more, on roundabout expressions to do what tense flexion supposedly does.

I04 The Loom of Language

Such roundabout expressions are of two kinds. We may simply as in the last examples, insert some qualifying expression or particle which denotes lime (e.g. formerly, now, soon), or aspect (e.g. once, habitually). Alternatively we may use the construction known as a compound tense by combining a helper with the dictionary form of the verb (e.g. I shall sing) or with one of two derivatives called the present and past participles. The present participle of English verbs is the -ing derivative, as in I am singing. The past participle is the corresponding form in I have sung. We can use both to qualify a noun, e.g. a singing bird or an oft-sung song. All English verbs (except some helpers) have an -ing derivative. Verbs which take the -ed or -t suffix have one form which we can use to qualify a noun (e.g. a loved one), as the simple past tense form (e.g, she loved him) or with helpers (e.g. she had loved Mm or she is loved). In Anglo-American usage the Chinese trick of relying on particles often overrides the distinction otherwise inherent in the use of the helper verb, as in: (a) I am leaving to-morrow ; (b) I am constantly leaving my hat behind.

There is therefore nothing surprising about the fact that so few of us notice it when we have no tense flexion to lean on. A student of social statistics finds himself (or herself) at no disadvantage because the verb in the following sentences lacks present and past distinction:

Oats cost x dollars a bushel to-day

Oats cost y dollars a bushel last fall

Indeed, few people who speak the Anglo-American language realize

how often they use such verbs every day of their lives. Below is a list of common verbs which have only three forms: the dictionary verb, its -ing derivative and the -s derivative of the third person singular present :

bet	cost	hurt	quit	shed	split
burst	cut	let	rid	shut	spread
cast	hit	put	set	slit	thrust

The foreigner who wishes to learn the language of Francis Bacon and Benjamin Franklin has nothing more to leam about them, and the time of young children is not wasted with efforts to memorize such

anomalies as:

give gave given sing sang sung .

live lived lived bring brought brought

Fortunately most English verbs are. weak* That is to say, they have a

single past derivative with the suffix -ed{ot -t) added to the dictionary

Accidence — The Table Manners of Language 105

■ form, as in placed or dreamt. This corresponds to the German terminal ; -te ( schnarchte = snored) or -ete ( redete = spoke).

In Gothic, the oldest known Teutonic language, we meet such forms as sokida (I sought), and sokidedum (we sought). Some philologists believe that this is an agglutination of the same root as German tun , and English do with the verb root. It is as if we said in English I seekdid (= I did seek), or in German ich suchetat . In some hayseed districts a similar combination (e.g, he did say = he said) is quite customary. The example below shows the old English past of the verb andswerian 3 (to answer) and how it may have come about by contraction with dyde (did) if this view is correct:

{I. andswerian + dyde = andswerede

II. andswerian + dydest = andsweredest

III. andswerian + dyde = andswerede

3> Plural (all persons) andswerian ~f- dydon = andsweredon

ss The English verb of Harold at the Battle of Hastings had personal flexions of the past as of the present forms. All such personal flexions corresponding to a particular class of time or aspect derivatives make up what is called a single tense. In Slavonic, Celtic, and Teutonic languages, as in English, there are two simple tenses, corresponding more or less to our present and past. Some of the ancient Indo-European * languages and the modem descendants of Latin have a much more l elaborate system of derivatives signifying differences of time or aspect. ^ The following table shows that Latin verbs have six forms of tense ^ flexion, each with its own six flexions of person and number, making J UP six tenses, respectively called (i) present, (ii) past imperfect , (iii) $ past perfect , (iv) pluperfect) (v) future, and (vi) future perfect French,

	LATIN	FRENCH	ANGLO-AMERICAN
(i)	amo	j’aime	I love I am loving
(ii)	amabam	j’aimais	I used to love I did love I was loving
(iii)	amavi	faimai j’ai aim£	I loved I (have) loved
(iv)	amaveram	f avals aim6	I had loved
(v)	* amabo	faimerai	I shall love
(vi)	amavero	faurai aim6	I shall have loved

D*

io6 . The Loom of Language

Spanish, and Italian have two past tenses and one future, making four in all. One of the French past tenses has died out in conversation.

The examples cited show that the French future is not much like the Latin form. The latter ceased to be used in the later days of the Roman Empire. It made way for an idiom analogous to our way of expressing future action when we say; CT have to go to town to-morrow.” This is just what St. Augustine does. Writing about the coming of the King¬ dom of God, he declares : petant out non petant venire habet (whether they ask or do not ask, it will come). The combination of the infinitive venire (to come) with the common Aryan have verb (habere in Latin) means what the French or the Italian future conveys in a slightly more compact form. Fusion took place in the modem descendants of Latin. You can see tills if you compare the flexions of the present tense of the French verb “to have” with the future forms. The present tense of the verb have in French is as follows ;

PERSON SINGULAR PLURAL

1. (f ) ai I have (nous) avons we 1

2. (tu) as you have (vous) avez you > have

3. (il) a he has (ils) ont they]

We can get four out of the six personal forms of the French future tense by simply adding the appropriate forms of the present have to the “infinitive” form aimer (to love) as follows :

aimer + ai = aimerai .aimer. + (av)ons aimerons

aimer + as = aimeras aimer +. (av)ez » aimerez

aimer + a — aimera aimer + ont — aimeront

This example,.. representative of the origin of the future tense .and conditional mood forms, of the verb in other modem Romance dialects (p. 339)* shows that tense flexion, like flexion of person, can originate from a process of contraction like what we see at work in such words as you’re and don’t. It is likely that the Latin pluperfect and future perfect endings correspond to personal derivatives of the are root of our verb to he> because all their endings are identical with corresponding personal forms, of tenses of its Latin equivalent tacked on to the same stem, i.e, amav in the example cited. To anyone who is English-speaking this is not surprising, because we use our verb to be in expressions which signify past .and future time, e„g. I was coming or I am going . Indeed it Is not improbable that the be root turns up in the past imperfect (e.g, amabam) and the. simple future (e.g. amabo).

Tense flexions with the same common meaning may have begun by agglutination of the root to different elements which decay to a greater

Accidence — The Table Manners of Language 107

or less extent because of the difficulties of pronouncing them distinctly in a new context. This would explain why languages rich in such derivatives generally have several types of tense formation. The irregu¬ larities of the English strong verb, which has few surviving flexions, sufficiently illustrate the difficulties to which such irregularities give rise when a foreigner tries to learn a language. The forms of the English verb (including the -ing derivative) are typically four in number (e.g. say, says, saying, said), or at most five, in strong verbs which have internal flexion (e.g. give, gives, giving, gave and given). The Latin verb root has over a hundred flexional derivatives.

In English there are many verb families such as love-skove-prove, drink-sing-swim, think-catch-teach, of which the first includes more than ninety-five per cent. Grammarians put Latin verbs in one or other of four different families called conjugations, of which the third is a miscellany of irregularities. There are also many exceptional ones that do not follow the rules of any conjugation. So it is not surprising that the flexional system of Latin began to wilt when Roman soldiers tried to converse with natives of Gaul, or that it withered after Germanic tribes invaded Italy, France, and the Iberian Peninsula Personal endings were blurred, and roundabout ways of expressing the same thing replaced tense derivatives.

Our last table shows that we can express the meaning of six T^frn tenses by combining our helpers be, have, shall, with the -ed ( loved) or -en (given) form (past participle), with the combination to and the dictionary verb, or with the -ing form. Since there can be no difference of opinion about whether an analytical language, which expresses time, aspect, and personal relations in this way is more easy to learn than a synthetic (i.e. flexional) language, it is important to ask whether Europe lost anything in the process of simplification.

Clearly there is no tragedy in the removal of an overgrowth of mis¬ pronunciation that led to flexion of person. Similar remarks apply with equal force to the loss of tense flexion. The fine distinctions of time or aspect which old-fashioned grammarians detect in the tense flexions of a, language such as Latin or Greek have very little relation to the way in which a scientific worker records the correspondence of events when he is concerned with the order in which they occur; and few tense distinc¬ tions of meaning are clear-cut. It is sheer nonsense to pretend that pre¬ vision of modem scientific ideas about process and reality guided the evolution of the seven hundred or more disguises of a single Sanskrit verb root. Tenses took shape in the letterless beginnings of language

io8

The Loom of Language

among clockless people into whose nomadic experience the sun-dials and clepsydras of the ancient Mediterranean priesthoods had not yet intruded.

Again and again history has pronounced its judgment upon the merits of such flexions in culture contacts through trade, conquest, or the migrations of peoples. International intercourse compels those who speak an inflected language to introduce the words which make the flexions useless. If the flexions persist as mummies in the mausoleum of a nation’s literature, a large part of its intellectual energy is devoted to the pursuit of grammatical studies which are merely obstructive, while the gap between popular speech and that of highly educated people prevents the spread of technical knowledge essential to intelligent citizenship.

In nearly (see p. 419) all languages of the Indo-European family personal flexion is confined to the class of words called verbs-, and tense flexion is exclusively characteristic of them. We can still recognize as verbs some English words which have no tense flexion by the personal ending, -s, as in cuts, or -ing, as in hurting, but some helpers (may, can , shall) have neither -s nor -ing forms. The outlines of the verb as a class of English words have now become faint. In written Swedish, the verb has one ending common to tire first, second, and third person singular and another ending common to the first, second, and third person plural. This process of levelling is still going on in Swedish. Only the singular ending is customarily used in speech or correspondence. There is no trace of personal flexion in Danish and Norwegian.

NUMBER

Owing to accidental uniformities which have accompanied the levelling down of the personal flexion, grammar books sometimes refer to the number flexion of the verb. What is more properly called number flexion is characteristic of the class of words called nouns. In most modem European languages, number flexion, illustrated by the dis¬ tinction between ghost and ghosts, or man and men, simply tells us whether we are talking of one or more than one creature, thing, quality, or group. The terms singular and plural stand for the two forms. The singular form is the dictionary word; Some of the older Indo-European languages, e.g. Sanskrit and early Greek, had dual forms, as if we were to write catwo for two cats , in contradistinction to one cat or several cats.

In the English spoken at the time of Alfred the Great, the personal pronoun still had dual, as well as singular and plural forms. The dual form persists in Icelandic, which is a surviving fossil language, as the duck-bill platypus of Tasmania is a surviving fossil animal. At one time

Accidence — The Table Manners of Language 109

all the Indo-European languages had dual forms of the pronouns. The ensuing table shows the Icelandic and Old English alternatives. At an early date the hard Germanic g of English softened to y, as in many Swedish words. The pronunciation of git and ge became y it and ye. The latter was still the plural pronoun of address in Mayflower English.

Dual	ICELANDIC vi5	ANGLO-AMERICAN we (two)	OLD ENGLISH wit
Plural	vjer	we (all)	we
Dual	okkur	us (both)	uncit
Plural	OSS	us (all)	us
Dual	okkar	ours	uncer
Plural	vor	ours	ure
Dual		you (two)	git
Plural	p)QI	you (all)	ge
Dual	ykkur	you (both)	incit
Plural	y3ur	you (all)	eow
Dual	ykkar	yours	incer
Plural	yftar	yours	eower

Dual forms of the pronoun are widely distributed among earlier representatives of different language families and among living dialects of a few backward communities. So it is not surprising that distinctive dual personal flexions of the verb occur also, e.g. in Sanskrit, early Greek, Gothic. Though we meet' them both in the old Aryan languages, dual forms of the noun and of the adjective which goes with it are less widely spread than those of the pronoun. Dual forms of one sort or the " other now survive only in technically backward or isolated communi¬ ties. They disappeared in Greek in the fourth century b.c., and no distinctive dual forms are found in the earliest Latin. They have per¬ sisted in Lithuanian dialects of the western Aryan group, in the Amharic of Abyssinia within the Semitic family, and in two remote dialects of the Finno-Ugrian (p, 197) clan.

Separate dual and plural forms of the pronoun may go back to a time when many human beings lived in scattered and isolated house¬ holds made up of two adults and of their progeny. At this primitive level of culture the stock in trade of words is small, and a relatively consider¬ able proportion would refer to things which go in pairs, e.g. horns, eyes , ears, hands, feet, arms, legs, breasts . If so the distinction may have in¬ fected other parts of speech by analogical extension. The fate of the two pronoun classes throws light on the fact that the family likeness

no

The Loom of Language

of Aryan pronouns and verb flexions of the singular is far less apparent in corresponding plural forms. In the everyday speech of Iceland and of the Faeroes the dual now replaces the plural form of the personal pronoun, and one Bavarian dialect has enk (equivalent to our Old English inc) for the usual German accusative plural euch corresponding to the intimate nominative plural ihr (p. 126). This means that what is now called the plural form of a personal pronoun or personal flexion of an Aryan verb may really be what was once a dual form. (cf. Latin plural nos (we), Greek dual noi, and plural hemeis.)

The number flexion -s of houses is not useless, as is the personal ~s of bakes, nor pretentious like the luxuriant Latin tense distinctions. This does not mean that it is an essential or even universal feature of language. Some English name-words, such as sheep and grouse, and a much larger class of modem Swedish words (including all nouns of the baker-fisher class and neuter monosyllables) are like their Chinese or Japanese equivalents. That is to say, they have no separate plural form. The absence of a distinctive plural form is not a serious inconvenience. If a fisherman has occasion to emphasize the fact that he has caught one trout, the insertion of the number itself, or of the “indefinite article” a before the name of the fish, solves the problem in sporting circles, where the number flexion is habitually shot off game. Number flexion does not give rise to great difficulties for anyone who does not already know how to write English. Nearly all English nouns form their plural by adding -s or replacing^ and 0 by -ies and -oes. As in other Germanic languages, there is a class with the plural flexion in -en (e.g. oxen), and a dass with plurals formed by internal vowel change (louse, mouse, goose, man). The grand total of these exceptions is less than a dozen. They do not tax the memory. So we should not gain much by getting rid of number flexion.

COMPARISON, AND ADVERB DERIVATION

The same is true of another very regular and useful, though by no means indispensable, flexion called comparison. This is confined to, and in English is the only distinguishing mark of, some members of the class of words called adjectives. The English equivalent of a Latin or German adjective had already lost other flexions before the Tudor times. We make the two derivatives, respectively called the comparative and superlative form of the adjective as listed in the dictionary by adding -er (comparative), and -est (superlative), as in kinder and kindest. There are but few irregularities, e.g. good-better— best, bad— worse- worst, many or much— more— most. With these three outstanding

Accidence — The Table Manners of Language ill

exceptions, use of such derivatives has ceased to be obligatory in Anglo-American^ It is quite possible that they will eventually make way for the roundabout expressions illustrated by more firmy or the most firm . We do not use a comparative or superlative form of long adjectives which stand for qualities such as hospitable . Since gram¬ marians also use the word adjective for numbers, pointer-words (such as thisy thaty each)y and other vocables which do not form flexional derivatives of this class, no dear-cut definition of an adjective is appli¬ cable to a rational dassification of the Anglo-American vocabulary.

The monosyllables more and most in the roundabout expressions that are squeezing out flexion of comparison in Anglo-American are equivalent to words which have almost completely superseded it in all the modem descendants of Latin. They are examples of a group of particles called adverbs , including also such words as nowy sootiy veryy almosty quite* rather* well , seldom * and already. We use words of this class to limit, emphasize, or otherwise qualify the meaning of a typical adjective such as happy. We can also use such words to qualify the meaning of a verb, as in to live ' well* to speak illy to eat enough * or almost to avoid. The dass of English words which form flexional derivatives in ~er and -est generally form others by adding 4y* as in happily y firmly , steeply. We use such derivatives in the same way as adverbial particles. Thus we speak of an individual on whom we can depend as a really reliable person.

These adverbial derivatives are troublesome to a foreigner for two reasons. One is that the suffix 4y is occasionally (as originally) attached to words which have the characteristics of nouns, e.g. in manly * godly, * or sprightly (originally sprite-like or fairy-like). Unlike happily or firmly y such derivatives can be used in front of a noun, as in Shaw’s manly women and womanly mm. Another difficulty for the foreigner is that the adverbial flexion is disappearing. Such expressions as to suffer longy or to run fast* are good Bible English, and Elizabethan gram¬ marians who gave their benediction to a goodly heritage did not put a fence of barbed wire around the adverbial suffix. If we accept the expression to runfasty we ought not to resist come quick , or to object to the undergraduate headline, Magdalen man makes good (i.e. the Duke of Windsor has been promoted by. the death of his father). No reason¬ able man wants to suffer lengthily. English has never been consistent about this custom. It is at 'best a convention of context, and the com¬ plete decay of the adverbial derivative would be a change for the better. Americans are more sensible about it than the British.

The Loom of Language

1 12

GENDER

At one time the adjective (including the “articles” a and the) was a highly inflected word. It had flexions dictated by the noun with which it kept company. The only trace of this agreement or concord in English is the distinction between this and these or that and those. We say that this “agrees” with goose because goose is singular, and these “agrees” with men because the latter word is a plural noun. In the time of Alfred the Great, all English words classed as adjectives had number flexion dictated by the noun in this way. They also had flexions of case and gender. Gender-concord is the diagnostic characteristic which labels the adjective and pronoun when a clear-cut distinction between adjectives and other words is recognizable. Grammarians give the name gender to three different characteristics of word behaviour. In English, two of them are relatively trivial, and offer no difficulty to anyone who wants to learn the language. The third has disappeared completely.

The first is connected with the fact that male and female animals or occupations may have different names derived from the same stem, as illustrated by lion-lioness, tiger-tigress, actor-actress, or poet-poetess. Although the English word distress has the same ending as adulteress, grammarians do not call it a feminine noun. So far as English is con¬ cerned, the distinction implied by calling poet or lion masculine and lioness or actress feminine nouns, is not specifically grammatical. It is purely anatomical.

Corresponding to it we have a second distinction connected with the use of the third person singular pronoun. When we use the latter to replace an English noun, we have to take sex into account. We say he instead of heir or nephew, and she instead of heiress or niece. When we speak of animals we are not so particular. Even if we know the sex, as when we talk of bulls or cows, we are not bound to choose between the masculine he and the feminine she. More often we use the neuter form it, which always replaces a plant, a part of the body, a dead object, a collection, or an abstraction. To speak Anglo-American correctly, all we need to know about “gender” in this sense is :

(a) That the masculine and feminine pronouns are used in accordance

with sex differences when referring to human beings,

(b) That the so-called neuter form can replace any other singular

noun.

So defined, gender is still a biological distinction, and as such offers no difficulty to anyone who wants to learn our language. What gram-

Accidence — The Table Manners of Language 113

marians mean by gender extends far beyond the simple rules which suffice as a guide to correct Anglo-American usage.- We get a clue to its vagaries in poetry and in local dialects, when she stands for the moon or for a ship. This custom takes us back to a feature of English as spoken or written before the Norman Conquest* when there was no universal rule about the proper use of the pronoun. Any general rules which could be given to a foreigner who wished to learn the English of Alfred the Great* would have had ’more to do with the endings of names than with the sex or natural class to which an object belongs. If English had preserved this complication* we might call distress feminine because it has the same ending as actress^ and tractor masculine because it has the same ending as actor , We should then have to say: “his distress was so great that he could not speak of her” or “the manage¬ ment has inspected the tract or and has decided to buy him”

These fictitious illustrations do not fully convey the flimsy con¬ nexion between biological realities and the classification of words as masculine* feminine* or “neuter when such terms are applied to Latin and Greek or German and French nouns. Most nouns have no ending to recall anything which is recognizably male* like actor * or female* like actress. Names of common animals of either sex may belong to the so-called masculine and feminine categories in most European lan¬ guages. Whether it has ovaries or testes* the French frog (la grenouille) is feminine. In French or in Spanish, there are no neuter nouns, and the foreigner has to choose between two forms of the pronoun respectively called masculine and feminine. Danish and Swedish have two classes of nouns* respectively called common and neuter. The Scandinavian child like the Scandinavian or German sheep is neuter. A quotation from Mark Twain (A Tramp Abroad) illustrates how much unnecessary and useless luggage this adds to the memory. “I translate this,” he says, “from a conversation in one of the German Sunday-school books

Gretchen: Where is the turnip ?

Wilhelm; She has gone to the kitchen.

Gretchen: Where is the accomplished and beautiful maiden? e Wilhelm : It has gone to the Opera.

' Greater feats of memory imposed on the beginner by the gender- concord of the adjective complicate the effort of learning Aryan lan¬ guages other than English or modern Persian. Since, we have no sur¬ viving vestige of this, we have to fall back on a fictitious illustration or rely on examples , from another language, First, suppose that we had

1 14 The Loom of Language

six forms corresponding to the two this and these: three singular, thor (to go with words of the actor class), tkess (to go with words of the actress class), thit (to go with words like pit), and three corresponding plurals thors, thesses, and thits. This gives you a picture of two out of three sets of disguises in the wardrobe of the Old English adjective The foreigner who tried to speak Old English correctly had to choose the right gender as well as the right number form of a noun, and many so-called masculine, feminine, or neuter nouns had no label like the -or of actor, the -ess of actress, or the -it of pit to guide the choice. Below is an illustration of the four forms of the French adjective.

CORRESPONDING CORRESPONDING

PRONOUN PRONOUN

le grand homme	it	le grand mux	11 :
the great man	he	the Mg watt	it
la grande femme	die	la grande table	die
the great woman	she	the Mg table	it

Because sex is all that is left of gender in English we must not fall into the trap of assuming that the chaotic system of labelling nouns, pronouns, and adjectives as masculine, feminine, common, or neuter forms in other languages arose because of animistic preoccupation with sex at a more primitive level of culture. This is not likely. A more plausible view will emerge when we have learned something more about the languages of backward peoples such as the Australian abori¬ gines, Trobriand Islanders, or Bantu. Meanwhile, let us be dear about one thing. Although many nouns classified by grammarians as masculine and feminine may share the same suffixes (or prefixes) as newer namw (e.g. actor-actress ) for males and females, the older sex pairs of the Aryan languages, such as father-mother, bull-cow, horse-more, boar- sow, ram-ewe in English, carry no sex label. Even when they stand for adult human beings, the so-called masculine and feminine forms of the pronoun do not invariably replace nouns of the dass which their name suggests. Thus the German word Weib (woman) is neuter, i.e. the pronoun which takes its place is the neuter es, not the feminine sie (she).

Since names for objects carry no gender label such as the -ess in actress in most Aryan languages, gender flexion is not necessarily a characteristic of the noun as such. It is the trade-mark of the adjective. When there is no gender flexion, as in English, comparison is the only basis for a dear-cut distinction between adjective and noun. Since we can indicate which adjective refers to a particular noun by its position immediately before (English) or after (French) the latter, it goes

Accidence The Table Manners of Language 115

without saying that gender concord, like number concord, adds to the labour of learning a language without contributing anything to the clarity of a statement. If every adjective has three gender forms (mas¬ culine, feminine, and neuter) corresponding to each of three numbers (singular, plural, and dual), we have to choose between nine different ways of spelling or pronouncing it whenever we use it; and if there are no certain rules to help us to decide to what gender-class nouns belong, correct judgment demands memorizing many exceptions.

The pathology of adjectives does not end here. When nouns have case flexion, which we shall come to next, adjectives may have corre¬ sponding case forms. If there are eight cases, as in Sanskrit, which is fortunately a dead language, case concord implies that an adjective-root may have as many as seventy-two derivatives. The entire battery is called the declension of the adjective. In the old Teutonic languages, including modem Icelandic, one and the same adjective has two declensions, i.e. alternative forms for the same number, gender, and case; and it is necessary to learn when to use one or the other (see p. 269).

CASE

The word declension stands for all the flexions of the adjective, noun, or pronoun, as the word conjugation stands for all the flexions of a verb. The declension of an adjective, noun, or pronoun includes this third class of flexions which must now be discussed. English pronouns have two or three case-forms listed below:

SUBJECT FORM (NOMINATIVE CASE).

% we, you, he, she, it, they, who, which.

POSSESSIVE FORM (GENITIVE OR POSSESSIVE CASE).

my, our, your, \ . . 1 her, . .

mine, ours, yours, Jhls’ /hers, theus, whose.

OBJECT FORM (OBLIQUE CASE).

me, us, you, him, her, it, them, whom, which.

Of these three case-forms one, the genitive, sometimes fulfils a use denoted by its alternative name, the possessive. The F.nglish genitives of the personal pronouns other than he and it have two forms, one used in front of the possessed (my, your, etc.), the other (mine, yours, etc.) by itself. Grammarians usually call the first the possessive adjective. In English as in modem Scandinavian languages the genitive -s flexion is all that remains of four case-forms (singular and plural) for each noun, as for each pronoun and adjective in Old English, Old Norse, or in

il6 The Loom of Language

modem Icelandic, which does not differ from Old Norse more than Bible English differs from Chaucer’s. This genitive flexion of the noun has almost completely disappeared in spoken Dutch and in many German dialects. When we still use it in English, we add it only to names of living things, to some calendrical terms (e.g. day's), and to some astro¬ nomical (e.g. sun's). It is never obligatory, because we can always replace it by putting of in front of the noun. The French, Italian, and Spanish noun has completely lost case-flexion, and the fact that French¬ men, Italians, and Spaniards can do without it raises the same kind of question which disappearance of other flexions prompts us to ask. Is it an advantage to be able to say my father's in preference to the more roundabout of my father?

In the number flexion -s of die noun there is a common element of meaning, viz. more than one. This is characteristic of all plural deriva¬ tives, whatever the root represents. Though the English genitive often indicates possession, as in father's pants, it is stretching the meaning of the word to say that the same is obviously true of uncle's death, man’s duty, fathers bankruptcy, or the day’s work. In the older Teutonic languages, the genitive was also prescribed for use after certain direc¬ tives, of which there are fourteen in Icelandic. A few idiomatic sur¬ vivals of this exist in modern Scandinavian languages, e.g. in Nor¬ wegian, til fots {on foot), til sengs (to bed), til tops (to the top). German has many adverbial genitives, e.g. rechts (to the right), links (to the left), nachts (at night). The use of the genitive flexion then depends on the context of the word to which it sticks. There was no common thread of clear-cut meaning which governed its use when it was still obligatory in Teutonic dialects. It is a trick of language dictated by custom, for reasons buried in a long-forgotten past.

The same verdict applies with equal justice to the distinction between the nominative and objective (or oblique) case-forms of the pronoun. We are none the worse because it znA.you each have one form corresponding to such pairs as he-kim, they-them. The grammar book rules for the use of these two pronoun cases in English, or Dutch or Scandinavian languages are: (a) we have to use the nominative (I, we, he, etc.) when the pronoun is the subject of the verb; (b) we have to use the oblique case when the pronoun is not the subject of a verb. The subject is the word which answers the question we make when we put who or what in front of the verb. Thus this sentence is the subject of this sentence is short, because it answers the question what is short? This and nothing more is the grammarian’s subject. The subject of the grammarian is not neces-

Accidence— The Table Manners of Language 117

sarily the agents as it is in the sentence, I wrote this . It becomes the grammarian’s object when we recast the same sentence in the passive form, this was written by me . It is not even true to say that the subject is necessarily the agent when the verb is active (p. 120) as in I wrote this . The grammarian’s subject is not the agent in the sentence I saw a flash. Plato would have said so, because Plato believed that the eye emits the light. We, who use cameras, know better. Seeing is a result of what the flash does to my retina. It is not what 1 do to (or with) the flash.

So far as they affect our choice of the case-forms I or me, the only features common to such statements are: (a) if the answer to the question constructed by putting who in front of the verb (e.g. who wrote? or who saw?) is a personal pronoun, it must have the nominative form J, (thou)) he, she, it, we, you, or they; ( b ) if the answer to the ques¬ tion formed by putting whom or what after the verb (J wrote or saw) (what?) is a personal pronoun, it must have the objective form me, (thee), him, her, it, us , you , or them. It gets you no further to have a word subject for (a) and another word object for (b), as if subject and object really had a status independent of what the verb means. To say that the subject is the nominative case-form means as much and as little as the converse. Neither is really a definition of what we mean by the subject, or what the choice of the nominative involves.

Only the customs of our language lead us to prefer I to me for A or B in such a statement as A saw him or he saw B. We have no doubt about its meaning when a child or a foreigner offends the conventions by using J, as we already use it and you for A or for B. Till the great Danish linguist Jespersen drew our attention to the customs of Anglo- American speech, old-fashioned pedagogues objected to thafs me or its him, because grammarians said that the pronoun after am or is also stands for the subject itself. They overlooked the fact that the author¬ ized version of the Bible contains the question : “whom say ye that I am?” i.e. “I am whom, say you?”

In the time of Alfred the Great, English pronouns had four case- forms, as Icelandic and German pronouns still have. Corresponding to our single object or oblique case-form of the pronoun were two, an accusative and a dative. Icelandic nouns still have four case-forms, as have the adjectives, and there is a distinct dative ending of plural German nouns placed in the neuter and masculine gender classes. In Old English, in German, or in Icelandic the choice of the accusative or dative case-form depends partly on which preposition accompanies the noun or pronoun. When no preposition accompanies a noun or pro-

The Loom of Language

noun other than the subject of the verb, it depends on how we answer questions constructed by putting the subject and its verb in front of (a) whom or what, ( h ) to whom or to what. The direct object which answers (a) must have the accusative case-ending. The indirect object which answers (b) must have the dative case-ending.

A sentence which has a direct and an indirect object is: the bishop gave the baboon a bun. The bun answers the question : the bishop gave what? So it is the direct object. The baboon answers the question: the bishop gave to whom? It is therefore the indirect object. The example cited means exactly the same if we change the order of the two objects and put to in front of the baboon. It then reads: the bishop gave a bun to the baboon. When two nouns or pronouns follow the English verb, we can always leave out the directive to by recourse to this trick, i.e. by placing the word which otherwise follows to in front of the direct object. What we can achieve by an economical device of word-order applicable in all circumstances, languages with the dative flexion, express by using the appropriate endings of the noun, pronoun, adjective or article.

Two sentences in English, German, and Icelandic given below illustrate this sort of pronoun pathology:

(a) Fate gave him to her in her hour of need.

Das CJcschick gab ihn ihr in der Stunde ihrer Not (German).

Orlogin gifu henni harm & stund hennar thurftar (Icelandic).

(b) Fate gave her to him in his hour of need.

Das Geschick gab sie lhm in der Stunde seiner Not (German).

Orlogin gifu honum hana & stund hans thurftar (Icelandic).

If all nouns had the same dative ending attached to the plural and to the singular forms, this would not be an obvious disadvantage. The trouble with case-flexion in Aryan languages, as with all other flexions, is this. Even when they convey a common element of meaning (e.g. plurality) they are not uniform. In languages which have case-flexion* the affixes denoting number and case fuse beyond recognition, and the final result depends on the noun itself. Before we can use the Icelandic dative equivalent of to the baboon or to the bishop, we have to know which of four different dative singular and two different dative plural case-endings to choose. Thus teaching or learning the language involves classifying all the nouns in different declensions which exhibit the singular and plural case-endings appropriate to each.

Latin and Russian have a fifth case respectively called the ablative and instrumental, which may carry with it the meaning we express by putting with, as the dative may express putting to, in front of an English noun j but Romans used the ablative and Russians use their instrumental

Accidence — The Table Manners of Language 119

case forms in all sorts of different situations. There is some reason to believe that the directive used to come after, instead of before, the noun,

as the verb once came before the pronoun in the beginnings of Indo- European speech — and still does in the Celtic languages. It is therefore tempting to toy with the possibility that case endings began by gluing directives to a noun or pronoun. Several fac-s about modem European languages lend colour to this possibility.

It is a common-place to say that directive easily attach themselves to pronouns as in Celtic dialects (p. 102), or to the definite article as in German or French. In German we meet the contractions im = in dem (to the), zum = zu dem (to the), am = an dem (at the), in French du = de le, des = de les (of the) and au = a le, aux = a les (to the). Almost any Italian preposition (p, 361) forms analogous contracted combinations with the article, as any Welsh or Gaelic preposition forms contracted combinations with the personal pronouns. The directive glues on to the beginning of the word with which it combines in such pairs; but it turns up at the end in the small still-bom English declension represented by skyward, earthward, Godward. One member of the Aryan family actually shows something like a new case system by putting the directives, at die end of the word. The old Indie case- endings of the Hindustani noun (p. 412) have completely disappeared. New independent particles like the case suffixes of the Finno-Ugrian languages (p. 197) now replace them.

Here we are on speculative rround, What is certain is that, once started in one way or another, the habit of tacking on case-endings continues by the process of analogical extension. The English genitive ending in kangaroo's got there after Captain Cook discovered Australia. If the ever was part of a separate word, it had lost any trace of its identity as such more than a thousand years before white men had any word for the marsupial.

MOOD AND VOICE ' '

,We have now dealt with all the flexions characteristic of words

classified as nouns, pronouns, or adjectives, and with the two most characteristic flexions of the verb. The six tense-forms of Latin already shown, with the three corresponding persons in the singular and plural, account for only thirty-six of the 101 forms of the ordinary verb. Besides time, person, and number, Latin verbs have two other kinds of flexion. They are called mood and voice. There are three moods in Latin, To the ordinary, or indicative mood of a plain statement, as

120 The Loom of Language

already mentioned on p. 105, we first have to add four tenses, adding twenty-four other forms which make up a “subjunctive?’ mood. This is reserved for special situations. The only vestige of such purely con¬ ventional flexions in Anglo-American is the use of were instead of was after if, in such expressions as if I were , or the use of be, in be it so, for conventional situations of rather obscure utility.

Flexions of person, tent ., and mood do not exhaust all the forms of a Latin verb listed in die ionaries under what is called the infinitive (with the ending -are, -ere, or -ire). We shall come to the use of the infinitive later (p. 263). There is no distinctive infinitive form of the English verb. What grammarians call the infinitive of modem Euro¬ pean languages is the dictionary form we use when we translate the English verb after to {a book to read) or after helper verbs other than have or be (I shall read). Latin had several verb derivatives more or less equivalent to our present and past participles (see p. 277). Another form of the Latin verb is the imperative, in expressions equivalent to come here, or give me that. Its English equivalent is the same as the dictionary form.

Voice flexion duplicates the flexions already mentioned. It has dis¬ appeared in the modem descendants of Latin, and is absent in German and English. It exists in the Scandinavian languages, as illustrated by the following Danish expressions with their roundabout English equivalents:

Active: vi kaller (we call) vi kallede {we called)

Passive: vi kalles {we are called) vi kalledcs {we were called)

The Scandinavian passive has come into existence during the last thousand years, and we know its history. Its origin depends upon the use of what are known as reflexive pronouns to signify that subject and object are the same in such expressions as you are killing yourself. In Anglo-American we do no: use the reflexive pronoun when the meaning of the verb and its contex. indicate that the action is self-inflicted. We can' say I have just washed without adding myself. Such expressions often have a passive meaning, illustrated by the fact that I shot myself implies that I am shot. The passive inflexion of modem Scandinavian languages originated in this way during Viking times, or even before, from the agglutination of the reflexive pronoun (sik or sig) with the active form of the verb. Old Norse finna sik (German “findrn sich”-, English “find themselves”) became finnask, which corresponds to the modem Swedish finnas or Danish findes (are found). The Scandinavians

Accidence — The Table Manners of Language 121

therefore got their passive flexion independently by the method which Bopp (p. 188) believed to be the origin of the Greek and T^tin passive.

The Scandinavian model is instructive for another reason. It is already falling into disuse. Perhaps this is because it is not easy to recognize when speaking quickly. Whatever reason we do give for it* the simple truth is that passive flexion is a device of doubtful advantage in the written as well as in the spoken language. The passive flexion* which is quite regular in modern Scandinavian languages* is not an essential tool of lucid expression. We can always translate the passive form of a Latin or of a Scandinavian verb in two ways. We can build up the sentence in the more direct or active way* or we can use the type of roundabout expression given above. Thus we can either say I called him or he was called by me. The first is the way of the Frenchman or Spaniard. It is what an Englishman prefers if legal education has not encouraged the habit of such preposterous alien circumlocutions as it will be seen from an examination of Table X. Table X shows would be more snappy* and would not devitalize the essentially social relation between author and reader by an affectation of impersonality.

DECAY OF FLEXIONS

Our account of the decay of the flexions in English may lead a reader who has not yet attempted to learn another European language to take a discouraging view of the prospect. Let us therefore be dear about two things before we go further. One is that though Anglo-American has shed more of the characteristic flexions of the older Indo-European languages than their contemporary descendants, all of the latter have travelled along the same road. The other is that many of the flexions which still survive in them have no use in the written, and even less in the spoken, language.

In two ways French has gone further than English. It has more com¬ pletely thrown overboard noun-case and adjective-comparison in favour of roundabout or* as we shall henceforth say* analytical or isolating ex¬ pressions equivalent to our optional “off* and “more . . . than” or “ the most. 99 Though French has an elaborate tense system on paper, some of its verb flexions never intrude into conversation, and we can short- circuit others by analytical constructions such as our “I am going to , . The Danish, Norwegian* and the conversational Swedish verb has lost personal flexion altogether; and the time flexion of German, like that of the Scandinavian languages, is closely parallel to our own. The personal flexion of French is sixty per cent a convention of writing,

122

The Loom of Language

with no existence in the spoken language. We might almost say the same about the gender and case flexions of the German adjective, because they do not stick out in quick conversation. The mere fact that proof readers overlook wrong flexional endings far more often than incorrect spelling of the root itself shows how little they contribute to understanding of the written word.

In Teutonic languages such as Dutch, Norwegian, or German, and in Romance languages such as Spanish or French, many flexions for which English has no equivalent contribute nothing to the meaning of a statement, and therefore little to the ease with which we can learn to read quickly or write without being quite unintelligible. So we can make rapid progress in doing either of these, if we concentrate our attention first on the rules of grammar which tell us something about the meaning of a statement. This is the part of grammar called syntax. We are going to look at it in the next chapter.

Syntax is the most important part of grammar. The rules of syntax are the only general rules of a monosyllabic language such as Chinese. Since Chinese monosyllables have no internal flexion, e.g. change from man to men or mouse to mice , all Chinese root words are particles. Because rules of syntax are also the most essential rules of English, it is helpful to recognize how English, more particularly Anglo- American, has come to resemble Chinese through decay of the flexional system. Ihree features of this change emphasize their simi¬ larities. The first is that English is very rich in monosyllables. The second is the great importance of certain types of monosyllables. The third is that we can no longer draw a clear-cut line between the parts of speech * In other words, the vocabulary of English is also becoming a vocabulary of particles.

To say that English is rich in monosyllables in this context does not mean that an Englishman necessarily uses a higher proportion of mono¬ syllables than a Frenchman or a German. It means that in speaking or in writing English, we can rely on monosyllables more than wc can when vie write or speak French or German. The following passage illustrates how the translators of the authorized version of the English Bible drew on their native stock of monosyllables. It is the first ten verses of the fourth Gospel, and the only words made up of more than one syllable are in italics :

* Jagger {English in the Fume) boldly uses the two Chinese categories In

the forthright statement : * ‘English words may be classified into what are

Jmown m full or mpty words ”

Accidence ■ — The Table Manners of Language 123

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him, and without Mm was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness and the darkness comprehended it not. There was a man sent from God whose name was John. The same came for a witness to bear witness of the Light that all men through Mm might believe . He was not that Light but was sent to bear witness of that Light. That was the true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew Mm not.

A word-count of the corresponding passage in some other European languages (British and Foreign Bible Society editions) gives these figures:

LANGUAGE	NO. OF WORDS	NO, OF MONOSYLLABLES	: PERCENTAGE j
ENGLISH	139	124	90
ICELANDIC , |	138	■ IOO :	73
GERMAN	135 -	100	74
FRENCH	121	78	64-5
LATIN	92	26	28

A comparison between the figures for French and its Mghly syn¬ thetic parent Latin, or between Bible English and German or Icelandic, which are nearer to the English of the Venerable Bede, shows that this feature of English is not an accident of birth. It is a product of evolu¬ tion due to the disappearance of affixes. Decay of these affixes has gone with the introduction of roundabout expressions involving the use of particles such as of, to, more than, most , or of a special class of verbs some of which (e.g. will, shall, can, may ) have more or less completely lost any meaning unless associated with another verb. These helper verbs have few if any of the trade-marks of their class. None of them has the one surviving English flexion -s of the third person singular; and their alternative forms {would, should, could, might) would be diffi¬ cult to recognize as such unless we know their history. Three of them {shall, can, may) never had the -ing derivative characteristic of other English verbs; and one helper, not included among the examples cited, has no single distinctive feature of its dass. The helper must has no flexion of person or tense, and we cannot say musting . Called a verb by courtesy in recognition of its versatile past, it is now a particle.

In other Indo-European languages, including the modem Scandi-

124 The Loom of Language

navian dialects which have lost personal flexion, the uninflected verb stem turns up as a separate word only in the imperative. Both the present tense and the infinitive after helper verbs in roundabout expressions equivalent to Latin tenses have their characteristic affixes. One invariant English word does service for the present tense form (except in the third person singular), the imperative and the infinitive of other Indo-European verbs. Many verb-roots are identical with those of nouns; and English nouns of this type are often identical with the verb form which serves for the present tense, infinitive and impera¬ tive of other European languages. In very many situations in which English verbs occur, there is therefore no distinction between the form of what we call the verb and the form of what we call a noun. The following comparison between English and Norwegian illustrates this:

a motor . . . . en bil

I motor . jeg biler

I shall motor . jeg ska! bile

A pedant may object to the choice of so new a word. Bible English provides many examples of the same thing, for instance fear , sin , love, praise, delight, promise, hope, need, water', and the day’s work supplies many others which have been in use as long as hammer, nail, screw, use, dust, fire. When an electrician says he is going to earth a terminal, a bacteriologist says that he will culture a micro-organism, or a driver says that he will park his taxi, each of them is exploiting one of the most characteristic idiosyncrasies of Shakespeare’s English. He is doing something which would be quite natural to a Chinaman but very shocking to the Venerable Bede.

We can press the comparison between English and Chinese a stage further. By dropping gender-concord, English forfeited the distin¬ guishing characteristic of the adjective about the time of Chaucer. The only trade-mark left is that certain words equivalent to Latin, Greek, or German adjectives still have (a) comparative and superlative deriva¬ tives; (b) characteristic endings such as -ical or -al in biblical, com¬ mercial, logical, or - ic in aesthetic, electric, magnetic. These adjectival words are different from words (e.g. Bible, commerce, logic, aesthetics, electricity, magnetism ) equivalent to corresponding German or Greek nouns. A distinction of this sort was breaking down before the Pilgrim Fathers embarked on the Mayflower . Bible English contains examples of adjectives identical both with the dictionary forms of nouns such as

Accidence — The Table Manners of Language 125

golds silver 3 irons coppery leathery and with the dictionary form of verbs such as cleans dryy warm, freey open.y loose.

Since Mayflower times the number of adjective-nouns, or, as Jesper-

sen calls them in recognition of the fact that they are no longer distin¬ guishable, substantivesy has increased yearly. Some pedants who have forgotten their Bible lessons in Sunday school object to night starvations ice many sex appeals petrol pumps or road traffic signals without realizing that they follow such impressive leadership as the Knight Templar , Gladstone bags Prince Consorty and our Lady mother. These objections usually come from the gentry who call a man a Red if he wants income tax relief for working-class parents. What is specially characteristic of Anglo-American is the large and growing group of words which can be verbs, nouns, or adjectives in the sense that we use them to translate words belonging to each of these three classes in languages which have preserved the trade-marks of the parts of speech. Even in this class, some have the sanction of long usage.

For instance, we speak of water lilies or water power, and we use the municipal water supply to water the garden, when there is a shortage of water. If we have too little water , our local representative can put a question at question time; and does not question our grammar when we test his professions of goodwill by making the water shortage a test case. Even headmistresses who do not think that sex is a genteel word can put love to the test by looking for a love match in books they love. Such words as watery questions testy and love in this sequence have a single flexion -s which can be tacked on the same dictionary form as a functionless personal affix, or as a signal of the plural number. They may also take the affixes -ing and -ed. Other words of this class, such as cut (a cut with the knife, a cut finger), or hurty have no ~ed derivative. From Chinese, which has no flexions at all, it is a small step to a language in which the same root can take on the only three surviving flexions of the Anglo-American verb, or the single surviving flexion of the English noun, and can do service as the flexionless English adjective.

LEARNING A MODERN LANGUAGE

Like the story of Frankie and Johnniey our review of the decay of the flexional system has a moral. Ip is neither the plan of the text-books which begin with the declension of the noun on page i, nor the advice of phoneticians who advocate learning by ear. Though we cannot use a dictionary with profit unless we know something about accidence, we can lighten the tedium of getting a reading knowledge of a language, or of writing it intelligibly, if we concentrate first on learning: (a) flexional derivatives least easy to recognize, when we look up the standard form

126

The Loom of Language

*

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z

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O

Z

o

Z

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(X,

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M

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£

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.h

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O '>4

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<t> aS & •$

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Q Ct

DUTCH	!j?	0 o a	:W	c3 03 A	o A	*S	H « Is a d <u d
							*d rd
ffl				<u>
00 « $		1	3	Xt fl <t»
a	g .		A	rd	(com.) (neut.) den det		dem
W 8	|4m5				<L> XJ
	a		4>	« *-* 4> «U
	§	Cl	3	XI TJ
l		3	&	J3

"3 TJ

3 S

lx.&o

M xs

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a w

<2 5

at <t> eh

« 13

•* 8

•g S

H ‘.H

d *»

Q 0

Accidence — The Table Manners of Language 127

given in a dictionary; (b) flexional derivatives which still affect the meaning of a statement.

To the first class belong the personal pronouns. It should be our first task to memorize them, because we have to use diem constantly, and because they often have case-forms which are not recognizably like

the dictionary word. Fortunately they are not numerous. The accom¬ panying tables give their equivalents in the Teutonic languages. Their Romance equivalents are on pp. 331, 332, 363, 369, 372. In subsequent chapters the Loom will set out the minimum of grammar necessary for the reader who wants to get a reading or writing knowledge of them.

TEUTONIC POSSESSIVBS*

ENGLISH	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN
my	min (	etc.)	mijri'f	mein (etc.)
(thy)	Din (etc.) j	jovto	dein (etc,)
our	vdr (etc.)	vor (etc.)	onzc or ons (n)	unser (etc.)
your	Er (etc.)	Deres	Uz 0	Ihr (etc.)
his	hans	zijn	sein (etc.)
her	hennes	hendes	haar	ihr (etc.)
its	dess	dens	zijn	sein (etc.)
their	deras	deres	hun	ihr (etc.)
	Those italicized have neuter	fLike other adjec¬	These have case
	singular and	plural forms	tives take -e in	as well as gender
	mitt-mina or mit~mim, van- vara or vort-vore. The form given is the common sin¬ gular. Dm and Er behave like min and vdr respectively.	plural.	andnumberforms (p. 295) and are declined like ein, e.g. unser, unsere, unser. The form given is the masc. nomin. sing.

* Swedish and Danish have no special mine, ours, etc., forms. German has a triple set of possessive pronouns. Two of them follow the declension of the weak adjective and are used after the definite article (e.g. der meinige or der meine) ; the third behaves like the strong adjective and appears when not pre¬ ceded by der, die, das (e.g. meiner, meine, meines ).

When you have memorized the pronouns in their appropriate situa¬ tions, concentrate on the following. First, learn the plural forms of the noun, because the difference between one dollar and several dollars is often important. Then learn to recognise and to recall the helper verbs, such as the equivalents of shall , willy have, and is, etc., how to use them, and with what forms of other verbs (participles or infinitive) they keep

128

The Loom oj Language

company. Before bothering about the tense-forms given in other books you may read, you should make sure that those which other books give you* are necessary in ordinary speech or correspondence. The only useful flexions which have not come up for discussion are those of comparison. These have disappeared in die Romance languages (French, Italian, and Spanish). In all the Teutonic languages they are like our own, and will therefore offer litde difficulty. Above all, stick to the following rules ;

(i) Get a bird’s-eye view of die grammatical peculiarities of a language before trying to memorize anything.

(n) Do not waste time trying to memorize the case-endings of die nouns, or any of the flexions of die adjccdve (other than com¬ parison), till you have made a start in reading. They contribute little if anything to the meaning of a statement in most European languages which you are likely to want to learn. It is doubtful whether they ever had a clear-cut use in the spoken language, and any use diey once had in die written language is now fulfilled by other rules, which we shall learn in die next chapter.

FURTHER READING

GRAY Foundation of Language,

' JAGGER Modern English,

English fur the Ihiture.

PALMER Jfti Introduction to Modem linguistics ,

PEI Languages for War and Peace .

schlauch The Gift of 'Tongues .

SHEFFIELD Grammar and Thinking .

* They sometimes divulge this in a footnote, if not in the text.

CHAPTER IV

SYNTAX— THE TRAFFIC RULES OF LANGUAGE

What grammarians who have studied Latin, Greek, or Sanskrit call

the parts of speech (i.e. verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc.) depends on the way in which we form derivatives from dictionary words of such languages. It is helpful to know about how grammarians use these terms, if we want to learn another Indo-European language, because the student of Russian, German, Italian, French, or even Swedish has to deal with flexions which have wholly or largely disappeared in modem English. This does not mean that putting words in pigeon-holes as nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, and particles has any necessary con¬ nexion with what words mean, or with the way in which we have to arrange them to make a meaningful statement. In fact, classifying words in this way helps us little in the study of languages which have pursued a different line of evolution.

There is, of course, a rough-and-ready correspondence between some of these terms and certain categories of meaning. It is true, for instance, that names of persons and physical objects are nouns, that physical qualities used as epithets, i.e. when associated with names of objects or persons, are generally adjectives, and that most verbs indicate action or reaction, i.e. processes or states. When we have said this, we are left with several circumstances which blur the outlines of a functional defi¬ nition of the parts of speech in all languages of the Indo-European group .

One that Bacon calls man’s inveterate habit of dwelling upon abstrac¬ tions, has created a large class of names which have the same flexions as nouns, and stand for qualities or processes cognate with the meaning of adjective or verb forms. Headline idiom breaks through all the func¬ tional fences which schoolbooks put up round the parts of speech. Thus yesterday’s marriage of heiress to lounge lizard means exactly the same as the more prosaic statement that an heiress married a lounge lizard yesterday m, and sudden death of vice squad chief is just another way of announcing the sad news tfiat a vice squad chief died suddenly .

Such examples show that there is no category of meaning exclusively common to the English verb, to the English noun, or to the English

E

130 The Loom of Language

adjective when formally distinguishable. This is also true of all lan¬ guages included in the Indo-European group. Similar remarks apply with equal force to the pronoun. When we recognize as such a word which lacks the characteristic terminals of an adjective, a noun, or a verb in a flexional language like Latin, we depend largely on the context. For instance, the English particles a or the are signals that the next word is not a verb or a pronoun, and the presence of a pronoun usually labels the next word of a plain statement as a verb. A pronoun usually stands for some name- word previously mentioned; but in certain contexts personal pronouns may stand for anything which has gone before, and it has no specific reference to anything at all, when used in what gram¬ marians call impersonal constructions such as it seems. Neither the pronoun nor the verb, which we recognize as such by the flexional -r in the same context as the third person it, here fits into any tidy definition based on the function of words in a sentence, i.e. what they mean. Few of us now postulate a force not of ourselves which makes for raininess, when we say it rains.

To some extent we select one of several word-forms with the same general meaning in accordance with the process of analogical extension which plays such a large part (p. 204) in the growth of speech. In literate communities grammarians also take a hand in shaping the conventions 'of language by prescribing certain patterns of expression based on precedents established by authors of repute, or on paradigms from the practice of dead languages which have more ostentation-value than vernacular utterance. The most time-honoured model of this type is called the subject-predicate relation (see p. 117).

Till recently grammar books used to say that every sentence has to have at least two components, a verb and its subject, which must either contain a noun or be a pronoun. Accordingly, it is incorrect to write rainy day, what? The only intelligible definition which usually tells us what grammarians would call the subject of a Latin or Greek sentence is that it answers the questions formed by putting who or what in front of the verb; and this does not get us far when we replace the preceding' expression by the “sentence” : is it not a rainy day? Who or what rains, in this context, is less a matter of grammar than of theological opinion. Buddhists and Christians, atheists and agnostics, would not agree about the correct answer, and a Scots schoolmistress of any persuasion would find it difficult to convince a Chinaman that the meaning of the ensuing remarks would be more explicit if we put it is in front of the first, and there is in front of the second:

Syntax — The Traffic Rules of Language 131

First English gentleman (looking at the setting .sun): Not so dusty, what?

Second English gentleman; No need to rave about it like a damned poet, old man, -

Though it is quite true that the absence of a perceived situation

makes it necessary to be more explicit in writing than in speech, there are no sufficient reasons for believing that addition of verbs would improve the proverbial : one many one vote; more speedy less haste; or much cryy little wool . Most of us use telegrams only on occasions when it is specially important to be rather thrifty with words. When we have to pay for the use of words, we get down to essentials. Even “ those who can afford to dine habitually in costumes designed to inhibit excessive cerebration do not spend an extra cent for a verb in: dinner seven-thirty black tie . If a sentence is a word sequence with a “verb” and a “subject/5 any issue of a daily paper shows that a complete state¬ ment, request, direction, or question, sufficiently explicit for rapid reading, need not be a sentence. The following examples from the headlines are in the lineage of the Chartist plea: more pigsy less parsons :

CONTROL THREAT TO EXPORT COTTON TRADE: BUSINESS AS USUAL IN SPITE OF WAR*. CITY CHOIR OF SIRENS ALL IN HARMONY NOW: CHINESE APPROVAL FOR U.S. CONGRESS MOTION: VIOLENT DEMAND FOR VICE PURGE IN VALE¬ DICTORY SERMON: WHITES IN CONGO WITHOUT MORAL SENSE: NO NEW OFFER FROM NAZI NAPOLEON: MORE PROSPERITY LESS PETTING PLEA FROM LOCAL PULPIT: SHOP WINDOW SILK UNDIES ' PROTEST FROM PRELATE: PERUVIAN WOOLS TRANSFER TO WHITEHALL POOL: FREEDOM RADIO FORE¬ CAST OF FIRTH OF FORTH RAID: ALIENIST ATTACK ON PENITENTIARY FOR PANSY BOY: PLAIN WORDS TO ANTI-PANTIE PARSON.*

If we have to translate a language, such as Chinese, with no formal distinction between words we classify as nouns, verbs, pronouns,

* In his book. The Study of Language , Hans Oertel draws attention to the absence of any pretence at a subject-predicate form in advertisements which are also composed with due regard for economical use of words, e.g. FOR sale A LARGE HOUSE WITH GARDEN ALL MODERN IMPROVEMENTS SANITARY PLUMBING set TUBS. A significant comment on the dead hand of classical paradigms follows this example:

4 ‘Many instances of this kind can be found: they seem to be absent in the literary remains of the classical languages, or at least excessively rare.

I do not recall a single instance excepting list of names ... or super¬ scriptions . . . or headings implying dates, . . . Perhaps the reason is that the nominative endings (of which the modem languages have largely rid themselves) were too strongly charged with1 the ‘functional9 meaning of the subject relation: that therefore they could not well appear outside the sentence without the retinue of a verb.”

*32 The Loom of Language

adjectives, and particles, we have to forget everything we may have learned about the models of European grammar. In English we qm keep close to the pattern of Chinese without using any verbs at all. The following specimens of Chinese poetry (adapted from Waley’s delight¬ ful translations) show that the effect is not unpleasing, and the meaning does not suffer, when we retain the telegraphic or headline idiom of the original:

(a)

Wedding party on both river banks.

Coming of hour. No boat.

Heart lust. Hope loss.

No view of desire.

(b)

Marriage by parent choice Afar in Earth corner.

Long journey to strange land,

To King of Wu Sun.

Tent for house, walls of felt.

Raw flesh for food.

For drink milk of the mare.

Always home hunger,

Envy of yellow stork In flight for old home.

Some of the difficulties of grammar are due to the survival of a pretentious belief that accepted habits of expression among Euro¬ pean nations are connected with universal principles of reasoning, and that it is the business of grammatical definitions to disclose them. A complete system of logic which carried on its back the disputes of the medieval schoolmen started off with a grammatical misconception about the simplest form of statement. The schoolmen believed that the simplest form of assertion is one which contains the verb to be , and that the verb to be in this context has some necessary connexion with real existence. They therefore had to have a substance called falsity in a supposititious Realm of Ideas to accommodate the existence implied in the statement: such views are false.

So the type specimen of argument reduced to its simplest terms, as given in the old text-books of logic, was: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is mortal. In similar situations the translators of the Authorized Version of the Old Testament conscientiously put such words as ts or are in italics. The Hebrew language has no equi-

Syntax — The Traffic Rules of Language 133

valent for them when used in this way. In Semitic, as in many other languages, e.g. Malay, the connexion of a name with its attribute is indicated by position, as when we say: fine paragraph* this . Headline idiom also shuns the verb be as copula linking topic and attribute or as mark of identity, e.g. five cruisers in action, president in Balti¬ more TO-NIGHT, NEW TENNIS CHAMPION LEFT-HANDED, OHIO PRO¬ FESSOR NOBEL PRIZEMAN.

In a simple statement which calls attention to some characteristic of a thing or person, the function of the verb to be* when so used, has nothing to do with real existence; and it has nothing to do with the usual role of a verb in a sentence. We recognize it by purely formal criteria inasmuch as it takes different forms in accordance with the pronoun that precedes it, and with the time to which the statement refers. Its real function, which is merely to indicate time, could be equally well expressed, as in Chinese, by the use of a particle such as once or formerly (past), now or still (present), henceforth or eventually (future).

From what has been said it is now clear that there is no universal syntax* i.e. rules of grammar which deal with how to choose words and arrange them to make a statement with a definite meaning, in all languages. In this chapter we shall confine ourselves mainly to a more modest theme. Our aim will be to get a bird’s-eye view of essential rules which help us to learn those languages spoken by our nearest European neighbours, i.e. languages belonging to the Romance and Teutonic divisions of the Indo-European family. To speak, to write, or to read a language, we need to know many derivative words not com¬ monly listed in dictionaries. We have now seen what they are, and which ones are most important in so far as they contribute to the mean¬ ing of a statement or question, an instruction of a request. When we can recognize them, and can use those which are essential, without offence to a native, we still need to know in what circumstances a word in one language is equivalent to a word in another, how the meaning of a sequence of words is affected by the way in which we arrange them, and what derivatives to use in a particular context. Of these three, the last is the least important, if we merely wish to read fluently or to make ourselves intelligible. The second is the most important both for read¬ ing or for self-expression. The third is specially important only if we aim at writing correctly.

Humanitarian sentiment compels the writer to issue a warning at

this stage, what follows is not bedside reading. The reader who

134 The Loom of Language

is giving the Loom the once-over for the first time should scan the next TWO sections without undue attention to the examples. There¬ after we shall resume our narrative painlessly.

THE ANARCHY OF WORDS

_ Many of the difficulties of learning a foreign language arise through tailure to recognize to what extent and in what circumstances words of one language are stricdy equivalent to words in another. If we start with a dear grasp of what word-correspondence involves, we can greatly reduce the tedious memory-work involved in fixing a minimum vocabulary for constant and reliable use.

Whether any word in one language corresponds more or less often to a particular word in another depends largely on the class to which it belongs. Numerals are die most reliable, and names or physical qualities also behave well. If such words have homophones, we have no difficulty in recognizing die fact, and a litde common-sense prevents us from assuming that we axe entided to transplant a metaphorical usage in foreign soil. So it is unnecessary to point out that we cannot correcdy translate such expressions as a yellow streak, or a sugar daddy, by looking up the corresponding name words or epithets in a small dictionary. People who are not language-conscious are liable to mishaps of this sort, though few of us are likely to commit the double crime of the English lady who said to the Paris cabman: Cochon, le printemps est cassi*

1 he most capricious words in a language like our own are particles, especially diose classified as directives (e.g. to, with , for) and the link- words or conjurations (e.g. and, because, though). The difficulties which arise when using particles are of three kinds. One is that in any lan¬ guage particles are specially liable to idiomatic use. A second is that the meaning of a single particle in any one language may embrace the more restricted meaning of two or more particles in a second. The third is that when two particles with the same meaning are assigned to different situations, we need to know whether a foreign equivalent given in the dictionary is appropriate to the context, before we can translate them.

Any particle has a characteristic meaning in the sense that we can use it in a large class of situations to signify die same kind of relationship. Thus the characteristic meaning ol the English word to involves direc-

* Cochon (pig) for cocker (coachman). The word printemps means spring (season). The spring of a cab is h ressort.

Syntax— -The Traffic Rules of Language 135

tion of movement. We may also use a particle in situations where it does not have its characteristic meaning. In such situations we may not be able to detect any common thread of meaning. Thus the directive

significance of to does not help us to see why we put it in the expression with reference to. It does not tell us why we must insert it in allow me to do this, or why we omit it in let me do this. Since particles of all languages close to our own have idiomatic uses of this sort* dictionaries usually give us the choice of a large number of foreign equivalents for one and the same particle. We can say that a particle of one language corre¬ sponds to a single particle in another language only when we are speaking of its characteristic meaning* or its use in some particular context.

Examples given below illustrate pitfalls into which we can fall when using panicles. The first four give the German* Swedish* and English expressions equivalent to four French phrases containing the same particle* d. The last four give French* German* and Swedish equivalents for four English expressions all of which begin with in . The French a of these expressions requires four different German* and three different English or Swedish particles. The English in of the other set requires four different French or German* and three different Swedish particles:

FRENCH ; ,	GERMAN	SWEDISH	ENGLISH
d pied	zu Fuss	till fots	on foot
d Berlin	nach Berlin	till Berlin	to Berlin
d la cdte	kn der Kiiste	vid kusten	at the coast
d mes frais	auf meine Kosten	pk min rakning	at my expense
dans la rue	auf der Strasse	gatan	in the street
enhiver	im Winter	om vintern	in winter
le soir	am Abend	pa kvalien	in the evening
de bonne heure	zu rechter Zeit	i god tid	in goodtime

Just as the largest party in Parliament need not be a party with a clear majority* the characteristic meaning of a particle need not be the meaning common to the majority of situations in which we have to use it. It may happen that we can recognize, more than one large class of situations in which a particle has a distinctive significance. For instance* the directive with turns up commonly in two senses. It has an instru¬ mental use for which we can substitute the roundabout expression by

136

ENGLISH

) TIME:

after

at

before

during ( = in) in (== hence) since till

PLACE:

above ( =» over) among

around ■ behind (— after) below (~.~ under) beside ( * by) between in

in front of (» before) on ( * supported by) opposite outside

DIRECTION: across along around from into out of

over (® above) past (=* beyond) through to

towards

under (»* below)

ASSOCIATION : according to

unst (s» in opposition to) about (*» concerning) except

for ( on behalf of) lor (~--~= in place of) in spite of instead of ■ . of

ccount of (= because of) i («» in the company of) without

NSTR U MENTALITY:

for (« as a means of)

« in order to 4* infinitive)

with («» by means of)

The Loom of Language

TEUTONIC PREPOSITIONS

SWEDISH

DANISH

DUTCH

GERMAN

efter

fdre I

under

om

sedan I

till

for

siden

til

na

om

voor

gedurendc

in

sinds | tot

nach

um

vor

wlhrend

seit

bis

Over

bland

over

blandt

omitting

bakom | bagved

under

vid | ved mellan mellem

framfftr

pi

mitt emot utanfOr

Over

Pings

frln

ut

Over

fOrbi

genom

till

emot

foran

paa

over for

udenfor

boven

tusschen

om

achter

onder

bij

tusschen

voor

op

tegcnover

buiten

omitting

Ira

ud

over

kings

rondom ; om

van

liber unter; zwischen um Mnter unter bd; neben zwischen

vor

auf

gegeniiber

ausserhalb

Ober lings

fim . . . her urn;

von

in

under

forbi

gennem

til

imod

over

enligt emot

utom

for

fOr

trots

i stiillet fOr av

pi grand av

efter imod om

undiagen for'

for

trods

i Stedet for af

paa Grand af

utan

av

.till

fbr att

med

med

udem

af

til

for at

tut

voorbij door naar

naar . , „ toe onder

volgens tegen over; van behalve voor voor niettcgenstaande in piaats van van wegens met zonder

van; door voor om te met

aus

liber

an * , » vorbei dutch zuj nach; auf . . . ZU unter'

gemlss; nach'" gcgen

liber; von ausgenommen . fur fiir trotz anstatt von wegen mit ohne

von; durch

fcr

um zu mit

Syntax — The Traffic Rules ff Language 137

ROMANCE PREPOSITIONS

ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	PORTUGUESE	ITALIAN
nIME:
after at	apres	despues de	depois de	dopo
before during (= in)	avant pendant	a antes de durante	| prima di
in (= hence)	dans	de aqui a	1 daqui a	fra
since	depuis jusqu’a	desde	da
till	hasta	ate	fino a
'LACE:
above (= over)	au-dessus de	encima de	por cima de	sopra di
among	parmi	entre	fra; tra
around	autour de	alrededor de	em redor de	attorno a
behind (= after)	derriere	detras de	atras de	dietro
below (=* under)	sous ; au- dessous de	debajo de	debaixo de	sotto
beside (= by)	pres de; a	cerca de; al	perto de; ao	presso di;
between	cdt£ de	lado de entre	lado de.	accanto a fra; tra '
in	dans ; en	en	em	in
1 front of (= before)	devant	delante de	em frente de	davanti a
n (= supported by)	sur	sobre; en; encima de 1	sobre; em	su; sopra
opposite	en face de	en frente de	em frente de	di faccia a
outside	hors de	fuera de	fora de	fuori di
ERECTION:
across	k travers	a traves de	attraverso
along	le long de	a lo largo de	| ao longo de	lungo
around from	autour de	1 alrededor de de	em redor de	attorno a da
into	dans ; en	en	em	in
out of	hors de; de	fuera de; de	fora de; de	fuori di; da
over (= above)	par dessus	por encima de	por cima de	al di sopra di
past (— beyond)	au dela de	mas alia de	mais adiante de'	al di la di
through to	a travers ; par a	a traves de; por ■ . ■	attraverso; per
towards	vers	hada	para	verso
under (= below)	sous	debajo de	por debaixo de	sotto
SSOCIATION:
bout (= concerning)	de; sur	de; sobre	de; sdbre	di; sopra
according to	selon; d’apres	segun	de acordo com	secondo
1st (—in opposition to)	contre	contra	contro
except	excepte	excepto	eccetto
or (= on behalf of)	pour	por	per
for (=» in place of)	pour	por	per
in spite of	malgre	a pesar de	a dispetto di
instead of of	au lieu de	en lugar de | de	em lugar de	invece di di
count of (= because of) co (indirect object)	a cause de a	a causa de	1 por causa de . a	a causa di
(*» in the company of)	avec	con	com	con
without	sans	sin	sem	senza
STR U MENTALITY :
by	par; de	por	da
»r (== as a means of)	pour	para	per
in order to + infinitive)	pour	para	per
ith (= by means of)	avec	con |	com J	con

E*

*3^ Th& Loom of Language

means of when we open a can of peas with a tin-opener. It has also an associative use for which we can substitute in the company of, when we go with a friend to the theatre. The link-word as is another particle which we use in two ways, both common and each with a characteristic meaning. We may use it when the word while would be more suitable, and we often use it when because would be more explicit. It is therefore not a necessary word to put in our basic list. Its absence gives rise to no difficulty if we cultivate the habit of examining the meaning of the words we use, and the range of choice which our own language permits.

Few, but very few, English particles are above suspicion from this point of view. Even and is not innocuous. It is not always a conjunction (link-word). In the peculiarly English class of constructions in which it connects two verbs, it is an instrumental directive equivalent to in order to or simply to. rl hus try and do so is equivalent to try to do so. Simi¬ larly go and sec may often signify go in order to see. To be alert to the peculiarities of our own language in this way is essential if we intend to learn another one with a minimum of effort and tedium. We can then recognize when a particle has its characteristic meaning. If so, it is rarely difficult to choose the right foreign equivalent from the synonyms listed in a good dictionary which gives examples of their use. Those of us who cannot afford a good dictionary may get a clue by looking up the equivalents for another synonymous, or nearly synonymous particle. We may then find that only one equivalent is common to both sets. We sometimes get another clue by the wise precaution of looking up the English words for each of the foreign equivalents listed. Dealing with the difficulty in this way is laborious, and it is never a real economy to buy a small dictionary.

If we are clear about the characteristic meaning of our particles, we can avoid making mistakes in many situations; but we have still to decide what to do when we find ourselves using a particle idiomatically. The answer we give to this question, perhaps more than to any other which commonly arises in connexion with the learning of a language, decides how much time we waste before we get to the stage of expressing our¬ selves clearly without upsetting anyone. Text-books attempt to solve our difficulty by printing lists of idiomatic expressions such as by train, in which particular particles occur. Cursory study of such lists is useful because it helps us to recognize unfamiliar expressions if we meet them again when reading a book in a foreign language; but the effort of memorizing them for use in speech or writing is colossal. Unless we

Syntax — The Traffic Rules of Language 139

are content to wait until we have got used to them by meeting them often in books, we have to seek for another solution of our difficulty.

The most effortless solution emerges from Mr. C. K. Ogden's work on the simplification of English for international use. The basic rale is: always try to be as explicit as possible. This means that when you are going to use a particle, you must first decide whether you are using it with its characteristic meaning. If the answer is yes, your word-list can supply its correct equivalent. If the answer is no, the thing to do is to recast the statement without the use of the idiom in which it occurs. You can best see what this means with the help of an Illustration. Let us suppose that we want to say in French or in German: I take no pleasure in skating. The word in has one characteristic meaning, and only one. In English, we say that A is in B, if B surrounds, encloses, or contains A. Since skating does not surround, enclose, or contain pleasure, we have got to ask ourselves whether we can say the same thing in other words.

We can get rid of the offending directive by putting this in the form : skating does not please me. This is not quite satisfactory, because the English use of the -mg derivative of the verb is peculiar; and it is " important to understand its peculiarities, if we want to become pro- I fident in a foreign language. We use the -ing derivative of the English verb in three ways for which other European languages require at least two and usually three different words. One which corresponds with the so-called present participle in other European languages is its use as an epithet in such expression as an erring child. A second is its use as a name for a process in the first of the three following equivalent expres¬ sions:

Erring is human: forgiving is divine.

To err is human: to forgive divine.

Error is human: forgiveness divine.

When so used, grammar books call it a verbal noun. If it takes an object it is callqd a gerund, as in the difficulties of learning Dutch, or the dangers of eating doughnuts* To this use as a name-word we have to add the

durative construction with the verb “to be,” as in 1 am walking, you

* The Old English present participle ended in -ende, e.g. abidende. The -ing (rung or -ing) terminal originally belonged to nouns, as in schooling. Later it tacked itself on to verbs, as in beginning. So the same verb might have an abstract noun derivative and an adjectival one or true participle, e.g. abidung and abidende. Eventually the former absorbed the latter. That is why the modern -ing form does the work of a participle and a verb noun (gerund).

14° The Loom of Language

were sitting, he will be standing, etc. In other European languages it is impossible to find a single word which corresponds to any -ing deriva¬ tive in such diverse expressions as a forgiving father, forgiving our trespasses. I am forgiving you. So the -ing terminal is a danger-signal. We therefore recast our sentence in the form : I do not enjoy myself when I skate. T o handle this correctly we have to remember that the word do (p. 1 58) in such a context is also an English idiom. We omit it in translation.

These examples illustrate one outstanding class of difficulties which constantly arise in learning a foreign language. Many of the obstacles we meet exist because we are not sufficiently alert to the peculiarities of our own language, and fail to seize the opportunity of exploring different ways of saying the same thing. The directives listed in the tables on pp. 136-137 are the ones which are really essential. We do not need equivalents for roundabout directive constructions such as the one in the phrase: in case of difficulties. We do not need it, if we have the essential link-word if. Anyone who knows the equivalent of if, can paraphrase it in several ways, e.g. if we have difficulties, if there are difficulties.

Our next difficulty when dealing with particles is that the common thread of meaning characteristic of a particle in one language may embrace that of two particles each with a more restricted use in another language. For instance, we use the English word before to indicate priority, whether a series consists of dates such as 54 b.c., a.d. 10 66, and a.d. 1832, or objects such as the members of a class of boys stand¬ ing in single file. We can thus dissect what we mean by before into subsidiary categories, of meaning such as before (place), i.c. in front of and before (time), i.e. earlier than, or antecedent to. This distinction implied by the context in English, is essential in French, because a Frenchman uses diflerent words to signify before in such phrases as before the door and before the dawn. When we are drawing up a basic list of particles we have therefore to look beyond the characteristic meaning of the English word.

0ni?f merics of our own language is that we leave much to the con¬ text. whether the English conjunction when refers to an event which has happened once for all, to an event which happens repeatedly, or to some¬ thing which is still going on, is immaterial if the set-up makes the dis¬ tinction clear. We do not customarily use whenever unless we wish to emphasize the repetition of a process, and we are not forced to use while unless we wish to emphasize simultaneity. This is not true of German or ot Norwegian. If he is talking about something that is over and done with a German uses ah where we should use when. A Norwegian uses da.

Syntax — The Traffic Rules of Language 141

TEUTONIC CONJUNCTIONS

ENGLISH	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN
after	efter att	efter at	nadat	nachdem
and	och	og	en	und
as (manner)	som	als	wie
as . . . as	lika . . . som	ligesaa . . . som	zoo ... als	so . . . wie
because	darfor att	fordi	omdat	weil
before	innan |	for	voor	bevor; ehe
but	men	maar	aber; sondera
either . . , or	antmgen . . .	enten . . .	of ... of	entweder , . .
how	eller	eller		oder
hur	hvordan	hoe	wie
if	om	hvis	indien	wenn
in order that	for att	for at	opdat	damit
neither . . . nor	varken . . . eller	hverken . . . eller	noch . . . noch	weder . . . noch
hr	el]	.er	of	oder
since (temporal)	sedan	siden	sedert	seitdem
so that (result)	sk att	saa at	zoodat	so dass
than	an	end	dan	als
that	att	at	dat	| dass
although	fastan	skont	ofschoon; hoewel	obschon; obgleich
till	tills	indtil	tot	bis
when	nar	naar	wanneer; als	wenn; als
where	dar	1' hvor	waar	wo
whether	om	of	ob
while (temporal)	medan	medens !	terwijl	wahrend
	ROMANCE CONJUNCTIONS

ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	PORTUGUESE	ITALIAN
after	aprks que	despues que	depois que	dopo che
and	et	y(e)	e	e(ed)
as (manner)	comme	como	come
as ... as	aussi . . . que	tan . . , como 1	tanto . . . como	cosi . . . come
because	parce que	porque	perche
before	avant que	antes que	prima che
but	mais	pero; mas; sino	porem; mas	ma
either ... or	ou . . . ou	0 . . 0	ou . . . ou	0 ... 0
how	comment	1 como	come
if	si |	se
in order that	pour que; afin que	J a fin de que	a fim de que 1	perche; affinchk
neither . . . nor	ni . ,	. . ni	nem . . . nem	ne . . . ne
or	ou	1 O(u)	ou	0
since (temporal)	depuis que	desde que	dacchb
so that (result) than that	de sorte que	de modo que que que	di modo che di; che che
although	quoique; bien que	aunque	ainda que	benche
till	jusqu’a ce que	liasta que	at<£ que	finch^
when	quand	cuando	quando
where	oh	donde	onde	1 dove
whether	si	se
while (temporal)	pendant que	mientras que	ao tempo que	meatre che

142 The Loom of Language

When a German refers to something which occurs repeatedly he has to use wenn. The Norwegian uses ndr . Where it would be equally correct for us to use the word when or the word while the German equivalent is wdhrend and the Norwegian is unner .

An example taken from the history of the English language is instruc¬ tive in tills connexion. In Anglo-American the particle here means either at this place or to this place , and the particle there means either at that place7 or to that place . It is equally correct to say he stood here , or he came here; and it is equally correct to say he lived there, or he goes there . In Mayflower English, the particles here and there indicated

O O

• m

H

two white two black

two Hack ImIoW two white

one. white in, front ot' (wo Iteflr

O •• two blade behind, one, wltili*

one white among ewjit l!lt- seven black 4%XtMMl£L aw. white

# O # bbxck one white'

am wlute hetmmi two black

bb.de tmiiqh* Ul wjlite dn::te blade square Outside white, curb

dbgprul BjCXKfSS0 /square bottom- left t&vmfds top rustic

one lianaontal Otl two vertail am vertical Opposite anofch«ir

rm DIRECTIVES" OF PLACE

Fig. 21*

position alone, Le. here meant at this place, and there meant at that place . When we use them to indicate direction, Le* motion towards a place, our great-great-grandfathers would therefore have used hither and thither. An equivalent distinction exists in Swedish or German. Hie Swede says du dr hdr ( you are here) or du var Mr (you were there) and horn hit (come here , Le. come hither), or gd dti (go there, Le. go thither). Such distinctions are vefy important in conncjdon with the me of correct foreign equivalents for English directives. For that reason it is helpful to classify the latter according as they do or an signify relations of time, places motions associations and instrumentality (Figs, 21-25),

Syntax — ■ The Traffic Rules of Language 143

We have still to clear up one difficulty before our troubles with the particles are over. It will be easier to understand what it Is* if we first compare the sentences below:

(a) He read after dinner. (c) he read after he dined.

(b) He read during dinner. (d) he read while he dined.

In the first pair* the word after has the same meaning whether used as a directive before a noun or as a link-word connecting the statement he read with the statement he dined. Though it would be just as true to say that during has the same meaning as while in the second pair* it would not be in keeping with the customs of English to interchange them. Each has its appropriate context in English* though the German can use the same word in both situations. So in classifying one as a directive and the other as a conjunction^ the distinction refers only to the situations in which it is appropriate to use them. English is relatively thrifty in its use of particles* because it has relatively few which are restricted in this way. For instance* we can use all the interrogative particles Qim> when> where9 and why) as link-words. We can also use all the directives either as prepositions in front of a noun* or as adverbial particles standing alone. Some English adverbial particles (such as soon * backs forward^ here, very) never stand in front of a noun* but no English words are pure prepositionss i.e, cannot stand alone without a noun. In some languages the distinction between the two classes is much sharper. In German we cannot use the same particle to translate going below {adverb) and going below the surface (preposition). We have to be equally careful about foreign equivalents of words which can be directives or conjunctions. In Swedish* we have to use var for where when we ask WHERE do you live?s and ddr for where when we say he died WHERE he was bom.

When context demands one of two or more equivalents, a good

dictionary therefore prints such abbreviations as: conj,y prep,y adv.s interr. In making a basic word-list it is a good plan to list the same English word in each of these classes to which it may belong* in case it may require .different foreign equivalents. It is also useful to pay attention to the fact that some of our common English adverbial particles are BAD ones in the sense that some of our common conjunc¬ tions* e.g. as are bad ones. For instance* we use the English word quite to signify somewhat (e.g, quite pleasant)s or completely (quite full)s and rather to signify somewhat (rather enjoyable) * or preferably Qie would rather). An essential word-list for self-expression would include

144 The Loom of Language

somewhat , completely, or preferably . It would not give equivalents for

quite or rather . ,,

The most troublesome words for our basic vocabulary of link-words are that, which, what , who, whom, whose , The English that can occur in four situations. One context is common to that, who, and which. One is

peculiar to that, and one is peculiar to who or which * They are as follows :

(a) Relative use of that, who, whom, whose, which , as Mnk^words. after a noun or. preposition following a noun, e.g. : ;

This is the baboon that the bishop gave a bun to.

This is the baboon to whom (or which) the bishop gave the bun*

In such sentences, that can replace either which or who, and its derivative whom, but if they come after prepositions, the latter go to the end of the clause. The use of that with of rarely replaces whose. So we have to enter m our basic list of link-words, Hthat (rel)n and “whose" a$ separate items* • '

Syntax — The Traffic Rules of Language 145

(b) Conjunctive use of that as a link-word for which there is no substi-

tute, in such sentences as:

I do not believe that the creation took only six days.

We have therefore to enter as a separate item in our basic list of link- words, “that (conj.)”.

(c) We cannot replace the English words who, whom, which, and what by that when they do not refer to a person or thing in the main clause, but introduce a clause expressing a note of interrogation, e.g. :

I do not know whom you expect.

We must therefore enter who-which in our basic list separately for

this string can be fyr the reader with a, knife tot*' tying 'parcels

THE

imTRJUMENTAl

DiRicnves

Fig. 23.

interrogative situations when that or whose cannot take the place of which, who, or whom.

( d ) We also use our words which and that as pointer-words or demon-* stratives. Whether we put in or leave out the word hook is immaterial to our choice of the pointer-word that in the sentence: I have read that hook. In some other languages we have to use one word when the name is present, and a different one when it is left out. This makes it necessary to draw a distinction between a demonstrative adjective and a demon¬ strative pronoun comparable to our own distinction between the posses¬ sive adjective (e.g. my) and the possessive pronoun (e.g. mine). So in making up a basic list of necessary pointer-words, we shall sometimes need to indicate which pointer-word stands in front of a noun (< adj .), and which stands by itself (prow.).

Anyone who is familiar with the Anglo-American language alone might yield to the temptation of putting personal pronouns among the

146 The Loom of Language

class of words which have a high correspondence value. This is not so. Translation of English personal pronouns is complicated by two diffi¬ culties. One is the fact that correct choice of pronouns of the third person in most European languages depends on the gender class, as opposed to the sex (p. 1x3), of the nouns they replace. The other is that many, including most European, languages have special forms of the second person for intimate or for polite, i.e. formal address. There are thirteen Spanish substitutes £01 you.

In languages such as French, English, or German, there were origin-

at? noon

Fig. 24.

ally two forms of the pronoun of the second person. One, corresponding to thou of Mayflower English, for use when addressing one person; the other, corresponding to ye, was for use when addressing more than one. Thou, thee, ye, and you have now fused in the single Anglo-American word YOU. In most European languages, including Finnish which is not an Aryan language, the thou-form persists for use among members of the family and intimate acquaintances. What was originally the plural form, cited in our tables as you, has persisted in some European lan¬ guages, c.g. French and Finnish, both as the plural form and as the singular form when the person addressed is not an intimate friend or member of the family circle. This formal use of the plural you is comparable to the royal a‘we*”

In some European languages the equivalent of you has made way for a pronoun which recalls the oblique idiom of waiters (will the gentleman take soup?). For polite address a pronoun of the third person, sometimes plural, as in German, or both singular and plural, as in Spanish, has taken over the function of the pronoun of the second

Syntax — The Traffic Rules of Language 147

person. To use tables on pages. 126, 127, 331, 332, 363., 369, 372 cor¬ rectly it is important to remember this. The equivalents for thou and you respectively correspond to (a) singular and intimate address; (b) formal or plural address according to current usage.

We use one class of English pronouns in two situations for which some languages require different words. The English pronouns himself,

according to HoiTabm

one argimxeni £L0cUI2St the habit of* waJJanQ under ladders except to save life us put here OTl 'behalf of the reader

in case of dcfficuihes \

with ordinary

didimaries

on account: of

the fact’ that many

are without such.

diagrams j to lemove doubt

. concerning choice

of one particle instead of ajicther U

in spite of m . ,

4 // authors

msocim

:i >1REC

Fig. 25. — Note Cur Directive against

OFTEN MEANS THE SAME AS towards.

The one illustrated above is its Characteristic Meaning.

yourselves, etc., may give emphasis, as in I myself would never do it, or be reflexive, i.e. indicate self-imposed action, as in she does not give herself the credit When an action is commonly reflexive in this sense we nearly always omit it. We assume that washing, shaving, or bathing axe personal affairs unless otherwise stated. People who speak other Teutonic languages, or any Romance language, never omit the reflexive pronoun, and some verbs which do not imply a self-imposed action have also appropriated one. Thus the French verb se repentir, like its Swedish equivalent dngra sig = to repent, to rue, always keeps company with a reflexive pronoun. Dictionaries usually print such verbs with the reflexive pronoun, and the two should go together in a word-list.

148

The Loom of Language

Reflexive pronouns of Romance languages and of Teutonic languages other than English are not the same as the emphatic ones. Thus a

Frenchman says :

Je le dis moi-mSme

Je me lave

■ 1 say it myself.

: I wash (myself).

In Teutonic and in Romance languages, the reflexive forms of the first and second person are the same as the object (accusative in German) tormj and there is a special reflexive pronoun for the third person singu¬ lar or plural which betrays family likeness. The Romance form is se or «» Scandinavian sig, German sich.

Many people who realize the vagaries of prepositions and have no need to be told about the use of pronouns for polite and intimate address do not folly realize tire anarchy of the verb. The verb (cf soak dig, post ) is the most highly condensed and the most highly abstract element of discourse. Because it can condense so much meaning, it may be impossible to find a foreign equivalent with exactly the same territory. Because it is so highly abstract it is liable to semantic erosion by metaphorical extension. To construct a list of words for sclf-expres- ifion in another language it is important to realize how few of our English verbs in common use have a single clear-cut meaning.

. ^ have met two examples (p. 39); but ask and try arc not excep¬ tional. Sometimes a common thread of meaning is easy to recognize, as vvhen we speak of beating (defeating) the Germans and beating (chas¬ tising) a dog. lt is less obvious why we should use the same word when we admit visitors and admit the possibility of a printer’s error in this paragraph. When we make full allowance for metaphorical extension of meaning and for the peculiarly Anglo-American trick (see below) of using the same verb intransitively and causatively according to context we have not disposed of our difficulties. If we leave a train we cease to remain in it; but when we leave a bag in a train the result of our negli¬ gence is that the bag continues to remain in it. Few ordinary primers accessible to the home student emphasize how much effort we can waste by trying to learn foreign equivalents for the wrong verbs To get by with the least effort, we must have a lively familiarity with synonyms at our disposal. That is the explanation for the choice of verbs listed in

CDd 0f The Loom CPP- 512 et **). Many common English verbs arc not there; but the reader will be able to discover the most explicit synonym for every one of them; and may well find that it is helpful to hunt them down.

Syntax — The Traffic Rules of Language 149

One English verb is tricky for a special reason. Where we use know we have the choice of two different verbs in any other Teutonic, or in a Romance, language. In French they are savoir and connaltre , in German wissen and kennen. The distinction has scarcely any semantic value. Correa use depends on a syntactical custom. Broadly speaking the rule is as follows. We have to use connaltre or kennen (Span, conocer , Swed. karma) when the objea is a thing, person, or pronoun equivalent. We have to use savoir or wissen (Span, saber, Swed. veto) when the objea is a phrase, clause, or pronoun equivalent. Thus the Frenchman says je le sais (I know it), if le is a statement previously made or some general proposition. If he says je le connais the objea le is a person, book, or other conaete objea.

A second difficulty in connexion with choice of appropriate equiva¬ lents for an English verb is due to the trick mentioned above. Some English verbs such as design nearly always precede, and a few such as sleep or come never take, an object (p. 117). It is immaterial whether the objea is present, if the English verb can take one. The same verb of other Aryan languages cannot be used in situations where it de¬ mands, and in situations where it cannot have, an objea. There are still traces of this distinction between the objectless or intransitive (neuter) English verb (e.g. lie) and the transitive (active) verb (e.g. lay) which must have an objea. Distinctions such as between lie and lay (= make to He) are generally estabHshed by the context, which tells us whether cabbages grow (without our help) or whether we arrange for them to do so, as when we say that we grow cabbages. Similarly we say that something increases or that we increase it (i.e malm it inaease). A Frenchman or a German cannot do so. The latter has to use different words, where we use the same verb transitively and intransitively as below:

The management will increase his wages next month.

Die Leitung wird nachsten Monat seinen Lohn erhohen.

The length of the day will increase next month.

Die Lange des Tages wird nachsten Monat zunehmen.

In looking up a foreign equivalent for an EngHsh verb in a dictionary, it is therefore essential to pay careful attention to the abbreviations C irons . or v.a.) and ( intrans . or v.n.) which may stand after one or other of the words given. In Anglo-American usage almost any verb which used to be intransitive has acquired a more or less metaphorical transi-

15° The Loom of Language

tive, often causative, meaning, as in will you run me into town? This decay of the distinction between the two classes of verbs goes with two other peculiarities of Anglo-American syntax, both pitfalls of translation. In a passive construction the object of the active equivalent becomes the subject, e.g. he struck her (active form) = she was struck by him. Only transitive verbs of other Aryan languages can participate in passive expressions of the latter type, and only the direct object (p. 118) of the active equivalent can become the subject when it is changed to the passive construction. Thus we make such changes as ;

(a) he gave me this letter — this letter was given to me by him.

(fc) she told me this — this was told me by her.

In contemporary Anglo-American usage it is increasingly common to use an alternative passive construction, in which the indirect object p. 118) of the active verb becomes the subject, c.g.

(a) I was given this letter by him. ( b ) I was told this by her.

In this form we cannot translate them into other European languages. The moral is: use active expressions wherever possible. The reader of The Loom will find relatively few passive expressions in the preceding chapters.

If it were permissible to paraphrase the meaning of a verb, it would not be difficult to sidestep the pitfalls of choosing the right one. Unfor¬ tunately it is not. Many European peoples, indeed most, depend far more on the use of a large battery of verbs than we ourselves do. In fact there axe only two safe rules of verb economy for the beginner who is making a list of verbs essential for self-expression in a Teutonic or Romance language. We need not burden our word list with verbs equi¬ valent to a construction involving an adjective and either make (trans.) or got (intrans.). The equivalent adjective with the verb listed in Fart IV as equivalent to either make or become serves the purpose. Thus to tire means either to make weary or to become {get) weary. Similarly to diminish means to make smaller or to become (get) smaller. To heat is to make hot or to become hot— and so forth.

One danger-signal attached to a verb-root is the suffix -ing mentioned earlier in this chapter. The most idiomatic class of verbs are the helpers, so-called because we commonly use them with other verb derivatives (infinitive or participle). The English ones are be, shall, will , let, can, do, make, must, may (after which we never use to), have and dare (after which we sometimes use to), and go, use, ought (after which we always

Syntax— -The Traffic Rules of Language 15 1

use to in front of the verb). No general rule helps us to recognize idiomatic uses of a helper verb in a foreign language, if we know only its characteristic meaning; but we can. avoid some pitfalls, if we are dear about the vagaries of helper verbs in our own language.

It would be easy to write a volume about the pathology (and theology) of the verb to he. (Some of its vagaries in current English come up for dis¬ cussion in Chapter IX, p. 384.) Its use as a copula linking a thing or person to its attribute or class is an Aryan construction absent in many other languages, cf. the italics for the absent copula in the original of: the Lord is my Shepherd. In a large class of English expressions we use the verb to be where the equivalent in another closely related language would be the word corresponding to have. The fact that a verb which also means to have or possess may overlap the territory of our verb to be is not strange or unreasonable. To say that something is red means that it has or possesses the characteristic or attribute which we describe by that adjective. Thus the literal equivalent of to be right in French, German, and in the Scandinavian languages is to have right. Similarly, the literal equivalent of to be wrong is to have wrong . The literal equivalent of to be warm, hot, or cold, either in French or in Spanish, is to have warm , hot, or cold. Be well, or ill, is another peculiarly English idiom, equivalent to the German gesund sein, or krank sein (be healthy or sick). The literal French is equivalent to carry oneself well or ill (se porter Men, or se porter mal); in Swedish, md val or ilia (may well or ill) ; in Norwegian ha det godt or vaere syk (have it well, or be sick). The English be sorry is equivalent to the Scandinavian do oneself bad (g<t>re sig ond in Danish).

Though they look alike on paper, the most characteristic meaning of the helper verbs of two descendants of the same Teutonic root is rarely the same. The meaning of most of them has changed during historic times. The only safeguard against the pitfalls into which this leads us is to recognize which are our most reliable helpers, and to be quite clear about the various uses of the other English ones. The two reliable ones are can and must. Each has a well-defined territory, which overlaps that of others.

The verb may can mean two things. Thus he may do this can mean either (a) he is allowed to do this, or (b) it is possible that he will do this. We use our English to have, like its equivalents in other Indo-European languages, to signify possession, and as a helper to indicate past time or completed action (I have done this), but it can also do the same job as must in I have to do this, and replaces the compulsive function of must in some expressions which involve past time (I had to do this). It is not safe to translate have (when it means mast) by its dictionary equivalent in another language. The combination have had, has had, etc., can also signify arranged or allowed (let) where the German uses derivatives of lassen, as in he has had a house built.

152 The Loom of Language

When used in the first person after I or we, the verb shall is equivalent to a particle indicating the indefinite future. Otherwise it retains its old Teutonic meaning akin to must or have to (e.g. thou shalt not commit adultery). In the first person the related form should is used after the statement of a condition, as in I should be glad if he came. In expressions involving the second or third person, will and would are generally equi¬ valent to shallot should involving the first. Otherwise they revert to their original Teutonic meaning illustrated by the adjective willing. This distinction is not as clear-cut or universal, as arm-chair grammarians

TEUTONIC HELPER VERBS FROM SAME ROOTS

ENGLISH f I can \ I could	SWEDISH jag kan jag kunde	DANISH jeg kan jeg kunde	DUTCH ik kan ik kon	GERMAN ich kann ich konnte
f 1 shall \ I should	jag shall jag skulle	jeg skal jeg skulde	ik zal ik zoude	ich soli ich sollte
f I will \ I would	jag vill jag ville	jeg vil jeg vilde	ik wil ik wilde	ich will ich wollte
I must	jag m&ste		ik moet	ich muss
I let	jag liter	jeg lader	ik laat	ich lasse
f I may \ 1 might	jag m§ jag mitte	jeg maa jeg maattc	ik mag ik mocht l	ich mag ich radchte

would lead us to suppose. Few English-speaking people recognize any difference between (a) I should do this, if he asked me: (£>) I would do this, if he asked me.

Since can and must are the most reliable helpers, it is best to use their equivalents whenever either shares the territory of another such as shall, ham, may. The use of can and must is not foolproof, unless the beginner is alert to one pitfall of translation from English into any Romance or any other Teutonic language. Like ought, can and must form peculiar combinations with have {could have, must have, ought to have) for which the literal equivalent in other languages is have could, have must, have ought. The easiest to deal with is can. It is correct to use the corresponding German (konrten) or French ( pouvoir ) verb in the present or simple past where the English equivalent is cither can~could or is able to— was able to, etc., but I could have does not mean the same as I have been able to. It is equivalent to I should have been able to. To

Syntax — The Traffic Rules of Language 153

use can with safety-, the best rule of thumb is to remember that the foreign equivalent for can-could always corresponds to our is (or was) able to, but does not correspond to our can-could before have.

WORD-ORDER

Root words, the order in which we arrange them, tone and gesture are the indispensable tools of daily speech. Next to correct choice of words, their' order is therefore the most important part of grammar. Comparison of the statement that mm eat fish with fish eat mm suffi¬ ciently illustrates the importance of word-order as a vehicle of meaning in our own language. Arm-chair grammarians sometimes write as if a rigid pattern of word order is a comparatively late and sophisticated device. It is easy to support this view with spurious evidence. Much of the literature which furnishes case material for our knowledge of the earlier stages of the history of a language is poetry or rhetoric, and such belongs to a period when the gap between the written and the spoken word was much wider than it now is. We aU know the obscuri¬ ties into which poets plunge us by transgressing customary conventions of word order in conformity to the dictates of metre, alliteration, rhyme, or cadence. There is no reason to believe that they were ever less prone to violate the speech pattern of everyday life, and it is difficult to see how human beings could co-operate in daily work, if they took advan¬ tage of the licence which poets claim. In short, we may reasonably suppose that the importance of word-order in modern languages is as old as speech itself. The suggestion made on p. 134 applies especially to the next few pages devoted to this topic. It will be wise to skim it lightly on first reading , and to return to it later for relevant information as occasion arises.

Rules of word-order are like traffic regulations. The only thing rational about them is the rational necessity for uniform behaviour as a safeguard against congestion. To discuss word-order intelligibly we ' need some fixed points with reference to which we can speak of consti- tuent words or phrases as before or after. Verb and subject (p. 117) give us such fixed points which are generally easy to recognize in any state¬ ment other than newspaper headlines. Two others (p. 118) are respec¬ tively called the direct object and the indirect object. These terms do not describe any definite relation of a thing or person to the process implied in the meaning of a verb. We recognize them by converting a statement into a question, or vice versa.

154 The Loom of Language

The grammarian's subject is the person or thing which answers the question formed by putting who or what in front of the verb in an ordinary statement. In this way we get the subject of each clause in the following sentence from a Chartist pamphlet:

Peoples of all trades and callings forthwith cease work until the above

. document is the law of the land.

First Clause: Who cease work? Peoples of all trades and callings.

Second Clause: What is the law? This document .

The direct object is the answer to the question formed by putting who 3 which or what in front of the verb and the subject behind it. We get the indirect object by putting to whom , or to what, in the same position. To get the two objects of the statement: I may have told you this joke once too often , we therefore ask:

What may 1 ham told? . . . this jokk (Direct Object).

To whom may 1 have told this joke? . „ . you (Indirect Object).

The general rale for an ordinary Anglo-American statement is that the subject precedes the verb. The same rale also applies to French*

Syntax — The Traffic Rules of Language 155

with link-words. We shall come to complex sentences later on (p. 161). In simple statements* the English-Scandinavian rale holds good when there is only one verb. When the verb is compound* the object comes after the helper; and the participle or infinitive form of the verb comes after the object at the end of the sentence. Thus German-Dutch word- order is illustrated by the English and German equivalents:

The keeper has

given

the kangaroo candy.

Der Waiter hat dem Kanguruh Kandiszucker gegeben .

This difference between German-Dutch and Scandinavian-English word-order is very important to anyone who wants to learn Dutch or German. To read Dutch or to read German with ease* you have to cultivate the habit of looking for the main verb at the end of a long sentence. To speak either of these languages correctly you have to culti¬ vate the trick of recasting any simple sentence in the form illustrated above* if it contains a helper verb. The difficulty may be complicated by the presence of two helper verbs. The second helper verb (i infinitive ) then j^oes to the end of the statement immediately after 'the participle form of the main verb. Such sentences usually involve should have * could havey etc.* and we cannot translate them literally (see pp. 152 and 298).

The Scandinavian-English rale of word-order applies to the relative position of the object or objects* the helper verb and the participle or infinitive form of the main verb* in a French* Italian* or Spanish state¬ ment* when the object is a noun. If the indirect object is a norm* the equivalent of to precedes it. The indirect noun object foEows the direct object* as when preceded by to in English (p. 118). If either or both objects are pronouns* they follow the verb in a positive command or re¬ quest* he. after the imperative form of the verb. In a statement they come between the verb and its subject. If the verb is compound they come before the helper or first verb. To write or to speak French* Italian* or Spanish* we have to get used to the foUowing changes:

(a) The keeper it gave

(it)

(b) The keeper him gave

t

(him)

to the kangaroo, sugar-candy.

When there are two objects* the Scandmavian-English rale is that the indirect object comes before the direct object unless the latter is preceded by to or its (optional) equivalent (till in Swedish and til in

156 The Loom of Language

Danish). No such straightforward rule applies to all statements in German and Dutch. Usually the direct object comes first. This is the general rule in Dutch when both objects are nouns; but if both are pronouns, the shorter comes first, as in the English sentence: I told him everything. German custom is less simple. It can be summed up in three rules :

(a) If one object is a pronoun and the other a noun, the pronoun

object comes first.

(b) If both are nouns, the indirect object precedes the direct.

(c) If both are pronouns, the direct object comes first.

The relative position of two pronoun objects is not the same in all the Romance languages. In Italian and Spanish, the indirect precedes the direct object. The French .rule is that the first person or the second person precedes the third person. If both objects are pronouns of the third person, the direct object comes first. The necessary change is indicated by the following models:

(а) She has sent me it Elk me l' a envoyd.

She me it has sent.

(б) She has sent you it Elle vous I'a envoyd.

She you it has sent.

(c) She has sent him it EUe k lui a envoyd.

She it him has sent.

In addition to the verb, its subject and one or both objects, a simple statement may also contain one or more qualifying expressions. These are of two kinds, adjectival if they refer to a noun, and adverbial if they limit or extend the meaning of some other word. Adjectives and adjec¬ tival expressions can be used in two ways. One is the predicative use after the verb “to be,” as in the baboon was carefree . The other is the attributive use, as in the perplexed and celibate bishop. In some languages, e.g. German or Russian, adjectives have different predicative and attri¬ butive forms. The position of the predicative adjectival expression calls for no special comment. Wc recognize whether an attributive adjective or adjectival expression refers to one or other of several nouns by keeping it next to the noun which it qualifies* The position of old and silk is sufficient to leave no doubt about whether an American or

♦This applies to speech whether a language is synthetic or analytical. In , synthetic languages* writers may take liberties by relying on concord Co a 2 a)

to label the adjective.

Syntax — The Traffic Rules of Language 157

a Scotsman Is discussing the old underwear of the silk merchant or the silk underwear of the old merchant .

If everybody does the same., it does not matter whether drivers keep to the left as in Britain., or to the right as in the United States. By the same token, it does not matter whether the adjective usually comes after the noun, as in Celtic and Romance, or in front of it, as in Teu¬ tonic and Slavonic, languages. The student of a Romance language will find it helpful to recall a few fixed expressions in which the normal English order is reversed, e.g. lords temporal , malice aforethought, fee simple, he direct, retort courteous, cook general, body politic, knight errant. This rule does not apply to two classes of adjectives. Romance possessives and Romance numerals precede the noun. Thus a Spaniard says nuestra casa (our house) or ires muchachos (three boys).

As in English, pointer-words, e.g. words equivalent to this and that, including the “articles” the and a (an), come in front both of the attri¬ butive adjective and of % noun in Romance as well as in Teutonic languages. In this connexion, we should be on the look out for two classes of English idioms as pitfalls of translation : (a) such, almost, only, and even precede the article, e.g. such a woman, almost a father, only a coloners daughter; (b) any adjective qualified by the particle so precedes the article, e.g. so long a journey. The English rule for placing a long adjectival expression is not the same as that of other Teutonic languages. Long English adjectival expressions often follow the corresponding noun. We do not observe the Swedish or German word-order in a question so sudden and unexpected.

We use several English words to qualify a noun, an adjective, a verb, or a particle. Four of the most common are almost , even, only , and enough. The form of these words does not tell us whether they do or do not refer to a noun, i.e. whether equivalent or not equivalent to an adjective of another language. We can indicate which word they qualify by position. In English it is common to place such particles immediately in front of the word which they qualify. Unfortunately, this useful device is not universally observed. The English word enough, though placed in front of a noun which it qualifies (e.g. enough bother), comes after a verb, adjective, or particle (e.g. sleeping enough, a hard enough time, working long enough).

What matters about rules of word-order is: (a) whether we apply them consistently when they do affect the meaning of a statement; (b) whether we allow freedom when they do not do so. Some languages have straightforward rules about the order of adverbial particles or

qualifying expressions according as they signify time, place, manner, ox

158 The Loom of Language

extent. For instance, when two adverbial particles occur in a Teutonic language, the one which indicates time comes first. A defect of F.nglfch syntax is that although the accepted order for any particular pair of adverbs conforms to rigid custom, there is no simple rule which applies to any situation. Sometimes an adverb of time precedes, and sometimes it follows another adverb as in :

(a) he often wept bitterly ;

(b) he went North to-day.

Inversion of subject and verb is one way of changing a plain state¬ ment into a question in all Teutonic and Romance languages. The same is true of Bible-English. It is true of Anglo-American only when the verb is a helper, as in can you face reading the rest of this chapter ? Otherwise Anglo-American has its own peculiar roundabout method of interrogation. We no longer say: sayest thou? The modern form of the question is: do you say? We use this roundabout form with all verbs except helper verbs other than let. We can also employ it with have. In a few years no one will object to did he ought? or did he use? When translating a question from modern English into German, Swedish, or French, we have therefore to recast it in Bible English *

Inversion of verb and subject in Teutonic and Romance languages, and the roundabout Anglo-American expression with do or did, turn a statement into the general form which implies acceptance or rejection of the situation as a whole. We cannot concentrate attention on the identity of the transaction indicated by tire verb itself without either elaborating the question or using italics. In this general form, the answer to the question will be yes, no, or some non-committal comment. In English it is immaterial whether we ask it in the positive form (did the . . .?) or negative ( didn’t he . . .?). In some languages this distinction is important. The English yes has to be translated by different French or Scandinavian words when the negative is substituted for the positive form of the question. The English Yes, after a positive question, is equivalent to the Scandinavian da, and the French Oui. After a negative question, the English Yes is equivalent to the Scandinavian Jo, and the French Si. The German Ja and Dock tally with the Scandinavian J a and Jo.

The preceding remarks apply to the difference between the form of a question and the form of a statement in so far as the design of the question is to elicit confirmation of the statement as a whole. It may also be designed to elicit new information. It may then begin with an interrogative particle, in English, when, why, where, how. The interro¬ gative particle precedes other words in the order appropriate to a '

* The two forms of interrogation occur consecutively in the Authorized Version, 1 Cor, vi, 2 and 3.

Syntax— The Traffic Rules of Language 159

question designed to check the whole situation. Apart from the use of interrogative ^ pronouns or particles, and inversion of subject and verb, or a combination of both, there are various other ways of putting a question. If we want to ascertain the identity of the subject we have merely to substitute the English interrogative pronouns who, what, which, and equivalent words in a Romance or Teutonic language with¬ out any change of word order. The question then takes the form: who can face reading the rest of this chapter? To ascertain the identity of the object demands more than the substitution of an interrogative pronoun. The latter comes at the beginning of the question and the subject follows the verb, as in what can you face reading?

In English we can make a statement into a question by putting in front of it the clause: is it true that? This is roughly equivalent to a common form 01 French interrogation introduced by est-ce que (is it that), French permits a peculiar form of interrogation ' which lays emphasis on the subject without calling for specific interrogation. The following literal translation illustrates it:

1$ my father here? = Mon pere, est-il id?

My father, is he here?

In conversation we often do without devices on which we com-

monly rely when we put a question in writing. A falling and rising tone suffice to convey interrogation without change of word-order appropriate to plain statement. Emphasis on one or another word indi¬ cates doubt about the identity of subject, object, or activity denoted by the verb. We can do the same in writing by use of italics, but we have no type convention to signify change of tone in print. In everyday speech, though less in writing, we can convert a statement into a question by judicious or polite afterthought. The formula added is an idiom peculiar to each language. In English we add such expressions as eh?, don’t you?, or isn’t it? The German equivalent is nicht wahr? (not true?). The Swedish is inte sani ( not true?) or eller hur (or how?), the French is n’est-'ce pas (is this not?) and the Spanish is verdad (true?). The English affirmative answer I did, etc., is a pitfall for the unwary. In other European languages it is more usual to add a pronoun object, ie. it. Thus in Swedish I did is jag gjorde det (I did it = J did so).

One very important class of rules about word-order regulate nega¬ tion. Rules of negation, like rules of interrogation and the rule for the position of the subject in ordinary statements* draw attention to a fundamental difference between the syntax of Bible English and the syntax of Anglo-American. Subject to a qualification, mentioned later

160 The Loom of Language

(p. 162) the rule for Bible English is the same as for Scandinavian languages. If the verb is single and has no pronoun object, the negative particles not , never (or their Scandinavian equivalents) come imme¬ diately after it. If the verb is compound, they come immediately after the helper. For compound verbs with helpers other than let , the rule is the same in modern English ; and the same rule applies to the helpers be and have when they stand alone. Otherwise we now use the pecu¬ liarly Anglo-American construction with do or did. Thus a modern translation of the Bible would not say: I came not to call the righteous , but sinners to repentance. It would say: I did not come to call. ...

When inversion of subject and verb occurs, as in the negative form of question, the English negative particle comes immediately after the subject, like that of Scandinavian dialects. The negative particle of a Scandinavian statement always comes after the object when the latter is a personal pronoun. This again is the word-order of Mayflower English. Compare for instance the following:

(а) He came unto his own and his own received him not

(— did not receive him).

(б) The world was made by him and the world knew him not

(— did not know him).

This rule does not apply to a noun object, e.g .ye receive not our witness. In a negative question, the Scandinavian like the English negative particle comes after the subject and before the noun object. Its position with reference to the subject in Anglo-American is not obligatory. We sometimes say do you not ? and we sometimes say don’t you? The rule of word-order in Bible English and in Scandinavian languages is the same: (a) for a negative command or request; ( b ) for a negative state¬ ment. The Bible English or Scandinavian form is: lead us not into temptation. The roundabout Anglo-American equivalent is: do not lead us into temptation. We use this roundabout form of the negative request or command only with not. If the negative particle is never we stick to Mayflower idiom.

The position of the negative particle in a Dutch or a German sen¬ tence is not the same as in Bible English or in Scandinavian languages. When it qualifies the statement as a whole, it comes after the object whether the latter is a pronoun or a noun. In a question it comes at the end of a sentence unless the verb is compound. Then it comes immediately before the participle or infinitive. In the Romance languages the negative particle stands before the verb if the latter is simple, and

Syntax — The Traffic Rules of Language 161

before the helper verb if it is compound. When one or both objects are pronouns, and therefore stand in front of the simple verb or in front of the helper, the negative particle precedes them. French (pp. 339 and 341) makes use of two particles simultaneously. The ne which corre¬ sponds to the Italian non and the Spanish no, occupies the position stated. The second (pas, point, jamais, guere) comes immediately after the single verb, or after the helper.

In some languages the question form, like negation in Indo-European ones, is expressed by means of a particle. Latin had an interrogative particle, -ne equivalent to our eh? The Anglo-American do or did might almost be called interrogative particles, when used in questions. From this point of view the rules of language traffic in Finland are specially inter¬ esting, because the Finnish way of expressing question and denial is the mirror image of the common practice in the Indo-European family. Finns express interrogation by putting the interrogative particle ko, as we express negation by putting the negative particle not, after the pronoun. To express negation, they attach e to the pronoun suffix which they put in front of the verb, instead of after it. That is to say, the negative state¬ ment involves an inversion analogous to the inversion in the question form of French or German :

ole-mme-ko = are we? emme-ole = we are not.

ole-mme = we are. emme-ko-ole = are we not?

So far we have considered simple statements, commands, or ques¬ tions which we cannot split up without introducing a new verb. Link- words may connect one or more , statements to form compound or complex sentences. Such link-words are of two classes. One class, represented by only three essential elements of a basic vocabulary for English use, are the so-called coordinate conjunctions. In contradis¬ tinction to these three essential link-words (and, or, and but) there are others called subordinate conjunctions. The most essential English

subordinate conjunctions are:
after	how	so (as) .... as	when
as (in such a	if	so . that	where
way that)	in order that	though	whether
because	than	till	why
before	since

In addition to the particles given above, we also use the pronouns who, whom, what , and that as subordinate link-words, e.g. (a) this is the house that Jack built; (b) I know who he is.

F

1 62 The Loom of Language

The distinction between coordinate and subordinate mik-words is useful because the normal rules of word-order in some languages uic not the same in clauses which begin with the latter. Though we may some¬ times leave out that in a complex Lmgiish, and its egunnleut, in a complex Scandinavian or German, sentence, the best deimition oi a subordinate clause is that it can begin with one of these words. Grammar books sometimes distinguish the principal from the suboi dilutee . clause or clauses in a complex sentence by the statement that the principal clause is the most important part of the statement. Whether we usually convey any real distinction between the relative importance oi the constituent clauses in a complex sentence is at least doubtful.

In relation to word order, the distinction between coordinate and subordinate clauses is not important to the student of a Romance language. In Romance languages, as in English, the order of words in each part of a complex sentence is the same, 1 wo minor exceptions are:

(a) in Romance, as in Teutonic languages, the reLdhe pronoun comes at the beginning of a clause even when it is not the subject, as in: the readers for whom he wrote this novel . .

(/;) English, like other Teutonic languages, permits subject-verb inversion instead of the usual sequence alter ?/, when a con¬ dition is hypothetical, as in; were he to come ■ • if he came „

A similar inversion is possible in Scandinavian languages, and is common in German. It is reminiscent of the Chinese idiom of expressing condition by a question. In complex sentences, Scandinavian is not precisely the same as English word-order. In any Scandinavian $uh~ ordinate clause the negative particle and any particle indicating time stands in front of the verb. Scandinavian word-order in a complex

sentence is illustrated by:

<*>

This is the house that Jack not will | (not) I build.

Your passport will expire, if you lunger stay | (longer) j.

t """"'I

The difference between word-order of a subordinate clause and of a simple sentence is much greater in German or Dutch titan in Scan¬ dinavian languages.

Syntax — The Traffic Rules of Language 163

The rules for a simple statement apply to the principal clause of a complex sentence, i.e. (a) the present or- past tense-form of a simple or helper verb comes immediately after the German or Dutch subject, when the latter is the first word in the sentence; (b) when another word precedes the subject the simple tense-form of the Dutch or German verb precedes its subject; (c) the infinitive or parti¬ ciple which goes with the helper verb always goes to the end of the sentence; (d) if there are two helpers (e.g. I should have come), the second helper (infinitive form) follows the infinitive (p, 287). The rules for placing the German or Dutch verb in a subordinate clause are:

(a) when the verb is simple, it is the last word;

( h ) the helper also comes at the end immediately after the participle or infinitive which goes with it.

The following models illustrate both rules:

English word-order . After I had heard it yesterday, I forgot it again.

When I have seen it, 1 shall remember it.

German-Dutch word-order. After I it yesterday heard had forgot I it again.

When I it seen have, shall I it remember.

It is just as well to bear in mind the fact that conjunctions, especially subordinate conjunctions, are late arrivals in the history of a language. Many living people get on without them. Though they give emphasis to the logical lay-out of a sequence of statements, they cannot do much to clarify what the content does not itself disclose. In short, we can save ourselves endless trouble with a foreign language if we cultivate the habit of using simple sentences (see p. 173) in our own. We can short-circuit the embarrassment of changing the pattern of word order, if that is necessary, and we can steer clear of the troublesome choice of correct case-form for the link pronoun of a relative clause. Habitual use of the latter adds to the difficulties of learning a new language and leads to a congested style of writing in the one we aistomarily use.

It goes without saying 'that the use of a different pattern for different clauses of a complex sentence adds to the difficulties of learning a language without making the meaning more clear. That it is also a disadvantage for those who are brought up to speak 'German, is^leat if we compare the following examples which show how an English-

164 The Loom of Language

man and a German may deal with the problem of separating the constituents of a lengthy statement:

(a) Since this is an English sentence., it is not difficult to see what changes are necessary if we want to break it up.

This is an English sentence. We may want to break it up. Changes are then necessary. They are not difficult to see.

(£>) Da dies ein englischer Satz ist, ist es nieht schwer zu sehcn, welche Anderungen notwendig sin wenn wir ihn zerlegen wollen.

Dies ist ein englischer Satz, Wir wollen ihn zerlegen. Anderungen sind dann notwendig. Welche ist nicht schwer zu sehen,

..Clearly we have to put much more effort into recasting an involved German sentence as a sequence of simple ones than we spend when we do the same with an English one. This is important because our first impulse in stating a closely knit argument is always to keep the threads together with, conjunctions. In a first draft we are therefore ■prone to. construct cumbersome sentences, which are not necessarily objectionable in .speech* Effective writing demands a different tech-

Syntax — The Traffic Rules of Language 165

nique, Without the vitality they get from tone and gesture* long and involved sentences call for excessive attention* and are less suitable for rapid reading than a succession of short ones. So we rightiy regard the use of the short sentence as a criterion of good style in French or English writing. The rules of word-order make it easy for an English or French writer to make the necessary changes in a first draft of an intricate piece of reasoning. The rules of German word-order make it difficult to do so. Hence it is not surprising that the style of German technical books and journals is notoriously ponderous and obscure. It is unlikely that Hegel would have taken in three generations of Germans and one generation of Russians if he had been trained to write in the terse English of T. H. Huxley or William James.

The following citation from a book of a German scholar* Carl Brockelmann (Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der Semitischen Sprachen) is a type specimen of Teutonic telescopy. The key to the English translation is that the verb are before K. Voller goes with the last two words:

Diese von Th. Noldeke* Geschichte des Qdrans, Gottingen i860* erstmals dargelegten Grundanschauungen fiber die Sprache des Qdrans sind von K. Vollers* Volkssprache urid Schriftsprache im alten Arabien, Strassburg 1906* durch die falsche Voraussetzung* dass die Varianten der spatern Qdranleser* start Eigentumlichkeiten verschiedener Dialekte vielmehr nur solche der ursprunglichen Qdransprache wiedergaben* iibertrieben und entstellt.

These by Th. Noldeke* History of the Koran, Gottingen* i860* for the first time put forward basic views on the language of the Koran are in K. Voller’s Spoken and Written Language in Ancient Arabia, Stras¬ bourg* 1906* by the wrong assumption* that the variant readings of the later Koran scholars* instead of (being) peculiarities of different dialects, rather only those of the original Koran language reflected* exaggerated* and distorted.

The vagaries of German word-order are not a sufficient reason for the vast gulf between the language which Germans use in the home and the jargon which German scholars write. Accepted standards of such scholarly composition are also the product of a social tradition hostile to the democratic way of life. Intellectual arrogance necessarily fosters long-winded exposition when it takes the form to which W. von Humboldt confesses in the statement: “for my own part* it repels me to unravel an idea for the benefit of somebody else when I have cleared it up.” If one has to consult a German work of scholarship or techno-

1 66

The Loom of Language

logy* It Is reassuring to bear this In mind. When the English-speaking reader meets a sentence like the preceding specimen, it is some comfort to know that German readers also have to unravel Its meaning for their own benefit.

The fact that people often use a native word-order when trying to speak a foreign language sometimes gives rise to comic effects in drama or fiction. It also suggests a useful device for the home student. When learning a language, we have to acquire several types of skill, including the use of the right word and use of the right arrangement. It is rarely good policy to learn two skills at the same time. So the student of a new language may find it helpful to practise the more important tricks of syntax in a foreign language by separate exercises in syntactical translations. For instance if you are starting Swedish, the syntactical translation of didn’t you came here yesterday? is came you not yesterday hither? If you are learning German, a syntactical translation of if I don’t come soon9 don’t wait , is if I not soon come wait not . Models which make use of alliteration, or convey novel information are easier to remember than collections of words which have no emotive content. For instance, one of the tricks of Swedish syntax can be memorized by the syntactical translation of the prophets of the Old Testament did not often wash as the prophets of the Old Testament washed themselves not often .

WORD FORM AND CONTEXT

Iii Chapter III we learned that many flexional endings, like the «%* in he eats9 contribute nothing to the meaning of a statement. Context, and context alone, dictates which we choose. Thus we use eats in preference to eat if the subject is he9 $tie9 it , or any noun. In languages which are rich in flexional derivatives, a large part of syntax, including concord and the troublesome uses of the subjunctive mood of the verb in subordinate clauses, is made up of rules of this sort.

At one time rules of concord (pp. 112-1x5) occupied many pages of English grammar, because familiarity with the flexions of Latin and Greek -was the greater part of a gentleman's education. The wreckage of the English personal pronouns helps m to get a different perspective. The accompanying table gives the Old English and modem Icelandic equivalents to emphasize the progressive character of Anglo-American. It also shows our debt to Old Horse, from which we derived they9 them 9 theirs . Vbe objective forms (me9 thee, him9 etc.) often called the accuse tm , arc really survivals of a dative. The table does not show where she

FIRST PERSON I SECOND PERSON I THIRD PERSON

Syntax — The Traffic Rules of Language 167

Neuter form only given here.

1 68

The Loom of Language

and its came from. The she probably came from the Old English demonstrative seo (that). Its was a later innovation. The 16x1 edition of the English Bible uses his for things and males. Tills pronoun is a good example of analogical extension. The first person to use it was an Italian in 1598. Englishmen adopted it during the seventeenth century.

Though personal pronouns have retained more of the old flexions than any oilier class of English words, and therefore account for a large proportion of common errors of English speech catalogued in the grammar books used thirty years ago, we now use only seventeen to do the work of thirty-five distinct forms in Old English. In one way, the use of the pronouns is still changing. Throughout the English- speaking world, people commonly use they in speech to avoid invidious sex discrimination, or the roundabout expression he or she. Similarly, them is common in speech for him or her , and their for his or her . Prob¬ ably the written language will soon assimilate the practice, and gram¬ marians will then say that they, them , and tfmr are common gender singular, as well as plural forms of the third person.

We can already foresee changes which must come, even if rational arguments for language-planning produce no effect. Headmasters and headmistresses no longer bother so much about whether we should say the committee meets and the committee disagree , whether we need be more circumspect than Shakespeare about when we use who or whom* whether it is low-bred to say these sort and these kind , whether it Is useful to pre¬ serve a niche for the archaic dual-plural distinction by insisting on the comparative better in preference to the superlative best of the two, or whether it is improper to use me in preference to the “possessive adjec¬ tive” when we say: do you object to my kissing you?

The conventions of syntax change continually by the process of analogical extension. We use word forms because we are accustomed to use them in a similar situation. Thus our first impulse is to use were for was in the sentence: a large group of children was waiting at the dime. Whatever old-fashioned grammarians may say about the correct use of was and were when the subject is the “collective” noun group, most of us yield to the force of habit and use were for the simple reason that it is usual for were to follow children. Since we get used to saying know rather than knows after you, most of us say none of you know , unless we have time for a grammatical post-mortem on the aggluti¬ native contraction not one — none. So we may be quite certain that everyone will soon look on none of you knows as pedantic archaism.

Habits formed in this way give us some insight into the meaningless

Syntax — The Traffic Rules oj Language 169

association of it with rains, and similar expressions* e.g. it is usual. People who speak a language which has equivalents of is, are, was, were for the copula connecting attribute and topic (i.e. thing or person) get used to the transition from the explicit statement the water is hot to the more economical form* it is hot, when the context makes it clear that it stands for a real thing. The same remarks apply to the conventional question-patterns* is the water hot? and is it hot? It is a short step to apply the same formula metaphorically when the precise topic is less clearly specified. In spite of the fact that a unit of time is not a heatable object* we also say the day is hot. When we make the more economical substitution it is hot, in accordance with our habit of dealing with a statement with an explicit and relevant topic* the field of reference of the pronoun embraces the whole set-up. What now compensates for loss of its original function as a snappy substitute for a tangible thing is our habit of interrogation. The customary inversion demands a subject after the verb in the formula is it hot? Thus habit and metaphor conspire to encourage intrusion of the pro¬ noun it into situations where it merely does the job of an interrogative particle such as eh?

Something analogous goes on with words which have the formal peculiarities of nouns and verbs* and we can watch it happening in our own language. Hammer is the name-word for a static object. By assimi¬ lating -ing it becomes identified with the process of using it* and attracts all the affixes of a weak verb. The converse occurs. A process such as to sing is associated with a person or thing by assimilating the affix -er of singer. Interplay of habit and metaphor works havoc with any attempt to establish a clear-cut relation between word-form and word-function; and we can see both at work in the most primitive levels of speech. Malinowski sums up the results of his own studies on speech in backward communities as follows:

“The fundamental outlines of grammar are due to the most primitive uses of language. . . . Through later processes of linguistic use and of thinking* there took place an indiscriminate and wholesale shifting of roots and meanings from one grammatical category to another. For according to our view of primitive semantics* each significant root originally must have had its place, and one place only* in its proper verbal category. Thus* the roots meaning man, animal * tree, stone, water, are essentially nominal roots. The meanings sleep, eat, go, come, fall, axe verbal. But as language and thought develop* the constant action of metaphor* of generalization* analogy and abstraction* and of similar linguistic uses build up links between the categories and obliterate the

F*

I yo The Loom of Language

, boundary lines* thus allowing words and roots to move freely over Uie whole field of Language, In analytic languages* like Chinese and English* this ubiquitous nature of roots is most conspicuous, but it can be found even in very primitive languages. . . . The migration of roots into im¬ proper places has given to the imaginary reality of hypostatized meaning a special solidity of its own. For* since early experience warrants the substantival existence of anything found within the category of Crude Substance* and subsequent linguistic shifts introduce there such roots as goings rat* motion * etc.* the obvious inference is that such abstract entities or ideas live in a real world of their own. Such harmless adjectives as good or bad> expressing the savage’s half-animal satisfaction or dissatis¬ faction in a situation* subsequently intrude into the enclosure reserved for the clumsy* rough-hewn blocks of primitive substance* are sublimated into Goodness and Badness * and create whole theological worlds* and systems of Thought and Religion.*’*

What Malinowski calls €C shifting of roots rmd meanings from one grammatical category to another” has multiplied words appropriate to situations which have nothing in common and is responsible for ninety per cent of the difficulties of learning a language. One illustration of this is the multiplicity of word forms connected with the subject-object distinction. The lamp illuminates (shines on) tire table in the same sense as the lamp illuminates (or shines on) me. If so* I see the lamp. We do not say that the table sees the lamp; and there is a good enough reason for this distinction. The lamp does not stimulate the table as it stimulates my retina; but this difference does not: justify the use of two pronouns land me. In both statements the pronoun is the goal* and the lamp is the agent as I is the agent in 1 moved the lamp , Possibly there was once a real distinction of this kind* if what we should now call verbs were only words for action. To-day it signifies nothing apart from the context. To know which is the agent and which is the goal of action we need to know the meaning of the verb. If the verb is hear the subject is the goal of the process and the object is what initiates it. If the verb is strike, the reverse is true. The grammatical object is not necessarily the logical or biological object. It may be the actor or the victim of a performance* the stimulus or a result of a process.

THE HARD GRAFT OF GOOD WRITING

The positive rules of syntax which remain when wc have cleared away the cobwebs of classical grammar are concerned with the most explicit use of particles* with the rejection of unnecessarily idiomatic

* Appendix to The Mcamtig of Meaning by C. K. Ogden and L A» Richards.

Syntax— The Traffic Rules of Language 171

expressions, with burial of dead metaphors, and with rules of word- order- to prevent ambiguity or loss of interest. Syntax, as writers on “semantics35 so often forget, is concerned with far more than the

problem of meaning. The use of language is a social activity which involves a hearer or reader as well as a speaker or writer. So the art of writing implies the power to grip the attention, and sustain the interest, of the reader. Prolixity, pomposity, and evasion of direct statement are characteristics of writing most inimical to sustained interest; and any one who is willing to take the trouble can learn to avoid bad writing in this sense. Brilliant writing may be a gift, but the power to write simple, lucid, and compelling English lies within the power of any intelligent person who has grown up to speak it.

One important thing to know about the art of writing is that effective and lucid writing is hard work, A first draft is never perfect, and a good writer is essentially a good self-editor . Indiscriminate exercises in precis are far less helpful than the deliberate application of rules based on the recognition of standard forms of prolixity to which even the best authors are prone. If we apply a few fixed rules we can generally ' reduce a prose paragraph taken at random from any English classic by thirty or forty per cent without departing a hair’s breadth from the meaning. The important ones are : (a) condensation of participial expressions; (b) elimination of impersonal formulae; ( c ) translation of the roundabout passive into direct or active form; (d) cutting out circumlocutions for which a single particle suffices ; (e) rejection of the* unless absolutely necessary.

One useful recipe for concise writing is to give every participle the once¬ over in a first draft. The sun having arisen, then invites the shorter sub¬ stitute, after sunrise. If we are on the look-out for the passive fprni of statement as another incitement to boredom, we shall strike out the expression it will be seen from the foregoing figures, and substitute the snappier, more arresting active equivalent, the foregoing figures show you. The last example suggests another general recipe indicated in the last paragraph. The remoteness of the college cloister has cumbered the English language with a litter of impersonal constructions which defeat the essentially social character of communication in writing by creating the impression that a statement is for the benefit of the author and the Deity alone. Thus the intrusive it of the subject-predicate fetish is another danger-signal in a first draft. It would thus seem that, or it would thus appear that, for seemingly or apparently, which do the same job when really necessary,' are representative exhibits for the prosecution. They should go to the same limbo as it is said that (some people say), it is true that (admittedly), the completely redundant it is this that , and the analo-.

172 The Loom of Language

gous circumlocution of which a type specimen is the untrue statement, ’tis love that makes the world go round.

There are other common literary habits of long-windedness. One is the use of conjunctional and prepositional phrases when a single link- word or directive would suffice. The Times Literary Supplement and British Civil Service Reports specialize in the question as to zohether, when whether by itself suffices in the same context. During the time that generally means the same as while. At an 'earlier date is an unneces¬ sarily roundabout way of saying previously. With reference to is over¬ worked in situations where about, or concerning, would do as well, and both the latter, though no shorter than as to, are more explicit. The reader who has now grasped the importance of using particles explicitly will be on the look-out for these. Another trick which makes writing congested is indiscriminate use of the definite article the in situations where it is not really necessary. For instance, we can strike out four inessential articles of the sentence: If the war goes on, the social services will be cut, the income tax will rise, and the prices of commodities will soar.

Anyone who wishes to cultivate an agreeable and competent style can ' practise how to recognize signposts of prolixity by rewriting passages from standard authors or editorial articles in newspapers without recourse to redundant particles, passive expressions, prepo¬ sitional and conjunctival phrases, or to unnecessary articles. Another type of exercise which helps to develop the habit of self-editorship is to rewrite in simple sentences passages from books by authors able to manipulate long and complex ones with more or less effect. Sentences with more than one subordinate clause arc nearly always difficult to follow, and complex sentences in general are best kept to round off' a fusillade of simple statements, when the habit of writing in simple sentences has been well formed. If we have to use complex sentences, the subordinate clause should generally come first. One of the tasks of self-editing is to see that it does so. The worst type of involved sen¬ tence is the one with a clause starting with that, who, or which, telescoped into another beginning in the same way. That, who, and which (like participles, passive verbs, the and it) arc therefore danger- signals in a first draft. One simple trick which helps in cutting up long and complex sentences is the use of certain adverbial particles or expressions to maintain continuity of meaning. Meanwhile, first, then, after that, or afterwards, in spite of this, in this way, thus, for that reason, consequently, so, therefore, are therefore useful items of a word-list. We can reinforce the habit of self-editorship by practising the use of .such words in dissection of sentences made up to illustrate each of the

Syntax— The Traffic Rules of Language 173

subordinate conjunctions of page 161. The following example illus- trates this type of exercise:

(a) complex sentences:

Although you cannot learn a language without hard work, you may well exaggerate how much effort is necessary. Avoidable discouragement arises because many people memorize words and rules which we do not really need when we speak or write. There is another thing which adds to the burden of learning. Many people do not get as much benefit from reading as they would if they first got a bird’s-eye view of grammar in order to recognize rules which are not essential for self-expression, when they meet them in a fresh setting. If we set about our task as the reader of The Loom of Language will do, we shall find that the effort required is smaller than we think. One of our readers, who wanted to learn Swedish, had failed to make much progress, before she read The Loom of Language in proof. Since she followed its plan of study, she has gone ahead quickly. She started reading Swedish newspapers and writing to a boy friend in Sweden after she had got a bird’s-eye view of the grammar and was thoroughly familiar with about a hundred essential particles, pronouns, and pointer-words. Her vocabulary grew without effort, and her grasp of grammar became firmer, while she went on with her daily reading and continued her correspondence. She now intends to persevere till she is pro¬ ficient,

(b) SIMPLE sentences:

You cannot learn a language without hard work. Still, you can exaggerate the necessary effort. Many people memorize words and rules without asking this question: Do we really need them for speech and writing? Another thing adds to the burden of learning. Many people read without first getting a bird’s-eye view of grammar. They meet rules not essential for self-expression. They have not met them before. So they do not recognize them as such. Readers of The Loom of Language will set about the task in a different way. They will then find the effort less than our first estimate of it. One of its readers wanted to learn Swedish. She had previously failed to make much progress. Then she read The Loom of Language in typescript. She followed its plan of study. After that she went ahead quickly. Sht first got a bird’s-eye view of the grammar. She also got thoroughly familiar with about a hundred essential particles, pronouns, and pointer-words. Next, she started reading Swedish newspapers and writing to a boy friend in Sweden. She went on reading daily and continued to correspond. Meanwhile her vocabulary grew without effort. She also got a firmer grasp of grammar. Though not yet proficient, she intends to persevere.

174 The Loom of Language

SPEECH AND WRITING

A difficulty which besets many people when they try to express themselves effectively in writing would be less formidable, if early education did more to encourage the habit of careful and thoughtful speech. Within the domestic circle we can rely on the charity or intel¬ ligence of the listener to interpret a half-finished sentence or to sharpen the outline of a loose definition. Since we can usually do so with im¬ punity, many of us never cultivate precise habits of self-expression in everyday life. To write, especially for readers with whom we are not personally acquainted, is another matter. We cannot exploit a common background of domestic associations. We cannot take advantage of associations prompted by surrounding objects or current events. For all we can convey by tone or gesture, conventions of punctuation and of typography (e.g. italics) arc the only means at our disposal. If con¬ versation is habitually trivial and confined to a narrow social circle, learning to write is learning a new language.

Maybe, libraries of sound films or phonograph records will even¬ tually supersede the bookshelf as the collective memory of mankind. Meantime, the art of speech, even public speech, cannot be quite the same as the art of writing. There must be a region where the written and the spoken word do not overlap, but we can make it, and should make it, as small as need be. Whether it is relatively large, as in Ger¬ many, or small, as in Norway, reflects the extent to which intellectuals are a caste apart from the aspirations and needs of their fellow citizens. Homely writing closely akin to thoughtful speech is a signpost of the democratic way of life. For writing cannot fail to be effective, if vibrant with sympathy for the difliculties of the reader.

Where the democratic way of life prevails, public demand for popular science and social statistics discourages literary affectations. Drama and fiction deal more and more with the lives of ordinary people and reflect their speech habits. Since rhetorical prose based on classical models is not adapted to the needs of a public habituated to rapid reading in buses and trains, the vastly increased output of printed matter since the introduction of the linotype machine has also helped to bring the written closer to the spoken word. In our own generation broadcasting has reinforced the trend. Publication of radio talks popularizes a style akin to daily speech, and, as one of our leading phoneticians has said:

. There are signs that the tyranny of print under which we have lived since the days of the Renaissance may give way to a more

Syntax— The Traffic Rules of Language 175

emancipated era of the spoken word which is now broadcast as freely as print is disseminated. Wireless is making of us a nation of speech critics^ and may restore good spoken English to a place of honour.

FURTHER READING

FOWLER The King's English .

gratton and gukrey Our Living Language.

HERBERT What a Word .

jespersen Philosophy of Grammar »

MENCKEN The American Language.

OGDEN AND RICHARDS The Meaning of Meaning .

CHAPTER V

THE CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGES

Before there were comparative linguists, practical men already knew that some European languages resemble one another noticeably. The English sailor whose ship brought him for the first lime to Amsterdam;, to Hamburg* and to Copenhagen was bound to notice that .many Dutch* German* and Danish words are the same* or almost the same* as their equivalents in his own tongue. Where he would have said, thirsty come * good*, the Dutchman used the words dorst, komen> goed ; the German Durst, kommen, gut; and the Dane* T®rst>kom9 god , The Frenchman calling on Lisbon* on Barcelona* and on Genoa discovered to his delight that aimer (to love)* nuit (night)* dix (ten) differ very little from the corresponding Portuguese words amar, noite, dez ; Spanish amar, noche * diez; or Italian amare * mite, died . In fact* the difference is so small that use of the French words alone would often produce the desired result. Because of such resemblances* people spoke of related languages. By the sixteenth century* three units which we now call the Teutonic * the Romance or Latin, and the Slavonic groups were widely recognized. If you know one language in any of these three groups* you will have little difficulty in learning a second one. So it is eminently a practical division.

When the modem linguist still calls English* Dutch, German* Danish* Norwegian* Swedish related languages* he means more than this. We now use the term in an evolutionary sense. Languages are related, , if the many features of vocabulary* structure* and phonetics which they share are due to gradual differentiation of what was once a single tongue. Sometimes we have to infer what the common parent was like; but we have first-hand knowledge of the origin of one language- group, The deeper we delve into the past* the more French* Spanish* Italian* etc,* converge. Finally they become one in Latin* or* to be more accurate* in Vulgar Latin as spoken by the common people in the various parts of the Western Roman Empire.

Like the doctrine of organic evolution* this attitude to the study of languages is a comparatively recent innovation. It was wholly alien to European thought before the French Revolution. For more than two

The Classification of Languages 177

thousand , years before that time, grammatical scholarship had existed as a learned profession. During the whole of this period scholars had accepted the fact that languages exist without probing into the origins of their diversity. In Greece the growth of a more adventurous spirit was checked by the prevailing social outlook of a slave civilization. When Christianity became the predominant creed of the Western world, Hebrew cosmogony stifled evolutionary speculation in every field of inquiry.

Investigations of Greek philosophers and grammarians suffered at all times from one fundamental weakness. They were strictly confined to the home-made idiom. This was the inevitable consequence of a cul¬ tural conceit which divided the world into Greeks and Barbarians. The same social forces which held back the progress of mechanics and of medicine in the slave civilizations of the Mediterranean world held up the study of grammar. To bother about the taal of inferior people was not the proper concern of an Athenian or of a Roman gentleman. Even Herodotus, who had toured Egypt and had written on its quaint customs, nowhere indicates that he had acquired much knowledge of the language.

The Alexandrian conquest brought about little change of mind when Greek traders and travellers were roaming far beyond the Medi¬ terranean basin, establishing intimate contact with Bactrians, Iranians, and even with India. Both Greek and Roman civilization had unrivalled opportunities for getting acquainted with changing phases in the idioms of peoples who spoke and wrote widely diverse tongues. They had unrivalled, and long since lost, opportunities to get some light on the mysteries of ancient scripts such as hieroglyphics and cuneiform. They never exploited their opportunities. The Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was a sealed book till the second decade of the nineteenth century. The decoding of cuneiform inscriptions is a work of the last hundred years. ■ ■

Christianity performed one genuine service to the study of language, as it performed a genuine service to medicine by promoting hospitals. It threw the opprobrious term Barbarian overboard, and thus paved the way for the study of all tongues on their own merits. Before it had come to terms with the ruling class, Christianity was .truly the faith of the weary and heavy laden, of the proletarian- and the slave without property, without fatherland. In Christ there was “neither Scythian, barbarian, bond nor free, but a new creation.” Accordingly the early church ignored social rank and cultural frontiers. AE idioms of the

178 The Loom of Language

globe enjoyed equal rights, and the gift of tongues was in high esteem among the miracles of the apostolic age.

Christian salvation was an act of faith. To understand the new religion the heathen must needs hear the gospel in their own verna¬ culars. So proselytizing went hand in hand with translating. At an early date, Christian scholars translated the Gospels into Syriac, Coptic, and Armenian. The Bible is the beginning of Slavonic literature, and the translation of the New Testament by the West Gothic Bishop, Ulfilas, is the oldest Germanic document extant. Even to-day the Christian impulse to translate remains unabated. Our Bible Societies have carried out pioneer work in the study of African and Polynesian dialects.

' The historical balance-sheet of Christian teaching and language study also carries a weighty item on the debit side. The story of the Tower of Babel was sacrosanct, and with it, as a corollary, the belief that Hebrew was the original language of mankind. So the emergence and spread of Christianity was not followed by any deeper under¬ standing of the natural history of language. Throughout the Middle Ages the path trod by the Christian scholar was one already beaten by his pagan forerunner. There was no significant progress in the com¬ parative study of languages, but mercantile venture and missionary enterprise during the age of the Great Navigations made a wealth of fresh material accessible through the new medium of the printed page, and encouraged European scholars to break away from exclusive preoccupation with dead languages. For the first time, they began to recognize that some languages are more alike than others.

Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609), variously recognized as the phoenix of Europe^ the light of the world , the bottomless pit of knotvkdge^ saw as much, and a little more, when he wrote his treatise on the languages of Europe. He arranged them all in eleven main classes, which fall again into lour major and seven minor ones. The four major classes he based on their words for god, into deu$~, theos gott-9 and bog- languages, or, as we should say, into Latin (Romance) languages, Greek, Germanic, and Slavonic. The remaining seven classes are made up of Epitotic or Albanian, Tartar, Hungarian, Finnic, Irish (that port of it which to-day is spoken in the mountainous regions of Scot land , he. Gaelic), Old British, as spoken in Wales and Brittany, and finally Cantabrian or Basque.

During the seventeenth century many miscellanies of foreign lan¬ guages, like the hcrbals and bestiaries of the time, came off the printing .presses of European countries. The most ambitious of them til was die

The Classification of Languages 179

outcome of a project of Leibniz, the mathematician, who was assisted by Catherine II of Russia. The material was handed over to the Ger- ■ man traveller, Pallas, for classification. The results of his labour ap¬ peared in 1787 under the title, Linguarum Totius Orbis Vocdbularia Comparative^ (Comparative Vocabularies of all the Languages of the World). The number of words on the list circulated was 285, and the number of languages covered was 200, of which 149 were Asiatic and 51 European. In a later edition, this number was considerably increased by the addition of African and of Amer-Indian dialects from the New World. Pallas’s compilation was of little use. He had put it together hastily on the basis of superficial study of his materials. Its merit was that it stimulated others to undertake something more ambitious and more reliable. One of them was the Spaniard, Hervas ; another the German, Adelung. Leibniz’s suggestions influenced both of them.

Lorenzo Hems (1735-1809) had lived for many years among the American Indians, and published 'the . enormous number of forty grammars, based upon Ms contact with their languages. Between 1800 and 1805 he also published a collected work with the tide: Catdlogo de las lenguas de las naciones conoddas y numeradon, division y doses de estas segun la diver sidad de sus idiomasy dialectos (Catalogue of the languages of all the known nations with the enumeration, division, and classes of these nations according to their languages and dialects). TMs linguistic museum contained three hundred exMbits. It would have been more useful if the author’s arrangement of the specimens had not been based on the delusion that there is a necessary connection between race and language. A second encyclopaedic attempt to bring all lan¬ guages together, as duly labelled exMbits, #as that of the ■■ German grammarian and popular philosopher, Adelung. It bears the tide, Mithridates, or General Science of Languages , with the Lori's Prayer in nearly 500 Languages and Dialects, published in four volumes between 1806 and 1817. When the fourth volume appeared, Adelung’s com- v pilation had become entirely obsolete. In the meantime, Bopp had published Ms revolutionary treatise on the conjugations! system of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian, and German.

Previously, there had been little curiosity about the way in wMch language grows. In the introduction to “MlMdates” Adelung makes a suggestion, put forward earlier by Home Tooke, without any attempt to check or explore its implications, TMs remarkable Englishman was one of the first Europeans to conceive a plausible hypothesis to account

180 The Loom of Language

for the origin of flexion. In a book called Diversions of Parley, published in 1786, Tooke anticipates the central theme of the task which Bopp carried out with greater knowledge and success during the first half of the nineteenth century. Thus he writes :

“All those common terminations, in any language, of which all Nouns or Verbs in that language equally partake (under the notion of declension

or conjugation) arc themselves separate words with distinct meanings .

these terminations are explicable, and ought to be explained.”

The work of Bopp and other pioneers of comparative grammar received a powerful impetus from the study of Sanskrit. Though Sassetti, an Italian of the sixteenth century, had called Sanskrit a pleasant, musical language, and had united Dio (God) with Dora, it had remained a sealed book for almost two hundred years. Now and then some missionary, like Robertus Nobilibus, or Heinrich Roth, a German who was anxious to be able to dispute with Brahmanic priests, made himself acquainted with it, but this did not touch the world at large. After Sassetti, the first European to point out the staggering similarities between Sanskrit and the European languages was the German mis¬ sionary, Benjamin Schultze. For years he had preached the Gospel to the Indian heathen, and had helped in the translation of the Bible into Tamil. On August 19, 1725, he sent to Professor Frankcn an interesting letter in which he emphasized the similarity between the numerals of Sanskrit, German, and Latin.

When English mercantile imperialism was firmly grounded in India, civil servants began to establish contact with the present and past of the country. An Asiatic Society got started at Calcutta in 1784. Four years later, a much-quoted letter of William Jones, Chief-Justice at Fort William in Bengal, was made public. In it the author demon¬ strated the genealogical connexion between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, between Sanskrit and German, and between Sanskrit, Celtic, and Persian:

“The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonder¬ ful structure; more perfect titan the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could possibly examine all the three without believing them to have sprung, from some common source which, per¬ haps, no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and Celtic, though blended with a different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit.”

The Classification,' of Languages 181

This happened within a few years of the publication, of Hutton’s

Theory of the Earthy a book which challenged the Mosaic account of the creation. Custodians of the ... Pentateuch were alarmed by the prospect that Sanskrit would bring down the Tower of Babel. To anticipate the danger, they pilloried Sanskrit as a priestly fraud, a kind ■of pidgin-classic concocted by Brahmins from Greek and Latin ele¬ ments. William Jones, himself a scholar of unimpeachable piety, had to make the secular confession :

£T can only declare my belief that the language of Noah is irretrievably lost. After diligent search I cannot find a single word used in common by the Arabian, Indian, and Tartar families, before the admixture of these dialects occasioned by the Mahommedan conquests.”

Together with tea and' coffee, Napoleon’s blockade of England with¬ held from the Continent Sanskrit grammars and dictionaries which English scholars were now busy turning out. Fortunately the Biblio- theque Nationale in Paris possessed Sanskrit texts. Paris had in custody Hamilton, an Englishman who enlivened his involuntary sojourn in the French capital by giving private lessons in Sanskrit. One of his pupils was a brilliant young German, Friedrich Schlegel. In 1808, Schlegel published a little book, liber die Spracke und Weisheit der Inder (On the Language and Philosophy of the Indians). This put Sanskrit on the Continental map. Much that is in Schlegel’s book makes us smile to-day, perhaps most of all the author’s dictum that Sanskrit is the mother of all languages. None the less, it was a turning- point in the scientific study of language. In a single sentence which boldly prospects the field of future research, Schlegel exposes the new impetus which came from contemporary progress of naturalistic studies :

“Comparative grammar will give us entirely neW information on the genealogy of language, in exactly the same way in which comparative anatomy has thrown light upon the natural history.”

The study of Latin in the Middle Ages had preserved a secure basis for this evolutionary approach to the study of other languages, because the Latin parentage of modem French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Rumanian is an historically verifiable fact. Unfortunately, history has not been so obliging as to preserve the parent of the Teutonic and the Slavonic groups. To be sure, the present differences between Dutch, German, and the Scandinavian languages diminish as we go back in time. Still, differences remain when we have retraced our steps

1 82 The Loom of Language

to the oldest records available. At that point we have to replace the historical by the comparative method, and to try to obtain by inference what history has failed to rescue. We are in much the same position as the biologist, who can trace the record of vertebrate evolution from bony remains in the rocks, till he reaches the point when vertebrates had not acquired a hard skeleton. Beyond this, anything we can know or plausibly surmise about their origin must be based upon a com¬ parison between the characteristic features of the vertebrate body and the characteristic features of bodily organization among the various classes of invertebrates.

THE BASIS OF EVOLUTIONARY CLASSIFICATION

Biologists who classify animals from an evolutionary point of view make the assumption that characteristics common to all — or to nearly all — members of a group are also characteristic of their common ancestor. Similar reasoning is implicit in the comparative method of studying languages; and those who study the evolution of languages enjoy an advantage which the evolutionary biologist docs not share. No large-scale changes in the diversity of animal life on our planet have occurred during the period of the writ ten record, but distinct languages have come into being during comparatively recent times. We can check the value of clues which suggest common parentage of related lan¬ guages by an almost continuous historical record of what has happened to Latin.

Word-similarity is one of the three most important of these clues. It stands to reason that two closely related languages must have a large number of recognizably similar words. Comparison of the members of the Romance group shows that this is so. Such resemblance docs not signify identity, which may be due to borrowing. Evidence for kinship is strongest if words which arc alike arc words which are not likely to have passed from one language to the other, or to have been assimilated by both from a third. Such conservative words include personal pro¬ nouns ; verbs expressing basic activities or states, such as come and go, give and take, eat and drink, live and die’, adjectives denoting elementary qualities such as young and old, big and small, high and deep; or names which stand for universally distributed objects, such as earth, dog, stone, water, fire, for parts of the body such as head, ear, eye, nose, mouth, or for blood relationship such as father, mother, sister, brother .

If the number of words which two languages share is small, and confined to a special aspect of cultural life, it is almost certain that one

The Classification of Languages 183

is indebted to the other. This applies to word-similarities which the Celtic and Teutonic groups do not share with other Aryan languages. The common words of this class are all nouns* some of which are

TENSES OF THE VERB BE IN ROMANCE LANGUAGES (pronouns only used for emphasis in brackets)

	ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	LATIN	ITALIAN
	" I am	je suis	(yo) soy	(ego) sum	(io) sono
	thou art	tu es	(th) eres	: (tu) es’	(tu)sei
a <0	he is	il est	(el) es	(ille) est	(egli) e
	we are	nous sommes	(nosotros) somos	(nos) sumus	(noi) siamo
Pu	. you arc	vous etes	(vosotros) sols	(vos) estis	(voi) siete
	[they are	ils sont	(ellos) son	(illi) sunt	(essi) sono
a	f I was (used to	petals	era	eram	ero
0 <u CQ	be) 1
U s 1	thou wert	tu itais	eras	eras	eri
he was	il Stall	era	erat	era
	we were	nous itions	eramos	eramus	eravamO/
GO CO	you were	vous Suez	erais	eratis	eravate
pL,	[they were	ils itaient	eran	erant	erano
<0 I	* I was ,	je fus	fui	fui	fui
ia I	thou wert	tu fus	ftiiste	fuisti	fosti
*8 !	he was	il fut	fue	fuit	fu
p *	we were	nous f&mes	fuimos	fuimus	fummo
00	you were !	vous fates	fuisteis	fuistis	foste
ip	^ they were	ils furent	fueron	fuerunt	furono
	“ I shall be	je serai	sere	ero	sard
<0	thou wilt be	tu seras	seras	ms	sarai
1.1 a ,	he will be	il sera	sera	erit	sara
td a	we shall be	nous serous	seremos	erimus	saremo
	you will be	vous serez	sereis	critis	sarete
	^they will be	ils seront	seran	erunt	saranno
	(to) m	ETEE	SER	ESSE .	ESSERE

names for metals, tools and vehicles. This does not indicate that there is a particularly close evolutionary relationship between Celtic and Teutonic in the sense defined above. Other features show that a wide gulf separates them. Archaeological evidence suggests that the Teutons took over words with the arts they assimilated from Celtic communities at a higher cultural level.

184 The Loom of Language

Through such culture-contacts words have wandered from one language to another of a totally different origin. The modem word bicycle pedals over linguistic frontiers as the machine used to pedal over national boundaries before passports were obligatory. The word- material of all, or nearly all, languages is more or less mongrel. Even in the more exclusive members of the Teutonic group the number of intruders is many times larger than the number of words which the linguist thinks he can trace back to the hypothetical common idiom called primitive Teutonic. When dealing with words for numbers, or weights and measures, we have always to reckon with the possibility of cultural, and therefore wordy diffusion. If vocabulary is the only clue available, we have to give due consideration to geographical situation. If two languages which share a considerable portion of conservative root- words are not geographically contiguous, it is highly probable that they are related.

Word-similarity is a good clue. A second is agreement with respect to grammatical behaviour. French, Spanish and Italian, which wc may use as our control group, have a host of common grammatical features such as :

(i) A future tense (see pp. 106 and 339) which is a combination of

the infinitive and the auxiliary to have, (Fr. aimer-aiy aimer-as; Jtal, amar-dy atmr-ai ; Span, mnar-Cy amar-ds.)

(ii) The definite article (Fr, mase, ky fern, /a, Span, el or /a, Irak il or

la)y and pronouns of the third person (Fr, il or die y Span, cl or dluy XtaL egli or dla) all derived front the Latin demonstrative ilky ilia ,

(iii) A twofold gender system in which the masculine noun generally

takes the place of the Latin neuter (Fr. k truly the wine; Span, el vino ; XtaL il vino ; Latin vimtm ).

Grammatical peculiarities, like words, may be more or less conserva¬ tive, In the widest sense of the term, grammar includes the study of idiom and sentence construction, or syntax. , in contradistinction to accidenccy which deals with the modification of individual words by flexion or root-vowel changes. The syntax of a language is much less conservative than its accidence. When we meet with resemblances of the latter type, it would be far-fetched to attribute them to chance or to borrowing. All the evidence available tends to show that, while words and idioms diffuse freely, peculiarities of accidence do not. Now and then a language may borrow a prefix or a suffix, together with a foreign word, and subsequently tack one or the' other on to indigenous words.

The Classification of Languages 185

as German did with -ei (Liebelei, “flirtation”), which is the French -ie (as in la vilenieffviMmf*) ; but we know of no language which has incor¬ porated a whole set of alien endings like those of the Latin verb (p. 107).

Absence of grammatical resemblance does not invariably mean that two or more languages are unrelated. Once a parent language has split into several new species, the different fragments may move more or less swiftly along similar or different paths. For example, French has dis¬ carded more of the luxuriant system of Latin verb flexions than its Italian sister. English has experienced catastrophic denudation of its Teutonic flexions. Consequently its grammar is now more like that of Chinese than like that of Sanskrit. Grammatical comparison may therefore mislead us, and when the evidence of word-similarity does not point to the same conclusion as the evidence from grammatical peculiari¬ ties, the latter is of little value.

A third clue which reinforces the testimony of recognizable word- similarities arises from consistent differences between words of corre¬ sponding meaning. We can easily spot such a consistent difference by comparing the English words to> tongue and tin with their German equivalents zu, Zunge and Zinn. The resemblance between members of the same pair is not striking if we confine our attention to one pair at a time, but when we look at the very large number of such pairs in which the initial German Z (pronounced ts ) takes the place of our English T, we discover an immense stock of new word-similarities. The fact that changes affecting most words with a particular sound have taken place in one or both of two languages since they began to diverge conceals many word similarities from immediate recognition. This inference is not mere speculation. It is directly supported by what has happened in the recorded history of the Romance group, as illus¬ trated in the following examples showing a vowel and a consonant shift characteristic of French, Spanish and Italian.

LATIN	FRENCH	SPANISH	ITALIAN
ovum, (egg)	ceuf	huevo	uov 0
novum, (new)	neuf	nuevo	nuov 0
morlt, (he dies)	meun	muere	muovt
factum, (fact)	fait	hccho	farm
lac(^tis)> (milk)	hit	Itcht	larre
ocro, (eight)	hu it	ocho	otto

If we observe correspondence of this type when we investigate two other languages, such as Finnish and Magyar (Hungarian), we have to

1 86

The Loom of Language

conclude that each pair of words has been derived from a single and earlier one. If we notice several types of sound-replacement, each sup¬ ported by a large number of examples, we can regard relationship as certain. This conclusion is of great practical value to anyone who is learning a language. Sound-transformations between related languages such as English and German, or French and Spanish, are not mere historical curios, like the sound-changes in the earlier history of the Indo-European group. How to recognize them should take its place in the technique of learning a foreign language, because knowledge of them is an aid to memory, and often helps us to spot the familiar equivalent of an unfamiliar word. Use of such rules, set forth more specifically in Chapter VI of The Loom, should be part of the laboratory training of the home student who is learning a new language. The reader who takes advantage of the exhibits in tire language museum of Part IV can exchange the monotony of learning lists of unrelated items for the fun of recognizing when the rules apply, of noticing exceptions, and of discovering why they are exceptions.

One of the words in the preceding lists illustrates this forcibly. At first sight there is no resemblance between the Spanish word hccho and the Latin-English word fact or its French equivalent fait. Anyone who has been initiated into the sound-shifts of the Romance languages recognizes two trade-marks of Spanish. One is the CH which corre¬ sponds to IT in words of Old French origin, or CT in modern French and English words of Latin descent. The other is rite initial silent H which often replaces /, as illustrated by the Spanish (hava) and Italian (Java) words for bean. If an American or British student of German knows that the initial German D replaces our 27/, there is no need to consult a dictionary for the meaning of Ding and Durst.

If we apply our three tests— community of basic vocabulary, simi¬ larity of grammatical structure, and regularity of sound-correspondence — to English, Dutch, German and the Scandinavian languages, all the findings suggest unity of origin. Naturally, it is not possible to exhibit the full extent of word-community within the limits of this book; but the reader will find abundant relevant material in the word lists of Part IV. Here wc must content ourselves with the illustration already given’ on p. 21, where a request contained in the Lord’s Prayer is printed in five Teutonic and in five Romance languages. The reader may also refer to the tables of personal pronouns printed on pages 126 and 127.

The grammatical apparatus of the Teutonic languages points to the

The Classification of Languages 187

same conclusions as the reader may see by comparing the forms of the verbs to be and to have displayed in tabular form on pp. ioi and

below. Three of the most characteristic grammatical features of the Teutonic group are the following:

(i) Throughout the Teutonic languages, there is the same type

(see table on p. 190) of comparison (English thin, thinner , thinnest ; German dunn, dunner , dunnst ; Swedish tunn, tunnare, tunnast ).

(ii) All members of the group form the past tense and past participle

of the verb in two ways: (a) by modifying the root-vowel (English sing, sang, sung; German singen, sang, gesungen; Danish synge, sang, sunget); (b) by adding d or t to the stem (English punish, punished; German strafen, strafte, gestraft; Danish straff e, straffede, straff et).

(iii) The typical genitive singular case-mark is -s, as in English

day's, Swedish dags, Danish Dags, German Tages,

If we follow out our third clue, we find a very striking series, of sound-shifts characteristic of each language. We have had one example of consonant equivalence in the Teutonic group. Below is a single example of vowel equivalence:

ENGLISH	SWEDISH	GERMAN
bone	ben	Bein
goat	get	Geiss
oak	ek	Eiche
stone	sten	Stein
whole	hel	hell
TO HAVE	IN TEUTONIC	LANGUAGES

ENGLISH

1 have thou hast he has we 1 you > have they J

I had thou hadst he we you they

1 have had J shall have

>had

SWEDISH

m 1

Du >har han J vi ^

Ni lhava de J

jag, etc., hade

jag, etc*, hade

jag har haft jag shall hava

DANISH

jeg'

Du han vi De de

har

jeg, etc.,

havde

jeg har haft

jeg skalhavej

DUTCH * ik heb jij hebt hij heeft wij

jullie !>hebben zij

ik

hij

wij n

jullie l hadden

Zij J

ik heb gehad ik zal hebben

had

GERMAN*

ich habe du hast er hat wit haben ihr habt sie haben

ich hatte du hattest er hatte wit hatten ihr hattet sie hatten

ich habegehabt w/rwerde haben

* For polite address German has Sie+ third person plural; Dutch has U+ third person singular (p. 146).

i88

The Loom of Language

THE INDO-EUROPEAN FAMILY

Similarities are comparatively easy to trace in closely related languages such as Swedish and German or French and Italian. We can still detect some, when we compare individual members of these groups with those of others. Centuries back some people felt, though dimly, that the Teutonic group was not an isolated unit. In 1597, Bonaventura Vulcanius observed that twenty-two words are the same in German and Persian. Twenty years later, another scholar stressed the similari¬ ties between Lithuanian and Latin. Both were right, though both drew the wrong conclusions from their findings, the former that German had an admixture of Persian, the latter that the Lithuanians were of Roman stock.

Two hundred years later, in 1817, Rasmus Kristian Rask, a brilliant young Dane who had been investigating the origin of Old Norse in Iceland, first drew attention to sound-correspondence between Greek and Latin on the one hand, and the Teutonic languages on the other, Text-books usually refer to this discovery as Grimm’s Law — after the German scholar who took up Rask’s idea. One item of this most cele¬ brated of all sound-shifts is the change from the Latin p to the

Teutonic /:
LATIN	ENGLISH	SWEDISH	GERMAN
plenus	./till	full	von*
piscis	/ish	fisk	Fisch
ped-is	foot	fot	Fuss
pater	/atber	/ader	Facer

* The German V stands for the / sound in far.

A little later the German scholar Franz Bopp (1791-1867) showed that Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, and Teutonic in its earlier stages, have similar verb-flexions. His studies led him to the conclusion that Aryan verb- and case-flexion have come about by the gluing on of what were once independent vocables such as pronouns and prepositions. It was a brilliant idea. Bopp’s only weakness was that he tried to establish its validity yhen sufficient evidence was not available. Inevi¬ tably, like other pioneers, he made errors. His disciples grossly neglected the important part which analogy (pp. 93 and 204) has played in the accretion of affixes to roots. Subsequently a strong reaction set in. Even now, many linguists approach Bopp’s agglutination theory squeamishly, as if it dealt with the human pudenda. This attitude is none the less foolish when it affects scientific caution for its justification, because

The Classification of Languages 189

much valid historic evidence to support Bopp’s teaching (see especially PP* I003» 339) is available from the relatively recent history of

Indo-European languages.

The present tense of “to bear,” “to carry,” in the following table, where the Teutonic group is represented by Old High German, illus¬ trate obvious affinities of conjugation in the Aryan family:

		GREEK		OLD HIGH	OLD
ENGLISH	SANSKRIT	(DORIC)	LATIN*	GERMAN	SLAVONIC
I bear	bharami	phero	fero	biru	bera
(thou bearest)	bharasi	phereis	fers	biris	beresi
he bears	bharati	pherei	fert	birit	beretu
we bear	bharamas	pheromes	ferimus	berames	beremu
you bear	bharata	pherete	fertis	beret	berete
they bear	bharanti	pheronti	ferunt	berant	beratu

The singular of the present optative of the verb to be3 corre¬ sponding to the use of be in if it be, in three dead languages of the group is :

SANSKRIT OLD LATIN GOTHIC

syam

syas

syat

siem

sies

siet

sijau

sijais

sijai

From a mass of phonetic, morphological and word-similarities, we thus recognize the unity of the well-defined family called Aryan by

Anglo-American, Indo-European by French, and Indo-Germanic by German writers. The last of the three is a misnomer. Indeed the family does not keep within the limits indicated by the term Indo- European. It is spread out over an enormous belt that stretches almost without interruption from Central Asia to the fringes of westernmost Europe. On the European side the terminus is Celtic, and on the Asiatic, Tokharian , a tongue once spoken by the inhabitants of Eastern Turkestan and recently (1906) unearthed in documents written over a thousand years ago.

‘ The undeniable similarities between these languages suggest that they are all representatives of a single earlier one which must have been spoken by some community, at some place and at some time in the prehistoric past. The idiom of the far-flung Imperitmt Romanum began

* The initial/ sound in many Latin words corresponds to b in Teutonic languages, cf. Latin frater, English brother.

190 The Loom of Language

as a rustic dialect of the province of Latium; but nobody can tell where the speakers of proto- Aryan lived, whether in Southern Russia, or on the Iranian plateau, or somewhere else. If, as some philologists believe. Old Indie, and the Persian of the Avesta have the most archaic features of Aryan languages known to us, it is not necessarily true that the habitat of the early Aryan-speaking people was nearer to Asia than to Europe. The example of Icelandic shows that a language may stray far away from home and still preserve characteristics long ago discarded

TEUTONIC COMPARISON

		. . " ~		. — - ..........
ANGLO-AMERICAN	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN
(a) Regular type;
RICH	rik	rig	rijk	reicli
richer'1 than	; rikare lln	rigere end	rijker dan	rdcher als
RICHEST	[ rikast	rigest	rijkst	reichst
(b) Irregular forms:
(i) GOOD	1 god(t)* I	| goed	1 gut
BETTER	fo&ttre	1 bedre	beter	besser
BEST	bast	| bedst	best
(ii) MUCH	myckctt(f) |	mcgm(t)	vecl	vie!
MORE	mcra	mere	meer	mehr
MOST	most	incest: ■ j	merit
(Hi) LITTLE	literal)	Silk	weinig	wenig
	lilla (pi.) 1		weniger (minder)
LESS	nundre	minder
LEAST	miast	minds t	minst	wenigst (miadest)

* The -t ending is that of the neuter form.

by those that stayed behind. Only one thing seems certain. When the recorded history of Aryan begins with the Vedic hymns, the dispersal of the Aryan-speaking tribes had already taken place.

From the writings of some German authors we might gain the base¬ less impression that we are almost as well-informed about the language and cultural life of the proto-Aryans as we are about Egyptian civili¬ zation. One German linguist has pushed audacity so far as to compile a dictionary of hypothetical primitive Aryan, and another has surpassed him by telling us a story in it. Others have asserted that the proto- Aryans were already tilling the soil with the ox and the yoke. The proof

The Classification of Languages 191

adduced is that the word for thtyoke is common to all Aryan languages (Old Indian yugatn; Greek zygon; Latin jugum; Gothic yuk). Hence the thing, as well as the name, must have been part of primitive Aryan culture. Arguments of this kind are not convincing. The fact that the

THE TEUTONIC VERB A. Strong Type

ANGLO-AMERICAN	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH	f GERMAN
(a) to give	att giva	at give	te geven	zu geben
given (part.)	givit	givet	gegeven	gegeben
give(s) (sing.)	givei	> giver s	geef(t)	gebe(gibt)
(plur.)	giva	geeven	geben
gave (sing.)	gav	\ gav |	gaf	gab
(plur.)	g&vo	gaven	gaben
(b) to come	att komma	at komme	te komen	zu kommen
come (part.)'	kommit	kommet	gekomen	gekommen
come(s) (sing.)	kommer	\ kommer |	kom(t)	komme(t)
(plur.)	komnio	komen	kommen
came (sing.)	kom	\ kom .	kwam	kam
(plur.)	komme	kwamen	kamen

B. Weak Type

ANGLO-AMERICAN	SWEDISH	I DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN
(1 a ) to work	att arbeta	at arbejde	te arbeiden	zu arbeiten
worked (part.) !	arbetat	arbejdet	gearbeid	gearbeitet
work(s) (sing.)	arbetar	ij* arbejder -f	arbeide(t)	arbeite(t)
(plur.)	arbeta	arbeiden	arbeiten
worked (sing.)	arbetade	arbejdede	arbeidde	arbeitete
(plur.)	arbeidden	arbeiteten
(6) to hear	att hdra	at hore	te hooren	zu hOren
heard (part.)	hort	hort	gehoord	gehOrt
hear(s) (sing.)	h5r	j- horer i	hoor(t)	hore(f)
(plur.)	hOra	hooren	hOren
- heard (sing.)	hdrde	horte -!	hoorde	hOrtc
(plur.)	hoorden	hOrten

word yoke occurs in all Aryan languages is explicable without burdening the primitive Aryan dictionary. There is no reason whatsover why an Aryan-speaking tribe should not have borrowed the yoke from a non-Axyan-speaking community, and then passed it on to others.

*92 The Loom of Language

Though we know little about early culture-contacts, common sense tells us that what has happened in historical times must also have happened before.

It has also been said that the primitive Aryan-speaking tribes could count at least as far as one hundred. This does not necessarily follow from the fact that names for 2 or for 3 or for 10, etc., are alike. You cannot exchange goods without being able to count. It is therefore quite possible* that Aryan-speaking tribes borrowed the art of counting from an outside source, or that it diffused from one branch of the family to its neighbours. Indeed, numerals are the most indefatigable wan¬ derers among words, as indefatigable as alphabets. In the language of the Gypsies, an Indie tribe, the names for 7, 8, and 9 are modern Greek, whereas those for 5 and 10 are Indie. In the Finno-Ugrian group, the word for 100 is borrowed from Iranian; and Hebrew schesh (6) and scheba (7) are supposed to be derived from Aryan, while the Hebrew name for 8 is assumed to be Egyptian. But there is no need to go so far back. The English dozen and million have been taken over in compara¬ tively recent times from the Romance languages.

German philologists have not been content to draw encouraging conclusions from words which are alike and have the same meaning in all the Aryan languages. They have also speculated about the signifi¬ cance of words which do not exist. Of itself, the fact that the Aryan family has no common term for the tiger does not indicate that the proto-Aryans inhabited a region where there were no tigers. Once the hypothetical Urvolk started to move, tribes which went into colder regions would no longer need to preserve the word for it. If we are entitled to deduce that the East did not use salt because the Western Aryan word for the mineral does not occur in the Indo-Iranian tongues, the absence of a common Aryan word for milk must force us to con¬ clude that proto-Aryan babies used to feed on something else.

LANGUAGE FAMILIES OF THE WORLD

In a modern classification of the animal kingdom taxonomists unite many small groups, such as fishes, birds and mammals, or Crustacea, insects and arachnids (spiders and scorpions) in larger ones such as vertebrates and arthropods. Beyond that point we can only speculate

* philologists sometimes justify emphasis on similarity of number-words op. the ground that they also share general phonetic features characteristic of a

language as a whole. 1 Ms is also true of words which have undoubtedly been ."borrowed, ‘and is easily explained by the phonetic habits of a people.

The Classification of Languages 193

with little plausibility about their evolutionary past. Besides about ten great groups, such as vertebrates and arthropods, embracing the majority of animal species, there are many small ones made up of few species, isolated from one another and from the members of any of the larger divisions. So it is with languages. Thus Japanese, Korean, Manchu, Mongolian, each stand outside any recognized families as isolated units.

We have seen that most of the inhabitants of Europe speak languages with common features. These common features justify the recognition of a single great Indo-European family. Besides the Romance or Latin and the Teutonic languages mentioned in the preceding pages, the Indo-European family includes several other well-defined groups, such as the Celtic (Scots Gaelic, Erse, Welsh, Breton) in the West, and the Slavonic (Russian, Polish, Czech and Slovak, Bulgarian and Serbo- Croatian) in the East of Europe, together with the Xndo-Iranian lan¬ guages spoken by the inhabitants of Persia and a large part of India. Lithuanian (with its sister dialect, Latvian), Greek, Albanian, and Armenian are isolated members of the same family.

The Indo-European or Aryan group does not include all existing European languages. Finnish, Magyar, Esthonian and Lappish have common features which have led linguists to place them in a separate group called the Finno-Ugrian family. So far as wt can judge at present, Turkish, which resembles several Central Asiatic languages (Tartar. Uzbeg, Kirgiz), belongs to neither of the two families mentioned; and Basque, still spoken on the French and Spanish sides of the Pyrenees, has no clear affinities with any other language in the world.

Long before modem language research established the unity of the Aryan family, Jewish scholars recognized the similarities of Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic which are representatives of a Semitic family. The Semitic family also includes the fossil languages of the Phoenicians and Assyro-Babylonians. The languages of China, Tibet, Burma and Siam constitute a fourth great language family. Like the Semitic, the Indo- Chinese family has an indigenous literature. In Central and Southern Africa other languages such as Luganda, Swahili, Kafir, Zulu, have been associated in a Bantu unit which does not include those of the Bushmen and Hottentots. In Northern Africa Somali, Galla and Berber show similarities which have forced linguists to recognize a Hamitic family. To this group ancient Egyptian also belongs. A Dravidian family in¬ cludes Southern Indian languages, which have no relation to the Aryan vernaculars of India. Yet another major family with dear-cut features

G

*94 The Loom of Language

is the Malayo-Polynesian, which includes Malay and the tongues of most of the islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

Something like a hundred language-groups, including the Papuan Australian and Amerindian (e.g. Mexican and Greenlandic) vernacu¬ lars, Japanese, Basque, Manchu, Georgian, and Korean, still remain to be connected in larger units. This has not been possible so far, either because they have not yet been properly studied, or because their past phases are not on record. Below is a list of families which are well- defined:

L INDO-EUROPEAN:

(а) Teutonic

(German* iDutch, Scandinavian, English)

(б) Celtic

(Erse, Gaelic, Welsh, Breton)

(c) Romance

(French, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Italian, .Rumanian)

id) Slavonic

(Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovakian, Bulgarian, Serbo-

Croatian, and Slovene)

(e) Baltic

(Lithuanian, Lettish)

(/) Greek (c) Albanian

(//) Armenian (i) Persian (A) Modern Indie dialects

it. i-innq-ugkian:

(a) Lappish (b) Finnish (c) pytonian

(d) Chemuessim , Mordvinian (e) Magyar (Hungarian)

III. SEMITIC;

(a) Arabic ( b ) Ethiopian (c) Hebrew (d) Maltese

XV. HAMXTIC:

(3) Cushite (Somali ^ Ctalld) (IS) Berber languages V. INDO-CHINESE:

(a) Chinese (6) Tibetan (c) Siamese (d) Burmese ?L malayo-polynksian :

(a) Malay (b) Bijmn (c) Tahitian (d) Maori

VII. TURCO-TA»TAJt:

(a) Turkish (b) ' Tartar (c) Kirghiz

The Classification of Languages 195

vin. dravidian:

(a) Tamil (b) Telugu (c) Canarese ix. 'bantu:

Kafir , Swahili^ Bechuana , Sesuto , Hereto , Congo , Duala, etc. '

GRAMMATICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF LANGUAGE-FAMILIES

Because grammatical similarities between different languages furnish one of the three most important indications of evolutionary relation¬ ships it is useful to recognize certain general grammatical features which may be more or less characteristic of a language. From this point of view we can classify language-types which may coincide with genuine evolutionary affinity., if the evidence of grammar is supported by other clues such as the two already discussed. If other clues are not available, the fact that languages are classified in this way does not necessarily point to common origin, because languages which are related may have lost outstanding grammatical similarities, and languages which belong to different families may have evolved similar grammatical traits along different paths. From this point of view, we can divide languages into the following types: — isolating, flexional, mot-inflected and classificatory .

The first and the last are the most clear-cut; and the second, which embraces a great diversity of tongues, depends on grammatical devices which have no common origin. Even when we stretch the limits of all three to the utmost, we are left with many languages in which isolated flexional and classificatory features may be blended without' decisive predominance of any one of them, and the language of a single com¬ munity may traverse the boundaries of such groups in a comparatively short period of its history. Thus the English of Alfred the Great was a typically flexional language, and Anglo-American is predominantly isolating. Basque, which is a law unto itself, the Amerindian dialects, and the speech of the Esquimaux in Greenland, fit into no clearly defined family based on evidence of common ancestry, and we cannot classify them in any of the three grammatical groups mentioned above.

The word of an isolating language is an unalterable unit. Neither flexional accretions nor internal changes reveal what part the word plays in the sentence, as do the changes from house to houses, mm to metis, give to gave, live to lived . All the words which we should call verbs are fixed like must (p. 123), and all the words we call nouns are fixed like grouse. Vernaculars of the Chinese family, usually cited as extreme examples of the isolating type, have other common features which are not necessarily connected with the fact that the word is an

196

The Loom of Language

unchangeable unit; and the fact that they are difficult to learn has nothing to do with it. We have already touched on the real difficulties i.e its script ambiguities of the many homophones (p. 5r) and phonetic subtleties of the tone values; and shall study them at greater length m Chapter X. Here it is important to emphasize that representatives ot other language groups, especially languages which have been subject to hybridization resulting from culture contacts through trade, con¬ quest or migration, have evolved far towards the same goal. To the extent that they have done so, they are easier to learn than closely related neighbours* y

bio. 26,-— Coin or .Maccabean Times with On left side: sh-q-1 j-z-r-l sh b (shekel of hr j-r-w-sh-l-j-m h-q-tl-w-sh-h ( Holy Jerusalem).

Party 1 Iebrew Characters acl year 2). On right side:

Malay is one of the Polynesian language-group often described as

agglutinating languages. In his primer of Malay Winstedt says: “Nouns have no inflexion lor gender, number or case . . . there is no article the comparative is formed by using lebch (more) before ihe adjective’ Ihc superlative is lormed by putting the word sa-kali (most) after 'the elective there is no mllexion u> mark mood, tense or even

voice, lo this it may he added that the adjective is invariant and the pronoun has no case-form. Malay is therefore an isc.Iating langt ge

with none of the peculiar disabilities of Chinese, i.e. tone valuet -md numerous homophones. v.uuis and

AGGLUTINATION AND AMALGAMATION

1 he flcxwnal type includes languages which mainly indicate modifi¬ cation of meaning and grammatical relations by affixes attached to the same word-root. According to the degree of fusion between core and

,w° som •f«-

The words of agglutinating languages such as Finnish, Magyar (Hungarian) and Turkish are .not exclusively independent and mobile particles like those of Chinese. Affixes loosely joined to the unchanguw root m such a way that the boundary between the core and its act-re-

The Classification of Languages 197

tion is unmistakable modify the meaning of the former. In some agglutinating languages, we can recognize many or most of these aWs as contracted remains of longer words which still enjoy an indepen¬ dent existence. In others, the affixes do not correspond to elements which exist apart. What is most characteristic of such languages is mat each affix, like an independent word, has a distinctive meaning. So derivatives (see footnote p. 34) of an agglutinating language when classified according to case, mood, etc., have clear-cut uses, and the method of forming them is also clear-cut. Neither the use nor the form of derivatives described by the same name admits the perplexing irregu¬ larities of a typically amalgamating language such as Latin, Greek, or Sanskrit.

The . term itself implies that agglutinating languages form their derivatives by the process of fusion discussed in Chapter III and else¬ where. This is not certainly true of all so-called agglutinating languages, but it is appropriate to those of the Finno-Ugrian family. A Hungarian example will make tins clear. In the Indo-European languages, the case-endings are not recognizable as vestiges of individual words, but in Magyar we can still see how a directive is glued to the noun. From hajOy ship* and hajo~ky ships, we get:

SINGULAR

haj o-ban (= hajo + benri), in the ship. hajo-bol (= hajo + belol), out of the ship. hajo-ba (= hajo -j~ bele)> into the ship. hajo-hoz ( = hajo + hozza)3 towards the

ship.

hajo-nak ( = hajo nek) > for the ship.

PLURAL

hajo-k-bans in the ships. hajo-k-bol> out of the ships. hajo-k-bas into the ships. hajo-k-hoz, towards the ships.

hajo-k-nak, for the ships.

The origin of the affixes is not equally clear in Finnish, but the

example cited illustrates a feature common to Finnish and Magyar. Case-marks of the singular do not differ from those of the plural in languages of the Finno-Ugrian family. Signs which express plurality remain the same throughout the declension. In contradistinction to that of Greek or Latin, where number- and case-marks are indis¬ solubly fused, the build-up of the flexional forms of the Finnish or Magyar noun is transparent. The fact that Finnish has fifteen “cases” does not make it difficult to learn, because the case-endings in both numbers are the same for all nouns or pronouns and for adjectives,* which mimic the -endings of the nouns associated with them. Since an

* ln other Finno-Ugrian languages the adjective takes no case-affix.

I$$ The Loom of Language

invariable case-mark corresponds to the use of a fairly well-defined particle in our own language, the effort spent in learning the case- endings of a Finnish noun or pronoun is not greater than the effort involved in learning the same number of independent words.

Analogous remarks apply to the Finnish verb, which has two tense- forms, present and past, like ours. The same personal affixes occur throughout, and the change in the final root vowel indicating completed action is the same for all verbs. Here is a specimen:

mcnc-mme — we go meni-mme — we went

mem-tie— you go mem-tie - — you went

mene-vai — they go meni-vat—* they went

Where we should use a separate possessive pronoun in front of a noun, people who speak a Finno-Ugrian language use an affix attached to the end of a noun as the personal affix is attached to the verb. This personal affix follows the case-mark. Thus from talo (house) we get:

talo-ssa-mme — in my house laloi-ssa-mmc— in my houses

talo-ssa-nne — in your house taloi-ssa-nnc—m your houses

talo~s$a-n$a — in their house taloi-ssa-nsa — in their houses

The first of the three personal affixes is the same for the Finnish noun and Finnish verb. In Samoyede, a language related to Finnish and Magyar, the same pronoun suffixes appear throughout the conjugation of the verb and the corresponding possessive derivatives of the noun. So the formal distinction between noun and verb is tenuous, as seen by comparing:

lamba~u — my ski mada-u I cut (my cutting)

lamba-r — thy ski mada-r ■■■■■■■■ thou cuttest (thy cutting)

lamba~da~ Ms ski mada-da he cuts (his cutting)

The structure of derivative words in languages of the Finno-Ugrian family is not always as schematic as the examples given might suggest. In some languages of the family the vowel of the suffix harmonizes with that of the root-word. The result is that one and the same suffix may have two or even three different vowels, according to the company it keeps, e.g. in Finnish eldmd-ssa means in the life, but talo-ssa means in the house. The modifying sulfixes, particularly in Finnish, sometimes adhere more intimately to the root, as in the Indo-European languages. None the less, two essential features are common to all the Finno- Ugrian group. One is great regularity of the prevailing pattern of deriva¬ tives. The other i# comparative freedom from arbitrary affixes which

The Classification of Languages 199

contribute nothing to the meaning of a statement. Thus grammatical gender (p. 113) is completely absent.

Where we draw the line between a language which is predominantly agglutinating or isolating depends on where we draw the line between a word and an affix. If we do not know the history of a language* it is not easy to do so. We do not recognize words such as except or but as separate entities because they are names of things at which we can point or because they stand for actions we can mimic, We distinguish them from affixes such as mis- or anti-, became we can move them about in the sentence. Now this test is straightforward because of the charac¬ teristics of English word-order. For example, we put prepositions on the one hand, and pointer-words or adjectives on the other, in front of a noun. A pointer-word with two or more adjectives, adverbs and conjunctions can separate a preposition from a noun. When the adjec¬ tive comes after the noun, as it usually does in French, the distinction is not so sharp, and it is less sharp in some Indie vernaculars. The Hindustani (p. 412) adjective precedes and the directive follows the noun. If these postpositions — we cannot rightly call them prepositions —never strayed further afield, there would be nothing to distinguish them from case-affixes like those of Finnish.

Even the status of a pronoun as an independent element of living speech is difficult to assess by any other criterion. The reader who knows some French will realize that the pronouns je, me, tu, te, il, etc., never stand by themselves. When a Frenchman answers a question with a single word, he replaces them by moi, toi , lui, etc. We recognize them as words by their mobility in the sentence. That je or il do not always stand immediately in front of the verb is due to three accidents of the French language, i.e. the fact that the pronoun object and the negative particle ne precede the verb, and the use of inversion for question formation. By the same token (p. 198) we ought to call the personal suffixes of the Finnish verb, pronouns.

Thus the distinction between an affix and a particle is clear-cut only when the conventions of word-order permit the independent mobility of the latter. We are entitled to speak of a language as isolating when, as in Chinese vernaculars, great mobility of unchangeable elements is characteristic of it. When we speak of a language as agglutinating, we usually mean that a dear-cut distinction between particle and affix is impossible because any of the formal elements described by either of these names occurs in a small range of combinations with recognizably separate words, e.g. those we call nouns, adjectives, or verbs. Some grammarians apply the epithet agglutinative to any language with a

200 The Loom of Language

regular system of affixes, including the Bantu dialects discussed below. The veteran philologist Jacob Grimm first emphasized the merits of Magyar and commended it as a model to people interested in language planning. The existence of such regularity in natural lan¬ guages has left a strong impress on projects for a constructed world auxiliary.

At an early stage in the process of agglutination many words will share similar affixes, because the latter have not yet suffered much modifica¬ tion by fusion with different roots. Hence mere regularity of affixes has sometimes been used as a criterion of the agglutinating type; but regularity may also result from an entirely different process. After amalgamation has gone far, lifeless affixes tack themselves on to new words by the process of analogical extension, or old ones may be regularized for the same reason. In this way a language with an amal¬ gamating past, e.g. Italian, may approach the regularity of a language in which few words have yet reached, the stage of true external flexion. So the fact that Turkish or Japanese have regular affixes does not mean that they have evolved in the same way as Hungarian or Finnish. Only the last two, together with Estonian , with the language of die Lapps, and with dialects of a considerable region of northern Siberia constitute a truly related group within the heterogeneous assemblage once called the Turanian family.

In a language of the amalgamating type, e.g. Sanskrit, Greek, or Latin, modifications of the sense of the word and the place it takes in the sentence depend on affixes intimately fused with the radical (root) clement. Since fusion between core and affix is intimate, the build-up of words is by no means transparent. Even the grammarian can rarely dissect diem. We can always recognize which accretions are characterisdc of number or case in the various forms of the Magyar noun (p. 197), because all the plural case-forms, as of hajo (ship), contain the suffix ~k immediately after the root; but comparison of singular and plural case-forms of an Indo-European noun does not necessarily tell you which part of the suffix attached to the root is characteristic of a particular case or of a particular number. There is no part of the suffix common to all plural in contrast to all singular case- forms. In a language such as Latin or Sanskrit there is no part of the suffix common to the genitive, singular or plural, in contradisrinction to the different number-forms of all other case-forms.

You can see this without difficulty, if you compare the following case-forms of a Latin word with our Hungarian example:

The Classification of Languages 201

nav^ a ship naves, ships

navis, of a ship na vium, of the ships

nav^ to a ship navibus, to the ships

English equivalents for different case-forms of the Latin for a ship or ships, as printed above* are those given in text-books* and the truth is that text-books conceal the worst from the beginner. Correct choice of case-endings in a typical amalgamating language does not always depend on whether the English equivalent would have a particle such as of or to in front of it. The Latin ease-ending is much more versatile than in the corresponding Magyar one. The dative navi turns up in many situations where we cannot translate it by to a ship, and there is no simple rule which tells us what ending to tack on a Latin noun in one of several dative situations. Compare* for instance* the following with the pre¬ ceding examples:

porta* a gate portae* gates

portae, of a gate por tarum, of the gates

portae, to a gate portz's* to the gates

Comparison of the case-forms of these two nouns emphasizes the irregularity of derivatives in an amalgamating language. Though English is no longer an amalgamating language and is now remarkably regular in comparison with its nearest neighbours* there is no single way in which the plural of all English nouns is formed; and there is no single waY m which the past of all English verbs is formed. We can arrange English nouns in families like man-mouse or pan-house, according to the way in which we derive their plural forms* and verbs in families such as sing-drink, think-hring, live-bake, according to the way in which we derive the past tense. In a typical amalgamating language we have to reckon with many noun families (declensions) and many verb families (conjugations). Each declension has its own type of case- as well as plural-formation. Each conjugation has its own way of building person time, mood* and voice derivatives.

The two most characteristic features which distinguish languages of the amalgamating from languages of the agglutinating type may there- fore be summed up in this way. Amalgamating languages have many derivatives arbitrarily chosen by custom in situations connected by no common thread of meaning* and many different ways of forming the derivative appropriate to a single context in accordance with meaning or conventional usage. The table manners of an agglutinating language are unassuming. You use a spoon because a spoon is the tool appro-

G*

202

The Loom of Language

priate for soup, and there is no difficulty about recognizing what a spoon is, because all the spoons are produced according to a standard pattern. The table manners of an amalgamating language are largely moulded by a code of gentlemanly uselessness. You have a large assort¬ ment of tools before you. Whether you use a fork with or without a knife or a spoon depends on conventions of social class without regard to the texture of the food.

To all the intrinsic difficulties of learning a language such as Latin, old-fashioned grammarians and schoolmasters have added the dis¬ tracting pretence that such table manners have a rational basis. This is false. The grammar of an agglutinating language such as Finnish (or Esperanto) is mainly concerned with meaning. The grammar of an amalgamating language such as Latin is mainly concerned with social ritual. II you hope to master a language such as Latin, the question you have to ask is not what any one of half-a-dozen dilferent affixes which grammarians describe as trade-marks of tire ablative case signify. They have no unique meaning. Each case-affix of a Latin noun is the trade¬ mark of a shelf of diversely assorted idioms. The business of the learner who succeeds in emerging from the fog of false rationality in text-books of classical grammar is to find out in what situations Latin or Greek authors use these affixes. The use of Latin case-forms is a social habit, like eating asparagus with the fingers. The only reason for making an exception of asparagus is that the people with money do so.

like the boundary between oil and water in a test-tube, the difference between amalgamation and agglutination is not clear-cut. It would be difficult to give good reasons for describing the personal suffixes of the Celtic verb (or the verb ol some Indian vernaculars) as amalgamating in contradistinction to agglutinating. Flexions of this kind pass through the stage of agglutination to amalgamation. They then propagate them¬ selves by analogy, as when we stick the -s on the park in: he parks his car here. Conventions ol script may greatly exaggerate or hide regulari¬ ties or irregularities of the spoken language. The literary language of Germany preserves a luxuriance of flexions which are not dearly audible in the daily intercourse of many Germans. The same is more true of French. French script conceals a wealth of contractions which would make a faithlul transcription of Frcndt speech recall the characteristics of some Amerindian dialects (p. 215). Written English is more isolating than Anglo-American as we speak it, because it frowns on many agglu¬ tinative contractions of the pronoun or negative particle (e.g. who've, watt) with helper verbs.

The Classification of Languages 203

A large proportion of the languages of the world got script from al»>n missionaries bent on spreading the use of sacred texts. The missionary

who equips a language with its alphabet uses his own judgment to decide which elements of speech are* or are not, to be treated as separate words* and his judgment is necessarily prejudiced by the grammatical framework of his own education. If he is a classical scholar* he will approach the task with a keen eye for similarities between Latin or Greek and the language whigh he is learning.

ORIGIN OF FLEXIONS

The value of the distinction between an isolating type* which shuns affixation* an agglutinating type which favours a variety of highly regular affixes* and an amalgamating type which conserves a welter of irregular ones, lies less in the fact that it draws attention to essential differences between different languages* than that it emphasizes the coexistence of processes which play a part in the evolution of one and the same language. Though one of these processes may prevail at a given moment* the others are never absent. A language such as modem . English or modern French exhibits characteristics which are separated by thousands of years. It is like a bus in which the water-diviner sits next to the trained geologist, and the faith-healer next to the physician. The vowel-chime of sing> sang3 $ung> re-echoes from vaults of time before the chanting of the Vedic hymns* while a considerable class of English verbs such as cast> hurt> put3 have shed nearly every trace of the characteristics which distinguish the Aryan verb as such. In this and in other ways the grammar of the Anglo-American language is far more like that of Chinese than that of Latin or Sanskrit.

Nobody hesitates to call Chinese isolating and Latin amalgamating^ but neither label attached to French would do justice to it. In the course of the last thousand years or so* French has moved away from its flexional origin and has gradually shifted towards isolation without fully shedding its accretions. French has not gone nearly so far as English along this path* and Italian has lagged behind French* but Italian is much easier to learn* because what has happened to the few surviving flexions of English has happened to the far more elaborate flexional system of Italian. There has been extensive levelling of the endings by analogical extension which continually swells the over¬ whelming majority of English plurals ending in - s or English past tense forms ending in ~ed. To this extent modem Italian has assumed a , regularity reminiscent of Finnish* while it has also collected a large

204 The Loom of Language

battery of new agglutinative contractions for the definite article (p. 361) accompanied by a preposition.

Like other formative processes, levelling or regularization by analogy waxes in periods of illiteracy and culture contact, waning under the discipline of script. The part it has played in the evolution of our remaining flexions will come up for further discussion in Chapter VI. What applies to flexions, or to derivative affixes such as the ~cr in baker , applies equally to pronunciation, to word order and to syntax in general. Habit, local or personal limitations of vocabulary and human laziness continually conspire to impose the pattern of the more familiar word or phrase on those we use less often. To the extent that grammarians have set themselves against the popular drift towards (pp. 168 and 267) regularity, their influence has been retrograde. Analogical extension is the process by which natural languages are always striving to assume the orderliness of a constructed auxiliary.

To get rid of the disorder inherent in natural languages was the cardinal motif of language planning in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The issue was not entirely novel. The grammarians of antiquity had discussed it and were ol two minds. One party, the anonuilists , took the conservative view. The other, the analogists, swam with the stream, and even practised revision of texts to prune away grammatical irregu¬ larities. I he controversy went on lor several centuries. Among others, Julius Caesar took a hand in it. As a general he favoured regimentation. So he naturally took the side of the analogists.

The fact that isolation is the predominant feature of some languages (c.g. Chinese dialects or Malay), regularity of affixes the outstanding characteristics of others (c.g. Finno-Ugrian dialects, Japanese, Turkish) and chaotic irregularity of suffixes the prevailing grammatical pattern of a third group (c.g. Sanskrit, Greek, Latin or Old English) has prompted speculations which take us into the twilight of human speech, without much hope of reaching certainty. Some linguists believe that primitive speech was a sing-song matrix from which words emerged with the frayed edges of a Sanskrit noun or verb. According to this view there has been a steady progress from amalgamation, through agglutinative regularity to isolation. Others favour the opposite view. They believe that the speech of our primitive ancestors once consisted of separate root-words which were probably monosyllabic, like those of Chinese dialects. If so, words which carried less emphasis than others became attached as modifiers to more meaningful ones. Finally, these accretions got intimately fused, and forfeited their former independence.

snjwn^sKti^fj

Haw fe** wan

'fKrcrrSTWjr*?

tnfRWOTjwiii

Tm^pHmfri$

••"fTO'tWp

!9HW?K8?

5w!ftlw|

t *

Wi

H * *

MB#*

Fig. 27.— Three Verses from the Old Testament in the Oldest Dateable MS of the Hebrew Bible5 the Propheten-Codex from Cairo

The Classification of Languages 205

Since we can see four processes, isolation, agglutinative contraction,

levelling by analogy and flexional fusion, competing simultaneously in English or Italian, these extremes do not exhaust all the conceivable possibilities of evolution. If we hear less about a third, and more likely one, the reason is that most linguists still allow far too little time for the evolution of speech. It has taken us long to outgrow Archbishop Ussher’s chronology which fixed the date of the creation as October 4, 4004 B.c., at nine o’clock in the morning. Although our knowledge of grammar does not extend much further back than three thousand years, human beings like ourselves have existed for at least twenty times as long. We now knojv that the age of man, as a talking animal, may be as much as 100,000 years, perhaps more; and anything we can learn about Sanskrit, old Chinese — or even the ancient Hittite language — can never be more than the last charred pages of a burnt-out book-shelf. Long ago, one philologist saw the implications of this. In his book Sprachzoissenschaft Von der Gabelentz (1891) has suggested the possi¬ bility that isolation, agglutination, and flexion may succeed one another in a cyclical or spiral sequence:

“Language moves along the diagonal of two forces. The tendency towards economy of effort which leads to a slurring of the sounds, and the tendency towards clearness which prevents phonetic attrition from causing the complete destruction of language. The affixes become fused and finally they disappear without leaving any trace behind, but their functions remain, and strive once more after expression. In the isolating languages they find it in word-order or formal elements, which again succumb in the course of time to agglutination, fusion and eclipse. Meanwhile, language is already preparing a new substitute for what is decaying in the form of periphrastic expressions which may be of a syntactical kind or consist of compound words. But the process is always the same. The line of evolution bends back towards isolation, not quite back to the previous path, but to a nearly parallel one. It thus comes to resemble a spiral. ... If we could retrace our steps for a moment to the presumptive root-stage of language, should we be entitled to say that it is the first, and not perhaps the fourth, or seventh, or twentieth in its history — that the spiral, to use our simile once more, did not already at that time have so and so many turns behind? What do we know about the age of mankind?”

ROOT INFLEXION

While the distinction between agglutination and amalgamation or external flexion is fluid, modification of meaning by root-inflexion, such as in swim~swam~szmm is sharply defined. This example shows that it # exists in the Indo-European group, though it is less typical than addi-

man grammarians, is most characteristic of the verb. We have met with examples in the strong class which includes mini, come, find, sit. Ablaut

which one member is intransitive (cannot have an object), the other transitive in a causative sense. We still have a few such pairs in English, c.g .fall-fell, lie-lay , sit-set. Thus we fall down ( intrans .); but we fell a tree (i.e. cause it to fall). We lie down; but we lay (cause to lie) a book on the table. Wc sit down; but we set (came to sit) a Hag on a pole.

Umlaut is the technical word for a type of root inflexion peculiar to the Teutonic group. It is specially characteristic of the noun, and is illustrated by the English plurals man-men, foot-feet. Such pairs origin¬ ally had a plural suffix containing the i or j (p. 84) sound, which modified the vowels a, 0, u in the stem itself. Thus we get Old High German gast-gesti (mod. Germ. Gast-Gdstc). The process began first in English, and was already complete in documents of the eighth cen¬ tury. Alfred’s English had fot-fet, mus-mys (pronounce the like the u of French or the u of German). In the language of Shakespeare they appear as fut-fit, and mous-mcis. Old English had other pairs which have since disappeared. Thus the plural of boc, our book (German Buck) was Me (German Biicher ), and that of hnutu, our nut (German Nms) was hnyte (German Niisse). This trick never became fashionable in English. During the Middle English period it succumbed almost com¬ pletely to the custom of making the plural by adding -cs. Owing to this drift towards the invariant root, the hall-mark of a progressive language, English has escaped the fate of German and Swedish. There are a few Swedish, but no German nouns of the man-men class; but many Swedish, and far more German, nouns which retain a plural ending also have a modified stem vowel. The German and Swedish equivalents of the man-men class are shown below:

ENGLISH SWEDISH GERMAN

man-men man-man Mann-Mcltmer

mouse-mice mus-naoss Maus-Mduse

louse-lice lus-16ss Lam-Lduse

goose-geese gas-giiss Gans-Gdnsc

loot-feet fot-fdtter Fuss-Fusse

tooth-teeth tand-Ulnder Zahn-Zdhne

The Classification of Languages 207

The same process has affected other types of word derivation in Teutonic languages^ especially German. For instance we distinguish between the adjectival and noun forms foul and filth, or between the verb and adjectival forms fill and full {Gtmxmfuttm and vollf Simi¬ larly we have noun-verb pairs such as: gold-gild, food-feed (. Putter - *iitterri), tale-tell (Zahl-zahlen), brood-breed (Brut-briiten). Other related pairs distinguished by stem vowel change are fox-vixen and elder-older .

In German the shifting of the root-vowels went on in historic times, several hundred years after that of English. It did not reach com¬ pletion before about ajd. 1150. Once the pattern became fashionable it affected words which never had the i sound in the succeeding syllable. No drift towards unification had set in before the printing- press mummified the grammar of German. Thus vowel-change now crops up in the comparative and superlative of nearly all monosyllabic adjectives (e.g. hach-hoher ), distinguishes the ordinary past of many verbs from the subjunctive (e.g. ich nahm-ich ndhme), the agent from his activity (e.g. backen-Bdcker ), the diminutive from the basic word (Haus-Hduscheri), the noun-abstract from its adjective (gut-Gute), the verb from the adjective (e.g. glatt-gldttm, mooth-to smooth).

In many German dialects' such mutation appears where standard German does without. Thus we meet Hund, Arm, Tag, for Hunde, Arme, Tage, and Yiddish opposes tog-teg to the Tag- Tage of common German. Apart from the disruption caused by an i or j sound in the succeeding syllable, and the Ablaut1' inherited from primitive Indo-European, modem German preserves several other vowel mutations. Occasionally the various types come together in the conjugational forms of a single verb. Thus we have ich sterbe (I die) — er stirbt (he dies) — stirb! (die!) — er starb (he died) — er ist gestorben (he has died) — wenn er stiirbe ' (if he died). The backwardness of German root vowel behaviour is particu¬ larly impressive if we compare it with both Old English and Modem English:

GERMAN OLD ENGLISH

ich helfe ic helpe

du hilfst thu hilpst

erhilft he hilpth

wir helfen we 1

ihrhelft ge i helpath

sie helfen hie J

In view of the prevailing ideology of the Third Reich, , there is an

ANGLO-AMERICAN

- „

help(s)

208

The Loom of Language

element of comedy in this peculiarity which puts German apart from its sister languages. Internal vowel change, which is subsidiary to external flexion in the group as a whole, is the trade-mark of the Semitic family. The Semitic root-word consists of three, less often of two or four, consonants. Thus the consonantal group sfnn-r signifies the general notion of “guarding,” and g-n-b the general notion of “stealing.” Into this fixed framework fit vowels, which change accord¬ ing to the meaning and grammatical functions of the word. From the root sh-m-r wc get shamar , he has guarded; shtmier , guarding; shamur , being guarded. From the root g-n-b we have ganab, he has stolen ;goneb> stealing ;ganub> being stolen. Though Semitic languages form derivatives by addition of prefixes and suffixes, such additions have a much smaller range than those of the older Indo-European languages. It is therefore misleading to lump Semitic together with the Indo-European languages as flexional types. Semitic languages constitute a sharply marked type characterized by root-inflexion , in contradistinction to amalgamation , which is characteristic of the old Aryan languages such as Sanskrit, Latin, or Russian.

The student of German will find it useful to tabulate some essentially Semitic features of ihc language. Excluding minor irregularities and such comparatives as hoch-hoher (high-higher), we can distinguish the following categories :

(r) In the conjugation of the second and third person singular of the present tense and sometimes in the imperative of many strong verbs, e.g. :

sprcchcn (talk) : ich spreche er spricht Sprich!

geben (give) : ich gebc er gibt Gib!

nehmen (take) : ich nehme er nimmi Nimm!

lesen (read) : ich lesc er lien Lies!

(2) In the formation of the past, subjunctive of strong verbs, e.g. er gdhe , er ndhmc , er ld.se> when the vowel of the ordinary past is long as in er gab , er nahm> er las .

(3) In many couplets of intransitive verbs and transitive ones

(p. 149) with a causative significance, e.g. mnken-trdnken (drink-give to drink)., toiege.n-wdgen (weigh), sangm-sdiigcn (suck-suckle).

(4) : Plural derivatives of neuter and masculine nouns with the stem

vowels a> 0, u> au> e.g. Kalb-Kdlber (calf-calves), Buch-Bilchcr (book-books), Stock-Stdcke (stick-sticks), Hau$~H&user (house- houses),

, (5) Adjectival derivatives for materials, e.g* Holz^HSlzem (wood- wooden), Brde4rdm (earth-earthen). ,

The Classification of Languages 209

(6) Adjectival derivatives with the suffixes -zg, -icht, -isch3 or -Itch

e.g. Mackt-mdchtig (power-powerful), Haus-hduslich (house- domestic), Stadt-stadtisch (town-urban).

(7) Diminutives, e.g. Mann-Mannchens Frau-Frdulein.

(8) Abstract feminine nouns in -e, e.g. gut-die Giite (good-goodness),

hoch-die Hohe (high-the height).

(9) Collective neuter nouns, Berg-Gebirge (mountain-mountain

range), Wurm-Gewiirm (worm- vermin) .

(10) Feminine nouns which take -in> e.g. Hund-Hundin (dog-bitch).

CLASSIFICATORY LANGUAGES

The Bantu languages of Africa illustrate features common to the speech of backward and relatively static cultures throughout the world. One of these gives us a clue to the possible origin of gender in the Indo-European group. The Bantu family includes nearly all the native tongues spoken from the Equator to the Cape Province. In this huge triangle, the only exceptions are the dialects of the Bushmen, of the Hottentots, and of the Pygmies of Central Africa. About a hundred and fifty Bantu dialects form a remarkably homogeneous unit. Most of them % are not separated by greater differences than those which distinguish Spanish from Italian.

One member has been known to us since the seventeenth century. In 1624, a catechism appeared in Congolese. A generation later the Italian, Brusciotto, published a Congolese grammar. These two docu¬ ments show that the language has changed little during the last three hundred years, and therefore refute the belief that unwritten languages necessarily change more rapidly than codified ones. One Bantu language already had a script before the arrival of the Christian missionary and the white trader. It is called Swahili, and was originally the dialect of Zanzibar. To-day it is the lingua franca of the East Coast of Africa. For several centuries before the Great Navigations, Arabs had been trading with Zanzibar, and the native community adopted the unsuitable alphabet of the Moslem merchants.

The Kafir-Sotho group of Bantu languages (South-East Africa) have a peculiarity not shared by other members of the same family. ' In addition to consonants common to the speech of other peoples, there are characteristic clicks produced by inspiration of air. .They resemble the smacking sound of a kiss. It is probable that they are “borrowed” elements from the click-languages of the Bushmen and Hottentots.

The existence of the Bantu family as such has been recognized for a century. This is partly because every name-word belongs to one of a

210 The Loom of Language

limited number of prefix-labelled classes analogous to our small word- clusters labelled by such suffixes as -er, -ship, -hood, ~dom, and -ter or -tker in father , mother, brother , sister , daughter. So also in Greek, many animals have names ending in -x, e.g. alopex (fox), aspalax (mole), dorx (roe-deer), hystrix (porcupine), pithex (ape). The analogous Ger¬ man terminal -chs also holds together a limited group of animals, e.g. Docks (badger), Fuchs (fox), Lacks (salmon), Ochs (ox). Several German names for animals have another suffix, -cr, e.g, Adler (eagle), Hamster (hamster), Kater (tom-cat), Spcrbcr (hawk), Endings such as these are isolated examples of what is a universal characteristic of the Bantu languages. The names of any thing, any person, or any action is labelled by a particular prefix which assigns it to one of about twenty classes of words labelled in the same way.

The other outstanding peculiarity of the Bantu family is that the noun-prefix colours the entire structure of the sentence. Whatever moves within the orbit of a noun is stamped accordingly, liras a qualifying adjective or even a numeral carries the prefix of the pre¬ ceding noun which it qualifies, e.g. mn-ntu mu-loin {man handsome =» handsome man), but ba-ntu ha-lotu {men handsome . .* handsome men). The pronoun of the third person has a form which more or less recalls the prefix of the noun represented by it. In the sentence u-lcde ^ he {the man) is asleep , u- relleets the mu- of mu-ntu {man), and in lu-hde « he {the baby) is asleep, hi- echoes the classifier hi * of lu-sabila {baby). In Swahili and many other Bantu languages, the personal pronoun is prefixed to the verb even when the sentence has a noun-subject, e.g. ba-kazana ba-enda {the girls they go). This binding together of the various parts of the sentence produces a kind of alliterative sing¬ song, e.g.;

baAavu ba- bulimia ba-nru

the lions they bit the men

The type of concord which occurs in a highly inflected Aryan lan¬ guage produces an analogous but rhyming sing-song, e.g. hi German; die hubschtn amerilmnischcn Studentinmn mackicn Sensation (the pretty American co-eds made a hit).

The Bantu prefixes of most classes have distinct singular and plural forma. A singular prefix mu- (Subiya), corresponding to a plural prefix ba-3 signifies human agents. Thus mu-sisu means hoy, and ba-sisu means boys. Another singular prefix hi- (Swahili), corresponding to the plural prefix yi*, is largely used for manufactured things, e.g* M-fumko , cover, and viftmiko, covers. The prefix mu - (Sotho) Is characteristic of a

The Classification of Languages 211

collectivity, of a big number, a liquid, and also of tilings which, occur in pairs, e.g. ma-naka (horns of an animal). The prefix ka- (Ganda) corresponding to a plural prefix tu-3 denotes small s ize, e.g. ka-ntu (small man), tu-ntu (small men). With the prefix bo - (Duala), abstract nouns are formed, derived from adjectives, verbs and names for things, e.g. bo-nyaki (growth, from nyaka3 grow). The prefix ku- (Ganda) serves for the formation of verb-nouns or infinitives, e.g. ku-lagira (to command, or commanding).

Since there is no precise parallel to this type of concord in our own language, we must fall back on an artificial model to illustrate what it involves. Let us first suppose that every English noun had one of twenty prefixes analogous to the suffix -er common to the occupational fisher-writer-builder class. We may also suppose that the words dog and sheep respectively carried the prefixes be- and rtf-. If English also had, the same concord system as a Bantu dialect, the sentence hungry dogs sometimes attack young sheep would then be be-hungry be-dogs sometimes be-they-attack rtf-young rtf-sheep.

The origin of the Bantu classifiers is not above dispute. It is possible, though not conclusively proved, that they were once inde¬ pendent words with a concrete meaning, standing for groups of allied objects, such as human beings, trees, liquids, things long or short, big or small, weak or strong. When associated with other words they originally marked them as members of one class. According to this view, be-dog and rtf-sheep of the parable used above would be what remains of beast-dog and meat-sheep. Subsequently the outlines of once-distinct classes became blurred through contamination and fusion, and the classifier sank to the level of a purely grammatical device. If so, the original plan has survived only in the first two classes. With few excep¬ tions these signify human beings.

Only in a relatively static society at a primitive level of culture with little division of labour could classificatory particles retain a clear-cut function. Migration and civilization bring human beings into new situations which call for new vocables. These do not necessarily fall into any pre-existing niche of a classificatory system. In fact, languages of the classificatory type are confined to communities which used neither script nor the plough before contact with white men. The surmise that Bantu classifiers were once concrete words suggests analogy with the numeraires which the Chinese and Japanese almost invariably insert between figures and things counted, as when we speak of three head of cattle. Thus the Chinese say two piece mana (== two men), three tail fish (= three fish), four handle knife (= four knives), five oma-

212

The Loom of Language

merit officials (= five officials ). The analogy should not be pushed too far, because Bantu classifiers no longer possess a clear-cut meaning, nor do they survive as independent words.

Particles or affixes used as classifiers are not confined to the Bantu languages. Capell* writes as follows about one of the Papuan dialects :

“In the languages of Southern Bougainville nouns are divided fiito upwards of twenty classes, and the adjectives and numerals vary in agreement with the class to which the noun belongs. One gets something of the same effect as in the Bantu languages, except that in the Papuan languages it is the end of the word , not the beginning, that changes.”

In Kiriwinian, a language of the Trobriand Islands, demonstratives as well as adjectives and numerals are coupled with characteristic particles which are common to all members of a particular class of noun, and each noun belongs to such a class. Professor Malinowski, who has given an illuminating accountf of it, describes its essential peculiarities in the following passage:

“Let us transpose this peculiarity of Kiriwinian into English, following the native prototype very closely, and imagine that no adjective, no numeral, no demonstrative, may he used without a particle denoting the nature of the object referred to. Ail names of human beings would take the prefix ‘human.5 Instead of saying ‘one soldier5 we would have to say ‘human-one soldier walks in the street.5 Instead of ‘how many passengers were in the accident?5, liow human-many passengers were in the accident?5 Answer, ‘human-seventeen.5 Or again, in reply to ‘Are the Smiths human-nice people?5 we should say, ‘No, they arc human-dull!5 Again, nouns denoting persons belonging to the female sex would be numbered, pointed at, and qualified with the aid of the prefix ‘female5; wooden objects with the particle ‘wooden5; flat or thin things with the particle ‘leafy,5 following in all this tire precedent of Kiriwina. Thus, pointing at a table, we would say, ‘Look at wooden- this5; describing a landscape, leafy-brown leaves on the wooden-large trees5; speaking of a book, leafy-hundred pages in it5; ‘the women of Spain are female-beautiful5; ‘human-this boy is very naughty, but feraale-this girl is good5.55

Thus the habit of labelling all name-words with one of a limited number of affixes is not confined to the Bantu family. It is widely distributed among unrelated languages spoken by static and backward communities throughout the world. The number of such classes may

* Oceania, 1937.

f Classijicatory Particles in Kiriwina (Bulletin of the School of Oriental

Studies, vol. i, 19x7-20).

The Classification of Languages 213

be as many as twenty, as in Bantu dialects ; or it may be as few as four3 as in one of the dialects of the Australian aborigines. The classificatory mark is not necessarily a prefix. In the Papuan language cited by Capell, it is a suffix like the gender-terminal of an Aryan adjective.

Thus the distinction between the classificatory and the flexional type is not so sharp as it first seems to be. The trade-mark of the Indo- European adjective as a separate entity is that it carries the suffix determined by one of the three gender-classes to which a noun is assigned. We know that what are called adjectives in Aryan languages were once indistinguishable from nouns., and the example of Finnish (p* I97) shows us how easily the ending of the noun gets attached to an accompanying epithet. In each of the three Aryan gender-classes we meet with a greater or less proportion of nouns with characteristic affixes limited to one of them, and the notion of sex which an American or an Englishman associates with gender has a very flimsy relation to the classification of Indo-European nouns in their respective gender-classes.

Though we have no first-hand knowledge about the origin of gender, we know enough to dismiss the likelihood that it had any essential connexion with sex. The most plausible view is that the distinction of gender in the Indo-European family is all that is left of a system of suffixes essentially like the Bantu prefixes. If so, the former luxuriance of such a system has been corroded in turn by nomadic habits and civilized living as primitive Aryan-speaking tribes successively came into contact with new objects which did not fit into the framework of a classification suited to the limited experience of settled life at a low level of technical equipment.

PHONETIC PATTERN OF LANGUAGE FAMILIES

Just as we recognize grammatical processes such as isolation, aggluti¬ nation, amalgamation, root-inflexion, we can also recognize sound- patterns which predominate in one or other group. Such phonetic patterns furnish us with an additional clue to linguistic affinities, albeit a clue which too few philologists have followed up. Our last sec¬ tion illustrates one phonetic type which is distributed over a large part of the world. In a multitude of unrelated languages, including Japanese, Malayo-Polynesian, and Bantu dialects, agglutinative regularity coexists with a sound-pattern quite unlike that of our own language or of any languages related to it. Jespersen (Growth and Structure of the English Language) illustrates the contrast by the following passage from the

214 The Loom of Language

language of Hawaii, of which the familiar place-names (e.g. Honolulu) recall the same characteristics as the Japanese Yokohama, Fujiyama , etc.: I kona hiki ana aku ilaila no hookipa ia mat la oia me ke aloha

pumehana ha.

The syllable in this sample consists of a vowel or of a vowel preceded by a simple consonant. That is to say (p. 63) the syllable is like a typical Chinese word. Aryan languages are rich in consonant clusters. In languages as far apart as Norwegian, Welsh, and Greek, we may meet at the beginning of many words any of the consonants b, d, f, g, k, p, followed by l or r, t followed by r, s by l, i, or tr. For this reason alone such words as sprinkle, sprightly, expression , blaspheme, electrical , or the German Zweischge (prune), are quite foreign to the pattern of sounds to which many peoples of the world are attuned. They also illustrate another characteristic of the Aryan family. Aryan words are comparatively rich in closed (p. 63) syllables; and, if monosyllabic, are commonly of the closed type illustrated by God and man , or cat and dog. We have many English monosyllables which illustrate both these trade-marks of Aryan word-structure, e.g. breeds , straps, prowled, plump, sprained, smelts, blunts, stinks, floats, proved, stringed.

Firth* points out that certain combinations of initial consonants, illustrated by word-counts in dictionaries, are characteristic of particu¬ lar groups within the Aryan family. We shall find that some clusters, e.g. the Greek PS-, Latin -CT-, and Teutonic SM- or SK- are sign¬ posts of word origin. Some clusters or elements of a cluster may convey a common thread of meaning in groups of words which exist in closely related languages. In English there are about a hundred and twenty verbs in which a final / suggests repetitive action, as in wobble, wangle, riddle, coddle, bungle, handle, nestle, snaffle, tipple, sprinkle.

Among modem Aryan languages Italian has moved furthest from the Aryan pattern, owing to elimination of some Latin medial con¬ sonant combinations, e.g. -CT- to -TT- (p. 242), and through the decay of the final consonant of the Latin terminals. Hence almost all Italian words end in a vowel. Conversely English is very rich in words which end with a consonant cluster owing to the decay of the vowel of a' terminal syllable, e.g. the short c still fairly audible in the plural ilexion of houses or princes, and in the past suffix of a learned woman . So it may be no accident that a wealth of compound consonants and dosed syllables go with a family whose other diagnostic characteristic (at least that of all its earliest representatives Sanskrit, Old Persian, Greek, * Speech (Bean's library).

The Classification of Languages 215

Latin) of which we have knowledge* is amalgamation^ i.e. great irregu¬ larity of affixation.

At one time comparative linguists distinguished an incorporating or holophrasitc type to accommodate the Amerindian languages* which illustrate another peculiarity of sound-pattern. It is extremely difficult

to recognize where one word begins and another ends in the language of the Greenland Eskimo. The same is true of a great variety of indi¬ genous* totally unrelated* vernaculars of the American continent. How far people distinguish one word from the next, especially in rapid

speech* varies from one dialect to another within a small group. In a large family such as the Aryan* we find examples of highly holophrastic languages such as French or highly staccato languages such as German.

The peculiar sound pattern of the Aryan group which is now cus¬ todian of the bulk of modern scientific knowledge has one result relevant (p. 5°&) t0 tiie design of a satisfactory international auxiliary. People who do not speak an Aryan language commonly distort words of Aryan origin when they assimilate them. Extraneous vowels break up consonant clusters* or supplement closed syllables* and familiar more or less related sounds replace foreign ones. Thus the Roman transcription of football and calcium after passing through the phonetic sieve of Japanese is fotoboru and karushutnu in which r deputizes for the alien L Since Japanese does not tolerate a terminal consonant other than n9 assimilated words tack on a vowel e.g. inki (ink)* naihi (knife). In fact* Japanese equivalents for technical terms of Greek origin are reminiscent of Greek transcription in the Cypriotic sylla¬ bary (Fig. 14). Mencken has drawn attention to similar distortions by Italian immigrants in the United States* e.g. aito (hat)* orso (horse), scioppa (shop), bosso (boss).

FURTHER READING

BLOOMFIELD Language.

FINCK Die Haupttypen des Sprachbaus.

FIRTH Speech .

The Tongues of Men »

GRAFF Language and Languages.

MEILLET Les Langues dans V Europe nouvelle.

MEXLLET and COHEN Les Langues du Monde.

PEDERSEN Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century.

SAPIR Language.

TUCKER Introduction to the Natural History of Language .

Whitney Life and Growth of Language.

PART II

OUR HYBRID HERITAGE

A COOK’S TOUR ROUND THE TEUTONIC AND ROMANCE GROUPS

CHAPTER VI

HOW TO LEARN THE BASIC WORD LIST

Some people complain of poor memory., and attribute to it the diffi¬ culties of learning a foreign language. If also fond of horticulture or of natural history, they do not complain about the difficulty of memor¬ izing a copious vocabulary of technical terms. So a poor memory is rarely a correct explanation . of what holds them back. One of the essential obstacles is that the interest of the beginner is focused exclu¬ sively on a remote goal. It is not also directed, like that of the naturalist, to the material itself. To learn with least effort we have to become language-conscious . If The Loom of Language has succeeded in its task so far the reader who has not studied languages before, and the reader who has studied them without thinking much about their family traits, will now be more language-conscious. The four chapters which follow are for those who are. They contain a more detailed treatment of some of the languages referred to in previous chapters for the benefit of the home student who may want to start learning to read or to write intel¬ ligibly in one or other of them. Any one who intends to give the method of this book a fair trial must pay careful attention to cross references, including references to relevant tables in Part I. Some practical sug¬ gestions which immensely lighten the tedium of traversing the first few milestones when learning a new language have come from the work of scholars who have contributed to the international language movement (see Chapter XI). They have not yet made their way into current text-books, and the reader who wishes to use The Loom of Language as an aid to the study of a foreign language should recall them at this stage.

The most important is to concentrate on learning a relatively small class of words before trying to learn any others. This class includes the particles, pronouns, pointer words , and helper verbs. There are several reasons for doing this. One is that a battery of about one hundred and fifty of such words for ready use, supplemented by a nodding acquaintance with about a hundred others, includes a very high proportion of the words we constantly use or constantly meet on the printed page. A second is that what verbs, adjectives, and nouns we commonly meet, especially the nouns, depends on individual circum-

220

The Loom of Language

stances and tastes. A third is that it is easier to guess the meaning of nouns, adjectives, and verbs when we meet them. This is partly because an increasing proportion of new words of this kind are international and also because the particles are the most unstable elements in a language. We do not borrow prepositions or conjunctions, but we constantly borrow nouns, verbs, or adjectives, and such borrowed words play an important part in modern life. The word for a telephone or for a museum is recognizably the same in English, Swedish, Serbo-Croat, or Hungarian; but the Dane who learns the word rabbit in his first lesson from the English primer commonly used in Danish schools may live ten years in Nottingham or correspond regularly with a friend in

New York without getting involved in a discussion about rodents of any kind.

If you learn only ten new words of the group which includes par¬ ticles, pronouns, and pointer-words every day for a fortnight, you will have at your disposal at least twenty-five per cent of the total number of words you use when you write a letter. When you have done this, it is important to have a small vocabulary of essential nouns, adjectives and verbs ready for use. Before you start trying to write or to read in a foreign language, it is best to get a bird’s-eye view of its grammatical peculiarities.^ The bird’s-eye view is easy to get in an hour’s reading, and is not difficult to memorize unless the language, like Russian, has a large number ot archaic and useless grammatical devices. Even so, much of the effort commonly put into learning the rules of grammar can be capitalized for use in other ways, if you do not start reading or wilting till you have a broad general outlook. It will help you to remember the essentials, if you see them in an evolutionary context. Since it is relatively .easy to recall information when prompted by the written word, a student who first gets a bird’s-eye view of the grammar o a new language will be able to recognize essential rules when he meets them in newspapers, letters, or books. In this way, reading will le p. to fix them from the start. Contrariwise, the beginner who starts reading without the bird’s-eye view may become colour-blind to conven¬ tions which are essential fox correct self-expression. Facility in guesswork

may then become a hindrance to learning how to write or speak correctly.

To say that the bird’s-eye view given in the next few chapters will help the beginner to start writing to a correspondent who will correct gross errors, or to begin reading without becoming colour-blind to rules of grammar, does not mean that they provide an insurance policy

221

How to Learn the Basic Word List

against all possible mistakes, if the rules given are conscientiously applied. Only a senes of volumes each nearly as long as this one and each devoted to each of the languages dealt with, could claim to do so lheir aim is to explain what the beginner needs to know in order to avoid serious misunderstandings in straightforward self-expression (see Chapter IV) or the reading of unpretentious prose, and therefore to help the home student to start using a. language with as little delay as is possible or advisable. Beyond this point, progress in a foreign, like progress m the home, language depends on trial and error.

It is more easy to form habits than to break them; and it is more difficult to learn by eye alone than by eye and ear together. So it is a bad thipg to start memorizing foreign words from the printed page without first learning how to pronounce them recognizably. The spell¬ ing conventions (see Chapter II) of different languages are very differ- rent, and it is important to learn sufficient about them to avoid gross mistakes. Beyond this, further progress is impossible without personal instruction, travel, or gramophone records (such as the Linguaphone or Columbia series) for those who can afford them, and careful attention to foreign broadcasts if such opportunities are not accessible.

Peculiar psychological difficulties beset individuals of English- speaking amntries when they approach the study of a foreign language.

ome arise from social tradition. Others are due to geographical situation. English-speaking people speak a language which has become w°r -wide through conquest, colonization, and economic penetration.

1 artily for this reason and partly because their water frontiers cut them off from daily contact with other speech communities they lack the incentives which encourage a Dane or a Dutchman to acquire linguistic proficiency. Though these extrinsic impediments are undoubtedly powerful, there is another side to the picture. Those who have been brought up to speak the Anglo-American language have one great linguistic advantage. Their word-equipment makes it equally easy for them to take up the study of any Teutonic or any Romance language with a background of familiar associations, because modem English is a hybrid language. Indeed, more than one artificial auxiliary language, notably Steiner’s Pastlingua put forward in 1885, takes as its basis the English stock in trade of words for this reason. It is the object of this chapter to help the reader to become more language-conscious by recognizing what it implies.

Examples taken from the Lord’s Prayer and printed on p. 21 show the close family likeness of the common root-words in the Teutonic

222

The Loom of Language

group,, including English. For this reason sentences and expressions made up of such words can be used to illustrate grammatical affinities and differences which an American or a Briton with no previous know¬ ledge of other members of the group can recognize without difficulty. The resemblance between members of the group is so dose than many linguists speak of them as the Teutonic dialects* English stands apart from other members of the Teutonic group in two ways* its grammar has undergone much greater simplification, and it has assimilated an enormous proportion of words from other language groups, more espedally the Latin. In fact, if we set out to discover its place in the Indo-European family by merely counting the Teutonic and Latin root-words (see p, 1 6) in a large dictionary^ we could make a good case for putting it in the Romance group.

This conclusion would be wrong. Though it is true that more than half the words in a good dictionary are of Latin origin, it is also true that nearly all the root-words which we use most often— the class re¬ ferred to on pp, 127-128 — are Teutonic. However freely we sprinkle our prose with foreign words, we cannot speak or write English with¬ out using native (i.e. Teutonic) dements. Native are (a) all pronouns, (b) all demonstrative and possessive adjectives, (c) the articles, (8) the auxiliaries, (e) the strong verbs, (/) nearly all prepositions and conjunc¬ tions, (g) most of the adverbs of time and place, (A) die numerals, except dozen* million , billion , and milliard . Native also are the few flexions which English has retained. Thus the majority of words on a printed page, even if it is about technical matters which rdy on a large vocabulary of Latin derivatives, arc Teutonic; and though it is possible to write good English prose in which all, or nearly all, the vocabulary is based on Teutonic roots, it would be difficult to write a representa¬ tive specimen of sustained and intelligible English containing a bare majority of Latin-French words,

* The word dialect is used in two senses. In everyday life we associate it with local variations of pronunciation and minor local differences of vocabulary within a single political unit. Since the members of a single political unit are usually able to understand one another in spite of such local variations, dialect differences also signify differences which do not make it absolutely impossible for people to understand one another. In this sense dialects overrun national boundaries. The “Doric” of Robert Bums differs from Bible English or from Anglo-American both with respect to pronunciation and to spelling conven¬ tion s, as much as Norwegian differs from Swedish or Danish. Anyone who can read Norwegian can read Swedish or Danish, and Norwegians can understand Swedes or Danes when they speak their own languages. We only speak of them as different languages because they are dialects of different sovereign states. It is Impossible to draw a hard-and-fast line between language and dialect differences.

flow to Learn the Basic Word List 223

The basic stratum, ie. the most 'common words, of our English vocabulary is derived from a mixture of dialects more closely allied to Dutch than to other existing members of the group, especially to the

speech of the Frisian Islands. These dialects were the common speech of ^ Germanic tribes, called Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who came to, Britain between 400 and 700 a.d. The Norse invaders, who left their footprints on our syntax, contributed few specifically Scandinavian words to Southern English, though there are many Norse words in dialects spoken in Scotland. Norse was the language of the Orkneys till the end of the fourteenth, and persisted in the outermost Shetlands (Foula) till the end of the eighteenth century. Many words in Scots vernaculars recall current Scandinavian equivalents, e.g. bra (fine, good), bairn (child), and flit (move household effects). Scandinavian suffixes occur in many place-names, such as -by (small town), cf. Grimsby or Whitby , and the latter survives in the compound by-law of everyday speech in South Britain.

When the Norman invaders came in 1066 the language of England and of the South of Scotland was almost purely Teutonic. It had assimilated very few Latin words save those which were by then common to Teutonic dialects on the Continent. Except in Wales, Cornwall, and the Scottish highlands, the Celtic or pre-Roman Britain survived only in place-names. After the Norman Conquest, more particularly after the beginning of the fourteenth century, the lan- • guage of England and of the Scottish lowlands underwent a drastic change. It absorbed a large ^number of words of Latin origin, first- through the influence of the Norman hierarchy, and later through the influence of scholars and writers. It shed a vast load of useless gram¬ matical luggage. Norman scribes revised its spelling, and while this was happening important changes of pronunciation were going on.

This latinization of English did not begin immediately after the Conquest. For the greater part of two centuries, there were two lan¬ guages in England. The overlords spoke Norman French, as the white settlers of Kenya speak modem English. The English serfs still spoke the language in which Beowulf and the Bible of Alfred the Great were written. By the beginning of the fourteenth century a social process was gathering momentum. There were self-governing towns with a burgher class of native English stock. There was a flourishing wool trade with Flanders, There were schools where the sons of prosperous burghers learnt French grammar. In the England of Dick Whittington, English again became a written language, but a written language which had to

224 The Loom of Language

accommodate itself to a world of familiar things for which the Saxon poets had no names. Investment in trading enterprise fostered a new sort of class collaboration depicted in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and a new type of litigation with an English-speaking clientele. In 1362 Edward III ordered the use of English in the courts, though the written law of the land was French till the eighteenth century.

In contradistinction to Old English, the purely Teutonic language of Alfred the Great, the English of this period, that of Chaucer and of Wy cliff, is called Middle English. Scholars refer literary remains to the Middle period if written between about a.d. 1x50 and 1 500. The process of assimilating words of Latin origin received a new stimuli!.; from the rise of classical scholarship at the end of the middle, and has been nursed through the modern, period by the growth of scientific know¬ ledge. One result is that English in its present form has an enormous range of couplets, one member Teutonic like forgive, the other Latin or French like pardon. Usually die Teutonic one is more intimate, the Latin formal, because Teutonic words are the language of the countryside, Latin or French words the prerogative of lawyers, priests, and scholars. Thus Wamba the jester in Ivanhoe points out that the ungulates (sheep, pig, calf, ox) have native names while it is still the business of the English people to look after them. When they reach the table of the Norman overlord they have become mutton, pork, veal, beef, for which the corresponding French words are mouton, pore, veau , bceuf.

Relatively few people learn lists of new words with ease, unless they can connect them with familiar facts, and an adult who has already collected a variegated vocabulary is in a strong position to take advan¬ tage of this hybrid character of modern English. To become language¬ conscious in this way we need to know something about the regularities of sound-change which have been mentioned in the last chapter (p. 185), and we need a few hints which help us to detect when an Anglo- American word is Teutonic or Latin. This can be done by following up clues suggested in Chapters II and V. The spelling of a word is often a sufficient signpost of its origin, especially if we know a little about the sound-changes which have occurred in the history of the Teutonic and Latin families.

How the sound-shifts mentioned in Chapter V help to build up word associations is illustrated by the German word Teil (part) or its deriva¬ tive verb teilen (separate, divide, distribute, share). Old Teutonic words which begin with the d sound begin with the t sound in modern Ger-

How to Learn the Banc Word List 225

»“°“s **. which means the same ^ the Swedish-Damsh del, with the corresponding derivative verbs dda (SwethshJ or Me (Dattoh). In to „ew fa words dell and deal The Oxford Dictionary teUs us Aat thf comes from Old English dal, which also meant a part an^ to 2/

Sem mwordAf^Me,PaCk *** t0 01

lhe WOrd ddl (or Me) no connexion with this root. It has

MfT^

Jfr f°U0W m P1“J y°U ^ introduce an ^ment of adventure into memorizing a vocabulary, and incidentally learn more about the

correct use of English words. It may be helpful to look up some of the ■unusual words in the Canterbury Tales, 4 the Faerie ZL Fo r instance, the smaller Oxford Dictionary tells us that the Chaucerian eke means also and compares it with the contemporary Dutch S and German (auch) equivalents. The Swedish for also is och or ocksd You can also compare the Middle English eke with the Swedish och and D-ih ^ for our lint-word mid, which wo cm someth^

An example which illustrates how to make associations for memor¬ izing words of Romance origin is hospitable. The Oxford Dictionary teUs us that tins comes from the Latin verb hospitare (to entertain) ThI related w°rd hospite meant either or host, and It has sSefas latter. Another related Latin word is hospitale, a place for guests later for travellers. This was the original meaning of hospital and survives as such in Knights Hospitallers. In Old Irench ft appeal shortened to hostel, which exists in English. In modern French, before * or p has often disappeared. That it was once there, is indicated by a arcumflex accent ( ) over the preceding vowel, as in hotel. The French words hate, hdtesse, hotel, hdpital, resolve themselves into their EnSsh equivalents when we apply this rule. Hostelry, hospice, and hospifalitv obviously share the same lineage. A host of other similarities come to life if we are familiar with another sound-change. When an accented e precedes t, p, or c at the beginning of a modem French word it often

°fthe,Latm 5 m EnSUsh words of Romance origin. Thus Hat (state), etranger (stranger, foreigner), etoffe (stuff), Sponge (sponge)

Spouse (spouse, wife). Spider (grocer- man who sells spices), id icole

C school ) come to life if we know this.

Even when there is no precise English equivalent containing the same root as a word tn one of the Romance languages, we can usually

H

226

The Loom of Language

lighten the effort of memorizing the latter by fishing up a related word which does contain it. In the table on p. 249 there are twenty-two English words of which six, or one-fourth of the total, recall the Romance equivalent. English words of related meaning at once suggest the Romance root in most of the others. Thus our Teutonic hunger pairs off with famine and famished which suggest the French word faint. The French word fil for our Teutonic thread turns up in filament Similarly we associate fumes with smoke, fugitive with flee, foliage with leaves, factory production with making things, filial piety with son and daughter (more particularly the latter), or ferrous metals with iron. That leaves us with a few Italian and French words which are self-explanatory to a naturalist, chemist, or anatomist. Thus formic acid is an irritant emitted by ants, sainfoin is a leguminous hay substitute, and Vida faba is the botanical name for the common bean.

SOUND-SHIFTS IN THE TEUTONIC LANGUAGES

Before studying further examples of the way in which the hybrid

character of English word-equipment helps anyone who is beginning to learn a Teutonic or Romance language, we need to know more about sound-changes such as those mentioned in the preceding paragraphs. The neglect of an enormous volume of relevant research in text-books for beginners shows how little education is enlightened by Bacon's counsel; “wc do ill to exalt the powers of the human mind, when wc should seek out its proper helps,5'*

Let us start with die Teutonic group. We have no direct knowledge of the single ancestor of all Teutonic languages, but our earliest records lead us to infer diat it underwent a drastic change some time before the beginning of the Christian era. This change, which involved several consonants, may have come about because tribes speaking an Indo- European language came into contact with people who spoke non- Aryan languages such as the peculiar speech still extant among the Basques, Five of these consonant changes appear below, and wc can recognize them in the difference between the English form of an Indo-European word and its Latin or Cheek equivalent. Thus the first and second are recognizable in comparison of the Greek or Latin pater

* English Primers of German — perhaps because philology has been culti¬ vated in Germany— refer to such sound changes, but do not disclose equally relevant information of the way in which English pronunciation has changed since it parted company with what is now German, Otherwise it is true to say that the topic is still taboo in elementary teaching*

How to Learn the Basic Word List 227

with our word father; the first and last by comparing the Greek root pod- or Latin ped- with our foot ; the third by comparing the Latin genus and germ with our kin and knee; and the last two by comparing the Greek root hard- or Latin cord- with heart:

(i) p became/.

(ii) t became th (J>).

(Hi) g became k.

(iv) k became the throaty "Scots ch in loch> and subsequently the

simple aspirate h.

(v) d became t.

The reader who knows no Latin and is not likely to acquire more knowledge of Latin than can be got from the next chapter but one, should not find it impossible to detect the same root in some English words of Teutonic and of Latin or Greek origin. Thus we recognize the same root as foot in pedicure , and the same root as heart in cardiac, the same root in trinity as in three, the same root in fire as in pyrex glass, and the same root in flat as in plateau or platitude (a flat saying)

This primitive or first sound-shift in the history of the Teutonic¬ speaking peoples equipped English with sounds for which the Latin alphabet had no precise equivalents. For reasons sufliciently explained in our survey of the alphabet, this fact has its practical application. With the exception of a few words derived from Greek, English words c ntaining th are Teutonic. So also are words which begin with w or y or contain gh. These consonant, or combinations of consonant, symbols are therefore signals which tell us whether we are likely to find a recognizably equivalent or related word in a Teutonic language. The following is a list of five signposts of Teutonic word origin:

Words containing sh, e.g. sheep, shield, ship.

Words containing th, e.g. thaw, then, thin.

Words containing gh, e.g. laughter, through, rough.

Words with initial w, e.g. ware, wasp, wash.

Words with initial sk, e.g. skin, skirt, sky.

These five signposts help us to recognize a very large number of words of Teutonic origin as such, and many more can be identified by the presence of characteristically Teutonic prefixes, of which the be- (in belong or behead) is the most reliable, and suffixes of which the adjec¬ tival -some (in lonesome), the diminutive -ling and the abstract ending* -dom, -hood or -head, -ship, -kind, and -craft are most diagnostic.

228

The Loom of Language

When we are able to detect words of Teutonic origin in this way, we can lighten the task of memorizing our word-list with a little informa¬ tion about the simultaneous changes of pronunciation which have occurred since the common parent of the Teutonic family split into three main groups — an eastern represented by Gothic, a northern or Scandinavian represented by Old Norse, and a western represented by Old English and Old High German. In what follows we must not confuse sounds with their symbols. The latter may be arbitrary conven¬ tions peculiar to particular languages, or a hang-over from a period when the pronunciation was different. Thus the German W is merely another way of writing the sound represented by our V ; and the sound we usually represent by F and sometimes by GH (e.g. laugh ) is either F (as in Fisch) or V (as in Voter for father). The letter </ used in English for the peculiarly English sound in jam or Gentile stands in all other Teutonic languages for a different sound represented by our Y in yeast. Our own d 3 sound in jam has no equivalent in German, Danish, Dutch or Swedish. It is confined to English in the Teutonic clan.

These different conventions of closely allied languages may be due to the whims of scribes who originally sponsored the system of spelling in use to-day, or, like the German IV, to changes of pronunciation since their time. If we want to detect word-equivalence on the printed page, what is more important to know is how pronunciation of related dialects had already diverged before writing began, or how it is reflected in subsequent spelling reforms. For instance, the correspondence between the Swedish words vind, -odder, and vatten on the one hand and the German words Wind, Wetter, and Wasscr or their English equivalents wind, weather, and water on the other, is partly concealed by the fact that Scandinavian spelling incorporates the V-sliift which English has resisted.

English has preserved two old Teutonic consonant sounds which have scarcely left a trace in its sister Teutonic dialects other than Icelandic. One of these is the p sound of thin, the other is the 0 sound of then. Modem Icelandic is more conservative than English in so far as p is never softened to b (p. 81) at the beginning of a word. That is illustrated by:

ICELANDIC	ENGLISH
pBT	there
J?essi	this
J^u	thou
pinn	thine
J^cirra	their

Fig. 28.— Page from the “Codex Argenteus” now in Uppsala

r T1IhiS -*S 3 sixth-century edition of the New Testament translated by Bishop Ulfilas into Gothic about a.d. 350. The characters used are mainly drawn trom the Greek alphabet supplemented by Roman and Runic letters. Note for instance the Greek symbol W which stands not for ps as in Greek writing but for p. &

The Codex Argenteus now in the University library at Uppsala has 187 of the original 330 leaves of the four gospels intact. Wolfenbuttel and Milan libraries possess other fragments of the gospels, the Pauline epistles, and the Old Testament books Ezra and Nehemiah, together with a part of a Gothic calendar. These are the basis of our earliest knowledge about the Teutonic languages.

How to Learn the Basic Word List 229

in other Teutonic languages* f has changed directly to t, or via 6 to d.

This is illustrated by many common words* such as our definite article the, with its plural equivalent de in Swedish* Danish and Dutch* and die in German; the English that with its neuter equivalent det in Swedish and Danish* or dat in Dutch; the English they and theirs, with modem Scandinavian equivalents* de and deras (Swedish)* deres (Danish); or the English thou with its equivalent Swedish* Danish* and German du .

German equivalents of English words with the initial consonants or 6, i.e. either sound represented by th in English spelling* start with d:

Dank *	thanks	Dingy	thing
das *	that	denkeny	think
danny	then	dreiy	three
da *	there	Durst,	thirst
dick.	thick	Distely	thistle
Diehy	thief	Dorn,	thorn
dunny	thin	Dorfy	thorp (= village)

In two ways English has changed as some of the Scandinavian dialects have done. One is that a sound which was SK in Old English (then spelt sc) has now become SH* as in German* where the spelling convention is SCH* e.g. shade — Schatten, shame — Scham, (to) shed — scheiden. A partial change of this kind has occurred in Swedish* in which the symbol SK, except when it precedes the back vowels a, d * or o, is pronounced /* i.e. skepp has the same initial sound as its equivalent ship. The following words illustrate the English shift from sk to sh. In the Swedish equivalents on the left* the symbols have their original (hard) value. Those of the right are paper survivals, the initial sound being the same as in English :

SWEDISH	ENGLISH	SWEDISH	ENGLISH
skaka	shake	skepp	ship
skal	shell	skida	sheath
skall	shall	skimma	shimmer
skam	shame	skina	shine
skarp	sharp	skjuta	shoot
sko	shoe	skold	shield
skrika	shriek
skur	shower

In the evolution of modern English there has also been a weakening of the guttural g like the weakening of the guttural k illustrated by the words now spelt with the arbitrary combination sh. This has had an

230 The Loom of Language

important grammatical consequence which will appear at a later stage (p. 264). The hard g as in goat is generally the sound which corresponds to the symbol in German, Dutch, and Danish. In Swedish it is usually softened to our y sound unless followed by a back vowel (a in father , aw in law3 00 in hook). Swedish spelling does not reflect this softening, but in Danish and Norwegian the softened g is replaced by GJ, J or I ; and in new Norwegian y is substituted for the soft g after 0 (Swedish or German 0 roughly equivalent to our ir in shirk). Thus in German eye is Augc, in Swedish it is oga and in Norwegian 0ye. So also way is Weg in German, vdg in Swedish, iwj in Danish, vci in Norwegian. In many English words of Teutonic origin the// has softened in this way, and Y or W are now its gravestones in the written language. The Y may stamp a diphthong as in eye or v'ung or it may be equivalent to the soft Scandinavian G or GJ as in yellow (German gelh^ Swedish gul). A IF in place of, g turns up in the pantemonic word for bird (Swed. fdgif German Vogel) which we now spell as fowh as also in bow (Swed. beige* German Hogcn).

In a large class of English words, the combination gh is completely silent. The combination originally stood for a breathy sound repre¬ sented by ch in German, and still pronounced as such in Scots. Thus the Scots words for night and light are close to the German Nacht and Lichl. This sound, which has disappeared in English elsewhere, is almost absent in Scandinavian. Thus the Scandinavian word for night is natt, and ljus for light (Swedish) or lys (Danish and Norwegian).

So far as the consonants are concerned, the changes from w to v and from p to 4 or from 0 to d, are the sound-shifts which are most impor¬ tant to anyone who aims at learning Norwegian or Swedish. They are illustrated by:

ENGLISH	SWEDISH	ENGLISH	SWEDISH
waggon	vagn	thick	tjoek
water	vatten	thief	tjuv
weak	vek	thin	Hum
week	vccka	thing	ling
wild	vild	think	tiinka
wise	vis	thousand	tusen
work	verk	three	tre
world	varld	thread	trad
warm	varm	throne	tron
way	vag	thumb	nimme
weather	wider
well	vil
west	vllster '

231

How to Learn the Basic Word List

ENGLISH	SWEDISH	ENGLISH	SWEDISH
wet	vat	that	det
whale	val	them	dem
whistle	vissla	there	dar
white	vit	these	dessa
wide	vid	thine	din
willing	villig	thou	du
win	vinna
witness	vittne
. wood	ved
worst	varst	brother	broder (bror)
worth	■ vard	father	fader (far)
wreck	vrak	mother	moder (mor)

In an English-Swedish dictionary there are many other words beginning with th or sh with Swedish equivalents, recognizable as such when these changes are made. Of course, the family likeness is obvious in a hpst of words without sounds which have undergone a shift of

this type. Even if the English equivalent given in the dictionary does

not correspond to a Swedish word, it is often easy . to think of a related

one which does so. Thus the Swedish word skdra (cut) reminds us of shear, and veta (know) is derived from the same Teutonic root as wit (German wissen), still used as a verb in Bible English and in the ex¬ pression to wit.

Similarities between English words of Teutonic origin and the corresponding one in another Teutonic language are most difficult to recognize at sight when the latter is German. From the phonetic point of view, German has wandered farthest afield from the old Teutonic homestead. So the similarities of German and English words are less easy to recognize than the family likeness of English and Swedish ones. In the evolution of German, a compact group of changes called the second sound-shift took place in middle and south Germany, and these are reflected in German spelling. The most characteristic are the following: ,

{a) At the beginning of a word (or in the middle after a consonant) t was followed by a hiss, i.e. became ts (as in cats). This ts sound is represented by Z in German script.

0 b ) Inside the word after a vowel the t shifted further and became a hiss, now spelt SS.

(c) The initial p was followed by /, and the result is represented by

PF-.

(d) After a vowel the shift went further, f replaced p — in script FF-.

Another sound-change which took place early in the High German

232 The Loom of Language

dialects was the shift from k to ch (as in Scots loch) after vowels. This change is illustrated by (e) below. Besides the preceding, other sound- changes, some of them much later, now distinguish High from Low German dialects (including Old English). The most important are:

(/) The early shift of the initial d to t.

00 The initial s before I, m, p, t, usually becomes sh as in ship fsnelt SCH except before P and T). '

(h) Between two vowels v often becomes b.

ENGLISH	GERMAN	ENGLISH	GERMAN
(a) tap	Zapfen	(e) book	Buck
ten	/.elm	break	brechen
tide (time)	Zeit	make	maehen
to	zu	rake (tool)	Reehen
tongue	Zunge	reek	riechen
two	zwei	token	Zeichen
		weak	weich
		week	’ Wochc '
(b) better	besser
eat	essen	(/) dance	tanxen
foot:	Fuss	daughter	Tochter
kettle	Kcssel	day	Tag
let	lasscn	dream	Traum
water	Wasser	drink	trinken
(c) path	Pfad	0.0 sleep	sehlafen
pepper	Pfeifer	smut	Sehmutz
pipe	Pfeife	snow	Selmee
plant	Pfkmze	swan	Sehwan
plaster	Pilaster	sweat	Schweiss
(d) hope	hotfen	(ft) give	geben
pepper	Pfeifer	have	haben
pipe	Pfeife	live	leben
ape	Affe	liver	Leber
gape	galfen	love	lieben
sleep	sehlafen	sieve	Sieb

Some of the words chosen in these examples illustrate more than one sound-shift. For instance, we have to make two changes to get our sweat from Schweiss. When we apply (/?), Schweiss changes to Sch&eit, and this changes to Sweit when we apply (g), It is then recognizably the same as its English equivalent.

The geographical boundaries between regions where the older or Low and the newer or High German forms predominate are not the

How to Learn the Basic Word List ' 233

same for all the shifts mentioned above. The process of change reaches its peak m South German, including German Swiss (ffighAlemanic) dialects. As we go north and north-west, the typical High German sounds fade out and disappear in the plains. The Low German of north and north-east Germany, like Dutch and Flemish which are really Low German dialects with their own spelling rules, remains true to the earlier Germanic sound-pattern. A line across Germany divides a region where Low German forms predominate from one where the High German prevail. It runs from the Belgian frontier south of Aachen to Diisseldorf, thence to Cassel, striking the Elbe above Magde- burg, passes north of Luther’s Wittenberg, and touches the Polish fiontier north-east of Frankfort-on-the-Oder. North of the line we hear dat Water , South of it, das Wasser .

In what has gone before we have seen that English consonants are conservative. The consonants of English have departed from the Old Teutonic pattern less than those of any Teutonic language except Icelandic. The reverse is true of the vowels. In the middle period during the century in which Chaucer wrote, the English vowels shifted while the spelling remained fixed. This explains why we so often succeed in identifying an English word with a German one when we see the two in print, but fail to do so when they strike our ear. German vowels also shifted between the Middle High German and the Modem High German period, and the evolution of two English and German' vowels runs parallel. In both languages a primitive long I (pronounced ee as in bee) became the diphthong y in fly. The German spells it as El (Middle High German min, Modem High German mein), while English retains the older spelling (Old English min. Modem English mine). The primitive long u (like 00 in food) went through a similar process, but this time the diphthong ( ow as in how) is indicated as such in both languages. The German spells it as AU (Middle High German hus. Modern High German Ham). In English it Is OU or OW (Old English mus, brun. Modem English mouse, brown). In all, there were seven characteristic vowel-changes in Middle English, including the two mentioned. Not all of them extended to Scotland, where house is still pronounced like its Scandinavian equivalent hus and a cow is a hi. Owing to the chaos of English vowel symbols, these sound-shifts are not of very great assistance to the beginner. Like Spanish, modem German spelling is very regular compared with our own. The following paragraph summarizes its essential conventions. At a first reading it will be wise to skip it, as also to skip the succeeding ones (pp. 236-237)

H*

234 The Loom of Language

which deal with pronunciation and spelling of Dutch and Scandinavian dialects.

The few exceptions to the rule that one sound has the same German symbol are :

(a) the /- sound is represented both by F and V, e.g. fallen (fill) and

wZZ(full);

(b) the i- sound of file is represented by El, e.g. mein (my) or Al, e.g.

MAI (May);

(c) the oi- sound of boy is represented by EU or AU, e.g. teuer (dear),

Hauser (houses) ;

(d) die ee- sound in bee is represented by IE or IH, e.g. Liebe (love),

Ihr (your);

(e) the use of a silent H of a double vowel symbol to give A, E, O the

long values of Ah!, Eh!, Oh!, e.g. Jahr (year) — Aal (eel), mehr

(more)—* Meer (sea), bohren (bore) — Boot (boat).

A simple rule decides whether the vowels A, E, 1, O are long or short when the long value is not indicated as under (d) and (e) above. Before two or more consonants they have the short values of our words pat-pet** pit-pot, e.g. halt (cold), seeks (six), ist (is), offen (open). Otherwise with one exception A, E, O, have the ah!, eh!, oh! values of J a (yes), dm (die), wo (where). The exception is that a final -E (or the ~E in -EN) is slurred like the -ER in worker.

The German U has two values, the short one before a double con¬ sonant is like u in pull, e.g. Luft (air), the long one like oo in pool, e.g. gut (good). Three German vowel symbols (A, 6, U) with long and short values in accordance with the same rule have special marks; and they do not exactly correspond to any of our own sounds. The short A, e.g. in Lange (length) is like the short c in pen. The long A, e.g. in sdgen (saw) is somewhat nearer to die long e in f£te. The 0 and t) are pronounced with rounded lips, long 0, e.g, in schdn (beautiful) rather like u in fur, short 0, e.g, kdnnte (could), radier like or in work. The long U, e.g. uber (over) is like the w in Scots guid. To get the short t)> e.g. ftinf (five), make the % in pin with rounded lips.

The pronunciation of German consonants is straightforward. The only silent symbol is H after a vowel. The English contracted syllable repre¬ sented by the initial KN of know (*= Scots ken), knife, knit, etc., does not exist in other Teutonic. dialects. The German KN-, e.g, in Knabe (boy) is pronounced as in darkness. The symbols F, H, K, M, N, P, T, X have their characteristic English values. In radio or stage pronunciation the voiced consonants b, d,g, shift towards tiieir voiceless equivalents p, t , k when at 'the end of a- word,," e.g. the G of des Tages (the day’s) is as in goat, but of der Tag as in coat. The stage German R is trilled like the Scots’. The main differences between German and English consonant conventions are:

(i) CH after a back"' vowel (A, O, UV e.g* in Nacht- (night) is bard as

How to Leant the Basic Word List 235

in Scots loch) but is nearer the sound of h in hew after the front vowels A, E, I, 0, t), e.g, in nicht (not).

(ii) S alone at the beginning of a word, e.g. See (lake) or syllable,

e.g. lesen (read) is the z sound of s in buys. Before P or T at the beginning of a word, S (= SCH elsewhere) is like sh in ship. A double SS or a single S at the end of a word is the true s sound of bliss, e.g. Fuss (foot), das (the).

(iii) Z always stands for the ts in cats, e.g. Zunge (tongue). This is a

convention peculiar to German.

(iv) As in Dutch, W = v in voice, e.g. Wasser (water) and either F or

V = /in find, e.g. Feder (feather) or Vater (father).

(v) As in all Teutonic dialects (other than English), J —y as in

year , e.g. in Ja (yes).

(vi) NG is like ng in bing, e.g. Finger is pronounced by analogy to

singer, not to its English equivalent.

(vii) CHS = ks, e.g. in Ochs, ox, and QU = kv, e.g. in Quarz or

Quelle (spring).

In German, as in all Teutonic languages other than English,' the personal pronoun of polite address (Sie) in its several guises (Ihnen, etc.) begins with a capital letter. In German, as in Danish and Norwegian correspondence, the same applies to Du, etc. The custom of using a capital for the nominative of the ist person singular is peculiarly Anglo- American. In German as in Danish orthography nouns are labelled by an initial capital letter, e.g. der Schnee (the snow). This habits which slows down the speed of typing, did not become fashionable till the middle of the sixteenth century. Luther’s Bible follows no consistent plan, e.g. the opening verses of the Old Testament are;

Im anfang schuff Gott Himmel und Erden. Und die Erde war wiist und leer, und es war finster auf der Tieffe, Und der Geist Gottes schwebet auf dem Wasser. Und Gott sprach, Es werde liecht, Und es ward liecht. Und Gott sahe, dass das liecht gut war, Da scheided Gott das Liecht von Finstemis, und nennet das liecht. Tag, und die finisternis, Nacht. Da ward aus abend und morgen der Erste tage.

Simple German words and compound nouns are stressed on the first syllable, e.g. KSchin (cook), drbeiten (work), Bierfass (beer vat). Foreign words usually carry the stress on the last syllable, e.g. Organisation , Resultdt (result), Fabrik (factory). Words beginning with the prefixes be~9 ge~, er~, emp ent~, very zer~, miss - accent the basic element, e.g. be* gliiten (accompany), erlauben (allow), vergissen (forget).

The second sound-shift does not exist in the everyday speech of ordinary folk in North Germany. It goes without saying that people who speak Dutch and North German or Platt dialects, can understand one another. Anyone who can read German should be able to" read Dutch. To do so it is only necessary to recall the sound-changes' dted

236 The Loom of Language

above and to know the peculiar spelling conventions of written Dutch. These are as follows :

With the exception of Z, 8, and G, Dutch consonant symbols have values like the German ones. Z sounds as in zebra, e.g. zoon (son). By itself S stands for a sharp sibilant, like 5 in sin or this. The combination ST e.g. in meisje (girl), is like sh in ship. Except before R, the com¬ bination SCH is ■ pronounced 5+ ch of Scotch loch or German ach. Otherwise it is like $. Thus SCHR = sr, e.g. schrijven (write). Dutch G stands for a weaker variety of ch in loch. In words of Latin or French origin T before IE is pronounced like $, e.g. natie (nation).

In syllables ending in a consonant, e.g. vallen (fall), tries (knife), sok (sock), the single vowel symbols A, E, and O are like their English equivalents in what, pen, pot. If A, E, and O end a syllable, as in vadcr (father), zeven (seven), boven (above), they have their vowel values in rather , fete , nor , The terminal -EN is pronounced like the final a in banana . Thus the final ~n in the -en of the verb plural and infinitive (p. 263) is a paper survival. The single I, e.g. vinden (find) is pro¬ nounced as in our pit. In syllables ending in a consonant, e.g. km (kiss) U resembles the u of rust. Otherwise U (or UU) is like the French u or the German it.

The double vowel symbols AA, e.g. in maan (moon), 00, e.g. in 00m (uncle), EE, .e.g. twee (two) are respectively equal to ah!, oh!, eh! The combinations IE (equivalent to Y in words of foreign origin), e.g. in met (not), El, e.g. in einde (end), AU, e.g. in nauw (narrow) have the same values as in German, There is a group of combinations peculiar to Dutch:

(i) IJ, e.g. mijn (my) near to i in file;

(ii) EU, e.g. deur (door) like the French eu or English «, 0 , e, . i in

fur, worm, pert, fir ;

. (hi) ' OE, e.g. goed (good) near to. 00 in fool ;

(iv) OU, e.g, oud (old) near to the 0 in old;

(v) - UI, e.g. huts (house) rather like oi in foil.

The triple and quadruple groups are pronounced as follows:

hhlyt.g. fraai (fine) likey in fly; .

; 001, e.g. hoot (hay) like oy in boy;

OEI, e.g. moeilijk (difficult) roughly oo~y (as in boot and pity);

■ EETJW, e.g. leeuw '(lion) roughly ay-00 (as in tray and too)*

■ e,g. nieuw, roughly ew in its English equivalent.

Each of the Scandinavian dialects has words peculiar to itself, as Scots Doric contains words which do not occur in the daily speech of Kent or Kansas. The proportion of recognizably common or actually

How to Learn the Basic Word List 237

identical words in Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish is enormous. Any¬ one who can speak or read one of them can be intelligible to some one who speaks either of the other two, and can read all three with little difficulty. The difficulty can be greatly reduced by a few hints about the spelling conventions characteristic of each, and the sound-shift peculiar to Danish.

Norwegian has two vowel symbols not in our alphabet. It shares d with Swedish (aa in Danish) and 0 with Danish (o in Swedish). The Swedish a is written as e in Norwegian except before r, when it is <zy as always in Danish. The Swedish ju is always y in Danish and Norwegian words. The initial hv of Danish and Norwegian equivalents for English words which begin with wh is replaced by v alone in Swedish. The double Danish or Norwegian kky which shortens the preceding vowel, is written as ck in Swedish. The Swedish and Norwegian nn and ll are replaced by nd and Id in Danish. In Danish and in Norwegian a soft Swedish gy pro¬ nounced like our 3/, is represented by gj. The terminal vowel a of Swedish words becomes e in Danish, and Norwegian. The most striking difference of pronunciation reflected in spelling is the shift from a final voiceless py ty k in Swedish or Norwegian to the voiced equivalents by dy g in Danish, as illustrated by:

ENGLISH

ship

foot

speech

SWEDISH

skepp

fot

sprak

DANISH

Skib

Fod

Sprog

The identity of some words is obscured by the spelling of prepositions used as prefixes, e.g. Swedish upp for Danish op. When due allow¬ ance is made for all these differences of spelling or of pronunciation, it is safe to say that ninety-five per cent, of the words of a serviceable vocabu¬ lary are either identical in any of the three Scandinavian dialects men¬ tioned, or can be appropriately modified in accordance with the rules above.

Scandinavian symbols usually have the same values as those of German in the preceding table. The notable Swedish exceptions are as follows :

(a) before front vowels (E, I, Y, A, 0), G softens to y as in yewy e.g. get (goat), K becomes ch as in German ichy e.g. kdra (dear), SK becomes sh as in ship (skepp) ;

(i b ) After L or R the final G is like y in buryy e.g. berg (mountain) ;

(c) SJ, e.g. sju (seven), SKJ or STJ, e.g. stjarna (star) is like sh in ship;

(d) Before R, e.g. flickor (girls) and in many monosyllables, e.g. stol

(chair), O is like 00 in good*

(1 e ) A is generally like oa in oar.

238 The Loom of Language

The Danish AA replaces the Swedish A; & 'and 0 replace the German-Swedish A and 6. Other differences are:

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

of the corresponding voiced consonants (&, d3 g), Thus ikke is pronounced like igger in nigger ;

(b) Terminal G, final V after L, and initial H before V (where hv

replaces wh of the English equivalent, e.g. hvad — what) are silent;

(c) D is silent after L, Nr R, e.g. holde (hold), fmde (find) and like d

when it follows a vowel.

SOUND-CHANGES IN THE LATIN FAMILY

Most English words of Latin origin are of two kinds. First come words derived from the French of Normandy and Picardy. 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 times. Thus borrowed French words of the period between Chaucer and Caxton do not come- from the same region as the earlier Norman words and they are 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 oil 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 filz9 larron^md cmseil with Latin filius , latm> and consilium 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 Latin noun or adjective is usually the ablative singular*

* The case system had decayed in the daily speech (p, 325) of the late Empire and the ablative or dative is often the literary case form nearest to the colloquial

singular.

Fig. 29.

This remarkable Rune stone now stands in the national park in Stockholm. It was placed over the grave of a young man named Vamod by his father Varin. The rune begins : To the memory of Vamod stands this stone. But Varin the father engraved it for his dead son. Then follow many verses of a long elegy.

How to Learn the Basic Word List 239

ENGLISH WORDS DE¬	ENGLISH WORDS
RIVED THROUGH	DIRECTLY DERIVED	LATIN
FRENCH	FROM LATIN
conceit	concept	conceptu
constraint	constriction	constrictione
couch	collocate	collocare
count	compute	computare
coy	quiet	quieto
dainty	dignity	dignitate
defeat	defect	defecto
dungeon	dominion	dominio
esteem	estimate	aestimare
fashion	faction	factione
feat	fact '	facto
frail	fragile	fragili
loyal	legal	legali
mayor	major	majore
penance	penitence	poenitentia
poor	pauper	pauperi
privy	private	privato
royal	regal	regali
rule	regulate	regulare
.Sir	senior	seniore
strait	strict	stricto
sure ■	secure	securo
^ trait	tract	tractu
treason	tradition	traditione

The spelling of many French loan-words is identical with that of the corresponding words in modem French, e.g. figure, front, fruit, gain, grace, grain, table, torrent, torture, or does not deviate sufficiently to make identification impossible, e.g. chain (chaine), charity (charite), colour (couleur). Furthermore, words which look alike or similar in French and English have usually an area of common meaning. On the other hand, there are many which betray the beginner. The reason for this is that the meaning of words often changes in the course of cen¬ turies through metaphorical usage, tlirough specialization or through generalization. Even since the time of James I, such words as crafty (originally skilled) and cunning {knowing, wise), have done so, and many words, such as homely (plain in America, domesticated in England) do not mean the same thing on both sides of the Atlantic. So it is not surprising that French spirituel means witty or that figure refers to the face alone.

If we were to ask for mutton (mouton) and mustard (moutarde), onions (oignons) and vinegar (vinaigre) in a French inn, we should not

240 The Loom of Language

be understood unless we indicated our wishes in writing. Sometimes our own pronunciation of a French loan-word (e.g. damage) is nearer to the original than that of a Frenchman to-day. Modem French has discarded many words which survive in English* e.g. able, bacon, chattel , mischief, nice, noise , nuisance, pledge, plenty, random, remember, revel* English is thus a museum in which relics of Old and Middle French are exhibited; but English words of Latin origin derived from bor¬ rowed French words are far less numerous than English words coined directly from Latin roots* and these are the words which lighten our

LATIN FRENCH

	(a) Older	(b) Newer
causa	CHOSE	(thing)	cause	(cause)
calculo	GAIIXOU	(pebble)	calcul	( calculus )
caice	CHAUX	(lime)	caique	(tracing)
carta	CHARTS	(charter)	carte	(card)
captivo	CHgTIF	(puny, weak)	captif #	(captive)
factione	FACON	(style)	faction	(faction)
fabrica	FORGE	(smithy)	fabrique	(factory)
fra gill	FRllLE	(frail)	fragile	(fragile)
hospitale	h6tel	(hotel,	hdpital	(hospital)
		mansion)
parabola	PAROLE	(speech)	parabole	(parable)
pietate	PITlfi	(pity)	pictc	(piety)
praedicatore	precheur (preacher)	pr<5dicateur	(preacher)
questione	QtJETE	(quest)	question	(question)
rigido	RA1DE	(stiff) I	rigide	(rigid)
redemption©	RAN9ON	(ransom)	redemption (redemption

task in learning a Romance language such as Spanish, To take full advantage of our Latin legacy we therefore need to know a little about how the pronunciation of Latin changed when, it split up into the daughter dialects which are now spoken* and how the sound-changes are reflected in the spelling of each,

■ There are several signposts, by which English words of Latin or French' origin can be recognized* We have, already come 'across one of them (C for the k sound) in Chapter II, Another important one is the combination -TI- for the sound represented by sh in words of Teutonic parentage. The following is a list of some of the most reliable dues:'

(1) The combinations CTj TI (pronounced sh) and SC, action and scale ,

How to Learn the Basic Word List 241

(2) Words containing the sound 3 (p. 83) represented by the French

_ J of jeu (game) or G of rouge (red), e.g. vision or treasure.

(3) Words beginning with J and G pronounced as J in jam, e.g.

gentle, giant, jacket.

(4) Nearly all words containing OI, e.g. boil, moisture, soil.

(5) All words in which OU stands for long u, e.g. group, soup, tour.

(6) Words beginning with CH followed by a (where ch = tsh), e.g.

challenge , change, charm .

(7) Words with final GUE, initial QU, and final QUE, e.g. fatigue,

quarter, brusque.

(8) All words in which final 5 and T are mute, e.g. debris, bouquet.

(9) Nearly all words ending in -ANT, -ENT, e.g. agent, merchant,

student.

(10) Most polysyllabic words with end stress, e.g. buffoon, campaign,

Hite.

At one time the habit of attaching Latin affixes to native words or words containing a Greek or Teutonic root was frowned on. So other signposts are several Latin particles, or numerals used as affixes {contra-, pre-, a- or ad-, ante-, per-, multi-, uni-, di tri-). Some of these are easily confused with Greek ones {a-, anti-, peri-) which do not mean the^ same. 1 he abstract noun-ending -ion in constipation is also Latin, as is the termination -it in deposit The following is a list of the more common affixes of Latin or French origin and the characteristic meaning of the prefixes :

(a) prefixes:

ah- (away) extra- (beyond) re- (again)

ad- (to) %n- {in) retro- (backward)

ambi- (both) in-, ne-, non- (not) semi- (half)

ante- (before) inter- (between) sine- (without)

bene- (well) intra- (within) sub- (under)

bi- (twice) pen- (almost) subter- (under)

circum- (around) per- (through) super- (above)

contra- (against) post- (after) tram- (across)

cow- (with) pre- (before) tri- (three)

de- (from) preter- (beyond) ultra- (beyond)

ex-, e- (out of) pro- (for, forth) vice- (in place of)

{b) suffixes:

-able	-ance	-esque	-ite	- ment
-acious	-ary	-ess,	-ity	-mony
-acy	-ery or -ory	-ette	-ive	-tude
-age	-ent, ant	-ion	-ise

Like French, all Romance languages have a stock of old words of a more familiar type derived directly from Vulgar Latin, and a newer.

242 The Loom of Language

larger stratum of Classical Latin words Introduced by scholars, clergy, lawyers or technicians. Words of the second class are easy to recognize. The roots have the same shape as those of our own loan-words which belong to the same class. The others, that Is to say the older ones, are less easy to recognize, and therefore more difficult to memorize. The home student can get some fun out of the otherwise dreary task of memorizing a basic word-list by noting the sound-shifts which dis¬ guise or even distort beyond recognition the original Latin form. Illustrative examples of this trick will be the basis of the next few pages which deal with phonetic changes during the period when Latin was breaking up into what we now call French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian.

When Latin began to break up into these dialects the H had become silent. Initially the symbol has disappeared in all but four Italian words. It is soundless in French and in Spanish words, though it survives in the spelling. Apparently the people of the Roman Empire also became slack about the use of compound consonants such as ct9 pt, st. The first of these has disappeared in all the daughter dialects, except in Latin words reintroduced by scholars. In Italian words other than those of the last-named type CT — TT9 in Spanish CT — CIJ (as in much), in Portuguese and Old French CT = IT. in Modem French the symbol remains - IT , but the T is usually silent. The combination pt becomes t (or tt) in old words of all the Romance dialects, though scholars have sometimes put back an unpronounced pox bin script, as in the modem French sept for the Old French set (seven) or as in our debt derived from the French detie.

LATIN	ITALIAN
DXCTO '	detto
FACTO	fatto
LACTE	latte
LECTO	letto
NOCTE	notte
OCTO , . '	otto
SEPTEM	sette
TECT0 ;■ *;	tetto ■■

SPANISH	PORTU¬ GUESE
dicho	dito
hecho	feito
leche	leite
lecho	leito
noche	noire
echo	oito
siete	setc
techo	teto

FRENCH	ENGLISH
die	said
fait	done
iait	milk
lit	bed
null	night
huit	eight
sept	seven
toit	roof

Except in French .there was decay of the initial combinations pl9 cl, fl. In Italian l fades out in the y~ sound represented by L In Spanish

How to Learn the Basic Word List 243

the lit sound of million, represented by LL, may replace any one of the. three compounds cited. In Portuguese the three consonant combi¬ nations make way for the sh sound represented by CH.

LATIN	ITALIAN	SPANISH	PORTU¬ GUESE	FRENCH	ENGLISH
PLENO	pieno	lleno	cheio	plein	full
PLUERE	piovere	Hover	chover	pleuvoir	to rain
CLAVE	chiave	Have	chave	clef	key
FLAMMA	fiamma	llama	chama	flamme	flame

In two of its daughter dialects the medial and final l of a Latin word often takes the soft value of Hi in million. The symbol for tills is GL in Italian and LH in Portuguese. In Spanish it gave way to the ch in Scots loch. This is represented by J. In many French words, including all those in the list below, a Latin L has become the y sound in yes. This pronun cia tion, which is Parisian in origin, appears from the seven¬ teenth century on and does not intrude in the written language.

LATIN	ITALIAN	SPANISH	PORTUGUESE	FRENCH	ENGLISH
AURICULA	orecchio	oreja	orelha	oreille	ear
CONSILIO	consiglio	consejo	conselho	conseil	counsel
FILIA	figlia	hija	filha	fille	daughter
FOLIA	foglia	hoja j	folha	feuille	leaf
OCULO	occhio	ojo	1 ollio	ceil	eye
PALEA	paglia	paja	pallia	paille	straw
TRIPALIO	travaglio	trabajo	trabaUio	travail	work

Between vowels b and p of Latin words were also unstable. Of the

two the former softened to the v sound even before Vulgar Latin broke up. In French it maintains itself' as v or has faded out, in Italian and Portuguese words it vacillates between & and v9 and in Spanish it appears uniformly as b, but the Spanish Academy Grammar admits that “in the greater part of Spain the pronunciation of b and v is the same although it ought not to bed’ Latin p between vowels survives in Italian alone. In French it has become a, and in Spanish and Portuguese soft b.

Another change affected all Latin dialects except Portuguese. A short stressed e and o respectively made way for the compound vowels ie

244 The Loom of Language

LATIN	ITALIAN	SPANISH	| PORTUGUESE	FRENCH	ENGLISH
CAPILLO	capello	cabello	cabelo	cheveu	hair
CAPRA	capra	cabra	chbvre	goat
LEPORE	lepre	liebre	lebre	libvre	hare
OPERARIO	operaio	obrero	obreiro	ouvrier	worker
SAPERE	sap ere	saber	savoir	to know
SAPORE	sapore	sabor	saveur	taste
BIBERE	bevere	beber	boire	to drink
CABALLO	cavallo	cabailo	cavalo	cheval	horse
FEBRE	febbre	fiebre	febre	fibvre	fever
HABERE	avere	haber	haver	avoir	\ to have
PROBARE	provare	probar j	provar	prouver	to prove

and ue. In French the latter became a sound like 6 in German. It is written -EU in the ensuing examples.

LATIN	ITALIAN	SPANISH	PORTUGUESE	FRENCH	ENGLISH
PEDE	piede	pie !	pb	pied	foot
PETRA	pietra	piedra	pedra	pierre	stone
TENET	tiene	tem	tient	he holds
DECEM	diecx	diez	dez	dix	ten
MORIT	muore	muere	morre	meurt	he dies
POTET	pub	puede	pode	peut	he can
NOVO	nuovo	nuevo	novo	neuf	new
FOCO	fuoco	fuego	fogo	feu	fire
PROBA	pruova	prueba	prova	preuve	proof

In general Latin had fewer compound vowels than its descendants. The most prominent one, au , has become a simple vowel in all our four Romance languages. Its descendant is spelt O in Italian and Spanish, OU or 01 in Portuguese, and O or AU in French.

LATIN	ITALIAN	SPANISH	PORTUGUESE	; FRENCH	ENGLISH
' AUEO	,'oro	ouro	or	gold
CAUSA	cosa .	cousa	chose	thing
PAUPERI	povero.	| . pobre	' pauvre	poor

_ Arwdier common tendency at work during the period of differentia¬ tion of the Romance dialects is reflected in spelling. Spanish, Portu-

How to Learn the Basic Ward List 245

guese, and French equivalents of classical Latin words beginning with ST, SC, SP, SQ, SL, appropriate a vowel, e.g. Latin spiritu, Spanish espintu , Portuguese espirito , French esprit , or Latin scribere (to write), Spanish escribir, Portuguese escrever, French ecrire. This e- turns up in Latin inscriptions of the second century a.d., and was once part of the spoken language of the Empire. It dropped out in Italian, e.g. spirito or scrivere. In English words derived from French or Latin this initial e is absent. There are a few exceptions, e.g. estate , esquire, espouse, especially. The following list illustrates the contrast and also shows a French peculiarity explained in the next paragraph.

ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH
scald	echauffer	escaldar	spine	6pine	espina
scarlet	6carlate	escarlata	sponge	eponge	esponja
school	ecole	escuela	spouse	epoux	esposo
scripture	ecriture	escritura	stamp	etampe	estampa
scum	ecume	espuma	standard	etandard	estandarte
slave	esclave	esclavo	state	etat	estado
sluice	ecluse	esclusa (	stanch	etancher	estancar
space	espace	espacio	stomach	estomac	estomage
spade	epee	espada	strange	etrange	estrano
Spain	Espagne	Espana	study	etudier	estudiar
spice	<§pice	especia	stuff	etofFe	estofa

We have now looked at what was happening to Latin dialects simul¬ taneously in different parts of the disintegrated empire during the four or so centuries after the fall of Rome. We shall now look at more local changes. From this viewpoint French stands most apart from its sister languages. We have already met (p. 225) one peculiarity of French.

ITALIAN	SPANISH	PORTUGUESE !	MIDDLE FRENCH	MODERN FRENCH	„ ENGLISH
bes chiostro costare festa isola ostrica	bastardo stia ! clau costa f .. costar fiesta isla osi	| besta istro custar festa ilha ira	bastard , beste cloistre coste couster feste isle oistre	bAtard BETE CLOiTRE GoTE COUTER f£te !le HUfTRE	bastard beast cloister coast (to) cost feast isle oyster

246 The Loom of Language

The compound consonant si has made way for U The preceding vowel then carries a circumflex accent, as in the examples below. The change began in the eleventh century, but a mute S before T persisted in written French till the reforms of 1740.

Another specifically Old French sound-change lias also cropped up in preceding tables. The modem French C is a hard (k) sound only before a, 0, and u. Otherwise it stands for s. Where C preceded a in Latin words it softened to the sh sound in skip, spelt CH in French orthography (c£ chamois , champagne ), as in the following:

LATIN	ITALIAN	SPANISH	PORTUGUESE	TRENCH	ENGLISH
cabailo	cavallo	cabailo	cavalo	CHEVAL	horse
camisla	camicia	camisa	' CHEMISE	shirt
capra	capra	cabra	CHfiVRE	goat
capite	capo	cabeza	cabe^a	CHEF*	head
caro		1 caro		CHER	dear
causa	cosa l	cousa	CHOSE	thing

In many English words derived, from French this initial CH conceals correspondence with the Spanish or Italian equivalent. It does $0, for instance, in those below:

LATIN	SPANISH	FRENCH	ENGLISH
calefacere	calentar	chauffer	chafe
cambio	cambio	change :	change
campione	campedn	champion	champion
cancellario	canciller	chancellor :	chancellor
cantare	cantar	chanter	chant
capitulo	capitulo	chapitre	chapter
captiare	cassar	chasser	chase
caritate	caritad	charite	charity
cam	carta	charte	chart
casto	casto	chaste	chaste

Another characteristially French sound-shift recalls what happened in Middle English. and is still going on in Scandinavian dialects. Be¬ tween two vowels g softened to y or i or disappeared* Hence wc get English old-new couplets such as royal-regal , loyal-legal , frail-fragile . (The English pronunciation of royal and loyal is a survival of the Old French stage*) Examples are in the following table*

^ In a metaphorical sense. The anatomical head is la rite*

How to Learn the Basic Word List 247

LATIN	'ITALIAN,	SPANISH	PORTUGUESE	FRENCH	ENGLISH
augusto castigare	castigare	agosto I castigar	aoOt CHATIER	August to chastise
integro	iatero	entero	inteiro	ENTIER	entire
fugire	■ fuggire	' huir	fugir	FUIR	to flee
lege	legge	ley	lei	L0I	law
ligare	legare	ligar	LIER	to tie
negare	negare	negar	NIER	to deny
nigro	nero	negro	N0IR	black
pacare	pagare >	pagar	PAYER	to pay
pagano	pagano	pagao	PAXEN	heathen
plaga	piaga	llaga	praga	PLAIE	wound
ruga	( strada )	(calle)	rua "	RUE	( plague ) street

Another French consonant-shift scarcely conceals the Latin equi¬ valent. A v 'which through phonetic loss has become final hardens to /, or is mute, as shown in the next instalment for our vocabulary of Romance words. One reason for mentioning this is that it brings to life a grammatical irregularity. The feminine form (p. 357) of adjectives which have the masculine singular ending -/ takes ~ve in place of it.

LATIN	ITALIAN	SPANISH	PORTUGUESE	FRENCH	ENGLISH
bove	bove	buey	1 boi	BCEUF	OX
breve		breve		BREF (-eve)	brief
novo (-a)	nuovo •	nuevo	novo .	NEUF (-Ve)	new
novem	nove	nueve 1	nove	NEUF	nine
clave	cfaiave	Have	chave	CLEF	key
nervo	nervo	nervio	nervo	NERF	nerve
ovo	uovo	huevo	ovo	CEUF	egg
vivo ( -a)		vivo (-a)		VIF (-ve)	alive

Two vowel-shifts are peculiar to French: (a) in an open syllable the Latin stressed a became an e sound, spelt to-day E, fi, £, AI, or -BR; (b) in the same position the Latin* stressed e changed to the diphthong 01. The combination now stands for a sound like wa in Scots we twa. French' grammarians disapproved of this pronunciation till the Revo¬ lution put its seal on it. Examples' of these changes are overleaf.

What is most characteristic of modern French words is loss of body through successive elimination of terminal vowels, medial consonants, and final consonants. The consequence is that French has a very large pro¬ portion of monosyllables. Indeed, almost every bisyllabic Latin word which has left a direct descendant in modern French is now represented by a single syllable, as illustrated by the following couplets in which a

248 The Loom of Language

medial consonant has disappeared : lege-LOl (law), fide-FOi (faith), videt-voiT (sees), credit croit (believes), or patre-PERE (father), matre- MERB (mother), fratre-FRERE (brother), sorore-soEUR (sister). In other French words, as in the last four, an unaccented final E exists only on paper. The last remark would be equally true about the majority of final consonants, e.g. the silent T in voit or croit. One result of this is a great gap (see p. 35) between the flexional system of the written and of the spoken language. No other Romance language furnishes comparable examples of drastic shortening, e.g. eau (pronounced 0) from aqua (water), haut (pronounced 0) from alto (high). Mi from medio (half), AotlfT (pronounced a-00 or 00) from augusto (August), rond (pronounced

LATIN	ITALIAN	1 SPANISH PORTUGUESE	FRENCH	ENGLISH
(a) cantare	cantare		cantar	CHANTER	sing
claro	chiaro		claro	CLAIR	clear
ala		ala		AILE	wing (aisle)
prato	prato		prado	PRE	meadow
sale	sale		sal	SEL	salt
patre	! padre	1 pai	PERE	father
(b) seta	seta |		seda	SOIE	silk
me		me		MOI	me
velo	velo	1 veu	VOILE	veil
tela		tela		TOILE	cloth

rd) from rotundo (round), sftR (pronounced syr) from securo (safe), h6te (pronounced oat) from hospite (host). Thus the Latin ancestry of most French words, other than those which have been introduced by scholars in comparatively recent times, is far less apparent than that of their Italian or Spanish equivalents.

As a spoken language Spanish has moved further away from Latin than Italian has, but not so far as French. Partly for this reason, but also because the spelling of Spanish words is highly regular, there is less to say about the sound-changes in relation to the appearance of the printed word. For recognizing the similarity of English words of Latin origin to their Spanish equivalents, the important ones are few. Some have turned up in the preceding paragraphs. The most mislead¬ ing one is still to come. This is the disappearance of the initial f> re¬ placed in script by what is now silent H, cf. hacienda, which comes from the Latin word facienda. Some linguists attribute this to the influence of the Moorish occupation, and others to that of the pre-Aryan popula¬ tion now represented by the Basques, who have no/ sound. The first of these suggestions is unlikely, because H atthe beginning of a word crops up at a comparatively late stage in old documents. The Spanish Jews who emigrated to Salonika about a.d. 1500 still preserve the

How to Learn the Basic Word List 249

Latin/., e.g. fierro for hierro (iron) and favlar for hablar (to speak). So also do the Portuguese. The change began in the neighbourhood of Burgos on the Spanish border of the Pyrenees, and in Gascony on the French side. That is to say, it prevailed where Spanish and French communities were in closest contact with the /-less Basques. Below are a few characteristic examples of the change from / to H, i.e. the dis¬ appearance off.

LATIN	ITALIAN
faba	fava
fabulari	(parlare)
facere	fare
falcone	falcone
fame	fame
farina	farina
fendere	fendere
foeno	fieno
fervore	fervore
ferro	ferro
fico	fico
filio	figlio
filia	figlia
filo	filo !
folia	foglia
furca	forca
forma	forma
formica	formica
fugire	fnggire
fumo	fumo
furone	| fiiretto
ficato	: fegato

SPANISH	PORTUGUESE
HAVA	fava
HABLAR	falar
HAGER	fazer
halc6n	falcao
HAMBRE	fome
HARINA	farinha
hinder	fender
HENO	feno
HERVOR	fervor
HIERRO	ferro
HIGO	figo
HIJO	filho
HIJA *	filha
HILO	fio
HOJA	folha
HORCA	forca
HORMA	forma
HORMIGA	formiga
HUIR	fugir
HUMO	fumo
hur<5	furao
HlGADO	ffgado

FRENCH	ENGLISH
feve	bean
( parler )	to speak
faire	to make
faucon	falcon
faim	hunger
farine	flour
fendre	to split
fpin	hay
ferveur	fervour
fer	iron
figue	fig
fils	son
fille	daughter
fil	thread
feuille	leaf
fourche	pitchfork
forme	form
fourmi	ant
fuir	to flee
fumee	smoke
fiiret	ferret
foie	liver

The disappearance of initial / did not take place in all old Spanish words. It remained intact when followed by r or uey as is shown in the following:

LATIN	ITALIAN	SPANISH	PORTUGUESE	FRENCH	ENGLISH
fronte	fronte	fre	nte	front	forehead, front
frigido	freddo	frio	froid	cold
fricto	fritto	frito	frit	fried
fbco	fuoco	fuego !	fogo	feu	fire
forti	forte	fuerte	forte	fort	strong
fortia	forza	fuerza	forga	force	force

250 The Loom of Language

Many Spanish words have come to look different from equivalent' ones in other Romance languages because of the interpolation of an additional consonant :

1 LATIN 1	ITALIAN "	SPANISH	PORTUGUESE	FRENCH	ENGLISH
fame	fame	hambre	fome	faim	hunger
homine	uomo	hombre	homem	homme	man
legnmine	legume	legumbre	legume	legume	vegetable
sanguine	sangue	sangre	sangue	sang	blood
seminars	seminare	sembrar	semear	semer	to sow

The table before the last but one shows that Portuguese does not share this /-less word-form. As previous ones have shown* Portuguese differs from Spanish in two other ways. It participated in the b-v shift which Spanish resisted* and it resisted the replacement of e and 0 by the compounds ie and ue. Portuguese shares with French the tendency to* slough off medial consonants. It shares with Spanish elimination of a medial d, as illustrated by the first five* and* with no other Romance language the disappearance of /* as illustrated by the last four examples in the next table. The reader will find other differences between Portu¬ guese and Spanish in Chapter VIII* p. 345.

LATIN	ITALIAN	SPANISH	PORTUGUESE	FRENCH	ENGLISH
cadere	cadere	caer	CAIR	choir*	to fall
credere	credere	creer	. CRER	croire	to believe
fideli	fedele	FIEL	fidele	faithful
audire	udire	oir	OUVIR	ouirf	to hear
laudaxe	lodare	loar	LOUVAR	louer	to praise
caelo	cielo	ciu	tael	sky
colore	colore	color	COR	couleur	colour
salute	salute	salud	: SAUDE	salut	health
volare	volare	volar	VOAR	voler	to fly

THE GREEK CONTRIBUTION

The revolt against papal authority in the sixteenth century went hand in hand with biblical scholarship and a renewal of interest in Greek philosophy. Greek words* disguised by Latin spelling* came into English usage. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a steady

* archaic, the usual verb equivalent of to fall is tomber/ f archaic, the usual verb equivalent of to hear is entendre. The imperative ol quit survives m our law courts as oyez, oyez ( hear * oh hear!).

How to Learn the Basic Word List 251

trickle became a torrent. On the whole, medical science had favoured Latin more than Greek roots from which to build new technical terms. The introduction of modem chemical nomenclature in the closing years of the eighteenth century set a new fashion. Modem scholarship whether literary or naturalistic, prefers Greek to Latin; and proprietary products have fallen into line. At no other time in our history have there been so many words of Greek origin on the lips of the English- speaking peoples.

To-day Latin as a quarry for word-building material has lost its former importance. In the terminology of modem science, especially in aeronautics , bio-chemistry, chemotherapy, genetics, its place is increasingly taken by Greek. But the inventor of a new process or instrument does not scan the pages of Plato or Aristotle for a suitable name. He goes to the lexicon and creates something which was never heard before. So it happens that the language of Euripides is sending out new shoots in the name of a dental cream, a mouth-wash or a patent mpHinV a large number of these artificially created scientific and technical terms are becoming common property. When they are of an unwieldy length, everyday speech tends to subject them to a process of dipping similar to what resulted in alms, shortened in the course of centuries from the same Greek root which yields eleemosynary. What used to take several centuries is now reached in a few decades, if not in a few years. With the same snappiness with which popular parlance has shortened pepper (Greek peperi) to pep, it has changed photograph to photo, automobile to auto, telephone to phone, and stenographer to stenog.

Most words of Greek origin are easy to recognize in script by certain peculiar consonant combinations introduced by Latin scribes. Of these ph pronounced like /, in phonograph, and ch pronounced like & in a Christian chorus, are infallible. So also is the rh in rheumatism and diarrhoea. An initial ps pronounced like s alone, as in psychology or pseudonym, is nearly always indicative of Greek origin, as is the vowel combination oe or ay pronounced as in lyre. The combination th for ]> represented in Greek by 0 is common to Greek and Teutonic root- words. Scholars of the Reformation period used Latin spring con¬ ventions such as C for K in Greek roots. This practice is dying out. Though we still write cycle and cyst, the Greek K is now used at the beginning of som,e technical words coined from Greek sources, as illustrated by hinetic, kerosene , or kleptomaniac. German and French, like English, adhere to the earlier Latin transliteration PH where Scandinavians, Spaniards, and Italians have adopted the later F.

252 The Loom of Language

Romance languages other than French render TH by T, RH by R and Y by I, as in the Spanish words fotografia, teatro, diarrea, sintoma.

Many words of Greek origin can be recognized at sight by their prefixes, of which the following are specially important. Of the examples given, the first of each pair is literary, the second a product of the new technical humanism :

amphi-	both or around	as in	amphitheatre,	amphibious.
a- or an-	not	as in	amnesty.	amorphous.
ana -	hack, again,	as in	anachronism,	anabolism.
anti-	against	as in	antithesis.	antiseptic.
apo-	away	as in	apostasy,	apogamy.
auto-	by itself	as in	autocrat.	auto-erotic.
dia -	through	as in	diagonal.	dia-magnetic.
dys-	bad	as in	dysgenic,	dyspepsia.
ec-, ex-	from, out of	as in	exodus,	ecdysis.
endo-	within	as in	endogenous,	endometrium.
epi -	upon	as in	epigram.	epidiascope.
eu-	good	as in	eulogy.	, eugenic.
herni -	half	a s in	hemisphere.	hemicycle.
hetero -	different	as in	heterodox.	heterodyne.
homo-	same	as in	homophone.	homosexual.
hyper-	above	as in	hyperbole.	hypertrophy.
hypo-	below	as in	hypothesis.	hypophosphate.
iso -	equal	as in	isosceles,	isomer.
kata-	down .	as in	catastrophe,	catalysis.
meta-	after	as in	metaphysics,	metabolism.
neo -	new	as in	neologism.	neon.
palaeo-	old	as in	palaeography.	palaeolithic.
pan-	all	as in	pantheism,	panchromatic.
para -	beside	as in	paradox.	parameter.
peri-	around	as in	periphrasis.	periscope.
poly-	many	as in	polytheism,	Polydactyly.
pro-	before	as in	prologue,	prognosis.
proto-	first	as in	protocol.	protoplasm.
pseudo -	false	as in	pseudonym,	pseudopodium.
syn-, sym -	together	as in	synchronous,	symbiosis.

To these we should add the numeral prefixes : mono - (1) as monogamy, di (2), tri- (3), ietra- (4), penta (5), hexa- (6), in tripod, tetrahedron, pentagon, hexagon; hepta- (7) as in heptameter, octo- (8), as in octopus and octagon, deka- (16), as in decalogue, kilo - (1000) in kilometer or kilogram . One of the foregoing prefixes, ex- or ec- is like its Latin equiva¬ lent and is not diagnostic. So also is pro-. The only outstanding Greek suffixes are -ic or -ics in dialectic and mathematics with the derivative -ical and -ism, e.g. in theism . The last exhibit in the language museum

How to Learn the Basic Word List 253

(Part IV) of The Loom is a list of Greek words used to build inter¬ national technical terms.

Both in its ancient and modern form* Greek stands apart from other languages of the Aryan family. Two thousand five hundred years agq, closely related dialects were spoken throughout the Balkan peninsula , the Aegean Islands, including Cyprus and Crete, in the western part of Asia Minor, and in many settlements of the Black Sea. That people who spoke these dialects could understand one another was the only tie between all the constantly warring and rarely united communities called collectively Ancient Greece. By the fourth century b.c., a common standard for written communication based on mainland Attic was accepted. This koine^ which was officially adopted by the Macedonian kings, supplanted all its local competitors (Ionic, Doric, Aeolic, Arca¬ dian, Corinthian, etc.) except Spartan, which still survives locally in modem Greece as Tsaconian. The koine spread over the Near and Middle East. After the division of the Macedonian Empire, it disinte¬ grated into regional forms such as the Macedonian Greek of the main¬ land and the Alexandrian Greek into which the Jews of Egypt trans- lated their Old Testament (Septuaginta). Even in the third century a.p. the Western Church relied mainly on Greek. During the fourth, it began to die out in Gaul, Spain, Italy, and North Africa, and Augustine could not read Plato in the original. When Constantinople fell to the Turks in the fifteenth century Greek survived as a living language only in vernaculars restricted to the southernmost portion of the Balkan peninsula and its vicinity.

There was little vernacular writing before Greece won its indepen¬ dence from the Turks in 1827. Thereafter classical models had a strong influence on the form adopted. As a written language, modem Greek is therefore a product, and a highly artificial product, of the last century. The gap between the written and the spoken language is greater than in any other European language. While Italian spelling has become more phonetic with die march of time, Greek spelling has relinquished the claims of convenience to cherish an historic memory of departed glory.

A modem movement to bring the literary language nearer to the spoken has met with no success. In 1911, students of the University of Athens demonstrated in public against the proposal to translate the Bible into folk-Greek. Excluding the vocative, classical Greek had four case-forms corresponding to those of Old Norse, Old English, and Old German. Modem Greek, as prescribed in the text-books used in the schools, retains three case-forms of the adjective, noun, and article, and

254 Tfe Loom of Language

the three gender-classes still exist. It has dropped two tense-forms (perfect and future) which are replaced by analytical constructions. Otherwise it has not moved far from the elaborate flexional system of ancestral Greek,

PRONUNCIATION OF SPANISH, ITALIAN AND FRENCH

From various clues such as the study of puns and of metre in Latin literature, or of features common to two or more of its modem descen¬ dants, it seems quite clear that the Latin of the Roman Empire had a very regular system of spelling. With few exceptions a particular symbol always stood for a particular sound, or a group of very closely related sounds. This is almost true of Italian or of Spanish to-day. French spelling is scarcely more regular than that of English. The home-student who wishes to learn a Romance language will need to be familiar with its sound patterns and conventions. Other readers should skip the rest of the chapter. There are notes on the pronunciation of Portuguese in Chapter VIII (p. 345).

We have seen that Italian is rich in double consonants such as tt, //, m, zz> etc., and it is necessary to linger on them in pronouncing a word in which one of them occurs. One inconsistency, common to Italian, Spanish, and French spelling, involves the pronunciation of the symbols G and G. In Latin they always had their hard values in cat and goat. In its modem descendants they still have them when they precede the vowels a, 0, and u. Thus we meet the same hard C in costa (Italian and Spanish), cote (French) as in its equivalent coast. So also we meet the same hard G in govemo (Italian), goliemo (Spanish), gouvemement (French), for government. Before e and i the Italian C is the CH sound in child) and the Italian G is the soft G of gem. Before e and i the Spanish C has the same value as the Spanish Z before a, 0 and u* he. the TH in thin> and the Spanish G has the value which Spanish J has before all vowels, i.e. the guttural sound of Ch in Scots loch. Before e and /the French Cis the C in cinder and the French G is the same as the French J (p. 241), which is our S in treasure.

When the hard cand^ sounds precede e and i in the Italian word the symbols which stand for them are CH as in ckianti and GH as in ghiacdo (ice). The corresponding Spanish and French symbols are QU as in Fr. bouquet and GU as in Fr. guide. The symbols Cl and GI before

* The Q value for the Spanish Z and C before e and i is Castilian. In Spanish-speaking America both C and Z have the value of the French C in CIGARETTE.

How to Learn the Basic Word List 255

a, o, u in an Italian word have the same values as C or G before e or i, corresponding to our CH in chocolate {cioccolatd), and our J in journal (giornale). Italian SC before E or I is pronounced like SH in ship, elsewhere like SC in scope. SCH has the same value as SCH in school. Similarly the French GE before a, o, u as in nous mangeons (we eat) stands for the soft French J or G alone before e and i. A subscript mark called the cedilla shows that a French or Portuguese C before a, 0, u, as in legon (lesson) has the value of C in cinder .

These inconsistencies and conventions draw attention to the chief differences between the souiid values of identical symbols in the Romance group. Thus the Italian CH of chianti has the k value in character, the Spanish CH in mucho its value in the equivalent much, and the French CH is the sh sound in chamois or champagne. The symbol J does not occur in modem Italian. The Spanish J is the CH in Scots loch, and the French J is the SI sound in vision. The ' Italian Z usually corresponds to ts, the Spanish-American to C in citrus, and the French Z to our own in maze. There is no z sound in Spanish. In Italian and in French an S between two vowels as in easy stands for z, otherwise for the pure s sound in silly. The Spanish $ is always pure* i.e. a hiss as in case, never a buzz as in rqse. The French and Spanish QU is the k sound in lacquer. The Italian QU is the kw sound in liquid.

The LLI sound of billiards has cropped up earlier in this chapter* in Italian with the symbol GL* in Portuguese with LH* in Spanish with LL. Originally* and to-day in some dialects* the LL of a French word had the same value* which has otherwise faded to the y sound in yes. In some French words the LL still stands for an ordinary / sound* e.g, ville (town) or village. The N in some Latin words has undergone a softening analogous to the LLI sound. For this N sound ' as in onion, the Italian and French symbol is GN as in Mignon. The Spanish symbol is N* as in canon (tube). The mark is called the tilde.

Another feature of the sound-pattern of Romance languages men-' tioned in passing is the total absence of an h sound. Though the symbol remains* there is no aspirate in a French word which begins with H* e.g. herbe (grass)* nor in a Spanish one* e.g. hombre (man). The H of French and Spanish is a dead letter and it has disappeared altogether in corresponding Italian words* e.g. erba or uomo. The four Italian words which cling to it are : ho (I have)* hai (thou hast)* ha (he has)* hanno (they have). The initial H of these words distinguishes them from their

, The Loom of Language

symbol R which Ifoftcn' a 'del’d fctt'ct’ ^‘7^ a' C°nver5ely’ tie slwsys audible in words of RotLe "“u* “

Italiau J’SJ SStS*. 1 ?»*•

vowels. The simple vowel symbols A F b ^ °f Latin

to ah, eh, or , in yes, eJohZt if p’ ’ ’ ’ ** I0UgMy «**»*« Unlike long English Cowds “ Romance vow^ are pure vowels, thongization. SWiteS? 5* , ^ “ tendency to™rds diph- tongue feed during articulation ^Kyou do^^n0 keep Ups and Italian O of dove (where) correctlv iL. th * IZ ^ pronounce the will sound lifce the O of ^ . e ^ ^avJ- Otherwise it

Spanish twotuSs « - Man or

other vowel fe , „ ^ »f rhm is,,' or rbe

over. The vowel equipment of Porn,™-/ “ are qmcldy passed h® travelled far from the ijn hJ^“P 345)M^ °f Fra“b

— P^s to any English one. All man could recognize as sudr. approxunate equivalents which a French-

Before a sh^le it is ofejfw “ e‘g‘ patte (P*w).

O written above a vowel lengthens it and k m ^ F“' circumflex the vowel was followed by S + comomny , at 0ne time

Without an accent E may be short , -,'g' chateau (castle).

(salt) or is faintly audible ^ E °f ' * **- «

final E without an accent, e.g barbJ (h S? • JWtor» e-S- %<>«. A speech, like the e in our wofd mal * 1S always silent in daily net, but is longer, e.g. picker (to sin') f p£onounced like the E in

have the sound value of E,e g chassis and "EZ “ verb forms

“*> the aiin affair, e.g. ^

open sound of eainleacherZbZll * r°Ughly the same

° “ orally short as in long, e.g Wlml ^^ *? pScher (t0 hah), e-g. ^ (remove). The soiSd represenr^ £ ^ O in opal,

Enghsh. If you speak Scots, pronounced Ht ^“t?0 ^valent in Imow German, like the U 0/ Jer ^ U °f if you

you were to pronounce the U of tool h1^ ^°,Ut your JiPS as if sound. Then, with the lips in rhe ^ ’ but wltilout uttering any pronounce the E of flea tiie same Position as before trv Z

in June (moon), or punt (puiS *“* 0btBin ^ S0Und of French U

AI may either be pronounced lie F o • .

je chanterai (I shall sing). AutdpZ?™ (t?e)j °r Uke ^ as in e.g. cause, beau (beautifS). EU resemwH ■lfl» 0U ^ ought,

u resembles the pronunciation of EA

How to Leavn the Basic Word List 257

m heard. ,eg Europe. OU is like the 00 of loot , e.g. doux (sweet) 01 sounds like wa, e.g. st»r.

W?F,d beSins with a vowel, final consonants, I less °ften C, F, L, are usually silent, e.g.

sonnet, rad (nest), vers,yeux (eyes), reea (nose), trop (too much), estomac (stomach), clef (key), fusil (rifle). Americans and English are familiar with many borrowed French words in which the final

wtTfVr PrT0lfCed3 e’g- ballet> gourmand, chamois , tZr t il TheSC Slkl?t finaIs3 which Preserve continuity with the past ot the language, become vocal under certain conditions. When a word ending m a mute consonant precedes one with an initial vowel, French safeguards smoothness of speech by bringing the

word 1Th1’ back t0 llfe‘ Ir becomes the beginning of the following word. Tim&onen a pour son argent (it is worth the money) is pro-

nounced w en a pour son7rgent. For this so-called liaison there is no ard-and-fast rule. Common people use it more sparingly than those who affect culture. It is customary between article and noun,

e.g. les enfants (the_children), pointer word or possessive adjective and^noun, e.g. nos amis (our friends), numeral and noun, e.g. trots autos (three motor cars), pronoun and verb, e.g. ilParrivent (they arnye). The French have other means of avoiding a clash of two vowels One is liquidation of the first vowel, e.g. Voiseau for le otseau (the bird), the other is separation of the two vowels by a Latin-derived t, e.g. a-t-il? (Latin habet-ille? = has he?). Unlike hrench, Spanish is not averse to vowel collision, cf. la obscuridad ana l obscunte (darkness).

French is a highly nasal language. At an early stage of its evolution the nasal consonants M and N became silent, or almost so, imparting a nasal twang to the preceding vowel. When English-speaking people first try to pronounce a nasal vowel like the one in the French word son (sound) they usually say song. To make sure that you actually nasalize the O instead of producing an ordinary O followed by a nasal consonant, take the advice of an English phonetician and mak*. the following experiment:

Pmch the nose tightly so that no ah can escape, and then say the sound. If the^ nasalized vowel is being said, then it can be prolonged indefinitely- but if ng is being pronounced, then the sound will come to an abrupt ending.”

Modem French has four different nasal vowels which in script are represented by a great variety of vowel-consonant combinations:

(x) Nasalized A (a), written AN, EN, AM, EM, e.g. dans (in), mensonge (lie), ambition , membre.

25$ The Loom of Language

(2) Nasalized E (e), written IN, EN, AIN, EIN, IM, AIM, e.g. fin,

remain i pletn (full),, simple , faim (hunger), ehien (dog).

(3) Nasalized O (p)> written ON, OM, e.g. bon (good), corrompu

(corrupt).

(4) Nasalized U (a), written UN, UM, e.g. brun (brown), humble .

IN- has a nasal sound when prefixed to a word beginning with a consonant, as in injuste . When prefixed to a word beginning with a vowel or a mute H, as in inutile , inhumain , it is pro¬ nounced like the IN- in English inefficient .

Double N does not cause nasalization of the preceding vowel, e.g. hannir (banish).

The French H is an empty symbol. It is always soundless, but its presence at the beginning of some words "affects pronunciation of its predecessor. From this point of view we can put French nouns with an initial H in two classes. In words of the mute- FI class it is a dummy, i.e. its succeeding vowel brings to life an otherwise mute final consonant of the preceding word, or suppresses the vowel of the definite article. In a second class of words the initial H, though silent on its own account, protects the following vowel from a tie-up with the preceding conso¬ nant, or the suppression of the final vowel of the definite article. The second class consists of Teutonic words, largely those which the Franks left behind them, or of Greek words introduced by scholars.

DUMMY H ‘BUFFER H

Fherbe	(grass)	la hache
Fheure	(the hour)	la haie
Fhirondelle	(the swallow)	la haine
Fhuile	(oil)	la harpe
Fhuitre	(the oyster)	la Hongrie
Fhahitude	(custom)	le hibou
Fkomme	(the man)	le hareng
Fheritage		le hasard
Fhistorien		le heros
Fhonneur		le homard
Fhiver	(winter)	le havre
Fhotel	(the hotel)

(the axe)

(the hedge) (hate)

(the harp) (Hungary) (the owl)

(the herring) (chance)

(the hero) (the lobster) (the harbour)

The buffer H of kiros prevents confusion between les heros and les ziros, when other evidence is larKng

“ Whf £ ^ common P^Ple of the Roman Empire stressed their words has left a deep mark on the modern Romance

languages. Unlike the Greeks, the Romans never stressed the last syllable of a polysyllabic word. Words of two syllables had the stress on the first e.g. ptoo (pure). Words of more than two had it on the last but o^ ff

How to Learn the Basic Word List 259

the vowel was long, e.g. colores . Otherwise it was on the last but two, as in dsino (ass). On the whole Spaniards' and Italians still place emphasis where it used to be in Vulgar Latin times, as in the Spanish equivalents, colores ) asno. Many Italian and even more Spanish words now have stress on the final syllable because what came after it has disappeared^ e.g. Spanish ciudad, Italian citta (Latin civitdte). In Italian, end stress is indicated by a grave (x) accent, the only one in its script, as in temerita (temerity). The grave accent also serves to distinguish a few mono¬ syllables from words which look alike and sound alike, e.g. e (is), e (and), or dd (he gives), da (from; at). Spanish has more words with end stress, and a trickier system of stress marks. Rules of Spanish stress are as follows :

00 Words ending in a vowel, e.g. salubre> or in 1ST, e.g. imagm% or S, e.g. martes3 and stressed on the last but one syllable, do without the accent.

(2) Words ending in a consonant other than N or S , and stressed on

the last syllable, do without the accent, e.g. esperar3 propriedad.

(3) Words which do not come under these two rules require the

acute ('), e.g. fui3 imagination.

(4) The acute accent also serves to distinguish between words of like

spelling but different meaning, e.g. mas (more), mas (but)5 el (the) — el (he).

With regard to stress French stands quite apart from her sisters. When, as usual, the unstressed part of an original Latin word has disap¬ peared, we should expect to find the stress on the final syllable, cf. Latin amico3 French ami. In fact, a rule of this sort gives an exaggerated im¬ pression. Predominance of the final syllable is slight, and a trifling increase in stress goes with rise of tone. For purpose of emphasis or contrast, stress may fall on a syllable other than the last.

Since C and G are sources of trouble to the student of any Romance language, the following table may prove useful :

C AND G BEFORE E AND I

LATIN	ITALIAN	SPANISH	PORTUGUESE	FRENCH
LETTER	SOUND	LETTER	SOUND	LETTER	SOUND	LETTER	SOUND	LETTER	| SOUND
c		c		C		c		G
centum
= 100	cold	cento	chin	! ciento	thin.	cento	cinder	cent	cinder
G		G				G		G,J
■genero= brother-
in-law	Sift	genero	gem	CjMO	—	genro 1 •	meamre	gendre	measure

260

The Loom of Language

FURTHER READING

BAUGH History of the English Language.

JESPERSEN Growth and Structure of the English Language. MENCKEN The American Language.

MYERS The Foundations of English.

PARTRIDGE The World of Words.

SKEAT A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language.

The Linguaphone and Columbia Records,

CHAPTER VII

OUR TEUTONIC RELATIVES— A BIRD’S- EYE VIEW OF TEUTONIC GRAMMAR

The object of this chapter is to give a bird’s-eye view of the grammar of four Teutonic languages* more especially German* for the benefit of the home student who may wish to learn one of them by using the methods outlined in the preceding chapter. The reader who does not intend to do so will find a more detailed treatment of principles already stated in Chapter V. The reader who does must pay attention to each cross-reference for relevant material printed in another context.

Some striking peculiarities of English are : (a) great reduction of its flexional system owing to loss of useless grammatical devices such as gender-* number-* or case-concord of adjectives; (b) great regularity of remaining flexions* e.g. the plural Both reduction and levelling have taken place in all Teutonic languages* but in no other have these pro¬ cesses gone so far. German is the most conservative of those with which we shall deal. It has not gone far beyond the level of English in the time of Alfred the Great. Consequently it is the most difficult to learn. A brief account of the evolution of English grammar will help to bring the dead bones of German grammar to life* and lighten the task of learning for the beginner.

If Alfred the Great had established schools to make the Old English Bible* like the Reformation Bible* accessible to the common people* English-speaking boys and girls would have had much more grammar to learn about than American or British boys and girls now need to know. Like Icelandic and German* Old English was still a highly inflected language. The reader of the Loom has already met two examples of this difference between the English of Alfred’s time and the English of to-day. Old English had more case-forms of the personal pronoun (p. 1 15) and more personal forms (p. 97) of the verb.

In modem English the personal pronouns and the relative pronouns (pho) have three case-forms* at least in the singular: the nominative (verb subject)* the possessive or genitive, and the objective, which may be the “direct” or “indirect” object of a verb and is always used after a directive. Old English had four case-forms in the singular and plural*

2 62

The Loom of Language

together with corresponding ones of the dual number, which has dis¬ appeared in ail modem Teutonic languages except Icelandic. The original four case-forms included a nominative and genitive used as we still use them, an accusative or direct object form also used after certain prepositions, e.g. purgh (through— German durch ), and a dative or indirect object form used after the majority of prepositions. The fate of these two object or preposition case-forms has been different in different Teutonic languages. Comparison of the tables printed on pp. 167 and 126 shows that the Old English dative eventually displaced the accusa¬ tive. The Old Norse accusative supplanted the dative, which has disappeared in Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian. These languages have therefore three case-forms like English. The same is true of Dutch (p. 126), though a trace of a separate dative persists in the third person plural. German and Icelandic have stuck to the old four case-forms. If you want to learn German it is necessary to memorize the rules given in small print below.

. Germans still use the accusative case-form of the pronoun (or adjec-

aS.Ntile7 dlrfct. °fy'ect and always after some prepositions: durch (through), ohm (without), gegen (against), urn (around), fur (for). When the verb expresses motion, the accusative case-form also comes after the prepositions ,auf, (on), uber (over), unter (under), zwischm (between), are (at), Unter (behind), vor (in front of), neben (beside). The dative or imhrect object form follows: (a) these prepositions if the verb indicates rest, (b)aus (out of), (except), bei (at, near), gegenuber (opposite),

Z w?£ ^ { - t0)5 $dt (sinC£)’ von (of> from)> *« (to)- Prepositions toLowed by the genitive are: anstatt (instead of), diesseiis (on this side of), trotz (m spite of), wahrend (during), wegen (because of).

What happened to the verb after the Battle of Hastings can be seen

from the table on the facing page.

This table exhibits several features which Old English shares with German (or Dutch) but not with modem English or with modern Scandinavian dialects. If we leave out of account the ritual riba-form no longer used in Anglo-American conversation or prose, the only sur¬ viving personal flexion of its verb is the third person singular -s of the present tense. The personal flexion of the Old English plural(-ariiin the present and -ore in the past) had already disappeared in Mayflower rimes but in two ways the English of the Pilgrim Fathers was more like Alfred s English. The Old English flexion of the third person singular as in the Bible forms doetk, saith , loveth, kateth, findeth, hmgereth and thrstetn, etc., was soil current m South Britain; and the Old Teutonic thou- form with its flexion -st was still used, as in German. The -th

Bird’s-Eye View of Teutonic Grammar 263

terminal of the third person singular present disappeared early in North Britain. The -s ending had already replaced it in the fourteenth century. During the eighteenth century, the Northumbrian form everywhere into its own.

Another difference between the Old and the modem English verb is that the former had a special infinitive form. The infinitive, which is the dictionary form of the verb, does not always correspond to the dic¬ tionary form of the modem English verb. The latter (except that of the

ANGLO-	BIBLE			l
AMERICAN	ENGLISH	OLD ENGLISH	GERMAN
I '	\ do	I	do	ic	do	ich	tue
you .	J	thou	dQ£S£	thu	dest	*du	tust
he	does	he	doeth	he	deth	er	tut
we	1 ,	we	i	we	1	wir	tun
you	> do	you	} do J	ge	h doth	*ihr	tut
they	j	they ^	1 _	hie	J	sie	tun
.1 i		I	did	ic	dyde	ich	tat
you		thou	didst	thu	dydest	du	tat(e)st
he	did	he 1		he	dyde	er	tat
we	|	we	l did	we	]	wir	ta ten
you	|	you j		ge	f dydon	ihr	tatet
they ^		they J		hie	J	sie	taten
I have done	1 have done	ic haebbe gedon	ich habe getan
I had done	I had done	ic haefde gedon	ich hatte getan
(to) do	(to) do	don	(zu) tun

verb to be) is also the present tense-form of all persons other than the third singular, and is used as an imperative. The Oxford or Webster dictionary verb corresponds to the typical Teutonic infinitive: (a) after the preposition to (e.g. try to do this); (b) after certain helper verbs (p. 150), (e.g. I shall do so myself, if I cannot make him do it). In such situations other Teutonic languages require a form with its own charac¬ teristic terminal. In Old English this infinitive ending was -ian, -an (or -n), corresponding to the Dutch or German -en or -n.

* }n German4 die du and ihr forms are used only between intimates and relatives. The Sie form replaces both in other circumstances (see p. 146). The pronoun sie and the possessive ihr (with their case-forms) are always written or printed with a capital if they stand for the second person, and so are du, ihr, and detrt, eiter when used in letters.

264 The Loom of Language

To us* perhaps* the oddest thing about the Old English verb is its past participle. Li he that of modern Dutch or German* it carried the prefix ge-. Originally it had nothing to do with past time. It was attached to the beginning of a large class of verb-roots in all their derivatives*

and survives as such in some current German verbs. Thus the Old English for to win is gewinnan, equivalent to the German zu gewmnen. If* as is probable* it was once a preposition* it had ceased to mean anything much more definite than the be- in behold, belong, believe. The past participle pattern of these ge- verbs infected others* and became its characteristic label* as be- has become an adjectival affix in bedecked, beloved, bewigged, beflagged. Before Chaucer’s time the soften¬ ing process (p. 230) which changed the pronoun ge to ye had trans¬ formed gedon to y-done . The vestigial ^-prefix lingered on in a few archaic expressions used in poetry for several centuries after Chaucer. For instance* we read in Milton* “By heaven y-clept (i.e. called) Euphro- syne.”

In the Prologue of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales the y-inflected participle occurs frequently* as in

It is ful fair to been ycleped “madame*”

And goon to vigilies al before*

And have a mantel roialliche ybore.

In the opening lines* “the yonge sonne hath in the Ram (i.e. in the sign of Aries) his halve course yronne” The story tells “of sondry folk* by aventure yfalle in felaweshipe.” The Knight “was late ycome from his wage,” Of the Prioress we learn that

At mete wel y taught was she with alle:

She leet no morsel from hir lippes falle.

The Monk “hadde of gold ywroght a ful curious pyn.” Of the Shipman we are told that “full many a draughte of wyn had he ydrawe” The Plowman had “ylad of dong ful many a father (cart-load).” The Steward’s hair “was by his erys ful round y shorn,” and the Host was “boold of his speeche* and wys* and wel ytaught”

Such forms are fairly common in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, e.g. :

A gentle knight was pricking on the plaine Ycladd in mightie armes and silver shielde . .

Grammatical similarities between German and Old English are more striking when we allow for phonetic changes (p. 231) which have occurred in the history of the former (i.e. J> to d or t9 d to i). When we

Bird’s-Eye View of Teutonic Grammar 265

make these substitutions, we see that there is only one essential dif¬ ference between the flexion of the German and the Old English verb. In German the plural ending -en, corresponding to the -on of the Old English past, is also the corresponding plural* ending of the present

ffiE

liiuiai

Fig. 30. — Earliest Teutonic Inscription (See p. 76 for translation and Fig. 17 for code of Runic signs.)

tense. Otherwise the behaviour of the German verb is essentially like that of the English verb in the time of Alfred the Great.

If we go back a little further to the earliest Teutonic document, i.e. the Gothic Bible of Bishop Ulfilas (Fig. 28), we meet a more formidable array of verb-flexions. The example printed below shows that the Gothic verb had separate endings for all three persons of the plural as for the singular. It also had dual forms of the first and second person. The separate pronoun, not always used in the written language, is in brackets:

ANGLO-AMERICAN	GOTHIC	GERMAN	DUTCH
I take	(ik)	nixna	ich	nehme	ik neem
you take	(thu)	minis	du	nimmst	St }neemt
it takes we (two) take you (two) take	(ita) (wit) (jut?)	nimith nimos nimats	es	nimmt
we 1	(weis)	nimam	wir	nehmen	wij 1
you > take	(jus)	nimith	ihr	nehmt	jullie > nemen
they J	(ija)	nimand	sie	nehmen	zij J

Thus a levelling process has gone on throughout the history of the verb in all the Teutonic languages. In Dutch and in German it has stopped short at the stage which English had reached at the Battle of Hastings. In Norwegian, in Danish, and in non-literary Swedish, it has led to the disappearance of all personal flexions. The survival of the third person singular -s of the English present tense is offset by the fact that English — unlike the Scandinavian languages — has lost the flexion of its infinitive. As far as the verb is concerned, the grammar of the Teutonic languages offers few difficulties for anyone who knows English. You have to remember sound-changes (see p. 231) which * Excluding the familiar form of the second person.

' I*

266 The Loom of Language

dictate the past tense-form, and the two following rules about personal

endings:

id) In German and Dutch, the Bible English -th of cometh is hardened to -r, and the plural forms of both tenses have the infinitive ending -en tacked on to the stem;

(b) In modern Scandinavian languages the ending of the invariant present tense is -er or -ary the past tense is invariant as in English, and the infinitive ends in -a (Danish and Norwegian), or -a (Swedish).

For an American or anyone born in the British Isles, the difficulties of a Teutonic language begin with the noun and the adjective, especially

OLD ENGLISH AND GERMAN NOUNS

day (masc.) water (neut.) j tongue (fern.) bear (masc.)

(d) OLD ENGLISH!
fNom. ^3 J Acc.	| daeg	| waeter	tunge		bera
c§ 1 Dat.	daege	waetere	V tunga??	}	beran
LGen.	daeges	waeteres	J
[Nom. SjAce.	j* dag<25	| waeter	j" tunga?2	}	bera n
j Gen.	daga	waetem	tunge?za		ber ma
.Dat.	da gum	waeteiwz	txmgum		bztum

(b) german:

	'Nom.	} Tag Tag(e)				Bar
Sing .	Acc. ]Dat.	| Wasser		Zunge	S- Barew
	^Gen.	Tag es	Wassers	J		J
	fNom.	]	1	}
Plur,	I Acc. 1 Gen.	| Tags	| Wasser	Zun gen	j- Baren
	iDat.	Tag en	Wasser??			J

the latter. The modem English noun has four forms .in writing. Of these, only two are in common use, viz. the ordinary singular form (t.g. mother), the ordinary plural (e.g. mothers ) nearly always derived from the singular by adding -s. Nowadays we rarely use the optional genitives (e.g. mother's and mothers' ) when the noun stands for an inanimate object such as chamber or poL The Old English noun had

Bird’s-Eye View of Teutonic Grammar 267

four care-forms in the singular and four in the plural, making eight altogether, an$ the rules for using them were the same as the rules for the corresponding pronouns (p. 262). The nouns chosen as museum exhibits illustrate sound-changes described in the preceding chapter. The change from daeg to day is an example of the softening of the Old English g, and tunge-Zunge, tuaeter- Wasser illustrate the shift from T to Z (initial) or SS (medial).

Our table of Old English nouns with their modem German equiva¬ lents discloses two difficulties with which our Norman conquerors would have had to deal as best they could, if they had condescended to learn the language of the people. To use a noun correctly they would have had to choose the appropriate case-ending, and there was no simple rule to guide the choice. There were several classes (declensions) of noun-behaviour. If the learner had followed the practice of modem school-books, he (or she) would have to know which declension a noun belonged to before he could decide what ending, singular or plural, the direct object, the indirect object, the possessive, or the form appro¬ priate to the preceding preposition ought to take.

During the two centuries after the Conquest these difficulties solved themselves. The distinction between nominative, accusative and dative forms was not essential, because it either depends on a quite arbitrary custom of using one or other case-form after a particular preposition, or does something which can be expressed just as well by word-order (pp. 118 and 155). It had disappeared before the beginning of the four¬ teenth century. The distinction between the singular and the plural, and the possessive use of the genitive case-forms do have a function, and a plural flexion together with a genitive have persisted. Tor reasons we do not know the English people made the best of a bad job by the chivalrous device of adopting the typical masculine nominative and accusative plural ending -as (our -as or -s) to signify plurality. Similarly the typical masculine or neuter genitive singular -es (our ’s or ’) spread to nouns which originally did not have this genitive ending.

Perhaps, as Bradley suggests, the growing popularity of the -s mrminal was the survival of the fittest. It gained ground because it was easiest to distinguish. The result was an immense simplification. The words toaeter, tunge , and bera were once representative of large classes of nouns, and there were others with plural endings in -a, -«, and -e. To-day there are scarcely a dozen English nouns in daily use outside the dass of those which tack on -s in the plural. Such levelling also occurred in Swedish, Danish and Dutch; but standardization of

268

The Loom of Language

the plural ending did not go so far as in English. So the chief difficulty with Teutonic, other than German or Icelandic, nouns is the choice of the right plural ending. No such levelling of case-forms has taken place in Icelandic; and in German it has mot gone so far as in the modem Scandinavian languages or in Dutch. All German nouns have a dative plural ending in -en or -n corresponding to the common dative plural ending -vm of Old English nouns. In literary German the dative singular ending -e, common to Old English nouns, is still in use, though it is almost dead in speech. German feminine nouns are invariant throughout the singular. Some German nouns still behave much like our Old English beta. These always tack on -n in the singular except when used as the subject of the verb.

The student who wishes to learn German, or is learning it, should notice more carefully how the German noun as still used resembles the English noun of the Venerable Bede :

(a) Just as all Old English nouns took the ending -um in the dative

plural, all German nouns have the dative plural ending -EN or -N.

(b) Just as some Old English masculine nouns such as beta (p. 266)

added -n for all cases in the singular other than the nominative, one class of German masculine nouns add -EN or -N when used in the singular except as subject of the verb. This class includes nouns with the nominative ending -E and a few others, notably BAR (bear), OCHS (ox), TOR (fool), DIAMANT (diamond), HERR (gentleman), PRINZ (prince), KAMERAD (comrade), SOLD AT (soldier), MENSCH (man).

(c) Other German, like other Old English, masculine, and German

neuter, nouns, like Old English neuters, take the characteristic Teutonic genitive singular ending -ES or -S.

(d) Just as Old English feminine nouns take the nominative and

accusative ending -an in the plural, most German feminine nouns take the ending -EN in all cases of the plural.

In our last table the gender of each noun is printed after it. Our simple rules for deciding whether to use he, she or it would not have helped our Norman conquerors to decide that a day is masculine. For reasons already indicated (p. 114), the gender-class of an Old English noun means much more than how to use pronouns in a reason- able way, when we substitute he, she or it for a noun. Unlike the modem English adjective and pointer-word, both of which (with two exceptions, this-these and thaMhose) are invariant, the adjective or pointerrword of English before the Conquest had singular and plural case-endings, not necessarily the same ones, for masculine, feminine or neuter nouns.

Bird's-Eye View of Teutonic Grammar 269

Neither the fact that an adjective had these endings., all of them quite unnecessary if we always put it next to the noun it qualifies* nor the fact that there is no rhyme nor reason in classifying a day as masculine, a child as neuter* and a crime as feminine* were the only grounds for complaint. In the old or less progressive Teutonic languages* the adjective misbehaves in a way which even Greeks and Romans pro¬ hibited. After another qualifying word such as a demonstrative (i the * this, that) or a possessive {my, his, your, etc.) it does not take the ending appropriate to the same case* the same gender* and the same number when no such determinative accompanies it. The next museum exhibit is put in to show you the sort of adjective the Normans found when they landed near Brighton. All the derivatives in this table have been levelled down in modem English* and now correspond to the single word blind .

THE OLD TEUTONIC ADJECTIVE

	(i) STRONG FORM	(ii) WEAK FORM
	MASC. SING.	NEUT. SING.	j FEM. SING.	PLURAL	MASC. SING.	NEUT. SING.	FEM. SING.	PLURAL

(a) OLD ENGLISH

NOMIN.		j blind |		blinde j	blinda			1
ACCUS.	blindne			blinde
DAT.	blindum	blindre	blindum		blindan	blindum
GEN.	blindes				blindra

(b) GERMAN

NOMIN.	blinder |	blindes	blinde
ACCUS.	blinden
DAT.	blindem	blinden	blinden
GEN.	blindes

The table emphasizes how German lags behind. Like the Old English* the modem German adjective has two declensions* a strong one for use without an accompanying determinative word* and a weak one for use when a determinative precedes it. The strong adjective-forms have case and number endings like those of the more typical masculine* neuter* and feminine noun-classes. The weak adjective forms are less profuse. German has only two. In Dutch and in modern Scandinavian

270 The Loom of Language

languages (excluding Icelandic)* the distinction between masculine and feminine* together with all case differences* has been dropped. The weak plural has merged with a single strong form for use with singular or plural nouns (see p. 279).

To write German correctly we have to choose the right case-form of the adjective. The rule usually given in grammar books is that the adjective has to have the same case* number* and gender as the noun with which it goes. Since the strong adjective has more distinct case- forms than the German noun* we cannot always recognize the case of the noun by its form. What we mean by the case of the noun is the case of the pronoun which can take its place. The pronoun has retained the four case-forms of the adjective.

During the three centuries after the Norman Conquest grammatical simplification of English went on apace. By a.d. 1400 English had out¬ stripped Dutch* and we might now call Anglo-American an isolating, as opposed to a flexional language. What flexions now persist are shared by some or all of the surviving Teutonic dialects. So it is true to say that Anglo-American grammar is essentially a Teutonic language. We have already met three features common to all Teutonic dialects* including English (p. 187). Of these the behaviour of the verb is the most impor¬ tant. The Teutonic verb has only two tense forms* of which the so- called often expresses future time (e.g. Igo to London to-morrow). There are two ways of making the simple past. Some verbs (strong class) undergo internal vowel change. Others (weak class) add a suffix with the d or t sound to the root. The existence of a compact class of verbs which undergo comparable stem vowel changes* and the weak suffix with the doit sound* are two trade-marks of the Teutonic group.

In connexion with verb irregularities which confuse a beginner three facts are helpful. One is that all strong verbs are old, and all newer ones belong to the weak class* which has now incorporated many verbs which were once strong. This has gone furthest in English. So it is usually safe to bet that if an English verb is strong, its etymological equivalent in another Teutonic language will also be strong. It is often safe to make another assumption. If two verbs undergo the same vowel change in English* equivalent verbs in another Teutonic language undergo a corresponding change. Thus the German verbs finden and bindeny equivalent to our words find and bind, have similar past tense forms fand and band with corresponding past participles gefunden and gebunden. So also the Danish verbs finde and binde form their past tense forms (fandt and handt) and past participles (fundet and bundet) in the

Bird's-Eye View of Teutonic Grammar 271

same way. The difference between the weak D and T types (repre¬ sented by spilled and spelt in English) is more apparent than real. In the spoken language (see p. 81), a D changes to T after the voiceless con¬ sonants F, K, F, S, and a T changes to D after the voiced consonants V, G, By Zy M. In English -(E)D is usually, and in German -(E)TE is always the terminal added to the stem of a weak verb in its past tense. The past participle of all transitive verbs goes with the present or

SIX TEUTONIC STRONG VERBS

(INFINITIVE — PAST TENSE SINGULAR— PAST PARTICIPLE)

ENGLISH	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN
COME	komma	komme	komen	kommen
came	kom	kom	kwam	kam
come	kommit	kommet	gekomen	gekommen
FIND	Anna	finds	vinden	linden
found	fann	fand	vond	fandt
found	fuimit	fonder	gevonden	gefunden
FLY	flyga	flyve	vliegen	fliegen
flew	flog	fioj	vloog	flog
flown	flugit	flojet	gevlogen	geflogen
RIDE	rida	ride	rijden	reiten
rode	red	red	reed	ritt
ridden	ridit	redet	gereden '	geritten
SEE	se	se	zien	sehen ■
saw	sag	saa	zag	sah
, seen	sett „	set	gezien	gesehen
SING	sjunga	synge	zingen	singen
sang	sjong	sang	zong	sang
sung	sjungit	sunget	gezongen	gesungen

past of Teutonic forms of the verb have in combinations equivalent to have given or had given. The table on p. 187 shows the conjugation of have in the Teutonic dialects. The use of other helper verbs (see p. 152) displays a strong family likeness. In fact, the same root-verbs are used in Danish, Swedish, and Dutch where the English verbs shall or willy should or wouldy are used alone or in front of have or had or any other verb to express future time or condition.

We have met with one common characteristic of the Teutonic lan¬ guages in Chapter V where there is a table of the comparison' of the

272 The Loom of Language

adjective. All the Teutonic languages form three classes of derivatives other than those usually called flexions . Some of them are important. For instance* it is less useful for the foreigner to know that a gander is a male goose or that the plural of louse is lice, than to learn the trick of manufacturing numberless new words such as fisher or writer by tacking

ENGLISH-TEUTONIC AFFIXES

ENGLISH	EXAMPLE	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN
(a) Noun:
-DOM	kingdom	-DOM	-DOM	-DOM	-TUM
-ER	writer	-ARE	-ER	-ER	-ER
-HOOD (-HEAD)	fatherhood	-HET	-HED	-HELD	-HEIT
-ING	warning	-ING	-ING	-ING	-UNG
-LING	darling	-LING	-LING	-LING	-LING
-NESS	kindness		—	-NIS	-NIS
-SHIP	friendship	-SKAP	-SKAB	-SCHAP	-SCHAFT
( b ) Adjective:
-FUL	wishful	-FULL	-FULD	-VOL	-VOLL
-ISH	hellish	-ISK	-ISK	-ISCH	-ISCH
-LESS	lifeless	-LOS	-LOS	-LOOS	-LOS
-LY	lonely	-LIG	-LIG	-LIJK	-LICH
-SOME	loathsome	-SAM	-SOM	-ZAAM	-SAM
-Y	dusty	-IG	-IG	-IG	-ICH* -IG
UN¬	unkind	0-	U-	ON-	UN-
CO Adverb:
-WARDS	homewards	—	—	-WAARTS	-WARTS
-WISE	likewise	-VIS	-VIS	-WIJZE	-WEISE
(d) Verb:
BE-	behold	BE-	DE¬	BE-	BE-
—	—	-ERA	ERE	-EEREN	-IEREN
FOR-	forbid	FOR-	FOR-	VER-	VER-
FORE-	foresee	FORE-	FORE-	VOOR-	VOR-
MIS-	mistake	MISS-	MIS-	MIS-	MISS-

-er on to a verb. The older Teutonic verbs readily combine with pre¬ positions* e.g. undergo, or overcome (Swedish overkomma), and with other prefixes which have no separate existence. Teutonic languages have many adjectives or adverbs formed from nouns by adding 4y (English)* -lig (Swedish-Danish)* -Iijk (Dutch)* and -lich (German)* corresponding to Old English -lie. In modem English this terminal is characteristic of adverbial derivatives (see p. in) but we still clings to a few adjectives such as godly, manly, brotherly, kindly. At {east ope of

Bird’s-Eye View of Teutonic Grammar 273

the affixes in the accompanying table, though very much alive, is not native. It has no precise English equivalent, recognizable as such. From about the twelfth century onwards German courtly poetry assimilated many French verbs. The infinitive ending -ier became Germanized as -ieren, and this terminal subsequently attached itself to native roots, as in halbieren (halve). The stress on the suffix -ter- instead of on the root labels it as an intruder. It turns up later as -er- in Scandinavian, and in Dutch it is -eer-. It is very prolific. In fact, it can tack itself on to almost any current international root, as of scientific terms, e.g. telefonera (Swed.), telefonere (Dan.), telefoneeren (Dutch), telefonieren (German). German, but not Dutch, verbs of this class have past participles with¬ out the ge- prefix, e.g. ich habe telegrafiert (I have telegraphed).

It is possible to avoid some errors of sef-expression if our bird’s-eye view takes in some of the outstanding differences between English and other Teutonic languages. One of these, the disappearance of gram¬ matical gender, and with it of adjectival concord, has been mentioned more than once. Several syntactical peculiarities of modem English are also pitfalls for the beginner. One common to Mayflower English and to English in its present stage, is the identity of word-order in different clauses of a complex sentence (pp. 161 to 165). The moral of this is to stick to simple sentences when possible, and to recognize the conjunctions listed on p. 161 as danger-signals when it is not con¬ venient to do so. The way to deal with some other outstanding syn¬ tactical peculiarities of Anglo-American when writing or speaking German, Dutch, Swedish, or Danish has been suggested in Chapter IV. Express yourself in the idiom of the Pilgrim Fathers. Three important rules to recall are: (d) inversion of the verb and its subject unless the latter is the first word in a simple statement (p. 154); (b) use of the simple interrogative, e.g. what say you? (p. 158); (c) use of the direct negative, e.g. I know not how (p. 160).

In the same chapter we have met with four other characteristics of Anglo-American usage, and the student of any other Teutonic language should recall them at this stage. They are: (a) the economy of English particles; ( b ) the peculiar uses of the English -ing derivative as verb- noun or with a helper (p. 139) to signify present time and continued action; (c) the disappearance of the distinction (p. 149) between transi¬ tive and intransitive verbs ; (d) the transference of the indirect object to the subject in passive constructions (p. 150).

It is important to note the wide range of the two epithets all and only. We can use the former before a plural or before a singular noun,

274 77z6 Loom of Language

e.g. all the water. Swedish, Danish, Dutch and German prescribe separate words (see table on p. 283) for all before a plural noun and all the,i.e. the whole. The English word only can qualify a verb, adjective, or noun. As an adverb, i.e. qualifier of a verb or adjective, its usual

TEUTONIC POINTER-WORDS AND LINK PRONOUNS*

ENGLISH	SWEDISH |	DANISH j	DUTCH	GERMANf
(a) Demonstratives ( see pp. 144-5).
	denna (c.s.)	denne (c.s.)	deze (c.s.)	I dieser (m.s.)t
THIS	detta (n.s.)	dette (n.s.)	dit (n.s.)	dieses (n.s.)
	dessa (pi.)	disse (pi.)	deze (pi.)	diese (f.s. & m.n.f,pl.)
	den	die	jener
THAT	det	dat	jenes
	de		die	jene
	vilken	hvilken	welke	welcher
WHICH	vilket !	hvilket	welk	welches
	vilka	hvilke	welke	welche

(b) Link Pronouns (see pp. 244-5).

THAT	ATT J AT	DAT	DASS
WHO, THAT, WHICH (as subject)	SOM	DIE(C.S.&C.n.pl.) DAT (n.sg.)	DER (m.) DAS (n.) die (f.s & m.n.f.pl.)
WHOM, THAT, WHICH (as object)	I DEN (m.) DAS (n.) die (f.s & m.n.f.pl.
TO WHOM TO WHICH	TILL VILKEN (c.) TILL VILKET (n.) TILL VILKA (pi.)	TIL HVILKEN TIL HVILKET TIL HVILKE	AAN WIE ( persons ) WAARAN (things)	dem (m.n.) DER (f.) DENJ5LV (C.pl.)
WHOSE, OF WHICH	VEMS	HVIS	VAN WIE (persons') WAARVAN (things)	! dessen (min.) deren (f.s & m.n.f.pl.)
WHOM, WHICH (after all other prepositions) ,	(h)vtlken (c.) (h)vilket (n.) VILKA HVILKE (pi.)	prep.' 4- WIE (persons) waar + prep. ( things )	as for whom above after pre¬ positions on page 263, otherwise as for TO WHOM.
WEAT	VAD | HVAD	WAT	WAS

meaning is the same as merely. As an adjective its usual meaning is solitary or single: Swedish, Danish, Dutch, and German prescribe separate words (see pp. 283 and 341) for only as adverb meaning merely and as adjective meaning single.

* c. common, n. neuter, m. masculine, /. feminine, gender, s . singular, pi. plural. For conventions respecting capitals , see p. 371.

f Nominative case-forms only given here (see p. 293).

$ In common speech stressed der> die , dasy replace dieser> etc., e.g. der Mann with stress on Mann means the maiu but with stress on der it means this man..

Bircfs-Eye View of Teutonic Grammar 275

Teutonic verbs include several confusing clusters of near synonyms. At one time all Teutonic dialects had a vtthfara or far an, meaning to go or to travel. It survives in set English expressions such as farewell or “to go far and fare worse.” The word ford comes from the same root. Otherwise go and its Dutch equivalent gaan have taken over its func¬ tions. The Scandinavian equivalent of go is more fastidious. We can use the Swedish gd when a human being goes on foot or when a train or other vehicle goes., but when we speak of going in a train or other vehicle the right verb is fara. Analogous remarks apply to Danish, and to the use of the German verbs gehen and fahren , but German usage is now less exacting.

Another cluster corresponds to place, set or lay , for all of which we can usually substitute put. The choice of the right word for put is per¬ plexing in other Teutonic languages, especially in German. It there¬ fore calls for explanation. We have three English words for bodily orientation, all Teutonic: stand, sit, lie. A bottle stands on the table if upright or lies if fallen; and we set, i.e. make sit, a flag on a pole. German preserves these distinctions meticulously in the corresponding causative verb forms stellen (Swed, sidlla), setzen (Swed. sdtta ), legen (Swed. Idggd) corresponding to stehen, sitzen, liegm (Swed. std, sitta, ligga :) for stand, sit, lie. They are not interchangeable though each equivalent to put. The intransitive forms in all Teutonic languages are strong, the causative weak.

German is more exacting than its sister languages in another way. We can combine put with a variety of directives. German demands separate derivative verbs, e.g. auf setzen (einen Hut) = to put on (a hat), anziehen (einen Rock) = to put on (a coat), umbinden (eine Schurze) = to put on (an apron). It is important to remember that the English verb make has a wider range than its dictionary equivalent in other Teutonic languages. Making in the sense of compelling is specifically English. For the correct word see compel or force.

To complete our bird’s-eye view, we have now to ask how the several members of the Teutonic group differ from and resemble one another. For this purpose we may draw a line across the map of Europe corre¬ sponding roughly with the fifty-fifth parallel of latitude. North of it, the Teutonic group is represented by Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, south by Dutch (including Flemish), and High German. This line now splits the Teutonic group into two natural clans with highly characteristic grammatical features.

276

The Loom of Language

TEUTONIC INTERROGATIVES*

ENGLISH	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN
how?	hur	hvordan	hoe	wie
how much? how many?	hur mycket hur manga	hvor meget hvor mange	\ hoeveel J	wieviel wieviele
when?	nar	naar	wanneer	wann
whence?	varifran	hvorfra	vanwaar	woher
whither? where	vart var	hvorhen hvor	waarheen waar	wohin wo
why?	varfor	hvorfor	waarom	warum
who?	VEM	HVEM	WIE J	WER
which? |	VILKEN , VILKET ; VILKA	HVILKEN, HV1LKET , HVILKE	WELKE WELK WELKE	1 WELCHER j (-ES, -E)
what?	VAD	HVAD	WAT	WAS
whom?	VEM	HVEM	WIEN	WEN
to whom?	TILL VEM	TIL HVEM	AAN WIE	WEM
whose?	VEMS	HVIS	VAN WIE	WESSEN
what kind of...?	vad slags	hvilken slags	wat voor een	was fiir ein

THE SCANDINAVIAN CLAN

The Scandinavian clan consists of four official languages of which Icelandic differs little from Old Norse of the sagas. Icelanders read the latter as we read Shakespeare, if we do so. The others, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, differ from one another scarcely more than do some dialects within the British Isles. The first is spoken throughout Sweden by over six million people, and by a substantial Swedish minority in Finland. Danish is the official language of Denmark, with a population of three and three-quarter millions. The Norwegian dialects are the vernaculars of about two and three-quarter millions. The official language of Norway is less highly standardized than that of Denmark. Till 1905^ when Norway seceded from Sweden, it was still Danish. This official Dano-Norwegian of the ruling clique was then the medium of instruction in all higher education as well as of administrative procedure, and was far removed from the speech of the masses. Since secession, the government has introduced successive changes to make the spelling more phonetic and the accepted grammatical standards

* Same conventions as on p. 371.

Bird's-Eye View of Teutonic Grammar 277

nearer to those of common intercourse. To accommodate local senti¬ ment of communities separated by great distances in a vast and thinly- populated territory, the newest official spelling and grammar-books admit many alternative forms; and as yet no English-Norwegian dictionaries incorporate the changes which came into force in 1938. The net result of all these changes is that written Norwegian is now as close to Swedish as to Danish.

The grammar of Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian is very much simpler than that of German. The word-order (see Chapter IV) is essentially like that of the authorized English Bible except that the negative particle or an adverb of time precede the verb in a subordinate clause. Illustrations of this are the Swedish and Danish equivalents of the sentence : he said that he could not come:

Han sade att han inte (or icke) kunde komma. (Szved.)

Han sagde at han ikke kunde komme. (Dan.)

Personal flexion of the verb has disappeared. The present tense ending for all persons singular and (except in literary Swedish) all persons plural, is the same, -r added to the infinitive form: the only exception to this rule is that the present tense of some Swedish verbs ends in -er instead of -or. The infinitive ending is -a (Swedish) or -s (Danish and Norwegian). The past tense of weak verbs ends in -de or -te (cf. loved and slept) in accordance with the preceding consonant (p. 81) when the end vowel of the stem is omitted. Compound tense forms are analogous to our own. Thus we have (Swedish) jag kallar (I call), jag kallade (I called), jag har kallat (I have called), jag hade kallat (I had called),;^ skall holla (I shall call),/a^ skulle kalla (I should call). In the Danish equivalent e replaces a throughout (t.g.jeg holder). Any good dictionary gives a list of the past tenses and past participles of strong verbs.

The active past participle used with hava or have always ends in t as above. The passive adjectival form is nearly always the same in Nor¬ wegian, often in Danish, but never in Swedish. The Swedish adjectival form ends in - d (sing.) or - de (plur.) when the verb is weak, or -en (sing.), -ena (plur.) when it is strong, as in given or givna in contradistinction to givit (given) after hava. The many Danish verbs which form a contracted past analogous to dreamt (in contradistinction to dr earned) , e.g. betale- betalt “(pay-paid), have no special adjectival form, and uncontracted verbs have kept the d form in the plural only, e.g. straffet (punished) in the singular, strajfede in the plural.

278

<*■ -•r a Jidir >snaSi, eSa aS starf A- •alfretta- kla bef- •s starfs 5alskrif- karitari ssfSa vlnna *tta- %ra

og

5

The Loom of Language

<OON ! morgun. FfiT. OstaCfest fregn fra Tokio hermi?, a5 Japanir muni ekkl

aftur a vald si% fylkjum i Hopei-hera6 Smaskasruhopar K hafa undanfama manuSi viS i naesta nagrenni hofuSb

Um 9® frnsimd tunaur saltadar alls & 811u landicu og i kvdld er buistviSad 200 pus. m&lver8i komin Aland i braedslu

loki.

328

h?

i

I

brj

A

maim 245 r V

SAMI mokaflinn er enn|a svo segja fyrir ollu forSurlandi, ends kefir ver>3 a-

VerksmiSjan a Solbakk? bum aS fa **

af k-

Fig. 31. — Cutting from Icelandic Newspaper showing the two th symbols p (as in thin) and 6 (as in them).

One outstanding oddity of the Scandinavian clan is the fiexional passive already mentioned on p. 120. Any part of the verb -can take a passive meaning if we add -5 to the end of it or if it ends in -r* substitute

s for the latter* e.g, in Swedish:

an hallos to be called

jag kallas I am called

jag kallades I was called

jag har hallats I have been called

jag shall kallas I shall be called jag skulle kallas I should be called

The rule is the same for all three dialects* and it is the easiest way of handling a passive construction. In the spoken language it is more usual to substitute a roundabout construction in which hliva (Swed.)* Hive (Dan.)* Mi (Norweg.) takes the place of our hey and vara or vaere (be) replaces to have. This passive auxiliary was originally equivalent to the German Meihen (remain). Its present tense is Mir or Miver> its past tense Mev (Norweg. Me); past participle Hivit, Mevet * or Mitt. The verb Miva takes the adjective participle (p. 277)* not the form used with hava in an

att holla

jag hollar jag kallade jag har kallat jag shall holla jag skulle holla

to call

I call I called I have called I shall call I should call

Bird’s-Eye View of Teutonic Grammar 279

active construction when (as always in Swedish) the two are different; e.g.:

jag hlir straffad I am being punished jeg blivet strajfet

vi blir ( bliva ) straff ade we are being punished vi blivet straff ede

Similarly we have:

jag shall bliva straffad I shall be punished jeg ska l blive strajfet

jag har blivit straffad I have been punished jeg er blevet strajfet

jag hade blivit straffad I had been punished jeg var blevet strajfet

The only flexions of the noun are the genitive -s (see below) and the plural ending, typically - er in Danish, Norwegian, and many Swedish nouns (-ar and - or in some Swedish). A few nouns form a plural analogous to that of our ox-oxen . Two words of this class are common to all three dialects: — ear-ears: ora-dron (Swed.), 0re-0ren (Dan., Norweg.), and eye-eyes, oga-dgon (Swed.), 0je-0jne (Dan.), oye-oyne (Norweg.). A large class like our sheeps with no plural flexion, includes all monosyllabic nouns of neuter gender. A few words (p. 206) like our mouse-mice , man-men (Swed. man-man , Dan. Mand-Maend , Norweg. Mann-Menn) form the plural by internal vowel-change alone. As in German, many monosyllables with the stem vowels o, a, have modified plurals, e.g. book-books = bok-bocker (Swed.), Bog-Boger (Dan.).

The so-called indefinite article (a or an) has two forms in official Swedish and Danish. Norwegian, like some Swedish dialects, now has three. One, ett (Swedish) or et (Dan. and Norweg.) stands before nouns classed as neuter. The other, ens stands before nouns classed as non¬ neuter (common gender) in Swedish and Danish, or masculine in Norwegian, which has a feminine ei as well. Thus we have en god fader (a good father), and et(t) godt ham (a good child). The adjective has three forms :

(a) root + the suffix -a (Sw.) or* -e (Dan. and Norweg.) when associated with any plural noun or any singular noun preceded by a demonstrative or' possessive, e.g. :

SWEDISH , DANISH

good women goda kvinnor gode Kvinder

my young child mitt unga bam mit unge Bam

this good book derma goda bok denne gode Bog

(b) root alone , when associated with a singular non-neuter noun which is not preceded by a demonstrative or possessive, e.g.:

a good dog en god hund en god Hund

280 The Loom of Language

(c) root + suffix -t9 when associated with a singular neuter noun not preceded by a demonstrative or possessive, e.g. :

a young child ett ungt barn et ungt Bam

The oddest feature of the. Scandinavian clan is the behaviour of the definite article. If a singular noun is not preceded by an adjective, the definite article has the same form as the indefinite but is fused to the end of the noun itself, e.g. :

en bok = a book = en Bog : boken = the book = Bogen ett barn — a child = et Bam : hornet = the child = Barnet

If the noun is plural the suffix -na (Swed.) or -ne (Dan. and Norweg.) is tacked on to it when the last consonant is r. If the plural does not end in -r, the definite article suffix is - en (Swed.) or -me (Dan. and Norweg.), e.g.:

gator — streets = Gader : gatoma = the streets = Gaderne ham = children = Bern : barnen = the children = BSrnene

If an adjective precedes a noun the definite article is expressed by the demonstrative dm (com.), det (neut.), de (plur.) which otherwise means that . In Swedish it is still accompanied by the terminal article, e.g.:

de goda hundama = the good dogs = de gode Hunder

The fusion of the terminal definite article with the noun is so complete that it comes between the latter and the genitive -s, e.g. :

a dog’s	en hunds	en Hunds
the dog’s	hundens	Hundens
the dogs’	hundarnas	Hundernes
a child’s	ett bams	et Bams
the child’s	barnets	Barnets
the children’s	barnens	Bornenes

Comparison of the Scandinavian (p. 190) is like that of the English adjective. Comparatives and superlatives have no separate neuter form. A pitfall for the beginner arises from the fact that out much and many have the same comparative and superlative forms. Thus we have:

mycket-mera-mest much-more-most meget-mere-meste manga-flera-flest many-more-most mange-flere-fleste

Scandinavian adverbs are formed from adjectives by adding the neuter suffix -i (also by adding -vis or -en). The -t is not added to Danish and Norwegian adjectives which end in -lig.

Bird’s-Eye View of Teutonic Grammar 281

The survival of gender is less troublesome than it would otherwise

be because most nouns belong to the non-neuter {common) class. The neuter class includes substances, trees, fruits, young animals, including barn (child), countries, continents, and all abstract nouns which end in

ie imidlertid ble'v *es at rederne fant det j nyttesl0st a fortsette sa lenge de nor- 1 1 ske maskinister stod ute'nonq,.

I Mange med i biblio- tekmotet p§ Rjukan.

KJUKAN, 8. august CAP) Norsk Bibliotekforening holder i disse dager sitt Srsm0te Rjukan. Rju- kan offentlige bibliotek feirer .samtidig sitt SS’sars jubleum. Arsm0tet bar f&tt en usedvanlig stor tilslutning, idet ikke mind re enn 120 bibliotekfolk fra- hele * landet deltar. Sdndag var det Spent fore- drag.^ i Folkets hus, hvor Johan inckel jf. talte om d?ubli-

ixied til rapporter og bi * i-i*

Fig. 32. — -Cutting from a Norwegian Newspaper showing the Scan¬ dinavian VOWEL SYMBOLS 0 AND d.

-ande or -ende. Besides these there is a compact group of common words shown on page 282.

The Scandinavian negative particle is quite unlike the English- Dutch-German not-niet-nicht. In Danish and Norwegian it is ikke, of which the literary Swedish equivalent (used only in books) is icke. In conversation or correspondence Swedes use inte, e.g. jag skall inte se honom = I shall not see him =j eg skal ikke se ham .

There is a much greater gap between the written and spoken language of Sweden than of Denmark and ^modern Norway . Many flexions which

282 The Loom of Language

exist in literature have no existence in spoken Swedish or in correspon¬ dence. In literary Swedish the plural of the present tense is identical with the infinitive, and the past of strong verbs has plural forms which end in os some being very irregular, e.g. for ga (go) we have the two past forms giek-gingo and analogous ones for fd (may). The plural flexion of the verb Is never used in speech. The final -de of the past tense-form is often silent. The infinitive and the corresponding present tense-form of

ENGLISH	SWEDISH	DANISH	ENGLISH	SWEDISH	DANISH
animal	djur	Dyr	floor	golv	Gulv
egg	agg	! Aeg	hotel	hotel!	Hotel
life	LIV	house	HUS
people	FOLK	roof	tak |	Tag
pig	SVIN	table	BORD
sheep	far	Faar	window	fonster	Vindue
blood	BLOD	country	LA	lND
bone	BEN	language	sprak |	1 Sprog
ear	ora	0re	letter	BREV
eye	oga |	0je	light	ljus	Lys
hair	har	Haar	name	nanrn	Navn
heart	hjarta	Hjerte	weather	vader	Vejr
leg	BEN !	word	ORD
water	vatten	Vand	year	ir	Aar

many verbs is contracted as in Norwegian, e.g. be (bedja)i request, bli (bltvd)3 become, dra ( draga ), carry, ge (giva)> give, ha (hava), have, ta (taga) take. Similarly shall contracts to skas Eder to Er (you or your), broder (brother) to bror.

The terminal article and the flexional passive are both highly charac¬ teristic of the Scandinavian clan. Another of its peculiarities is a booby- ttap for the beginner, because English, like Dutch or German, has no equivalent for it. Scandinavian dialects have special forms of the possessive adjective of the third person (analogous to the Latin suits) corresponding to the reflexive pronoun sig. They are sin (sing, common), sitt or sit (neut. sing.), sina or sine (plur.) in accordance with the gender and number of the thing possessed. We must always (and only) use them when they refer back to the subject of the verb, e.g. :

Jag har hans bok (I have his book). Jeg har bans Bog.

Han har sin bok (He has his book). Han har sin Bog.

Jag besokte hennes bror (I visited her brother). Jeg besegte hendes Broder. Hon dlskar sin bam (She loves her child). Hun elsker sit Bam,

Bird’s-Eye View of Teutonic Grammar 283

TEUTONIC INDEFINITE POINTER-WORDS

	SWEDISH	DANISH
A, AN	. en (c.)
ett (n.)	ci (n.)
ALL (pi)*	alia	aile
AS MUCH AS	sa mycken (-r) som	saa -megew (~r) som
BOTH	b&da (bagge)	begge (baade)
EACH, EVERY, EACH ONE	var	hver
ENOUGH	nog	nok
EVERYONE	ENVAR	ENHVER
EVERYTHING	ALLT	ALT
FEW		faa
MANY	manga	mange
MUCH	mycken (-r)	megew (~z)
NO, NOT ANY	ingen (c,) intet (n.)
NOBODY	INGEN
NOTHING	INTET
ONE (pron.)	MAN	(EN)
ONLYt	enda '	ene
	annan	anden
OTHER	annat	andet
	andra	andre
SEVERAL	flera	Sere
	n&gon	nogen
SOME, ANY	niigot	noget
	n&gra	nogle
SOMEONE	nagon	NOGEN
SOMETHING	nAgot	NOGET
SUCH	sadan (-r, -a)	saadan (-r, -«)
	den	(c.s.)
THE	det (n.s.)
		de (pi.)
TOO MUCH	for mycken (-*)	| for megen (,-r)

DUTCH

een

a.l

zooveel als

german!:

in (m. & n.) eine (f.) aile

so viel wie

beide

elk («-), ieder C-e)

jeder (-es, ~e)

genceg

IEDEREEN

/

weinige

veele

veel

geen

NJ

NIETS

MSN

eenigst -e)

ander

andere

verscheidene

eenig

genug

JEDERMANN (AI.I.E) .ES

wenige

vide

viel

kein (m. & n.) keine (f.)

;and

NIGHTS

MAN

einzig (e)

anderer (m.) anderes (n.) andere (f.)

mehrere,

verschiedene

IEMAND

IETS

JE.MAND

ETWAS

zulk (- e )

de (c.s.) het (n.s.)

te veel

soldier (-«, -a)

der (m.s.) das (n.s.)

die (f.s. & m.nXpl.) zuviel

THE SOUTHERN CLAN

The flexional passive of the Scandinavian verb and the terminal definite article of the Scandinavian noun are features which the English and the southern representatives of the Teutonic group have never had at any stage in their common history. The southern clan, which in¬ cludes Dutch and German, also has positive grammatical character¬ istics which its members do not share with its northern relatives. Three of them recall characteristics of Old English:

(i) The flexional ending of the third person singular of the present tense of a Dutch or German verb is t. In accordance with the * All before a singular noun is equivalent to the whole (Swed. hela> Dan. hele3 Dutch geheely German ganz). f Not as adverb, see p. 341.

% Invariant unless masculine , neuter and feminine nominative case-forms are in parenthesis.

284

The Loom of Language

phonetic evolution of the modern Teutonic languages, this corresponds to the final ~th in Mayflower English (e.g. saith3 lovetK),

(ii) The infinitive ends in -en3 as the Old English infinitive ends in

-an (e.g. Dutch-German finden. Old English, findan).

(iii) The past participle of most verbs carries the prefix ge-3 which

softened to y- in Middle English, and had almost completely disappeared by the beginning of the seventeenth century.

When the Roman occupation of Britain came to an end, the domain of Low and High German, in contradistinction to Norse, was roughly what it is to-day, and a process of differentiation had begun. In the Lowlands and throughout the area which is now North Germany there have been no drastic phonetic changes other than those which are also incorporated in the modem Scandinavian dialects (e.g. w to v3 Y to 6 or t and 6 to d). To the South, a second sound-shift (p. 231) oc¬ curred before the time of Alfred the Great. The German dialects had begun to split apart in two divisions when west Germanic tribes first invaded Britain.

This division into Low or north and High or south and middle German cuts across the official separation of the written languages. Dutch (including Belgian Dutch or Flemish) is Low German with its own spelling conventions. What is ordinarily called the German language embodies the High German (second) sound-shift and an elaborate battery of useless flexions which Dutch has discarded. It is the written language of Germany as a whole, of Austria and of parts of Switzerland. Throughout the same area it is also the pattern of edu¬ cated and of public speech. The country dialects of northern Germany are Low German. This Plattdeutsch, which is nearer to Dutch than to the daily speech of south or middle Germany, has its own literature, like the Scots Doric.

The flexional grammar of Dutch is very simple. The chief difficulty is that there are two forms of the definite article, de and het . The latter is used only before singular nouns classed as neuter, e.g. de stoel — de stoelen (the chair— the chairs), het boek — de boeken (die book — the books). There is only one indefinite article, een. Adjectives have two forms, e.g. deze man is rijk and deze rijke man for this man is rich and this rich man respectively. Reduction of the troublesome apparatus of adjectival concord has gone as far as in the English of Chaucer, and the inconvenience of gender crops up only in the choice of the definite article. As in Middle English, the suffix -e is added to the

Bird’s-Eye View of Teutonic Grammar 285

ordinary root form of the adjective before a plural noun or a singular noun preceded by an article, demonstrative or possessive.

What is true of many of the dialects of Germany and Switzerland is true of Dutch. The genitive case-form of the noun is absent in speech. It has made way for the roundabout usage with van equivalent to the German von (of), e.g. de vrouw van mijn vriend (in dialectical and colloquial German die Frau von meinem Freund — the wife of my friend or my friend’s wife). Thus case-distinction survives in Dutch even less than in English. The only noun-flexion still important is the plural ending. This has been much less regularized than in English. Alone among the Teutonic languages, Dutch shares with English a class of nouns with the plural terminal -s. This includes those that end in - el, -en, and -er, e.g. tafet-tafels (table-tables), kammer-kammers (room-rooms). The majority of Dutch nouns take -en like oxen, e.g. huis-huizen (house-houses).

With due regard to the sound-shift, the Dutch verb is essentially the same as the German. There is one important difference. In Dutch, zal (our shall) is the auxiliary verb used to express future time. In Cape Dutch or Afrikaans (one of the two official languages of the Union of South Africa) the simple past (e.g. I heard), habitually replaced in some German dialects by the roundabout construction with have (e.g. I have heard), has almost completely disappeared in favour of the latter. This alternative construction is a useful trick in German con¬ versation, because the past tense and past participle of Teutonic verbs (cf. gave, given), are often unlike. So the use of the informal construc¬ tion dispenses with need for memorizing the past tense forms. The present tense of the Afrikaans verb is invariant and identical with the infinitive, which has no terminal.

The first person singular of the present tense is the root (i.e. the infini¬ tive after removal of the suffix -en). The 2nd and 3rd person singular is formed from the first by adding -t, and all persons of the plural are the same as the infinitive^ The past tense of weak verbs is formed by adding -te or -de in the singular, or -ten and -den in the plural, to the root. Whether we use the d (as in loved) or t form (as in slept) is determined (see p. 81) in accordance with pronunciation of a dental after a voiced or voiceless consonant. Thus we have:

ik leer (I learn), ik leerde (I learned).

ik lack (I laugh). ik lachte (I laughed).

The past participle is formed by putting ge- in front of the root and adding -d or -t. The compound tenses are formed as in English, e.g. :

ik heb geleerd (I have learned). ik zal leeren (I shall learn).

286 The Loom of Language

Passive expression follows the German pattern (p. 298) with the auxiliary word-wordt-worden (present)* werd-werden (past).

Owing to the ease with which it is possible to recognize the equi¬ valence of Dutch words and English words of Teutonic stock* as also to the relative simplicity of its flexional system which* with Danish* stands near to English* Dutch would be a very easy language for anyone already at home with Anglo-American if it shared the features of word- order common to English* Scandinavian dialects* and French. As we shall now see* the chief difficulties arise in connexion with the con¬ struction of the sentence.

GERMAN WORD ORDER

The most important difference between English and the two Ger¬ manic languages is the order of words. It is so great that half the work of translating a passage from a German or Dutch book remains to be done when the meaning of all the individual words is clear* especially if it conveys new information or deals with ' abstract issues. Were it otherwise* the meaning of any piece of simple Dutch prose would be transparent to an English-speaking reader who had spent an hour or so examining the Table of Particles* etc., elsewhere in The Loom of Lan¬ guage. To make rapid progress in reading Dutch or German* it is therefore essential to absorb the word-pattern of the printed page. One suggestion which may help the reader to apply the rules given in the preceding paragraph appears on p. 166.

How the meaning of the simplest narrative may be obscured by the nr> familiarity of the arrangement of’words* unless the reader is attuned to it by the painless effort of previous exercise in syntactical translation^ can be seen from the following word-for-word translation of a passage from one of Hoffmann’s Tales:

“Have you now reasonable become* my dear lord Count*” sneered the gipsy. “I thought to me indeed that itself the money find would. For I have you indeed always as a prudent and intelligent man known.’ 5

“Indeed thou shalt it have* but under one condition.”

“And that sounds ?”

“That thou now nor never to the young Count the secret of his birth betray. Thou hast it surely not perhaps already done?”

“Aye* there must I indeed a real dunce be*” replied Rollet laughing. “Rather had I from me myself the tongue out-cut. No* no* about that can you yourself becalm. For if I him it told had* so would he his way to the Lady mother certainly even without me already found have.”

To write German correctly it is necessary to know its archaic system

Bird's-Eye View of Teutonic Grammar 287

of concord between the noun* pronoun* and adjective (p. 293)* as well as to know how to arrange German words in the right way. To read German fluently* the former is unimportant and the latter is all- important. So the word-pattern of German is the common denomi¬ nator* and should be the first concern of the beginner who does not share the conviction that all learning must and should be painful. At this stage the reader should therefore read once more the remarks on pp. 153-166. To emphasize the importance of German (or Dutch) word-order* we shall now bring the essential rules together:

(a) Principal clauses* co-ordinate clauses* and simple sentences :

(i) Inversion of verb and subject when another sentence

element or a subordinate clause precedes the latter (p. 154) :

Oft kommt mein Mann nickt nach Hause Often my husband does not come home.

Weil es Sonntag ist> koche ich nicht Because it is Sunday* I am not cooking.

(ii) Past participle or infinitive go to the end of the sentence or

clause :

Die Katze hat die Milch nicht getninken The cat hasn’t drunk the milk.

Der Hnnd will mir folgen The dog wants to follow me,

(iii) The simple negative follows the object (direct or indirect)

when it negates the statement as a whole, but precedes a

word or phrase which it negates otherwise :

Mein Vater hat mir gestem den Scheck nicht gegeben My father did not give me the cheque yesterday.

Mein Vater hat mir nicht gestem den Scheck gegeben My father did not give me the cheque yesterday,

(b) Subordinate clauses :

(iv) The finite verb goes to the end* immediately after the, parti¬

ciple or infinitive when it is a helper:

Sie kam nach Hause> weil sie kein Geld mehr hatte She came home because she had no more money.

Mem Bruder sagte mir3 dass er nach Berlin gehen zoolle (will) My brother told me that he wanted to go to Berlin.

In all other Teutonic languages, except Dutch* and in all Romance

288 The Loom of Language

languages, words connected by meaning are placed in close proximity. German, and not only . written German, dislocates them. Thus the article may be separated from its noun by a string of qualifiers, and the length of the string is determined by the whims of the writer, e.g. der gestern Abend auf dem Alexanderplatz von einem Lastauto uberfahrene Backermeister Muller ist heute morgen seinen Verletzungen erlegen = the yesterday evening on the Alexandraplatz by a lorry run over master- baker Muller has this morning to his injuries succumbed. The auxiliary pushes the verb to the end of the statement, as in ich werde dich heute Abend aufsuchen (I shall you this evening visit). When you get to the end of a sentence you may always fish up an unsuspected negation, e.g. er befriedigte unsere Wunsche nicht = he satisfied our wishes not. The dependent clause is rounded up by the verb, e.g. er behauptety dass er ihn in Chicago getrojfen habe = he says that he him in Chicago met had; and when the subordinate is placed before the main clause it calls for inversion of the verb in the latter (da er arbeitslos isty kann er die Miete nicht bezahlen = since he unemployed is, can he the rent not pay). Even the preposition may leave its customary place before the noun and march behind it, e.g. der Dame gegenuber (opposite the lady) — as was possible in Latin, e.g. pax vobiscum (peace be with you).

Other preliminary essentials for a reading knowledge of German are already contained in the tables of pronouns, particles, demonstratives, and helper verbs, together with what has been said about the common features of all the Teutonic languages or of the Germanic clan. Anyone who wishes to write German correctly must also master the concord of noun and adjective. The behaviour of nouns, of adjectives, and of pronouns in relation to one another confronts those of us who are interested in the social use of language and its future with an arresting problem.

■ It is easy to understand why Icelanders can still read the Sagas. The Norse community in Iceland has been isolated from foreign invasion and intimate trade contacts with the outside world, while the speech- habits of Britain and some parts of Europe have been eroded by con¬ quest and commerce. The conservative character of German is not such a simple story. The Hanseatic ports once held leadership in maritime trade. There were famous culture centres such as Nuremberg, Augsburg and Mainz. There was the flourishing mining industry of South Germany and Saxony There were the great international banking-houses of the Fugger and Welser. Still, Germany was not yet a nation like fourteenth-century England or sixteenth-century France.

Bird's-Eye View of Teutonic Grammar 289

It had no metropolis comparable to London, Paris, Rome, or Madrid. The Berlin of to-day does not enjoy a supremacy which these capitals had earned three hundred years ago. Till the present generation German was not the language of a single political unit in the sense that Icelandic has been for a thousand years. When Napoleon’s campaigns brought about the downfall of the Holy Roman Empire, German was the common literary medium of a loose confederation of sovereign states with no common standard of speech. Modern Germany as a political unity begins after the battle of Sedan. The union of all the High Ger¬ man-speaking peoples outside Switzerland did not come about till Hitler absorbed Austria in the Third Reich.

In the fourteenth century, that is to say about the time when English became the official language of the English judiciary, the secretariat of the chancelleries of the Holy Roman Empire gave up the use of Latin. They started to write in German. The royal chancellery of Prague set the fashion, and the court of the Elector of Saxony fell into step. This administrative German, a language with archaic features like that of our own law courts, was the only common standard when the task of translating the Bible brought Luther face to face with a medley of local dialects. CT speak,” he tells us, “according to the usage of the Saxon chancellery which is followed by all the princes and kings of Germany. All the imperial cities, all the courts of princes, write accord¬ ing to the usage of the Saxon chancellery which is that of my own prince.”

Luther’s Bible made this archaic German the printed and written language of the Protestant states, north and south. At first, the Catholic countries resisted. In time they also adopted the same standard. Its spread received much help from the printers who had a material interest in using spelling and grammatical forms free from all too obvious provincialisms. By the middle of the eighteenth century Germany already had a standardized literary and written language. During the nineteenth century what had begun as a paper language also came to be a spoken language. Still, linguistic unification has never gone so far in Germany as in France. Most German children are nurtured on local dialects. They do not get their initiation to the spoken and written norm till they reach school; and those who remain in the country habitually speak a local vernacular. In the larger towns most people speak a language which stands somewhere between dialect and what is taught in school, but the pronunciation even of educated people, who deliberately pursue the prescribed model, usually betrays the

R

290 The Loom of Language

part of the country from which they come. There are also considerable regional differences of vocabulary, as illustrated by a conversation

between a Berliner and a Wiener :

“A Berliner in Vienna goes into a shop and asks for a Reisemiltze (travelling cap). The assistant corrects him: ‘You want zReisekappe ,’ and shows ifirn several. The Berliner remarks : ‘Hie bunten hebe ich nicht (I don’t like those with several colours). The assistant turns this sentence into His own German : ‘Hie farbigen gef alien Ihnen nicht? The Viennese, you see, loves (Jiehz) only people; he does not love things. Lastly, the Berliner says: ‘Wie teuer ist diese Mutze? (How much is this cap?), and again is guilty, all innocently, of a most crude Berlmism. Teuer, indeed, applies to prices above the normal, to unduly high prices. The Viennese merely says: Was hostel das?’ The Berliner looks round for the Kasse (cash-desk) and finds the sign: Kassa. He leaves the shop saying, since it is still early in the day: ‘Guten Morgen, greatly to the surprise of the Viennese, who uses this form of words on arrival only, and not on leaving. The Viennese in turn replies with the words: ‘Ich habe die Ehre ! Guten Tag /’ and this time the Berliner is surprised, since he uses the expression Guten Tag l only on arrival, and not when leaving.”

(E. Tonnelat: A History of the German Language )

THE GERMAN NOUN

■ The usual practice of text-books is to exhibit tables of different declensions of German nouns such as those given on p. 197. This way of displaying the eccentricities of the German noun is useful if we want to compare it with its equivalent in one of the older and more highly inflected representatives of the Teutonic family; but it is not a good way of summarizing the peculiarities which we need to remember , because the German noun of to-day is simpler than the Teutonic noun in the time of Alfred the Great. For instance, a distinctive genitive plural ending has disappeared altogether. In the spoken language the dative singular case-ending survives only in set expressions such as nock House (home) or zu House (at home). Essential rules we need to remember about what endings we have to add to the nominative singular (i.e. dictionary) form are the following:

A. In the singular:

(1) Feminine nouns do not change.

(li) Masculine nouns which, like der Knabe (boy), have -E in the nominative take -EN in all other cases. A few others (e.g. MENSCH, KAMERAD, SOLDAT, PRXNZ, OCHS, N*ERV) also take

. -en.

(iii) The other masculine nouns and all neuter nouns add -ES or -S (after -EL, -ER, -EN, -CHEN) in the genitive.

Bird’s-Eye View of Teutonic Grammar 291

(iv) Proper names and technical terms derived from foreign roots such as telefon or radium add -S in the genitive and do not otherwise change.

B. The dative plural of all nouns ends in -(E)N.

C. In ALL OTHER CASES of the PLURAL:

(i) Add -EN to all polysyllabic feminines (except Mutter and

Tochter) and to all the masculines mentioned under A(ii).‘

(ii) Masculines and neuters in -ER, -EL, -EN, -CHEN (diminu¬

tives), do not change, but many of the masculines and all feminines and neuters (diminutives) have root-vowel change (Umlaut) as stated under D.

(iii) Many monosyllabic masculines, feminines, and neuters

take -E. Some hf the masculines and all the feminines have Umlaut, e.g. der Sohn (son) — die Sohne (sons).

(iv) The most common monosyllabic neuters (e.g. Bild, Blatt,

Buch, Ei, Feld, Glas, Haus, Kind, Kleid, Land, Licht, Loch, etc.), and a few masculines of one syllable have -ER (dative -ERN). All nouns of this group have Umlaut.

(v) A small number of masculines and neuters show mixed

declension, i.e.-(E)S in the genitive singular and -(E)N in the plural. None of them has Umlaut. Examples are: auge (eye), bauer (farmer), bett (bed), doktor (pro¬ fessor, direktor, rektor, etc.), nachbar (neighbour), ohr (ear), staat (state), strahl (ray).

D. The root vowels a3 0, «, and the diphthong au may change to

a, 6, ii, au in the plural.

The genitive form of the German noun follows the thing possessed as in der Hut meines Vaters (my father’s hat). In this example the masculine singular noun carries its genitive terminal. Since no plural and no feminine singular nouns have a special genitive ending, the beginner will ask how to express the same relation when the noun is neither masculine singular nor neuter singular. The answer is that it usually comes after a pointer-word or adjective which does carry the case trade-mark. Thus my sister's hat is der Hut meiner Schwester. The roundabout method of expression is common in speech, and is easier to handle, e.g. der Hut von meinem Vater (the hat of my father), or der Hut von meiner Schwester.

To apply the rules given in the preceding and in succeeding para¬ graphs we need to be able to recognize the gender class to which a German noun belongs. Each noun in the museum exhibits of Part IV is 8Q labelled by the definite article (nominative sing.) der (m.), die (f.)9 das (n.). The following rules are helpful:

292 The Loom of Language

(i) masculine are:

(a) Names of adult males (excluding diminutives), seasons,

months, days and compass points. Notable exceptions : Die Nacht (night), die Woche (week), dasjahr (year).

(b) Nouns which end in -BN (excluding infinitives so used).

(ii) feminine are:

(a) Names of adult females (excluding diminutives). Notable exception: das Weib (wife or woman).

(Jb) Nouns which end in -El, -HEXT, -KEIT, -SCHAFT , -IN, and -UNG and foreign words which end in -IE, -IK, -ION, -TAT.

(iii) neuter are: "

(a) Diminutives which end in -LEIN or -CHEN.

(b) Metals.

(c) All other parts of speech used as nouns, together with the

following common words :

EIS	(ice)	El	(egg)	BLATT (leaf)
ENDE	(end)	HUHN	(fowl)	dorf (village)
FEUER	(fire)	INSERT		gras (grass)
GAS	(gas)	kaninchen (rabbit)	HAUS
JAHR	(year)	PFERD	(horse)	HOTEL
LICHT	(Hght)	SCHAF	(sheep)	LAND
WASSER	(water)	SCHWEIN	(pig)	stroh (straw)
		TIER	(animal)
BAD	(bath)	BIER	(beer)	auge (eye)
BETT	(bed)	BROT	(bread)	BEIN (leg)
BILD	(picture)	FETT	(fat)	blut (blood)
BUCK	(book) .	FLEISCH	(meat)	haar (hair) .
FENSTER	(window)	GEMUSE	(greens)	herz (heart)
KISSEN	(cushion)	OL	(oil)	ohr (ear)
SCHLOSS	(lock, castle)
ZIMMER	(room)
	BILLET	(ticket)	becken (basin)
	BOOT	(boat)	GLAS
	DAGH	(roof)	KLEID	(dress)
	DECK		PAPIER
	DOCK		TUCH	(cloth)
	SCHIFF	(ship)
	SEGEL	(sail)

German verb-roots used as nouns without change are generally mas¬ culine, e.g. fallen — der Fall> laufen — der Lauf (run — course), sitzen — der Sitz (sit— seat), schreien — der Schrei (cry). If the verb-root changes.

Bird’s-Eye View of Teutonic Grammar 293

e.g. by vowel mutation* the noun is usually feminine* e.g. geben — die Gabe (give — gift)* helfen — die Hilfe (help)* schreiben — die Schrift (write — script).

CONCORD OF THE GERMAN ADpCTIVE

The most difficult thing about German for the beginner is the elaborate flexion of the adjective. Its behaviour depends on (i) whether it is predicative* he. separated from its noun by the verb be ; (ii) whether it stands before a noun without any pointer-word or possessive adjective in front of it; (iii) whether it stands between a noun and a pointer-word or possessive adjective.

These remarks apply to ordinary adjectives. Numerals (other than ein*) do not change. Demonstratives (table on p. 274)* the articles and possessives (table on p. 127) always behave in the same way in accord¬ ance with the number of the noun* its gender class and its case. The demonstratives (dieser, jeder, jener, solcker, mancher, welcher ) behave like the definite article (der, die, das, etc.). In the singular the possessives (mein, etc.) behave like the indefinite article (ein), as also does kein (no). In the plural they take the same endings as demonstratives.

	MASC! SING.	NEUTER SING.	FEMIN. SING.	PLURAL	MASC.	NEUTER	FEMIN.
Nomin.	DER	DAS	DIE	EIN	EINE
Acc.	DEN	EINEN :
Gen.	DES	DER	{ EINES	EINER
Dat.	DEM		DEN 1	EINEM

In the preceding table the nominative case-form is the one which goes with a noun* if subject of the verb. The genitive is the one which goes with a noun used in a possessive sense. The accusative case-form goes with a noun which is the direct object* and the dative with a noun which is the indirect object. If a preposition comes before the determinative (demonstrative* possessive or article) we have to choose between the accusative and dative case-forms in accordance with the recipe on p. 262. Thus the accusative case-form goes with ohne (without)* fur (for)* and durch (through). The dative goes with mit (with)* von (of or from)*

* Zwei and drei have genitive forms* zweier, dreier * still in use.

294 The Loom of Language

and in unless the verb denotes motion. With the neuter* feminine and masculine nouns das Haus (house)* die Frau (woman)* der Hut (hat)* we therefore write:

SINGULAR

PLURAL

ohm die Hauser mit den Hdusern ohm meim Hauser in meimn Hdusern

ohm das Haus ohm mein Haus

fur die Frau fur meim Frau

mit dem Haus mit meinem Haus

von der Frau von meiner Frau

fttr die Frauen 1 fur unsere Frauen

von den Frauen von unseren Frauen

durch den Hut in dem Hut durch die Hute in den Huten

dutch meimn Hut in meinem Hut durch meim HUte von meinen Huten

The rules for choice of endings appropriate to ordinary adjectives fall under four headings:

(i) If predicative* an adjective has the dictionary form without addition of any ending. It behaves as all English adjectives behave. We do not have to bother about the number* gender or case of the noun. We use the same word dumm to say:

Das ist dumm = this is stupid. Sie ist dumm — she is stupid.

Er ist dumm = he is stupid. Wir sind dumm — we are stupid.

(ii) If the adjective comes after a demonstrative or the definite article it behaves like nouns of the weak class represented by der Knabe (p. 290). We then have to choose between the two endings -E and -EN in accor¬ dance with the number* gender* and case of the noun. The ending -E is the form which always goes with a singular subject. It is also the accusa¬ tive case-form for singular nouns of the feminine and neuter classes. Otherwise we have to use the ending -EN. The following table shows the relation of the definite article to an accompanying (weak) adjective:

	MASCULINE SINGULAR	NEUTER SINGULAR	FEMININE SINGULAR	PLURAL
Nomin.	der blind!?	das blind!?	die blind!?	die blmdEN
Accus.	den I blindEAT
Gen.	des blindEAT	der blindEAT
Dat.	dem blindEAT		den blind!?!/

Bird's-Eye View of Teutonic Grammar 295

Thus we have to use the weak forms of the adjective in:

von der guten Frau = from the good woman. mit diesem neuen Geld = with this new money. ohne die alten Hiite — without the old hats.

(iii) When no demonstrative, article or possessive stands in front of the adjective, it takes the strong endings of the various case-forms of the demonstrative. Once we know the case-forms of ders das* diey we know the strong endings of the adjective. The table below shows the essential similarity between the strong endings of the adjective and the endings of the absent (in brackets) demonstrative:

	MASCULINE SINGULAR	NEUTER SINGULAR	FEMININE SINGULAR	PLURAL
Nomin.	(dER) rotER		(daS)	(diE)
Accus.	(dEN) rotEN		rotES	rotE
Gen.	(dES) rotES	(dER) rotER
Dat.	(dEM) rotEM		(dEN) rotEN

Accordingly we use the strong forms analogous to the corresponding absent demonstrative in:

ohne rotes Blut mit rotem Blut

without red blood with red blood

fur gute Frauen von guten Frauen

for good women of good women

(iv) The behaviour ‘Of an ordinary adjective when it stands alone before the noun and when it follows a demonstrative or the definite article might be summed up by saying that it does not carry the strSng ending if preceded by another word which has it. This statement includes what happens when it comes after the other class of determinatives, i.e. after einy keiny and the possessives meiny seiny etc. The nominative singular masculine, as well as both the nominative and accusative singular neuter forms of these words lack the strong endings of the other case-forms; and the adjective which follows the indefinite article or possessive takes the strong endings of the masculine singular nominative and of both

296 The Loom of Language

nominative and accusative singular neuter. Otherwise an adjective which follows ein3 keiny mein} etc., has the weak endings. The following table illustrates the partnership:

	MASCULINE SINGULAR	NEUTER SINGULAR	FEMININE ‘singular	j PLURAL
Nomin.	mein rotER	mein rotES	meine rotE	meine rotEN
Accus.	meinen rotEN
Gen.	meines rotEN	mei rot	ner EN
Dat.	meinem rotEN	meinen rotEN

Accordingly we have to say:

ohm das grosse Haus ohne die gute Frau

ohm ein grosses Haus ohne eine gute Frau

Analogous to the difference between the nominative and accusative case-forms of der> etc., and ein is the difference between the possessive pronouns tneinery meines, meine% etc. (mine), and the possessive adjective mein (my). There are (see p. 127) five ways of saying it is mine in, German, if the word it refers to a masculine noun such as Hut : es ist meiner; es ist der meinige; es ist der meine; er ist mein; er gehort mir. Some nouns derived from adjectives and participles retain the two forms appropriate to the definite and indefinite articles, e.g. :

der Angestellte der Beamte der Fremde der Gelehrte der Reisende

(employee)

(official)

(stranger)

(scholar)

(traveller)

ein Angestellter ein Beamter ein Fremder ein Gelekrter ein Reisender

Unlike the English adverb of manner with its suffix 4y and the French one with the suffix -went, most German adverbs belong to out fast class (p.#m). They are identical with the uninfiected adjective as used alone after the verb, e.g.:

sie hat eine entzuckende Stimme she has a charming voice sie singt entzuckend she sings in a charming way

This praiseworthy feature of German accidence — or lack of accidence — is one, and perhaps the only one, which we might wish to incorporate in a world auxiliary. Some German adverbs which are not equivalent to the

Bird's-Eye View of Teutonic Grammar 297

uninflected adjective are survivals of the genitive case form* e.g. reckts (to the right)* links (to the left)* flugs (quickly)* stets (always). The genitive case-form of the noun is also used to express indefinite time* e.g. eines Tages (one day)* morgens (in the morning). The latter must not be confused with morgen (to-morrow). The accusative form is used in adverbial expressions involving definite time* e.g. :

er lag den ganzen Tag im Bett he lay the whole day in bed

er geht jeden Tag in den Park he goes to the park every day *

THE GERMAN VERB

With one outstanding exception* and with due allowances for the second sound-shift* the High German verb is like the Dutch. The past with haben can replace the English simple past or the English past with have. The past with hatte {er hatte gehort — he had heard) is like the English construction. In parts of Germany* the simple past has disap¬ peared in daily speech. A Bavarian housewife says ich habe Kartoffeln geschdlt . Context or the insertion of a particle of time shows whether this means : (a) I was peeling potatoes* (b) I have just peeled potatoes. The following table summarizes the formation of the simple present and simple past by suffixes added to the stem of a weak verb (i.e. what remains after removing the affix -en from the infinitive) or by helper verbs. A good dictionary always gives lists of strong verbs and their parts. The reader will find some important irregularities of personal flexion in the discussion of internal vowel change on p. 208 in Chapter V.

	PRESENT	PAST TENSE	FUTURE
1st Sing.	-E	>-(e)te	habe "		| werde j	!
3rd Sing. Plural	-(E)T	J	or hat	- -f past participle	| wird	- + infinitive
-EN	-(e)ten	haben „		werden „

The one exception mentioned in the preceding paragraph is the way in which future time and condition are expressed. In Dutch* as in Scandinavian dialects* the corresponding equivalents zal and zoude replace shall and should. At one time the shall (SOLL) verb of High German dialects was also a helper to indicate future time. During the fourteenth century it disappeared as a time marker in the Court German of the chancelleries* and reverted to its original compulsive meaning in thou shalt not commit adultery. In daily speech future time is usually

K*

298 The Loom of Language

expressed by the simple present with or without an explicit particle (e.g. soon)* or adverbial expression (e.g. next week) as in all Teutonic languages. In literary German the place of shall is taken by WERDEN, the common Germanic helper in passive expressions, e.g, :

ich werde kommen = I shall come . er wird kommen = he will come . wir3 Sie> sie werden kommen = we shall co?ne> you> they will come.

Similarly, when should or would are used after a condition (e.g. if he catne I should see him) in contradistinction to situations in which they signify compulsion {you should know)y they are translated by the past, wurde. If followed by have3 the latter is translated by sein (be), e.g. :

er wurde gehen = he would go.

er wurde gegangen sein = he would have gone .

This helper verb werden (warden in Dutch) is equivalent to the Old English weorpan which means to become. Its participle has persisted as an affix in forward , inward3 etc. It is used (like its Dutch equivalent) in passive expressions where we should use be3 and the German verb to be then replaces our verb to have3 e.g.:

er wird gehort = he is heard. er wurde gehort = he was heard. er ist gehort worden = he has been heard. er war gehort worden = he had been heard.

Unfortunately it is not true to say that we can always use the parts of werden to translate those of the verb be3 when it precedes a past parti¬ ciple in what looks like a passive construction. Sometimes the German construction is more like our own, i.e. sein (be) replaces werden. To know whether a German would use one or the other, the best thing to do is to apply the following tests: where it is possible to insert already in an English sentence of this type, the correct German equivalent is sein3 e.g. :

Unglucklicherweise war der Fisch (bereits) gefangen Unluckily the fish was (already) caught

In all other circumstances use werden. It can always be used if the subject of the equivalent active statement is explicitly mentioned.

The German equivalents for some English verbs which take a direct object do not behave like typical transitive verbs which can be followed by the accusative case-form of a noun or pronoun. The equivalent of the English direct object has the dative case-form which usually stands for

Bird’s-Eye View of Teutonic Grammar 299

%ur indirect object. It cannot become the subject of the verb werden in a passive construction. Such verbs include seven common ones : antworten (answer), begegnen (meet), danken (thank)., dienen (serve), folgen (follow), gehorchen (obey), helfen (help). We have to use these verbs in the active form, either by making the direct object of the English passive construc¬ tion the German subject when the former is explicitly mentioned, or by introducing the impersonal subject man> as in man dankte mir fur meine Dienste (I was thanked for my service = one thanked me for my ser¬ vice). Reflexive substitutes are not uncommon* e.g. plotzlich offnete sich die Tur (suddenly the door was opened). There is an alternative clumsy impersonal construction involving the passive construction with the indefinite subject esy e.g. es wurde mir gedankt. Because of all these diffi¬ culties* and because Germans themselves avoid passive constructions in everyday speech* the beginner should cultivate the habit of active state¬ ment.

Though it is true that the German verb haben is always equivalent to our have when it is used to signify past time* the converse is not true. With many verbs a German uses the parts of sein (p. ioi). Verbs which go with haben are all transitive* e.g. ich habe gegeben (I have given)* reflexive, e.g. sie hat sich geschdmt (she felt ashamed)* and the helpers solleny konnetiy wollen> lassen, e.g. er hat nicht kommen wollen (he did not want to come). The German uses sein and its parts when our have is followed by an English verb of motion* such as kommen (come)* gehen (go)* reisen (travel)* steigen (climb)* e.g. ich bin gegangen (I have gone). The verbs bldbeny werden and sein itself also go with sein3 as illustrated on p. 298.

The present tense-forms of five English and German helpers are derived from the past of old strong verbs. They have acquired new weak past tense forms. They have singular and plural forms in both, but no specific personal flexions of the third person singular present.

	can	may	shall	will	must
Sing. Plur.	kann konnen	mag mogen	soil sollen	will wollen	muss mussen
	could	might	should	would
Sing. Plur.	konnte konnten	mochte mochten	sollte sollten	wollte wollten	musste mussten

Though derived from common Teutonic roots the corresponding English and German words do not convey the same meaning. For reasons stated on p. 151* this is not surprising. Below is a table to show the correct use of these German helpers* including also darf-

300 The Loom of Language

diirfen-durfte , a sixth form from a root which does not correspond to that of any English auxiliary:

MtJSSEN

necessity (must, have to) :

ich muss nun packen I have to pack now.

er mussle Amerika verlassen he had to leave America.

es muss interessant gewesen sein it must have been very in¬ teresting.

KdNNEN

(i) capability (can* be able) :

konnen Sie tanzen? can you dance?

wir konnten nicht kommen we were unable to come.

(ii) possibility (may) :

er kann schon am Mittwock eintreffen

he may arrive (already) on Wednesday.

(iii) idiomatic , e.g. :

er kann Spanisch he knows Spanish.

ich kann nichts dafur I can’t help it.

MOGEN

(i) possibility (may) :

Sie mogen rechz haben you may be right.

(ii) preference (like to):

ich mag heute nicht ausgehen I don’t like to go out to-day.

mogen Sie ihn? do you like him?

MOGEN — ( contd. ) ich mochte Sie gem besuchen I should like to look you up

ich mochte lieber hier bleiben I would rather stay here.

WOLLEN

(i) intention (will) :

ich will und werde ihn zwingen I will and shall force him.

(ii) volition (wants to, wish to) :

er will dick sprechen he wants to talk to you.

(iii) idiomatic:

ich wollte eben gehen als . . .

I was just leaving when . . .

sie will uns gesehen haben she pretends having seen us

er will nach Holland he wants to go to Holland.

SOLLEN

(i) obligation (shall, be to, ought

to):

du sollst nicht stehlen thou shalt not steal.

sag ihm> er soil gehen tell him to go.

Sie sollten ihm kein Geld leihen you should not lend him any money.

Sie hatten friiher kommen sollen you should have come earlier.

(ii) idiomatic:

er soli ikr Geliebter sein he is said to be her lover v

Bird’s-Eye View of Teutonic Grammar 301

SOLLEN — (contd.) was soil ich tun? what shall I do?

sollte er vielleicht krank sein? can he be ill?

DURFEN

(i) permission (may, be allowed to) :

darf (jkatm) ich nun gehen? may I go now?

durfen — (contd.) er hat nicht kommen durfen xhe was not allowed to come.

darf ich Sie urn ein Streichholz bitten?

may I ask for a match?

(ii) possibility (may):

das durfte nicht schwer sein that shouldn’t be difficult.

The beginner who is not forewarned may be confused about one use of lassen, which is equivalent to let in the sense have a thing done. After this an infinitive is used where we should put a participle. This construction is common, e.g. :

Er lasst sich ein Haus bauen == he is having a house built.

Er hat sich ein Haus bauen lassen = he has had a house built.

Er wird sich ein Haus bauen lassen = he will have a house built.

Er hat mich warten lassen — he has kept me waiting.

Broadly speaking we can always translate the dictionary form which also does service for the present tense or the imperative in English by the German infinitive when it is accompanied by a helper or preceded by to. The latter is equivalent to zu, which does not precede the verb if it is accompanied by a helper. We omit the preposition after two verbs (see, hear) other than helpers listed on p. 152, and sometimes after a third (help). Germans leave out zu after horen, sehen, and helfen , and also do so after a few others. Of these lemen (learn) and lehren (teach) are most common:

I saw him do it I heard him say that . . .

Help me (to) find it

She taught me to dance

I am learning to write German

ich sah ihn es tun. ich horte ihn sagen, dass . . . Hilf mir dock es finden. sie lehrte mich tanzen. ich leme deutsch schreiben.

The helper verbs (konnen, mogen, durfen , wollen, sollen, mussen, lassen) together with the last named ( sehen , horen, helfen) have a second common peculiarity. In their past compound tenses the infinitive form replaces the past participle with the ge- prefix, whenever they are accompanied by the infinitive of another verb, e.g. :

er hat nicht gewollt he didn’t want to.

er hat nicht horen wollen he didn’t want to listen.

302 The Loom of Language

The verb werden has two past participles, (a) warden when it is used as a helper in passive expressions, (b) geworden when used as an ordinary verb meaning to become;

(a) er ist geseken worden he has been seen.

( b ) die Milch ist sauer geworden the milk has become sour.

When the English to signifies in order to the German uses um zu3 e.g. er ist auf dem Bahnhof, um seine Frau dbzuholen (he is at the station to meet his wife). The same combination um . . . zu must be used when an adjective before the infinitive is qualified by zu (too) or gerng (enough), e.g.:

er war zu schwach um aufzustehen he was too weak to get up.

er hat Geld genug um sick zuruckzuziehen he has money enough to

retire.

GERMAN SYNTAX

The rules given on p. 287 do not exhaust the eccentricities of German word-order. The behaviour of verb prefixes reinforces our impression of dislocation. Both in English and in French the prefix of a verb, e.g. be- (in behold^ etc.) or re- (in reconnoitre = recognize ) is inseparably married to the root. German has some ten of such inseparable verb prefixes; but it also has others which detach themselves from the root and turn up in * another part of the sentence. Of the former, little needs to be said. Some of them are recognizably like English verb prefixes, others are not. None of them except miss- has a clear-cut meaning. This class is made up of: be-) enty emp-y er-3 ge-3 miss-) vers wider-) zer-. The only useful fact to know about them is that their past participles lack the ge- prefix, e.g. er hat sick betrmken (he got drunk), er hat meine Karte nock nicht erhalten (he has not yet received my card), er hat mich verraten (he has betrayed me).

The separable German verbs carry preposition suffixes like those of our words undergo) uphold) overcome) withstand. In one group the preposition is always detached, and comes behind the present or simple past tense of the verb of a simple sentence, or of a principal clause, but sticks to the verb root in a subordinate clause. This is illustrated by comparison of the simple and complex sentences in the pairs :

(a) Die Dame geht heute aus The lady is going out to-day.

Die Dame) die gerade ausgeht3 ist krank The lady who just went out is ill.

Bird’s-Eye View of Teutonic Grammar 303

(b) Der Junge schreibt den Brief ab The boy is copying the letter.

Der Junge, der den Brief abgeschrieben hat, ist sehr begabt The boy who has copied the letter is very talented.

• The ge- prefix of the past participle of a separate verb is inserted between the root and the preposition-pre/zx, e.g. angebrannt (burnt), heigepflichtet (agreed), zugelassen (admitted). After the verb werden expressing future time the prefix sticks to the root of the infini¬ tive, e.g.:

ich werde ihm nickt nachlaufen I shall not run after him.

When the preposition zu accompanies the infinitive it comes between

the prefix and the root, e.g.:

Der Kndbe hat die Absicht es abzuschreiben The boy intends to copy it.

Sie bat mich zuruckzukommen She asked me to come back.

In the spoken language verbs which always conform to these rules are recognizable by the stress on the prefix, i.e. any one of the follow¬ ing: an-> auf-y bet-, ein- (= in), nack-> vor~> zu-. Unfortunately, another set of verbal prefixes belong to verbs with separable or insepa¬ rable forms which do not mean the same thing, or are inseparable when attached to one root and separable when attached to another. Thus durchreisen, a separable verb (with stress on the first syllable) means to travel through without stoppings but durchreisen as an in¬ separable verb (with the stress on the second syllable), means to travel all over. Of such pairs* another example is the separable unterstehen (seek shelter) and its inseparable co-twin unterstehen (dare). In unterscheiden (distinguish) the prefix is inseparable. In untergehen (sink) it is separable. These capricious prefixes are: durch-, hinter-, tiber, um-3 unter-, voll-, zvieder-. The inseparable verbs are usually transitive and form compound tenses with habenyxh& separable ones intransitive, forming compound tenses with sein (be).

One great stumbling-block of German syntax to the English-speaking beginner is the profusion of particles arbitrarily allocated to particular situations. The single English word before can be a conjunction in a temporal sense, a prepositional directive in a spatial or temporal sense,

304 The Loom of Language

an<Jcan replace the adverb previously. Where one word suffices, German

demands three:

Preposition: before the dawn (temporal) vor Tagesanbmch.

before his eyes (spatial) vor seinen Augen.

Conjunction: before he saw it ehe er es sah or bevor er e$ sah.

Adverb : you said so before Sie haben es bereits gesagt.

Similarly our word after can be either a preposition or a conjunction, e.g.:

after his birth nach seiner Geburt.

after he was born nachdetn er geboren war .

On the credit side of the German account, German has one word, wdhrend} for which we have a separate preposition (during) and con¬ junction (while\ e.g. :

during dinner wdhrend des Essens.

while he was eating wdhrend er ass .

For each of the English directives inside} outside} up} and over} there is a separate German preposition (f«, auS} auf3 uber) and two adverbs the use of which demands an explanation.

The small number of essential particles in a basic vocabulary for Anglo-American use is partly due to the fact that we have largely discarded distinctions already implicit in the accompanying verb. For instance we no longer make the distinction between rest and motion (or situation and direction) explicit in archaic couplets as here-hither or there-tMther. The German dictionary is supercharged with redundant particles or redundant grammatical tricks which indicate whether the verb implies motion, or if so in what (hither-thither) direction. Corre¬ sponding to each of the German prepositions mentioned last (m, aus3 auf} uber) there are here-there couplets: herein-hinein} heraus-hinaus , herauf-hinauf} heruber-hinuber analogous to herab-hinab (down) for which there is no precisely equivalent German preposition* If the verb is kommen (which already indicates motion towards a fixed point), we use the here- form, her-. If the verb is gehen (which indicates motion away from a fixed point) we have to use the there- form hin -, e.g. :

Kommen Sie herab = Come down. Gehen Sie hinab = Get down.

The adverbial form placed after the accusative noun does the work of the preposition^ as in

er ging den Huge! hinab he went down the hill. er kommt die Strasse herab he is coining down the street.

Bird’s-Eye View of Teutonic Grammar 305

With steigen or klettem (both of which mean climb) the use of the two forms depends on whether the speaker is at the top or at the bottom of the tree. If at the bottom he (or she) says : Klettern Sie hinauf, if at the tops Jslettem Sie her auf. Both mean climb upy and the distinction reveals nothing which is not made explicit by the context.

One way in which the German language indicates location and motion has no parallel in other modem Teutonic languages nor in French and Spanish. It is a relic from a very remote past. We have seen (p. 262) that a set of nine prepositions (an> up, to or at, auf> on, hinter, behind, iny neberiy near to, itber over or across, unter below or under, vor before, zwischen between) sometimes precede a dative and sometimes an accusative case-form. If the verb implies rest the pre¬ scribed case-form is the dative, if it implies motion^ the accusative, e.g. :

er stand unter dem Fenster he stood below the window. er trot unter das Fenster he stepped below the window.

The distinction is not always so easy to detect, as in

seine Hosen hdngen an der Wand his trousers are hanging on the wall. er hdngt das Bild an die Wand he is hanging the picture on the wall.

Still more subtle is the difference between:

Sie tanzte vor ihm ' she danced in front of him.

Sie tanzte vor ihn she danced right up to him.

Even when the German signs his name, the case-form has to obey the movement of the penholder, as in er schreibt seinen Namen auf das Dokument (he is writing his name on the document).

Germans often supplement a more or less vague preposition with a more explicit adverb which follows the noun. Such characteristically German prolixity is illustrated by:

er sieht zum Fenster hinaus he is looking through the window.

er geht um den See herum he is walking round the lake.

.Thus a simple direction may be supersaturated with particles which are at least fifty per cent redundant, e.g. vom Dorfe aus gehen Sie auf den Wald zu3 und von dort aus uber die BriXcke hinubery nach dem kleinen See hin. (You go up towards the forest and thence across the bridge towards the little lake.) The separable combination nach . . . hin within the sen¬ tence and the corresponding nach . . . hety both meaning tcwards9 must be memorized. The preposition nach is equivalent to after in a purely temporal sense, illustrated previously, as is the inseparable adverb nachher (afterwards). When nach precedes a place-name it signifies to9

30 6 The Loom of Language

e.g. nach Berlin = to Berlin. Thus nach Home gehen means go home in contradistinction to zu Hause sein (be at home).

The problem of choosing the right word also arises in German — as in most European languages other than Anglo-American — whenever we use a verb which may have a transitive or intransitive meaning. Since most Anglo-American verbs can have both, the choice is one from which an English-speaking beginner cannot escape. If the ordinary meaning of the verb is transitive, we can use its German equivalent reflexively. This trick is useful when there is no explicit object, e.g. :

er kuhh die Luft ah he is cooling the air. die Luft kuhlt sick ah the air is cooling (itself).

This construction is common to German and other Teutonic dialects, as also to French or Spanish. More usually we have a choice between two forms of the verb itself. They may be distinguished by internal vowel-changes as on p. 208, or by means of the affix be-. This prefix, which has lost any specific meaning in English, converts an intransitive German verb into its transitive equivalent, i.e. the obligatory form when there is a direct object, e.g. :

INTRANSITIVE

antworten

drohen

herrschen

trauem

urteilen

(answer)

(threaten)

(rule)

(mourn)

(judge)

TRANSITIVE

beantworten

hedrohen

heherrschen

betrauem

heurtdlen

The German vocabulary is burdened by an enormous number of couplets distinguished by one or another inseparable prefix , Besides the he - which gives the intransitive German verb an object in life, one prefix, miss like its English equivalent (cf. understand — misunderstand) has a clearly defined meaning illustrated by: achten — missachten (respect — despise), gliicken — missgliicken (succeed — fail), trauen — misstrauen (trust — mistrust). Other common prefixes have no single meaning. Both ent- and er - may signify incipient action like the Latin affiy -^sc- in evanescent . Thus we have flammen — entfiammen (blaze — burst into flames) or erroten (turn red), erkalten (grow cold). In some verb couplets of this sort er- signifies getting a result. Thus we have :

arheiten (work) betteln (beg) Mmpfen (fight) haschen (snatch)

erarheiten (obtain through work) erhetteln (obtain by begging) erkdmpfen (obtain by fighting) erhaschen (obtain by snatching)

Bud s-Eye View of Teutonic Grammar 307

The prefix ver- attached to many verbs which legs may nave a perfective meaning* e.g. :

can stand on their own

brennen (burn) arbeiten (work) schiessen (shoot) trinken (drink)

In another group of such pairs, the went awry, e.g. :

verbrennen

verarbeiten

verschiessen

vertrinken

(burn up) (work up) (shoot away) (drink away)

same prefix indicates that the

action

biegen (bend) verbiegen

Ugen (put) verlegen

sprechen (speak) sich versprechen

horen (hear) sich verhoren

schreiben (write) sich verschreiben

(spoil by bending)

(misplace)

(commit a slip of the tongue) (hear what has not been said) (commit a slip of the pen)

The older Teutonic languages had subjunctive verb forms, past and present. In English the only traces of this are (a) the use of were in conditional clauses, when the condition is rejected (i.e. hypothetical or unmie), as in if I were richer , I could buy it ; ( b ) in diffident statements such as lest it be lost. As we might expect, the German subjunctive has been more resistant. The verb sein has present (ich or sei, wir or sie seien) and past {ich or er ware , wir or sie waren ) subjunctive forms So has warden in the 3rd sing. «• werde of the present, and throughout the past, wurde-wurden. If we exclude the intimate forms (with du and thr) the only distinct present subjunctive form of most other verbs is the 3rd person singular. It ends in -e instead of -t, e.g. mache for macht (make) or finde for findet. The weak verb has no special past subjunc¬ tive form. That of strong verbs is formed from the ordinary past by vowel change and the addition of-*, e.g. gab—gabe (gave), flog—floge (flew). The subjunctive of the present of strong verbs of the nehmen- geben class is formed without the modification of the stem vowel (p. 208). Its use in conditional clauses, as in English, is illustrated by:

Wenn ich etnas, mekr Geld hdtte, wiirde ich zufriedener sein If I had a little more money I should be happier.

Wenn ich etwas mekr Geld gehabt hdtte , ware ich zufriedener gewesen If I had had a little bit more money I should have been happier.

The German subjunctive is also used in reported speech, e.g.:

In seiner Reichstagsrede erkldrte Hitler, er werde bis zum letzten Bluts- tropfen kdmpfen; dieser Krieg entscheide iiber das Schicksal Deutschlands auf tausend J ahre hinaus> etc.

The subjunctive is also used in indirect questions, e.g. ich fragte ihn, ob

308 The Loom of Language

er mit der Arbeit fertig sei ( I asked him if he had finished the job). It occurs in certain idiomatic expressions, e.g. the set formula for a qualified statement in which we might use very nearly :

Ich ware fast urns Leben gekommen I very nearly lost my life. Common idioms are:

da warm wir jal here we are I

es koste, was es wolle cost what it may.

es sei dmn, dass er gelogen hdbe unless he lied about it.

The grammar of German is difficult; and the aim of the last few pages has not been to pretend that it is otherwise. If we want to file the innumerable rules and exceptions to the rules in cupboards where we can find them, the best we can do is to label them as representative exhibits of speech deformities or evolutionary relics. Many of them are not essential to anyone who aims at a reading knowledge of the lan¬ guage, or to anyone who wishes to talk German or to listen to German broadcasts. For the latter there is some consolation. It is much easier to learn to read, to write, or even to speak most languages correctly than to interpret them by ear alone. This is not true of German. Ger¬ mans pronounce individual words clearly, and the involved sentences of literary German rarely overflow into daily speech. No European language is more easy to recognize when spoken, if the listener has a serviceable vocabulary of common words. There is therefore a sharp contrast between the merits and defects of German and Chinese. German combines inflation of word-forms and grammatical conven¬ tions with great phonetic clarity. Chinese unites a maximum of word- economy with extreme phonetic subtlety and obscurity.

FURTHER READING

BRADLEY The Making of English.

duff and freund The Basis and Essentials of German.

Grundy Brush up your German.

TONNELAT A History of the German Language.

WILS0N Tfo Student9 s Guide to Modem Languages

(A Comparative Study of English, French, German, and Spanish).

The primers in simplified Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, German, and Dutch published by Hugo’s Language Institute ; Teach Yourself German, Teach Yourself Dutch, Teach Yourself Norwegian, in the Teach Yourself Books (English University Press).

CHAPTER VIII

THE LATIN LEGACY

Four Romance languages, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian, are the theme of the next chapter. Readers of The Loom of Language Tivill now know that all of them are descendants of a single tongue, Latin, Two thousand five hundred years ago, Latin was the vernacular of a modest city-state on the Tiber in Central Italy. From there, mili- tary conquest imposed it, first on Latium and then upon the rest of Italy. Other related Italic dialects, together with Etruscan, with the Celtic of Lombardy, and with the Greek current in the south of the Peninsula and in Sicily, were swamped by the language of Rome itself. The subsequent career of Latin was very different from that of Greek. Outside Greece itself, the Greek language had always been limited to coastal belts, because the Greeks were primarily traders, whose home was the sea. The Romans were consistently imperialists. Their con¬ quests carried Latin over the North of Africa, into the Iberian Penin¬ sula, across Gaul from South to North, to the Rhine and East to the Danube. In all these parts of the Empire, indigenous languages were displaced. Only the vernaculars of Britain and Germany escaped this fate. Britain was an island too remote, climatically too unattractive, and materially too poor to encourage settlement. Germany successfully resisted further encroachment by defeating the Romans in the swamps of the Teutoburger Wald.

In Gaul, Romamzation was so rapid and so thorough that its native Celtic disappeared completely a few centuries after the Gallic War. The reason for this is largely a matter of speculation; but one thing is certain, Roman overlords did not impose their language upon their subjects by force. Sprachpolitik, as once practised by modem European states, was no part of their programme. Since Latin was the language of administration, knowledge of Latin meant promotion and social dis¬ tinction. So we may presume that the Gaul who wanted to get on would learn it. Common people acquired the racy slang of Roman soldiers, petty officials, traders, settlers, and slaves, while sons of chiefs were nurtured in the more refined idiom of educational establishments which flourished in Marseilles, Autun, Bordeaux, and Lyons.

When parts of Gaul came under Frankish domination in the fifth

3io

The Loom of Language

century A.D., the foreign invaders soon exchanged their Teutonic dialect for the language of subjects numerically stronger and culturally more advanced. Change of language accompanied a change of heart. The Franks embraced the Christian faith, and the official language of the Christian faith was the language of Rome. The impact of Frankish upon Gallo-Roman did not affect its structure, though it contributed many words to its present vocabulary. Several hundreds survive in modem French, e.g. auberge (German Herberge, inn), gerbe (German Gorbe, sheaf), hate (German Hag, hedge), hair (German hassen , hate), iardin (German Garten, garden), riche (German reich, rich). In addition the Franks imported a few suffixes, e.g., -ard as in vieillard (old man).

The language which diffused throughout the provinces of the Empire was not the classical Latin of Tom Brown’s schooldays. It was the Latin spoken by the common people. Ever since Latin had become a literary language (in the third century b.c.) there had been a sharp cleavage between popular Latin and the Latin of the erudite. In tracing the evolutionary history of Romance languages from Latin, we must therefore be clear at the outset about what we mean by T arin itself When we discuss French, Spanish, or Italian, we are dealing with languages which Frenchmen, Spaniards, or Italians speak. Latin is a term used in two senses. It may signify a literary product to cater for the tastes of a social elite. It may also mean the living language imposed on a large part of the civilized world by Roman arms before the beginning of the Christian era.

In the first sense, Latin is the Latin of classical authors selected for study in schools or colleges. It was always, as it is now, a dead language because it was never the language of daily intercourse. It belongs to an epoch when script was not equipped with the helps which punctuation supplies. Books were not written for rapid reading by a large reading public. For both these reasons a wide gap separated the written from the spoken language of any ancient people. In ancient times what remains a gap was a precipitous chasm.

When we speak of Latin as the common parent of modem Romance languages, we mean the living language which was the common medium of mtercourse in Roman Gaul, Roman Spain, and Italy during the Empire. For five centuries two languages, each called Latin, existed side by side in the Roman Empire. While the language of the ear kept oil the move, the language of the eye remained static over a period as long as that which separates the Anglo-American of Faraday or Men¬ cken from the English of Chaucer and Langland. Naturally, there

The Latin Legacy 31 f

are gradations of artificiality within the sermo urbanus, or cultured manner, as well as gradations of flexibility within the sermo rusticus, the sermo vulgaris , the sermo pedestris , the sermo usualis , as its opposite was variously called. The Macaulays of classical prose were less exotic than the Gertrude Steins of classical verse, and the Biglow Papers of the Golden Age were more colloquial than the compositions of a Roman Burke or a Roman Carlyle.

Unhappily our materials for piecing together a satisfactory picture of Latin as a living language are meagre. A few technical treatises, such as

Fig.

33- Very Early (6th Century b.c.) Latin Inscription on a Fibula

(clasp or brooch)

(Reading from right to left):

MANIOS MED FHEFHAKED NUMASIOI Manius made me for Numasim

N.B.— In later Latin this would read : Manius me fecit Numasio .

the Mechanics of Vitruvius, introduce us to words and idioms alien to the writings of poets and rhetoricians, as do inscriptions made by people with no literary pretensions, the protests of grammarians, then as now guardians of scarcity values, expressions which crop up in the comedies of Plautus (264-194 B.c.), occasional lapses made by highbrow authors, and features common to two or more Romance languages alive to-day.

From all these sources we can be certain that the Vulgar Latin which asserts itself in literature when the acceptance of Christianity promoted a new reading public at the beginning of the fourth century a.d., was the Latin which citizens of the Empire had used in everyday life before the beginning of the Christian era. By the largeness of its appeal, Christianity helped to heal the breach between the living and the written language. By doing so, it gave Latin a new lease of life. The Latin scriptures, or Vulgate, arranged by Jerome at the end of the fourth century A.D., made it possible for Latin to survive the barbarian invasions in an age when the Christian priesthood had become a literary craft-union.

As it spread over North Africa, Spain, and Gaul, this living Latin inevitably acquired local peculiarities due to the speech habits of

312 The Loom of Language

peoples on whom it was imposed, and to other circumstances. For instance, soldiers, traders, and farmers who settled in the various provinces came from an Italy where dialect differences abounded. Though the Lingua Romana thus developed a Gallic, a Spanish, and a North African flavour, the language of Gaul and Spain was still essen¬ tially the same when the Empire collapsed; and it must have had features which do not appear in the writing of authors who were throwing off the traditional code. Where contemporary texts fail us we have the evidence of its own offspring. If a phonetic trick or a word is common to all the Romance languages from Rumania to Portugal and from Sidly to Gaul, we are entitled to assume that it already existed in speech once current throughout the Empire. Thus many words which must have existed have left no trace in script, e.g. ausare (dare), captiare (chase), cominitiare (commence), coraticum (courage), mis- culare (mix), trivicar e (snow). By inference we can also reconstruct the Vulgar Latin parent of the pan-Romance word for to touch (Italian toccare , Spanish tocar, French toucher).

When the curtain lifts from the anarchy, devastations, and miseries of the Dark Ages, local differences separated languages no longer mutu¬ ally intelligible in the neighbouring speech communities of Spain and Portugal, Provence and northern France, Italy, and Rumania. As a language in this sense, distinct from written Latin, French was incu¬ bating during the centuries following the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire. The first connected French text is the famous Oaths of Strasbourg , publicly sworn in 842 by Louis and Charles,. two grandsons of Charlemagne. To be understood by the vassals of his brother, Louis took the oath in Romance, i.e. French, while his brother pledged him¬ self in German. To the same century belongs a poem on the Martyrdom of St. Eulalia. The linguistic unification of France took place during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when the literary Maimc 0f iocal dialects such as Picard, Norman, Burgundian, succumbed to those of the dialect of the Ile-de-France, i.e. Paris and its surroundings. The oldest available specimens of Italian—, a few lines inserted in a Latin charter— go back to the second half of the tenth century. Modem Italian, as the accepted norm for Italy as a whole, is based on the dialect of Florence, which owes its prestige to the works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio and their sponsors, the master printers. The oldest traces of Spanish occur in charters and in the Glosses (explana¬ tory notes of scribe or reader) of Silos, dating from the eleventh century. The first literary monument is the Cid, composed about 1140.

34- The Oldest Roman Stone Inscription — The Lapis Niger from the Forum (about 600 b.c.)»

The writing is from right to left

The Latin Legacy 313

The Romance languages preserve innumerable common traits. Their grammatical features are remarkably uniform, and they use recog- nizably similar words for current things and processes. So it is rela¬ tively easy for anyone who already knows one of them to learn another, or for an adult to learn more than one of them at the samp time French has travelled farthest away from Latin. What essentially distinguishes French from Italian and Spanish is the obliteration of flexions in speech. From either it is separated by radical phonetic changes which often make it impossible to identify a French word as a Latin one without knowledge of its history. As a written language, Spanish has most faithfully preserved the Latin flexions, but it is widely separated from French and Italian by phonetic peculiarities as well as by a large infusion of new words through contact with Arabic-speaking peoples during eight centuries of Moorish occupation. On the whole, Italian has changed least. It was relatively close to Latin when Dante wrote the Divina Cotnmedia , and subsequent changes of spelling, pro¬ nunciation, structure and vocabulary are negligible in comparison with what happened to English between the time of Geoffrey Chanr-pr and that of Stuart Chase.

Latin did not die with the emergence of the neo-Latin or Romance languages. It co-existed with them throughout the Middle Ages as the medium of learning and of the Church. Its hold on Europe as an inter- lingua weakened only when Protestant-mercantilism fostered the linguistic autonomy of nation-states. Pedantic attempts of the humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to substitute the prolix pom¬ posity of Cicero for the homely idiom of the monasteries hastpnpd its demise. By reviving Latin, the humanists helped to kill it. The last English outstanding philosophical work published in Latin was Bacon’s Neman Organum , the last English scientific work of importance Newton’s Principia. As a vehicle of scholarship it survived longest in the German Universities, then as ever peculiarly insulated from popular need and sentiment. In the German States between 1681 and 1690, more books were printed in Latin than in German, and Latin was still the medium of teaching in the German Universities. In 1687, Christian Thomasius showed incredible bravado by lecturing in German at Leipzig on the wise conduct of life. This deed was branded by his colleagues as an “unexampled horror,” and led to his expulsion from Leipzig. Latin has not wholly resigned its claims as a medium of inter¬ national communication. It is still the language in which the Pope invokes divine disapproval of birth control or socialism.

The Loom of Language

314

CLASSICAL LATIN

, Two conclusions are now well established by what we are able to glean about the living language of the Roman Empire from inscriptions

and from writings of authors with no pretensions to literary or rhetorical skill. One is that it was not so highly inflected as the Latin of the classics. The other is that the word-order was more regular. To emphasize the contrast for the benefit of the reader who has not studied Latin at school* our bird’s-eye view of the Romance Group will begin with a short account of Classical Latin. The next few pages are for cursory reading* and the home-student who aims at becoming more language- conscious may take the opportunity of recalling English words derived from the Latin roots used in the examples dted. Thus the second example in the ensuing paragraph (gladiis pttgnani) suggests gladiator , gladiolus (why?), impugn, and pugnacity.

like the English noun (p. 1x5 et seq.) before the Battle of Hastings, the noun of Classical Latin had several singular and plural case- forms. Old English (p. 266) had four: nominative (subject), accusative (direct object), genitive (possess ive), and dative (indirect object). In addition to four case-forms with corresponding names, the singular noun of classical Latin sometimes had an ablative case-form distinct from the dative, and occasionally a vocative distinct from nominative.

In reality, what is called the ablative plural is always identical with the dative plural, and the singular ablative of many nouns is not dis¬ tinct from the singular dative. So a grammarian does not necessarily signify a specific form of the noun when he speaks of the ablative case. The ablative case refers to the form of the noun used by classical authors in a variety of situations: e.g. (a) with the participle in expres¬ sions such as: the sun having arisen, they set out for home; (b) where we should put in front of an English noun the instrumental directive with (gladiis pugnant — they fight with swords); from as the origin of move- ment (oppicfo fiigit — he fled from town); at signifying time (media nocte at midnight), or than (doctior Paula est— he is cleverer than Paul).

If Latin were the living language of a country in close culture- contact with the English-speaking world* it might be helpful to empha¬ size its regularities and to give serviceable rules for recognizing the proper case-affix for a Latin noun. Since it is not a living language* the chief reason for discussing the vagaries of the Latin case-system is that it helps us to understand some of the differences between noun-endings

The Latin Legacy 315

of modem Romance languages. Another reason for doing so is that it clarifies the task of language-planning for world peace. For three hundred years since the days of Leibniz and Bishop Wilkins, the move¬ ment for promoting an inter-language which is easy to learn has been obstructed by the traditional delusion that Latin is peculiarly lucid and “logical.”

In so far as the adjective logical means anything when applied to a language as a whole, it suggests that there is a reliable link between the form and thz function of words. If this were really true, it would mean that Latin is an easy language to learn; and there might be a case for

reinstating it as a medium of international communication. Though no one could seriously claim that Latin is as easy to learn as Italian, clas¬ sic! scholars rarely disclose the implications of the feet that it is not. The truth is that Italian is simpler to learn, and therefore better suited to international use, because it is the product of a process which was going on in the living language of Italy and the Empire, while further progress towards greater flexibility and great regularity was arrested in Roman literature.

In text-books of Latin for use in schools the Latin case-forms are set forth as if the genitive, dative, and ablative derivatives have a definite meaning, like the Finnish case-forms, e.g. :

hominis = of a man . homini = to a man. homine — with or hy a man .

In reality no Latin case-form has a clear-cut meaning of this sort. The five or if we include a defunct locative (see below) — six possible distinct case-forms, for which few nouns have more than four distinct affixes in each number, could not conceivably do all the work of our English directives. In fact, prepositions were constantly used in Classical Latin Just as Englishmen once had to choose particular case-forms (p. 266) of adjective or pronoun after particular prepositions, Latin authors had to choose an appropriate case-affix for a noun when a preposition ramp before it. Thus the use of case was largely a matter of grammatical context , as in modem German or Old English.

_ Even when no preposition accompanies a noun, it is impossible to give dear-cut and economical rules for the choice of the case-forms which Latin authors used. We might be tempted to think that the genitive case-affix, which corresponds roughly to the ’$ or the apos¬ trophe of our derivatives father’s or fathers’ , has a straightforward

316 The Loom of Language

meaning. Tims some grammar books called the English genitive the possessive, but we have seen (p. 1x6) how little connexion it need have to any property relationship. It is even more difficult to define the Latin genitive in all circumstances. Grammarians became aware of this long ago, and split it into a possessive genitive (cams puellae, the dog of the girl), a partitive genitive (pars corporis, a part of the body), a qualitative genitive (homo magnae ingenuitatis, a man of great frankness), an objective genitive (laudator temporis acti, a booster of bygone times), etc. It is doubtful whether such distinctions help the victim of classical tuition.. In Latin, as in the more highly-inflected living Indo-European languages such as German and Russian, the genitive is so elusive that Hermann Paul, a famous German linguist, defined it as the case “that expresses any relation between two nouns.”

The functional obscurities of the cases of Classical Latin, in contra¬ distinction to the well-defined meaning of the case-affixes in an agglu¬ tinating language such as Finnish, would make it a difficult language, even if the case-affixes were fixed as they are fixed in Finnish. The truth is that the connexion between form and context is as flimsy as the connexion between form and function. The irregularity of Classical Latin burdens the memory with an immense variety of forms assigned to the same case. Just as English nouns belong to different families based on their plural derivatives such as man-men, ox-oxen, house-houses , Latin nouns form case-derivatives in many ways. So if you know the genitive affix of a particular Latin noun, you cannot attach it to another without courting disaster. According to their endings, Latin nouns have been squeezed into five families or declensions, each of which has its sub¬ divisions. The table opposite gives a specimen of the nominative and accusative singular and plural case-forms of each.

Unlike the Finnish or Hungarian noun, that of Latin has no specific prade-mark to show if it is singular or plural. In the first declension for instance, a word-form such as rosae is genitive and dative singular, as well as nominative plural. In the second declension domino is dative and ablative singular, and domini is genitive singular and nominative plural. The accusative, singular and plural, of a neuter noun is always identical with the nominative, while the dative plural of every Latin noun tallies with the ablative. Case-endings do not always change from one class to another. The word dominus, which is of the second declension, has the same ending in the nominative and accusative singular as fructus , which is of the fourth, and a word ending in -er may belong to the second (ager, acre) as well as to the third {pater, father) ; while one in -es may be of the third (fames, hunger} and of the fifth (dies, day). Even within one and the same class the genitive plural may show different endings, e.g.

The Latin Legacy 317

	I	11	in
	SING.	PLUR.	SING.	PLUR.	SING.	PLUR.
NOM.	rosa	rosae	dominus	domini	dux
	(rose)		(master)		(leader)	> duces
ACC.	rosam	rosas	dominant	dominos	ducem	J

	IV	V
	SING.	PLUR.	SING.		PLUR.
NOM.	fructus	]	dies	1
	(fruit)	?■ fructus		1	- dies
ACC.	fructum	J	diem	J

canum (of the dogs)* dentium (of the teeth). Words of the same class with identical endings may suffer other modifications* as shown in the following list:

NOMINATIVE	GENITIVE	NOMINATIVE	GENITIVE
SING.	SING.	SING.	SING.
lex (law)	legis	miles (soldier)	militis
judex (judge)	judicis	pulvis (dust)	pulveris
conjux (husband)	conjugis	tempos (time)	temporis
nox (night)	noctis	opus (work)	opens
pes (foot)	pedis	sermo (speech)	sermonis

There are still classical scholars who speak of Latin as an “orderly” or “logical” language. Professor E. P. Morris is much nearer to the truth when he writes (. Principles and Methods in Latin Syntax ):

“The impression of system comes* no doubt* from the way in which we learn the facts of inflexion. For the purposes of teaching* the gram- mars very properly emphasize as much as possible such measure of system as Latin inflexion permits* producing at the beginning of one’s acquaintance with Latin the impression of a series of graded forms and meanings covering most accurately and completely the whole range of expression. But it is obvious that this is a false impression* and so far as we retain it we are building up a wrong foundation. Neither the forms nor the meanings are systematic. . . . A glance at the facts of Latin morphology as they are preserved in any full Latin grammar* or in

318 The Loom of Language

Brugman’s Grundriss, or in Lindsay’s Latin Language, where large masses of facts which defy classification are brought together, furnishes convincing evidence that irregularity and absence of system are not merely occasional, but are the fundamental characteristics of Latin form-building.”

When Latin became a literary language in the third century b.c., its case-system was already withering away* The old instrumental , if it ever had a use, had merged with the ablative, when the latter was coalescing with the dative. The locative, which used to indicate where something was, or where it took place, had dwindled to a mere shadow. It survived only in place-names, e.g. Romae sum (I am in Rome), and a few fos¬ silized expressions such as dom (at home), ruri (in the country). The vocative, which was a kind of noun-imperative, e.g. et tu Brute (and you, 0 Brute), as when we use the expression say, pop , differed from the nominative only in nouns of the second declension (Brutus or Dominus, Brute or Domini). It was often ignored by classical authors.

One great difference between popular Latin and the Latin of the literati and rhetoricians is the extent to which prepositions were used. While the former made ample use of them, classical authors did so with discretion (i.e. their own discretion). In an illuminating passage of his Essay on Semantics the French linguist, Breai, has shown that the tendency to use prepositions where literary style dictated that they should be left out, was not confined to plebeian or rustic speech. Suetonius tells us that the Emperor Augustus himself practised the popular custom in the interest of greater clarity, and in defiance of literary pedants who considered it more “graceful” and well-bred to dispense with prepositions at the risk of being obscure (the prepositions quae detractae ajfenmt aliquid obsairitaiis, etsi gratiam augeni ). In the long run, the prepositional construction was bound to bring about the elimination of the case-marks, because there was no point in preserving special signs for relations already indicated, and indicated much more explicitly, by the preposition alone. In literary Latin, decay of the case- system was arrested for centuries during which it went on unimpeded in the living language, and ultimately led to an entirely new type of grammar.

The use of the Latin noun, like the use of the English pronoun, involves a choice of endings classified according to case and number. The use of the adjective involved the same choice, complicated, as in Old English or German, by gender . So every Latin noun, like every German or Old English noun, can be assigned to one of three genders,

The Latin Legacy 319

masculine, feminine, neuter, according to the behaviour of an adjective coupled with it, or of the pronoun which replaces it. This peculiar gender-distinction which the Indo-European (pp. 113 and 114) shares with the Semitic family was not based on sex-differentiation. Except where gender distinguished actual sex, which was irrelevant to the gender-class of most animals, Latin gender referred to nothing in the real world. It was merely a matter of table manners. Nobody, not even a poet, would have been able to say why the wall (mums) should be masculine, the door (porta) feminine, and the roof (tectum) neuter. The singular nominative or dictionary form of many norms carries no trade¬ mark of the gender-class to which they belong. Pirns (pear-tree) was feminine, hortus (garden) was masculine, and corpus (body) was neuter.

What labels a Latin, like an Old English,noun as masculine, feminine, or neuter is the form of the noun-substitute (pronoun) or of the adjective (including demonstratives) which went with it. Excluding participles nearly all adjectives of classical Latin can be assigned to two types. One type has three sets of case-derivatives, e.g. the nominative forms bonus, bona, bonum (good). The feminines had endings like those of nouns such as porta (door) placed in the first declension, the masculine and neuter respectively like dominus (master) and helium (war) in the second declension. To say that a Latin noun is masculine, neuter or feminine therefore means that a Latin writer would use the masculine, neuter, or feminine forms of such adjectives with it. The flexional modifications of the second type are modelled on the nouns of the third declension. Most adjectives of this type have a common gender form used with either masculine or feminine nouns, and a separate neuter, e.g. tristis-triste (sad). Some of them, including present participles, e.g. amans (loving), have the same form for all three genders, e.g. prudens (prudent), velox (quick). The nominative and accusative, singular and plural, of the two chief adjectival types are below:

	(a) bonus (good) i .	(b) tristis (sad)
	MASC.	FEM.	NEUT.	MASC.= FEM.	NEUT.
NOM. SING. ACC. SING.	bonus bonum	bona bonam	j- bonum	tristis tristem	\ triste
NOM. PLUR. ACC. PLUR.	boni bonus	bonae bonas	bona	tristes	tristia

320 The Loom of Language

It is usually true to say that: (a) most Latin nouns of the porta (door) type are feminine, ( b ) a large majority of Latin nouns which end in -us are masculine, and (c) all Latin nouns that end in -um arq neuter. So it is pardy true to say that the noun itself carries the trade-mark of its gender. One consequence of the fact that a large proportion of Latin nouns are labelled in this way, and that a large class of adjectives have corresponding affixes appropriate to the same gender, is that the Latin adjective very often carries the same suffix as the noun coupled with it, e.g. alii muri (high walls), portae novae (new doors), magnum imperium (great empire). Thus Latin sentences sometimes recall the monotonous sing-song of the Bantu dialects (p. 210). The corre¬ spondence of the Latin suffixes is less complete than that of the Bantu prefixes, because all Latin adjectives do not have the samp gender- forms, and all Latin nouns assigned to the same declension do not belong to the same gender.

All these trade-marks of the adjective have disappeared in English^ and comparison ( 'black , blacker, blackest ) is now its most characteristic feature. In Classical Latin the comparative and superlative derivatives of the adjectives were also formed synthetically, i.e. by adding appro¬ priate suffixes to the ordinary or positive root. Originally there must have been a great variety of these accretions, but in written Latin comparative uniformity had been established in favour of -for (m. or f.) or -ius (neut.) corresponding to our -er, and -issimus (- a , -um) corre¬ sponding to our -est, e.g. : fortis (strong)— fortior (stronger)— fortissimus (strongest). A few of the most common Latin adjectives escaped this regularization. They had comparative and superlative forms derived from stems other than that of the positive, e.g. bonus (good)— me/for (better) — optimus (best).

The most backward class of words in modem English is m^Hp Up 0f the personal pronouns. In Classical Latin (p. 310) the personal pronoun was a relatively rare intruder. There was little need for the nominative forms I, he, we, etc., because person was sufficiently indicated by the terminal of the verb. Thus vendo could only mean “I sell,” and vendimus could only mean “we sell.” In modern French, English, or German we can no longer omit the personal pronoun, except when we give a command '{hurry!) or find it convenient to be abrupt {couldn’t say). In speech we usually omit personal pronouns of Italian and Spanish, whose verb-endings still indicate person and number clearly, e.g. parlo a voi, signore (I am speaking to you. Sir). When Latin authors used ego (I), tu (thou), etc., they did so for the sole purpose of emphasis or con-

The Latin Legacy 321

trast as in Wolsey’s disastrously-ordered ego et mem rex (I and my King). There was no special Latin pronoun of the third person. Its place was taken in Classical Latin by the demonstrative is, ea, id. This was later replaced by ille , ilia, illud (that one).

The fundamental difference between the Latin and the English

coRwlTromtihd I

idues'cosokESOR •

H ONC Oiwo-P I U R V/v\E-C O S EA/T/ONT-R DVONOROOETVMO-FVI5E-VIRO-

I'MClOfA- SC IPi OA/£.pn,|05' bapbati

^gysOkCEA/soP AlD iUS-HIC-FVET-A |\Wtlc E p ,T'C oR51c A'Al VE-VRB E \ \\iWTOTTE MPE STATEB V5 -Al D E-ME R E TO

Fig. 35. Funeral Inscription of the Consul L. Cornelius Scipio in an Early Latin Script (259 b.c.)

verb-system has been pointed out in Chapter III (p. 107 et seqj). Like the Old English verb, the Latin verb had four kinds or classes of flexions, of which three might be described as functional and one, mood, depended on context. The first class, based on the personal suffixes, dispensed with need for the pronoun-subject, as in Gothic.

’ These flexions had already disappeared in the plural of the Old English verb, and in the singular they were not more useful than our -$ of the third person singular. Differences between corresponding personal forms, classified in different tenses, signified differences of time or aspect. In contradistinction to any of the Teutonic languages, including Gothic, classical Latin has six tenses, present, imperfect, perfect, plu¬ perfect, future, and future perfect. The conventional meaning attached to these time-forms or aspect-forms in text-books has been explained in Chapter III (pp. 103-108) which deals with the pretensions of verb- chronology in antiquity.

In reality the terminology of the Latin verb is misleading. The imperfect form, for instance, is usually said to express an act or process as going on in the past (monstrabat, he was showing). It was also used to denote habitual action (scribebat, he used to write). The perfect ' form stood for two things. It indicated completion of an occurrence, as

t

322 The Loom of Language

well as the historic past. So Latin scripsi may be rendered in two ways: I have written , and I mote. The pluperfect signified an action prior to some past point specified or implied in the statement as in F.ngtkh fo, had already drunk his beer when we arrived. The future perfect indicted something anterior to some future action, as in he will have drunk his beer when we arrive. The following table gives the first person forms of the tenses of the active voice in two moods :

	I SING,
	INDICATIVE	SUBJUNCTIVE
Present	canto	cantem
Future	cantabo
Imperfect	cantabam	cantarem
Perfect	cantavi	cantaverim
Pluperfect	cantaveram	cantavissem
Future Perfect	cantavero

Some, but not all of the Latin tenses, each made up of six distinct personal forms, were duplicated for passive use, like the two tenses of the Scandinavian verb (p. 120). There were only three tenses to express meaning in a passive sense, i.e. to replace the active subject by its object. As the Scandinavian passive is recognized by the suffix -r, the Latin passive is recognized by the suffix -r, e.g. timeo (I fear)— timear (I am feared). Classical Latin has no synthetic equivalent of the passive perfect, pluperfect, or future perfect. As in English, the passive form of the perfect was a roundabout expression, i.e. turns deleta est (the tower has been destroyed). Thus the passive voice of the Latin verb at the stage when we first meet it was a crack in the imposing fiexional arma¬ ture of the Latin verb-system.

Of mood littie need be said. Grammarians distinguish three Latin moods, the indicative mood or verb-form commonly used when making an ostensibly plain statement, the imperative mood or verb-form used in command or directions, and the subjunctive mood which is variously used m non-committal statements and in subordinate parts of a sentence. It is sufficient to say that there is no clear-cut difference between the meaning of the indicative and the subjunctive mood. In modem Romance languages the distinction is of little practical impor¬ tance for conversation or informal writing.

In Latin as in English there were many mansions in the verbal house.

The Latin Legacy 323

and we can classify Latin verbs in families as we can classify English verbs in weak, like love or shove, and strong types such as the sing and drink class., hind and find , bring or think classes, according to the way they form past tense-forms or participles {love-loved, sing-sang-sung , drink-drank-drunk, bind-bound, find-found , think-thought, bring-brougkt). School-books arrange Latin verbs in four main families, the amare, monere, legere, and audire types, according to the practice of Friscian, a grammarian who lived in the sixth century a.d.

A considerable class of Latin verbs are excluded from the four so- called regular conjugations of the school-books as irregular verbs. These include some which have tenses formed from different roots* such as fero — I carry, I bring— I carried, I brought. This suggests that the uniformity of the regular verb-type is greater than it is. The formal similarity of so many Latin verbs placed in the same conjugation is not greater than that of the present tense-forms {catch and bring) correspond¬ ing to caught and brought . Analogy is as bad a guide to Latin conjugation as to Latin declension, particularly as regards the perfect. Of deleo (I destroy) the perfect is delevi , but of moneo (I warn) which appears in the same class, it is monui; of audio (I hear) it is audivi , but of aperio (I open) it is aperuL The third conjugation includes as many different beasts as a Zoo, cf. the following list of perfect-formations: —

PRESENT PERFECT PRESENT PERFECT

colligo (I gather)	collegi	ago (I do, drive)	egi
carpo (I pick)	carpsi	frango (I break)	fregi
pono (I put)	posui	rumpo (I break)	rupi
mitto (I send)	misi	curro (I run)	cucurri
ludo (I play)	lusi	tango (I touch)	tetigi

An account of the essential peculiarities of Latin would be incom¬ plete if we left out one of the greatest of all difficulties which confront the translator. Orthodox linguists sometimes tell a story which runs as follows. Relations between Latin words were clearly indicated by fiexional marks, and there was therefore no need for fixed word-order. Thus the statement the farmer leads the goat could be made in six dif¬ ferent ways, for instance, capram agticola ducit — agricola capram ducit — ducit capram agricola, etc. Which one you chose was largely a question of emphasis. It did not vitally affect the meaning. Such freedom was possible because subject {agricold) and object {capram) were labelled as such by their affixes. Once the unstressed endings were ruined through phonetic decay, Latin developed auxiliaries and a fixed word-order.

Thus far the dominie. Nobody who has wasted a painful youth in bringing together what Latin authors had tom asunder, or in separating

324 The Loom of Language

what should never have been together, will deny that the word-order of literary Latin was amazingly “free.” In reality, this so-called free word-order was the greatest impediment to quick grasp of texts, never composed, as are modem books, for rapid reading by working people. The traditional narrative, as told above, omits to mention the circumstance that the Latin of selected school texts existed on wax or papyrus. It was not the language which Romans used when they talked to one another. The crossword puzzles of Qcero and his contemporaries, like the English of Gertrude Stein or James Joyce, had little to do with the character of the language they spoke. It was the exclusive speciality of literary coteries tyrannized by cadence, mesmer¬ ized by metre, and enslaved by Greek models. Classical Latin belongs to a period more than a thousand years before the printing-press democratized reading and promoted systematic conventions of punc¬ tuation, and other devices which have healed the breach between the human eye and the human ear. We do not know the exact nature of the word-order which Cicero used when bawling out to his slave; but there can be little doubt that it was as fixed as that of colloquial Italian. The homely Latin of the Vulgate, though not an accurate record of spoken Latin, probably stands nearer to it than the writings of any classical author. Here is a passage from the parable of the prodigal son :

Et abiity et adhaesit uni And he went and joined one

avium regionis illius. Et misit ilium of the citizens of that country. And he sent him

in villam mam ut pasceret porcos . Et cupiebat to his farm to feed the pigs. And he longed implere ventrem mum de siliquis quas to fill his belly with the husks which porci manducabant. Et nemo illi dabau

pigs ate. And nobody gave him anything.

In se autem reversus 3 dixit: quanti

After having come to himself he said ; How many

mercenarii . m domo patris mei abundant panibus> servants in the house of my father have bread enough ego autem hie fame pereo.

while I am dying here from hunger.

LATIN AS A LIVING LANGUAGE

By the time the Western Roman Empire collapsed, case-distinction

The Latin Legacy 325

of the noun had almost disappeared. Scholars used to discuss whether fixed word-order and the use of prepositions led to the elimination of the case-marks, or whether slurring and decay of case-marks which were not stressed brought in prepositions and fixed word-order. Un-

WRRnWRlVITOqWKlIXRR-D

RRTCfQTrR'RI!R'HjVnfRI!3(]33

3R3VIT&TO3S333SWTH3W

nwvn-avT^m>KM:flHH}3

H3RHHR^nVWH!>HRM3IM

XI3TTR8Vgn-fflVXRW3X3X

Fig. 36. — Oscan Inscription from Pompeii (Reading from right to left.)

doubtedly* the first is nearer the truth than the second. Thus A. D. Sheffield explains in Grammar and Thinking:

“Phonetic change . . . was the proximate cause of the ‘decay5 of in¬ flexions 5 but no mere physical cause can be viewed as acting upon speech regardless of men’s expressive intention in speaking. Before the analytical means of showing sentence-relations had developed, any tendency to slur relating endings would be constantly checked by the speaker’s need of making himself understood. The change, therefore, more likely proceeded as follows: Fixed word-order began to appear within the inflected languages simply as a result of growing orderliness of thought. Relating particles were at the same time added to inflected words wherever the inflexional meaning was vague. After word-order had acquired functional value, and the more precise relating-words were current, relating endings lost their importance, and would become assimilated, slurred, and dropped, from the natural tendency of speakers to trouble themselves over no more speech-material than is needed to convey their thought.”

The first case-casualty was the genitive. Caesar himself had written pauci de nostris (a few of ours), which in modem Italian is pochi dei nostri . Without doubt this was the way in which common people of Vergil’s time talked. Towards the end of the Empire the use of the ablative with de had universally displaced the old genitive without a preposition, and we come across such modem forms as de pomiss equivalent to the modem French des pommes (some apples), or filius de

32& The Loom of Language

rege, equivalent to the French lefils du roi (king’s son). By the beginning of the third century, the noun genitive survived only in set expressions such as lunae dies , which is the French lundi, our Monday or lunar day.

The dative, or case of giving, though more resistant had a rival at an early date. The accusative had long been used with the preposition ad (to). Thus Plautus writes ad camuficem dabo (I shall give to the execu¬ tioner), where Cicero would have written camifici dabo if he had been discussing so familiar a Roman figure; and a temple regulation of 57 B.c., i.e. during the Golden Era of Latinity, contains si pecunia ad id templum data erit (if money should be given to this temple). Eventually a separate dative (as opposed to ablative) flexional form of the noun disappeared with the genitive, except in Dacia (Rumania), where traces of it survive to-day. So popular Latin may be said to have taken the same road as Teutonic languages such as English and Dutch, which have of and to, or van and aan, for de said ad (French de and a) of Vulgar Latin.

In the later days of the Roman Empire, phonetic decay of the ter¬ minals led to further changes. A final -m which was the accusative trade-mark of feminine and masculine nouns, had disappeared at an earlier date. The unstressed vowels -u and -i of the affixes gave place to -o and -e. So the distinction between accusative and ablative case- forms faded out. Thus canem (accus.), cam (dat.), and cane (ablat.) of cams (nomin.) merged in the single oblique (p. ix 6) case-form cane (dog). Since the first century a.d. the ablative had been confused with the accusative of plural nouns. In an inscription from Pompeii, cum discentes (with the pupils) is used for the classical cum discentibus.

Before the fall of the Empire the five declensions of our Latin gram¬ mar-books had dwindled to three. The fifth noun-family had joined the first (Latin facies, figure; Vulgar Latin facia-, French face), and the fourth had joined the second (Latin fructus, fruit; Vulgar Latin /rarfw; Italian frutto), as brother which had joined the oxen class (pi .brethren ) m Mayflower times has now joined the same class as mother (pi. mothers). When the Latin dialects began to diverge after the fall of Rome, Latin declension was probably reduced to the forms as shown in the table on the opposite page. *

■ Id jthe sPoken La£in of Ira5y a final s, like a final t had ceased to be . £arc* *ons before Cicero’s time, and no efforts of the grammarian could Dring it back. Hence the bracketed -s of lunas and caballos in our table Partlyunder the influence of the school, the West preserved it. In spoken French it became silent before the end of the Middle Ages. In Spanish it survives till this day and is now the characteristic mart- of the plural.

The Latin Legacy 327

Further simplifications followed. The distinction between nominative and oblique case has disappeared in all modem Romance languages. On Italian territory the oblique form of the plural disappeared. Only the nominative survived (Latin muri (nom. pi.)— Italian muri). In Frances in Spain* and in Portugal the nominative plural disappeared*

	SINGULAR	I PLURAL
	NOM. | OBL.	NOM.	OBL.
I	lima	tune	luna(s)
	(moon)	(moons)
II	caballu{£) | caballu	1 caballi	cabalMs)
	(horse)	(horses)
III	cani(s) | cane	1 cane(s)
	(dog)	(dogs)

and the oblique (originally accusative) form with a final s took its place (Latin acc. pi. muros— French murs). Case distinction died last in Gaul. In the oldest French and Provencal texts some nouns still preserve the distinction between a subject and an object case as the following table shows:

SINGULAR

	NOM.	OBL.
Vulgar	mums
Latin	mum
Old
French	murs	mur
Modern		1
	/ -
French	mur

PLURAL

NOM. OBL.

muri muros

mur

murs

murs

The case-marks of the adjective shared the same fate as those of the noun. Meanwhile separate neuter forms disappeared. There were two reasons why the noun-form came nearer to that of the adjective. One is the disappearance of two families of noun-behaviour owing to the absorption of the fourth and fifth declensions (p. 317) so that the characteristic affixes corresponded to those of one or other remaining families of nouns. The other was regularization of the gender-classes.

328 The Loom of Language

For instance, names of trees assigned to the second declension of Classical Latin were feminine, though they had the nominative singular affix -us of masculine adjectives. Similarly the first declension, mainly made of feminine nouns such as regina (queen) included masculine words such as nauta (sailor) and poeta (poet). Tree-names which were feminine like populus (poplar) of which the French is peuplier have become masculine in modem Romance languages.

The disappearance of a distinct neuter form of the adjective or, what comes to the same thing, a neuter class of nouns, had already begun in classical times. Authors near to the people would write dorsus (back) for dorsum, or caelus for caelum. In so far as all Latin nouns which have the nominative singular affix -um were neuter, their character was obliterated by the phonetic decay of the final consonant, -m, like the decay of the distinctive masculine or feminine accusative case-mark. In late Latin the drift from neuter to masculine became a headlong retreat. Hence most Latin neuter nouns which survive in modem Romance languages are now placed in the masculine gender-class; and anyone who has learned a little Latin can usually apply his knowledge of Latin genders with success, i.e. masculine and feminine nouns retain the same gender, and neuters become masculine. Thus vinum (wine), imperium (empire) and regnum (a kingdom) become ( le ) vin, ( un ) empire, and (le) regne in French. The exceptions to this rule are few, and some of them are explicable. In so far as the nominative or accusative plural ending of Latin neuter nouns was -a, it was the same as the nominative singular of the more typical feminine noun-class represented by porta. If the meaning of a Latin neuter was such that the plural could be used m a collective sense, or for a pair (c£. news or scissors), it could be used in a singular context. Thus the Latin neuter plural, folia (foliage) becomes the singular feminine lafeuille for a leaf in modem French.

The reader has already had a hint about how knowledge of the forms of the noun in Vulgar Latin throws light on the different types of plural formation in the modem Romance languages. The greater luxuriance of the Latin adjective also helps us to understand the different types of adjective concord which have survived. Latin adjectives for the most part belong to the three-gender type bonus, -a, -um, or to the two- gender class tnstis-triste (sad), utilis-utile (useful) or facilis-facile (easy). The disappearance of the neuter means that survivors of the three- gender class now have only masculine and feminine forms— Spanish bueno-buena (sing.), buenos-buenas (pi.); Italian buono-buona, buoni- buone, French bon-bome, born-bonnes. The survivors of the two-gender

(«) 3rd person masc.^i j Italian.

_ THE JEKYLL AND HYDE PERSONALITY OF THE LATIN DEMONSTRATIVE (SINGULAR) Pronouns and Articles derived from Vulgar Latin Case-forms of Ille, btc.

330

The Loom of Language

The Latin Legacy 331

class in French, Spanish, and Italian have only one form. From this class of adjective gender-concord has disappeared, as for all English adjectives.

Unlike Greek Classical Latin did not possess what grammarians rail the “definite article.’3 Wherever we find this definite article in modem European languages, it can be traced back to a demonstrative which lost its pointing power in the course of time. Thus our English the is a ’ weakened form of that3 and die unaccented dev in German dev Ochs

ROMANCE PERSONAL PRONOUNS

(First and Second Persons — Unstressed* Forms)

	FRENCH	PORTUGUESE	SPANISH	ITALIAN	LATIN
I	je	1 eu		yo	io	ego
ME			ME	mi	me (acc.)
					mihi (dat.)
(thou)			TU
(thee)			TE , i	ti	te (acc.) tibi (dat.)
WE	1	nos		! nosotros	noi	nos
US	f nous				ci	nos (acc.)
J		nos	nobis (dat.)
(nom.)			vos		vosotros	voi	vos
YOU	i	" vous
(obj.)	j		vos		os	vi	vos (acc.) vobis (dat.)

(the ox) began as the der we have in der Mann (that man). The definite article of modem languages, including English, French, and German, rarely lives up to its name. On the contrary, it often has a generalizing, i.e. indefinite function, e.g. the cat is a domestic animal So if we say that Latin had not yet evolved an article, we really mean that the Latin demonstrative had not yet come down in the world, Literary

* Unstressed forms = subject, direct object, and indirect object forms. Ex** cept when the same as the stressed (p. 363), they are never used after a preposi¬ tion. The Spanish nosotras, vosotros are out of step with their equivalents in Latin, Italian, or French. They date from the late Middle Ages and are com¬ binations of nos3 vos with otros (others). Both have feminine iotms^r->nosotras3 vosotros. The French also combine nous or vous with autres (others) when they use either in a sense excluding individuals of a second group, e.g. nous autres Francoises (we French women). Italians have the same trick (noi altre3 etc.). In Spanish the combination has replaced the pronoun itself, i.e. vosotros — you.

332 The Loom of Language

Latin was embarrassingly rich in demonstratives. There were is- ea- id, for referring to something previously mentioned; hie- Haec- hoc, for this near me; iste- ista- istud, for that near you, or that of yours", and ille- illa- illud, for that yonder. The first survives in our abbreviation, i.e. for id est (that is).

Though the literati may have striven to make a real distinction

ROMANCE PRONOUNS OF THE THIRD PERSON (Unstressed Forms)

	FRENCH	PORTUGUESE	SPANISH	ITALIAN
HE	il	ele	el	egli, esso
HIM	le	o	le (or lo)	lo
(to) HIM	lui	Ihe - ‘	le	git
SHE	elle	ela	ella	ella, essa
HER	la	a	la
(to) HER *	lui	Ihe	le
THEY	ils	eles	i ellos	essi, loro
[(fem.)	elles	elas	ellas	esse, loro
THEM J(maSC'X	les	os (or los)	los	li
((fem.)	as (or las)	las	le
(to) THEM	leur	Hies	les	loro
Reflexive
(himself, herself, itself, themselves)		SE		SI

between the four demonstratives, it is more than doubtful whether the fine shades of meaning which grammarians assign to them played any part in living speech. At least this is certain. When Latin spread beyond Italy and was imposed upon conquered peoples* a distinction ceased to exist. Two of them (is and hie) completely disappeared. Through use and abuse the meaning of the other pair (ille and iste) had changed considerably. People used them with less discrimination in the closing years of the Empire. They had lost their foil power as pointer-words Except m Ibenan Latin iste disappeared. The same period also gave birth to the indefinite article (a or an in English) of which the primary function is to introduce something not yet mentioned. For this pur-

The Latin Legacy 333

pose Classical Latin had the word quidam, and in popular speech or informal writing, the numeral unus, una, unum (e.g. unus serous, a slave, a certain slave) was used for it. Only the latter is used in the Vulgate, where it is burdened with as much or as little meaning as the indefinite article of modem French or English.

The fate of the pointer-words is mixed up with the history of the personal pronoun. The terminal of a Latin verb sufficiently indicated the pronoun subject, and the nominative pronouns ego, tu, nos, vos, were used to give emphasis. In Vulgar as in Classical Latin there was no specific emphatic nominative form of the pronoun in the third person analogous to ego , tu, etc. When it was necessary to indicate what the personal flexion of the verb could not indicate, i.e. which of several individuals was the subject, a demonstrative, eventually tile, ilia. Mud (i.e. that one) took the place of he, she, or it. The demonstra¬ tive was therefore a pronoun as well as a definite article at the time when divergence of the Romance dialects occurred. The result of this split personality is that Romance dialects now contain a group of words which are similar in form, but have different meanings. Thus the word equivalent to the in one may be the word equivalent to her in another, or to them in a third. This curious nexus of elements, which are identical in form but differ in function is illustrated in the accompanying highly schematic diagrams (pp. 329 and 330).

Like Scandinavian languages, Latin had two possessive forms of the pronoun of the third person. One died childless. Onlythe reflexive suus, sua, suum left descendants in the modern Romance dialects. Like the Swedish sin, sitt, sina, any of its derivative forms could mean his, her, or its. The gender was fixed by the noun it qualified, and not by the noun which it replaced, i.e. the feminine case-derivative would be used with mater or regina, a masculine with pater or dominus, and a neuter with helium or imperimn .

Another difference between Classical and Vulgar Latin is important in connexion with the adjective of modem Romance languages. In Classical Latin comparison was flexional. There was only one excep¬ tion. The comparative of adjectives ending in -uus (e.g. arduus, arduous) was not formed in the regular way by adding the suffix -ior. To avoid the ugly clash of three vowels (u-i-o-r) the literati used the periphrastic construction magis arduus (more arduous) with the corresponding superlative maxime arduus (most arduous). Popular speech had em¬ ployed this handy periphrasis elsewhere. Thus Plautus used magis aptus (more suitable), or plus miser (more miserable). In the living language

334

The Loom of Language

LU C_

2 f' <

Uj —x LU

xT\ - - \<C

Mj O £>~ ^ -/■**

r q <

^ id UJ

°>-^o

tft O -<i

-^ O i-9- C ua CT3 4_

O

<o

there was thus the same competition between synthesis and isolatic as we now see m English (cf. pretty-prettier , handsome-more handsome In later Latin the plus and magis trick became the prevailing pattern

The Latin Legacy 33

Rumania* Spain* and -Portugal adopted magis (Rumanian mat, Spanish mas, Portuguese mats), while Italy and Gaul embraced plus (Italian pin, French plus). Latin adjectives comparable to English good, better, best, with comparative and superlative forms derived from other roots* resisted this change* and are now islands of irregularity in an ocean of order. They appear in the table of irregular comparison (p. 337); In all Romance languages the ordinary superlative is formed by putting the definite article in front of the comparative form e.g. Spanish mas rico (richer)* el mas rico (the richest). Spanish and Italian have adjectival forms of the same pattern as the Latin superlative with the terminal -isszmus, but they are not equivalent to superlatives in the grammatical sense of the term. The terminal -isimo (- a ) of Spanish or - issimo (-a) of Italian signifies exceedingly as in the exclamation bravo bravissimo! or in the mode of address used in letters carissima (dearest). These synthetic superlatives re-introduced by the learned should be used sparingly, Spanish muy or Italian motto both meaning very, replace them adequately in most situations* e.g. Spanish es muy rico (he is very rich) for es riquisimo.

The Spanish and Italian article before the superlative drops out when the latter follows immediately after a noun. French retains the article* e.g.

English the richest man.

Spanish el hombre mas rico.

Italian Puomo pih ricco.

French Phomme le plus riche.

The comparative particle corresponding to English than is que in French and Spanish e.g, French plus timide qu'un lapin (shier than a rabbit). Italian uses di (Latin de), e.g. i piii povero di me (he is poorer than I). In Spanish and French de also occurs* but confined to situations in which than is followed by a numeral* e.g. Spanish rnenos de cuatro dias (less than four days)* French plus de trois siides (more than three centuries).

REGULAR COMPARISON

	FRENCH	SPANISH	LATIN	ITALIAN
hot	chaud	calido	calidus	caldo
hotter	plus chaud	mas calido	calidior	piu caldo (di)
(than)	(que)	(que)	(quam)
hottest	le plus chaud (de)	el mas calido (de)	calidissimus	il piii caldo (di)
as hot as	aussi chaud que	tan calido como	tarn calidus quam	cosl caldo come

33^ The Loom of Language

In Teutonic languages the adverb may be the same as the neuter singular (Scandinavian) or the predicative form of the adjective (Ger¬ man). English alone is encumbered with a special form (p. in). Classi¬ cal Latin had several types of adverbs derived from adjectives. In modem Romance languages., nearly all the irregular ones have disap¬ peared. Notable exceptions are bene and male. In French these have become bien-mal, in Italian bene-male, and in Spanish bien-mal. The previous luxuriance of adverbs formed from adjective-roots has given place to a standardized pattern like the English -ly derivative. French adverbs are formed by adding -ment to the adjective, e.g. facile-facile- merit . The procedure is the same throughout the Western Romance languages. In Italian the corresponding forms are facile-facilmente^ and in Spanish fdcil-fdcilmente.

IRREGULAR COMPARISON OF ROMANCE ADJECTIVES*

ENGLISH	FRENCH
good	bon (-ne)
better	meilleur (-e)
best	le meilleur
bad	mauvais (-e)
worse	plus mauvais (pire)
worst	le plus mauvais (le pire)
big	grand (-e)
bigger	plus grand
biggest	le plus grand
small	petit (~e)
smaller	plus petit (moindre)
smallest	le plus petit (le moindre)

SPANISH

bueno (-a) mejor (mas bueno ) el mejor

malo

peor

(mds malo) el peor

grande mas grande (mayor) el mas grande

pequeno (-a) mas pequeno (menor)

el mas pequeno

LATIN

bonzzs (~a3 -um) melior

optima

malttf

pejor

pessimws

magnws

major

maximzzs

parvtts

minor

minima

ITALIAN

buono (-a) migliore (piii buono ) il migliore

cattivo (-a) peggiore (piii cattivo ) il peggiore

grande piii grande (maggiore) il piii grande

piccolo (-a) piu piccolo (minor e)

il piii piccolo

The germ of this new structure appears in Classical Latin. When the Roman wanted to indicate that something was done in a certain way, he sometimes used the ablative (mente) of mens (mind), and qualified it by means of an appropriate adjective, e.g. obstinates mente (with an obstinate mind), or bona mente (in good faith.) Since mente always

* In italics alternatives which have a more restricted use in common speech In French only bon has no regular comparative. common speech,

The Latin Legacy 337

followed close upon the heels of the adjective, it lost its 'former inde¬ pendence and became a formative element, eventually used without involving anybody’s mental processes, e.g. sola mente (French settlement) in place of singulanter (alone). Finally -mente fused with the adjective i.e. with its feminine singular form. In Spanish it keeps a trace of its separate identity. The Spaniard usually attaches -mente only to the

IRREGULAR COMPARISON OF ROMANCE ADVERBS

ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	LATIN	ITALIAN
well	bien	bene	bene
better	mieux	mejor	melius	meglio
best	le mieux	lo mejor	(optime)	il meglic
badly5 ill	mal	male	male
worse	plus mal (pis)	peor	pejus	peggio
worst	le plus mal	lo peor	1 (pessimum)	il peggio
little less least	peu	poco	paucum	, poco
moins * le moins	menos lo menos	minus (minime)	meno il meno
very> much	beaucoup	1 mucho	multum	molto
more	plus	mas	plus	piii
most	le plus	lo mas	(plurimum)	il piii

final one when several adverbs follow one another, e.g. habla clara, concha y elegantemente (he speaks clearly, concisely, and elegantly). This was also the custom in Old French, e.g. umele et dolce mente for humble- ment et doucemer.t (humbly and quietly).

One striking difference between the Romance languages and their Teutonic contemporaries is the variety of tense-forms which they possess. This is not because the flexional system of the Latin verb escaped the general process of flexional decay common to other classes of words in the living language. In later Latin verb-forms of the classical authors were largely superseded by new ones which remain the basis of conjugation in the Romance languages. The passive flexion disap- peared, as it is now disappearing in Scandinavian dialects. Its place was taken partly by the active, partly by a roundabout expression con¬ sistently made up of the past participle and the auxiliary esse, to be. Where classical authors had used the present tense of the latter ( traditus est, he has been betrayed) to express completed action, later authors used it for action in progress (cf. the French, il est train = he is being betrayed), and other tenses were used to build up similar

3 3 8 The Loom of Language

constructions, e.g. traditusfuit (he was betrayed), or traditus erit (he will be betrayed).

Two tense-forms of Classical Latin (future and future perfect) disappeared. A third ( pluperfect ) survived only in Iberian Latin; and a fourth lost some of its former territory. To indicate completion of a process or its final result, Latin, like other Indo-European languages had a verb-form, the perfect , which corresponds roughly to our com-

PRESENT AND IMPERFECT TENSE-FORMS OF ROMANCE

VERBS

	FRENCH	SPANISH	LATIN	ITALIAN
I love*	j’aime	amo	amo	amo
etc.	tu aimes	amas	amas	ami
	il aime	ama	amat	ama
	nous aimons	amamos	amamus	amiamo
	vous aimez	amais	amatis	amate
	ils aiment	arnan	amant	amano
1 was	j’aimais	arnaba	amabam	amavo
loving.	tu aimais	amahas	amabas	amavi
etc.	il aixnait	amaba	amabat	amava
	nous aimions	amabamos	amabamus	amavamo
	vous aimiez	amabais	amabatis	amavate
	ils aimaient	amahan	amabant	amavano

pound past, e.g. from scribere (to write), scrip* (I have written), but Caesar writes of himself, Caesar urhem occupatam habet, which is roughly equivalent to Caesar has occupied the city, and Cicero himself writes, scriptum habeo (I have written), satis habeo deliberation (I have deliberated enough). In late Latin the old synthetic perfect form {cantam = I have sung) was gradually ousted by the periphrastic construction with habere (to have) or esse (to be), i.e. cantam by cantatum habeo, an d reverti (I have returned) by reversus sum. The synthetic forrn remained, but came to be confined to the function of a past definite {cantam = I sang). As such it still persists in literary French as in spoken or written Spanish and Italian (he sang: Latin content, French il chanta, Spanish canid, Italian canto). Frenchmen never use it in conversation or informal writing.

Another tense-form which disappeared in the later stages of living Latin was the classical future. While the verb to have kept its indepen¬ dence as a helper to indicate past time, the new analytical future to

The Latin Legacy 339

which it also contributed formed the -basis of a fresh flexional tense- form (pp. 105 and 10 6). This new analytical future makes its appear¬ ance in the first century a.d. Its predecessor had two entirely different forms. Of dico (I say) the future was dicam (I shall say), and of lava (I . wash) it was lavabo (I shall wash). In the second century a.d. the classical future had lost caste, and people resorted to affective cir¬ cumlocutions such as volo lavare (I will wash), debetis lavare (you

_ THE FUTURE TENSE OF A ROMANCE VERB

ENGLISH

love (infin4)

I have	I shall
thou hast	thou wilt
he has	he will
we "1	we shall
you >have	you will
they J	they will

SPANISH

FRENCH

aimer

j’ai faimerai

to as til aimeras

il a il aimera

nous avons nous aimercns vous avez vous aimerez ils ont ils aimeront

ITALIAN

amar

yo he to has el ha

nosotros hemos vosotros habeis ellos han

yo amare to amar&s el amara

nosotros amaremos vosotros amareis ellos amaran

amare

io ho to hai egli ha noi abbiamo voi avete essi ham, no

io amero to amerai egli amera noi ameremo voi amerete essi ameranno

shall wash), vado (or eo) lavare (I am going to wash), or lavare haheo (I have to wash). Of these helpers, habere prevailed in all of the written Romance languages except in Rumania, where we hear to-day voiu cdntd. Elsewhere habere, which usually followed the infinitive, got glued to it, as explained on p. 106.

In our outline of Classical Latin nothing has been said about nega¬ tion. To give a statement a negative meaning, ne was used in archaic Latin, but it could also label a question* as such. In Classical Latin, it is replaced by the stronger non, a contraction of ne and unum (lit. not one). In daily speech, Latin-speaking peoples used to strengthen the particle by adding another word for something small or valueless. They said I can’t see a speck (Latin punctum ), we haven’t had a crumb (Latin micam), I won’t drink a drop (Latin guttam). In the modern Romance languages the negative particle is still the Latin turn (Italian non, Spanish * Cf. You have not understood this?

34° The Loom oj Language

n°> Portuguese nao, Rumanian mi), to which some such emphasizing element may be added; and in French a double-barrelled negation (ne-pas) is obligatory. It arose in the following way. In Old French,

Fig. 38.— Stone Slab from Lemnos with Early Greek Lettering The language itsdf, possibly Etruscan, is undedphered. The writing is from -eft to right, from right to left, vertically upwards or vertically downwards.

non had just become nen, and later ne. It was often strengthened by other words. Some of them tallied with ones used in Vulgar Latin as above. One was new:

je ne vots point I don’t see a speck.

je ne mange mie I don’t eat a crumb.

je ne hois goutte I don’t drink a drop.

je ne marche pas I don’t do a step — from Latin passus.

The Latin Legacy 341

The negative value of tie in the combinations in this list infected its bedfellows, which lost their original meaning and arc now used only as negative particles. Two of them, mie and goutte , eventually disap¬ peared. Two others, pas and point , have survived. By the sixteenth century it was the rule to use one of them in any negative statement. To-day the most common form is tie-pas, and tie-point is only for emphasis. If ne is accompanied by another negative such as personne (nobody), rien (nothing), or jamais (never), the latter replace pas or point, e.g. il ne me visite jamais (he never looks me up). In popular French the process has gone further. While in Old French the pas was more often omitted than not, you now hear French people drop the emasculated ne and say j’aime pas pa (I don’t like it), or il dort pas (he doesn t sleep). The French particle ne also keeps company with que and guire in a sense which does not imply negation. When que replaces pas, it signifies only, e.g. je n’ai que deux sous (I have only a penny). When guere takes its place, it means scarcely, e.g. je ne la connais guire (I hardly know her). Corresponding to the French ne . . . que for only we have the Italian non . . . che.

If we recall the wide range of only in English (p. 274) this construction should not puzzle us. As an adverb only, or its equivalent merely, involves a qualified negative. It implies no more {and no less) than, no better than or not . . . with the exception. Thus a Frenchman says il ria qiiun oeil (he has no more than one eye, he has only one eye) or je ne bois qu’aux repas (I don’t drink except at meals, I only drink at meals). This adverbial use of only in Romance as in Teutonic (p. 274) languages is quite distinct from that of the adjectival only meaning sole, solitary, single, alone, or unique. For only as adjective we have seul{e) or less common, unique in French, solo or unico in Italian (Spanish solo or linico).

School-book knowledge of Latin does not always help us to link up a Romance word with its Latin forerunner As a living language, Taft'n had a large stock of words which classical authors never used. Where they would write equus for horse, iter for journey, os for mouth, ignis for fire, comedere for eat, a citizen of the Empire would say caballus (French cheval, Spanish caballo, Italian cavallo); viaticum (French voyage, Spanish viaje, Italian viaggio); buca (French bouche, Spanish boca, Italian bocca); focus (French feu, Spanish fuego, Italian fuoco)-, manducare , lit. to chew (French manger, Italian mangiare). In the school-books the Latin word for house is dotnus, which was the name for the house of the well-to-do. Beside it Latin had casa, which

34s The Loom of Language

signified the sort of house with which most Romans had to be content. Casa survives in Spanish and Italian, French has maison derived from mansio (mansion). Many words current in Romance languages go back to diminutive forms which abounded in Vulgar Latin, e.g. auricula (little ear) for the classical aims (French oreille, Italian orecchio, Spanish orejd), geniculum (little knee) for the classical genu (French genou, Italian ginocchio). ’

Though their common parentage has equipped the Romance dialects with an immense stock of recognizably similar words, some of the more common ones are totally different. For the act of speaking, classical Latin had two words, loqui and fabulari. The first was high-flown, the second informal. Loqui has disappeared, while the latter survives as hablar (see p. 249) in Spanish. Italy and France on the other hand borrowed a word from church language, parabulare (French purler, Italian parlare). It comes from the Latin word parabula (Greek para- bole). By metaphor the gospel parables, i.e. Christ’s word, came to mean word in general. Its semantic journey did not stop there. In its Spanish form (palabra ) it degenerated from the speech of prophets to the speech of natives in the colonies, hence palaver. A similar cleavage is illustrated by the word for shoulder. In Spanish it is honibro , corre¬ sponding with the Latin word humerus. The French is epaule, and, like the Italian spalla, goes back to the Latin equivalent ( spatula ) for the shoulder-blade . Classical Latin had two words for beautiful. One was pulcher, which was ceremonial. The other, formosus from forma, might be rendered by shapely. The former disappeared everywhere. The latter survived in Spain (hermoso) and Rumania (frumps). The common people of Rome said bellus (pretty), instead of pulcher or formosus. This word fives on in French (beau masc ., belle fern.), in Italian and Spanish (bello-belld).

THE IBERIAN DIALECTS

Roman rule extended over more than six hundred years in the Iberian peninsula. Centuries before its end the speech of the conqueror had superseded that of the vanquished. The last reference to it is in the Armais of Tacitus. According to him a Tarragonian peasant under torture cried out in the language of his forefathers.” By that timp

Spam was completely Romanized. Seneca, Quintilian, and Martial were

all Spaniards.

A splinter of an earlier type of speech survives as Basque, which people still speak on French and Spanish soil at the western end of the

The Latin Legacy 343

Pyrenees. Before the planes of Hitler and Mussolini rained death on them, Basque was the tongue of about half a million people. Spanish Latin has survived all invasions of historic times. At the beginning of the fifth century Germanic hordes, including the Vandals who gave their name to (®)Andalusia, overran the Peninsula. Then the West Goths ruled for over two centuries, with Toledo as their capital. After them came the Arabs and Moors from Africa. The Muslims who subdued the whole country with the exception of the Asturian moun¬ tains, did not interfere with the religion or language of the people, and intermarriage was common under a benign regime. The Spanish national hero, Rodrigo Diez de Bivar, otherwise called the Cid, fought both for infidels and Christians. Cruelty and intolerance came with the reconquista started by Catholic princes in the unsubdued North.

The Catholic conquest of lost territory slowly spread fan-wise towards the South, ending in 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella appropriated Granada for the sacrament of inquisitorial fire. During the Moorish occupation the speech of the Peninsula was still a mixture of dialects descended from Vulgar Latin. In the East, and more closely akin to the Provencal of South France, there was Catalan; in the North, Leonese , Aragonese, , and Asturian ; in the centre Castilian ; in the West, including Portugal, Galician. From Portugal, already a semi-indepen¬ dent province in the eleventh century and foremost as a maritime power under Henry the Navigator, what was originally a Galician dialect was carried to Madeira and the Azores, later to Brazil. Li the neighbour¬ hood of 50 million people now speak Portuguese. This figure includes about 40 million inhabitants of Brazil, which became a sovereign, state jn 1822.

In Spain itself the emergence of a common standard was early. At the suggestion of Alfonso X, the Cortes of 1253 made the usage of Toledo' -the pattern of correct Spanish. Like Madrid and Burgos, Toledo was in Castile. Castilian, at first the vernacular of a handful of folk in the Cantabrian mountains on the Basque border, thus became what is now the official language of about ninety million people, including 23 million Spaniards, 16 million Mexicans, 13 million Argen¬ tinians, 30 million citizens of other South or Central American states, 3 millions in the Antilles, and one million in the Philippine Islands. American Spanish has some Andalusian features, partly because emigrants to the New World came mainly from the South, and partly because Cadiz was the commercial centre of the colonies.

The vocabulary of a territory so repeatedly invaded inevitably has a

344 The Loom of Language

large admixture of non-Latin words. Germanic tribes left fewer traces than in French, and these few. connected with war and feudal institu¬ tions. Many hundreds of Arabic words bear testimony to what Spain owes to a civilization vastly superior to its Catholic successor. The sample printed below shows how Arabic infected all levels of the Spanish vocabulary. The ubiquitous al- of algebra is the Arabic article glued on to its noun.

	ARABIC	SPANISH
. poor, paltry	misqin	mezquino
water-mill	as-saniyat	aceha
mayor	al-qadi	alcalde
constable	al-wazir	alguacil
suburb	ar-rabad	arrabal
drain	al-balla'at	albanal
cistern	al-zubb	aljibe
coffin	at-tabut	ataud
young corn	al-qasil	alcacel
jessamine	yasamin	jazmln
alcohol	al-quhl	alcohol
lute	al-eud	laud

None the less, the Spanish vocabulary is essentially a basic stratum of Vulgar with a superstructure of Classical Latin. The same is true of Portuguese, which has fewer Basque and more French loan-words. Otherwise the verbal stock-in-trade of the two Iberian dialects is similar. Needless to say, a few very common things have different Spanish and Portuguese, as some common things have different Scots, American, and English names, e.g. :

	SPANISH	PORTUGUESE
child	niho	crianca, menino (a)
dog .	perro	cao
knee	rodilla	joelho
window	ventana	janela
street	calle	rua
hat	sombrero	chapeu
knife	cuchillo	faca

It is not a hard task for anyone who has mastered one of the two official Iberian languages, and has learned the tricks of identifying copiate though apparently dissimilar words, to read a newspaper printed in the other one. A similar statement would not hold good for

The Latin Legacy

345

conversation. The phonetic differences between Spanish and Portu¬ guese are sharp. The outstanding ones are summarized below:

(i) Like French, Portuguese has nasalized vowels, and even (unlike French) nasalized diphthongs. Nasalization has come about when a vowel preceded m or n. These two consonants may be silent, or may have disappeared in writing. The til (") over the nasal vowel is then the tomb¬ stone of one or other, as the French ' weeps over a departed s, e.g.

pams ana (wool), Portuguese la; Spanish son (are), Portuguese sao; Spanish cnstiano (Christian), Portuguese cristSo; Spanish pan (bread), Portuguese pao; Spanish bum (good), Portuguese bom; Spanish fin (end), Portuguese fim.

(ii) Between vowels Portuguese suppresses the Latin /, e.g. Latin caelum (sky), Spanish cielo, Portuguese ceu; Latin salute (health),

pamsh salud, Portuguese satide; Latin volare (fly), Spanish volar , Portu¬ guese »oor. The loss of l extends to the definite article and the corre¬ sponding unstressed pronouns of the third person, i.e. 0 and a, «, and or, for what were once lo and la, los and las. Thus o potto = the port. Through agghitmation of the article with the preposition de or ad, we get do and da, dos and das, or ao and a, aos and as, which recall the French rorms au3 des3 or aus aux.

(iii) The initial Vulgar Latin cl, fl, pi, which often becomes ll in Spanish, change to the ch (as in champagne ) of Portuguese, e.g. Spanish

ave ( ey)> ana (full) 3 llama (flame), Portuguese chavey chela y chama ( rench clef, plem3 flamme). On this account the equivalence of one small group of words is impossible to detect without a knowledge of sound-shifts.

(iv) The initial Vulgar Latin/ which often degenerates to a silent h in

m Portuguese> e'§- Portuguese filho (son), Spanish hijo.

^ ' Wiule 1 ortuguese stressed vowels o and e are conservative, they are replaced in Spanish by the diphthongs ue and ie, e.g. Portuguese pernaQc g), nove (nine), perm (door), Spanish piema, nueve, puerta.

(vi) Portuguese orthography shares with French the accents ' , A, ». The acute accent labels as such an open and stressed vowel, the circum-

(Spanishp£w^d stressed one5 e‘g' powder (Spanish polvo), pdr, put

Grammatical differences between the two dialects are trifling. Por¬ tuguese discarded haver (Spanish haber) as a helper verb at an early date. As such it persists .only in set expressions. Its modem equivalent is ter (Spanish tener). Hence tenhoamado (I have loved), tenho chegado (I have arrived), for the Spanish he amado and he llegado. Both languages favour diminutives. The Spanish favourite is -ito, the Portu- guese -mho. In one way Portuguese still lingers behind modem Spanish, French, or Italian. The agglutination of the infinitive mth habere to form the future and the conditional is incomplete. In an affirmative

34-6 The Loom of Language

statement the personal pronoun may slip between the infinitive and the auxiliary, e.g. dir-me-as (lit. tell me you have = you will tell me), dar-vos-mos (lit. give you we have = we shall give you).

FRENCH

The first Romance language to have a considerable literature was a dialect of the Midi, i.e. Southof France. This Proven pal had a flourish¬ ing cult of romantic poetry greatly influenced by Moorish culture. Its modem representatives are hayseed dialects of the same region. Closely related to it is the vernacular of the Spanish province of Catalonia, including its capital, Barcelona. *

What is now French began as the dialect of the Parisian bourgeoisie. Owing to the political, cultural, and economic predominance of the capital, it spread throughout the monarchy, submerged local dialects and encroached upon Breton, which is a Celtic, and Flemish, which is a Teutonic language. It is now the daily speech of half Belgium, and of substantial minorities in Switzerland and Canada. In 1926 a compact body of 40 million European people habitually used French, 37 millions in France itself, excluding the bilingual Bretons, Alsatians, and Cor¬ sicans, 3 million Belgians and nearly a million Swiss. Outside Europe about three and a half millions in the French (or former French) dependencies and a million and a half Canadians use it daily. Canadian French has archaic and dialect peculiarities due to long linguistic isolation and the influence of early emigrants from Normandy.

French has twice enjoyed immense prestige abroad, first during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when the victorious Crusaders carried it to Jerusalem, Antioch, Cyprus, Constantinople, Egypt, and Tunis, and again in the seventeeth and eighteenth. Five years before the Revolu¬ tion the Royal Academy of Berlin set the following questions as tVipn-ip for a prize competition: what has made the French language universal, why does it merit this prerogative, and can we presume that it will keep it? The winner was a French wit and chauvinist, named Rivarol Rivard’s answer to the first and second was that French owed its' prestige to its intrinsic merits, that is to say, to the order and construc¬ tion of the sentence. (“What is not clear is not French. What is not

clear is still English, Italian, Greek, or Latin.”)

This is nonsense, as is the plea of some interlinguists, inducing the late Havelock Ellis, for revival of French as a world auxiliary. Its vogue as a medium of diplomacy was partly due to the fact that it was already a highly standardized language, but far more to a sue-

The Latin Legacy 347

cession of extrinsic circumstances. From the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) till the collapse of Napoleon, France was usually in a position to dictate the terms of her treaties on the continent. Before the period of enlightenment which preceded the Revolution the Court of Versailles was the cultural citadel of Absolutism. The Encyclopaedists w£re the commercial travellers of English rationahsm and the revolutionary wars emblazoned the fame of French culture in a new stratum of European society. The Empire reinforced its prestige, but provoked a nationaEstic reaction throughout Europe. After the defeat of Bona¬ parte its influence receded in Scandinavian countries, among the Russian aristocracy in Russia, where official foreign correspondence was conducted in French till about 1840, and in Egypt under the impact of British imperialism. Though it still has ostentation-value as a female embellishment in well-to-do circles, unfamiliarity with French no longer stamps a person as an ignoramus among educated people. Neither Lloyd George nor Wilson could converse with the Tiger in his own tongue. That they could discuss the spoils without resource to an interpreter was because Clemenceau had Eved in the United States.

ITALIAN AND RUMANIAN

The three Latin dialects discussed in the last few pages have trans¬ gressed the boundaries of sovereign states. ItaEan and Rumanian are essentially national, and o'ther Latin descendants, e.g. Romansch in Switzerland are local splinters, on all fours with Welsh or Scots GaeEc.

Phonetically ItaEan has kept closer to Latin than Spanish or French, and its vocabulary has assimilated fewer loan-words. The oldest avail¬ able specimens of ItaEan (a.d. 960 and 964) occur in Latin documents as formulae repeated by witnesses in connexion with the specification of boundaries. Written records are sparse till the thirteenth century. By then Italy again had a Eterature of its own. The dominant dialect was that of Florence, which owed its prestige less to the poems of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio than to a flourishing textile industry and wealthy banking houses. It has changed remarkably Ettle since Dante’s time. In 1926 there were 41 milEon ItaEans in the Peninsula, in Sicily, and in Sardinia. Less than a quarter of a milEon account for ItaEan minorities either in Switzerland or in Corsica.

Rumania corresponds roughly to the Roman province Dada under the Emperor Trajan. From one point of view its official language is the EngHsh or Persian (p. 410) of the Latin family. Strange-looking words

34^ The Loom of Language

of Vulgar Latin origin mingle with Bulgarian, Albanian, Hungarian, Greek, and Turkish intruders. The Slavonic loan-words predominate! Apart from its hybrid character, comparison with English or Persian breaks down. Rumanian grammar has not undergone great simplifica¬ tion. One odd feature mentioned on p. 280 is reminiscent of the Scandi¬ navian clan. In the eastern Empire, Vulgar Latin favoured the post- posited article, e.g. homo ille, rather than the more western ille homo. For that reason, the article is now agglutinated to the end of many Rumanian nouns in such contractions as omul = homo ille (the man), lupul = lupu ille (the wolf), cdinele = cane ille (the dog). Earliest Rumanian documents do not go back more than four hundred years and are ecclesiastical. To-day 15 million people speak the language.

FURTHER READING

bourciez Elements de Linguistique Romane. grandgent An Introduction to Vulgar Latin.

CHAPTER IX

MODERN DESCENDANTS OF LATIN

A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF FRENCH, SPANISH, PORTUGUESE, AND ITALIAN GRAMMAR

On the whole, differences between modem descendants of T.atin are less than differences between the two main branches of the Teutonic family. The Teutonic dialects had drifted apart before differentiation of the Romance languages began. The Romance languages have many common features which they share with Vulgar Latin, and others which are products of parallel evolution. Because it is the most regular representative of the group, Italian offers the least difficulty to a be¬ ginner, especially to anyone who intends merely to get a reading knowledge of it. Our bird’s-eye view will therefore deal mainly with Spanish and French. We shall discuss them together. The reader can assemble information appropriate to individual needs from dif¬ ferent sections of this chapter, from tables printed elsewhere, or from relevant remarks in other chapters. With the aid of a dictionary the reader, who is learning Portuguese or intends to do so, will be able to supplement previous tables of essential words (Chapters V and VIII or elsewhere) listing only French, Spanish, and Italian items.

The standpoint of the Loom of Language is practical. Our Hcfimrirm 0f grammar is knowledge essential for intelligible correspondence in a language or for ability to read it, other than information contained in a good dictionary. So we shah not waste space over what is common to the idiom of our own language and to that of those dealt with in this chap¬ ter. What the home student cannot find in a dictionary are tricks of expression or characteristics of word-equivalence peculiar to them. There are illustrations of outstanding features of word-order in the Romance languages in Chapter IV, p. 153 et seq., and hints about pronunciation of French, Italian, and Spanish in Chapter VI, p. 254 et seq. All there is need to say about comparison of the adjective is in Chap¬ ter VIII (pp. 333-337). Other grammatical peculiarities of Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Italian essential for reading or writing know¬ ledge are included in three topics: (a) concord of noun and adjective.

350 The Loom of Language

including plural formation; ( b ) vagaries of the definite article and of the

pronoun; (c) verb flexion.

Of the Romance dialects dealt with, English-speaking people find Spanish easier than French. Italian is more easy than either. This is so for several reasons : (i) the sounds of Spanish (or Italian) are much more like those we ourselves use; (ii) the spelling conventions of Spanish and Italian are much more consistent than those of French; (Hi) the Latin origin of the older — and therefore many of the more familiar — French words is hard to recognize, and they are therefore difficult to identify with English words 'of Latin origin (p. 238); (iv) the entire apparatus of noun-adjective flexion is immensely more regular in Spanish and in Italian than in French. Thus the rules for plural formation of nouns admit less exceptions, and, what is more important, it is easier to detea the gender-class of a noun from its ending. Apart from the greater regularity of their flexions, there are other features which bring Spanish or Italian into line with Anglo-American usage. One is a peculiar durative construction, equivalent to our own in expressions such as I was waiting .

NOUN AND ADJECTIVE

The only flexion of the noun now left in Romance languages marks distinction between singular and plural. In comparison with that of Teutonic languages other than English, plural formation of any Ro¬ mance language is remarkably Tegular . On paper the typical plural ending of Spanish , Portuguese , and French nouns and adjectives is -s, as in English . This is partly due to the mastery (p. 327) of the oblique, in competition with the subject, case-form. ■ Otherwise the masculine singular form of French nouns might also end in -r, as do a few sur¬ vivors, e.g.fils (son) and some proper names such as Charles .

Luckily for anyone who intends to learn the language, the regularity of Italian noun-adjective concord approaches that of Esperanto. Whether singular or plural, native Italian nouns end in a vowel The subject case (see p. 327) of the Latin noun is the one which has sur¬ vived in both numbers. Thus most Italian singular nouns end in -a, if feminine, or -0 (cf. mum on p. 327) if masculine, according as they come from Latin ones of the first and second declensions. Most of the remainder are survivors of the third, and end in - e . In the plural, -a changes to -e (Latin -ae) and - 0 or -e changes to These rules admit very few exceptions. The only notable ones are:

(a) Three common nouns have irregular plurals: wmo-uomini (mm- men), moglie-mogli (wife- wives), bue-buoi (ox-en).

(h) Masculine nouns of which the singular ending is an unstressed

Modem Descendants of Latin 351

-a take -i in the plural, e.g. poeta-poeti (poet-s), tema-temi (theme-s), dramma-drammi (drama-s).

(c) Some descendants of Latin neuters have singular masculine and

plural feminine forms, e.g. Fuovo-Ie uova (the egg- s). We also have to use the plural terminal -a for braccio, labbro , ginocchio (arm, lip, knee) as for il dito-le dita (the finger-s) when we refer to a pair. These have alternate masculine plural forms with the ending -i, as have frutto (fruit), legno (wood), dim (finger), osso (bone).

(d) Monosyllables, and all nouns which end in a stressed vowel are

invariant like our sheeps e.g. la dttd-le cittd (the city — the cities).

(e) In conformity with the consistent spelling rules of Italian (p. 354)

a hard G before the singular terminals -O or -A becomes GH before the plural -I or -E, e.g. lago-laghi (lake-s), luogo-luoghi (place-s). Likewise the hard C of the feminine singular becomes CH, e.g. amica-amicke (ffiend-s). Masculine nouns may retain the hard sound, Q.g.fuoco-fuochi (fire-s Ifico-fieki (fig-s), stomaco- stomach . Many masculines with final -CO have the soft sound

9 ^e^ore ^ ^ plural, e.g. amieo-amid (ffiend-s), medico - medid3 porco-pord (pig-s).

The regular types are illustrated by:

corona	anno	fiore
(crown)	(year)	(flower)
corone	anni	fion
(crowns)	(years)	, (flowers)

Plural formation in Spanish or Portuguese is as regular as in English.

All plural Spanish nouns end with -S. There is one noteworthy irregu¬ larity. Singular nouns which end in a consonant, in y, or an accented vowel take -esy e.g. :

corona ano hombre flor

(crown) (ysar) (man) (flower)

coronas anas hombres flares

(crowns) (years) (men) (flowers)

, T*1® same rule applies to Portuguese nouns, e.g. livro-Kvros (book- books), pena-penas (pen-pens). Portuguese nouns which end in -So change it usually to oes in the plural, e.g. na$fio-nagoes (nation-s). Nouns ending in -al, -el, -ol, -ul, form the plural in -ais, -eis, - ois , -uis, e.g. papel-papeis (paper-papers). Nouns ending in -m change it to -ns, eV homem-homens (man-men). °’

There is this difference between French on the one hand and Spanish or Portuguese on the other. The French plural -S, like so many other

352 The Loom of Language

flexional survivals of the written language, is often nothing more than a

convention of the printed or written page. Unless the next word begins with, a vowel— or a mute H (p. 258)— the plural -S is a dead letter. When it does precede a word beginning with a vowel, it sounds like z. Otherwise flexional distinction between singular and plural in spoken French is usually guaranteed only by the presence of the definite article le (masc. sing.), la (fem. sing.), or les (jplur.); and the French use their definite article far more than we use our own. In fact, it has become a sort of number-prefix.

A small group of French nouns has not yet been brought into line with the prevailing pattern. The singular endings -ail or -al change to -aux in the plural, e.g. email-emaux, hopital-hdpitaux. Apart from these, there are a few vestiges of audible number-distinction. The French word for the eye, Fcei % has the irregular plural les yeux. The ox, le bceuf and the egg, / ceuf, lose their final -f in the spoken plural — les bceuf s (pronounced bd)9 les ceufs (pronounced o). You will not be speaking the French of the text-book if you forget these irregularities and pronounce the plural of ceufs and bceuf s like the singular, or say les ceils for les yeux, but you will be understood. You are merely doing what millions of modest French¬ men themselves do. All that needs to be added is that nouns with the singular endings -au, -eau, -eu and -ou take -x instead of -s in the plural (e.g. cheveux , hair, eaux, waters, genoux , knees). This again is a paper distinction. The x is silent before a consonant, and pronounced as if it were z when the next word begins with a vowel.

To replace a French, Portuguese, Spanish, or Italian noun by the right pronoun, and to choose the right form of the adjective or the article to accompany it, we need to know the gender class to which it belongs. Any noun of a modern Romance language falls into one of two gender classes, masculine and feminine. Sometimes its mean¬ ing helps us to identify the gender class of a Romance noun. Three rules apply to the group as a whole : (a) male human beings and male domestic animals are masculine, female human beings and female domestic animals feminine; (b) names of days, months, and compass bearings are masculine; (c) most metals and trees are masculine, most fruits feminine. The reader can turn, to the exhibits of Part IV to test these rules and to note exceptions.

Usually, we have to rely as best we can on the ending, as already illustrated by reference to Italian nouns. Two clues have turned up in what has gone before:

(<2) Descendants of Latin masculines and neuters with the nominative singular endings -US and -UM are nearly always masculine. In Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, the corresponding terminal is -O.

Modem Descendants of Latin 353

Mojre often than not, French descendants of this class end in a consonant.

(b) Descendants of Latin feminines with the nominative singular ending -A are also feminine and retain the same terminal in Spanish and Portuguese, as in Italian. In French it usually makes way for a mute -E. Portuguese nouns ending in -gao (Latin -tione) are feminine.

These two clues tell us how to deal with the enormous class of Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese nouns which have the singular ter¬ minals -O (; masc .) or -A (Jem.). Among Latin nouns which did not have the characteristic masculine, neuter or feminine endings -US, -UM, -A in the nominative singular some had terminals which stamp the gender class of their descendants throughout the group. In the following list the Latin equivalent is the ablative case form.

LATIN	ITALIAN	SPANISH	FRENCH
MASCULINE
-ALE	-ALE	-AL
candle	candle	canal
-ENTE • j	-EN	1 TE	-ENT
accidente |	I accidente	accident
FEMININE
-TONE	I -TONE	1 -ION
natione	nazione	nacion	nation
-ATE	-A	-AD	HB
libertate	libertd	libertad	liberte
-TTJDINE	-TUDINE	-TUB	-TUDE
gratitudine	gratitudine	gratitud	gratitude

Latin abstract nouns with the ablative singular terminal -ore were masculine. Their descendants stick to their original gender in Spanish and Italian, but have become effeminate in French:

LATIN	ITALIAN	SPANISH	FRENCH	ENGLISH
clamore	il clamore	el clamor	la clameur	clamour
colore	il colore	el color	la couleur	colour
dolore	il dolore	el dolor	la douleur	pain
pudore	il pudore	el pudor	la pudeur	modesty
sapore	il sapore	el sabor	la saveur	taste (savour
vapore	il vapore	el vapor	la vapeur	steam, vapour

M

I

354 The Loom of Language

Rules of this sort are not absolutely reliable. Even if a noun is mascu¬ line or feminine in Latin* its descendant in a daughter dialect does not invariably fall into the same gender-class. Consequently knowledge of one Romance language is , not an infallible guide to gender in another. This is illustrated by the following list:

	LATIN	FRENCH	SPANISH	ITALIAN
flore	(flower), m.	fleur, f.	flor, f.	fiore* m.
lepore	(hare), m.	lievre* m.	liebre* f.	lepre* f.
limite	(limit), m.	limite* f.	limite* m.	limite* m.
pulvere	(dust), m.	poudre* f.	polvo* m.	polvere* f.
sanguine ( blood), m.	sang* m.	sangre* f.	sangue* m.
aestate	(summer), f.	et&» m.	estio* m.	estate* f.
dente	(tooth), m.	dent, f.	diente* m.	dente, m.
ffonte	(forehead), f.	front*, m.	' frente* f.	fronte* f.
arte	(art), f.	art* m.	arte* m.. or f.	1 arte* f.

A single common exception to the rule that Italian and Spanish -0 nouns are masculine is the word for handy which is feminine.

Thus the white hand is la mano blanca (Span.)* la mano bianca (Italian). Italian nouns of the minority class* i.e. those which do not have the singular terminals ~o or •a end in -E and are either masculine or feminine. There is an -E class in Spanish and Portuguese* and an even larger group of Spanish and Portuguese nouns which end in a consonant. Spanish nouns which have the singular endings -D or -Z are usually feminine.

Spaniards make a peculiar distinction between animate and inanimate objects. When the direct object is a person or its pronoun equivalent (de¬ monstrative* interrogative* relative* and indefinite)* it must be preceded by the preposition a, e.g. veo a Don Juan (I see Don Juan) * no he visto a nadie (I have seen nobody) * but veo la plaza (I see the square). The preposition 'a may also be used when the object is a familiar animal* e.g. llama al perro, he calls the dog. We omit it after tenet (have) and querer (want)* but not when tenet means hold or querer means love, e.g. tengo a mi amiga (I am holding my friend).

LATIN	ITALIAN	SPANISH	PORTUGUESE	FRENCH	ENGLISH
OVG	uovo	huevo	ovo	oeuf	egg
vino	vino	vino	vinho	vin	wine
anno	anno	aho	ano	an	year
aqua	acqua	agua	agua	eau	water
porta	porta	puerta	porta	porte	door
bucca	bocca	boca	boca	bouche	mouth

Modem Descendants of Latin 355

Relatively few French norms have an explicit gender label like the -O or -A endings of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. The original Latin vowel terminals which help to mark the gender of the Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian noun have disappeared or have changed past recognition. The preceding examples (p. 354) illustrate this.

The following rules are useful to the student of French, and the beginner who is not familiar with Latin or with another Romance language should learn them. French nouns are:

(a) masculine if they end in:—

(i) -AGE, -AIRE, -EGE, -OIRE, -EAU.

(ii) -fi {excluding those ending in -Tfi and -TIE).

(hi) Consonants other than those mentioned below.

Examples: V heritage, inheritance le labor atoire , laboratory

le vestiaire, cloak-room le vaisseau , vessel, ship

le college, college le conge, leave

(£) feminine if they end in:

(i) -TE and -Tlfi.

(ii) -£E.

(iii) -E preceded by one or more consonants (e.g. -ale, -ole, -ule; -be, -ce, -de; -fe, -ne, - pe ).

Examples: la vanite, vanity Parrivee, arrival

Pamitie, friendship la viande, meat

In all Romance languages the behaviour of the adjective tallies closely with that of the noun, and in all of them there are two classes. What is always the larger class is made up of adjectives with four forms, i.e. separate masculine and feminine forms both singular and plural. The smaller class is genderless. Adjectives of this type have only two forms, singular and plural. The singular forms of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian adjectives of the larger class have the terminals -O (masc.) or -A (fern.). The genderless Italian adjective has the singular terminal -E, as have many genderless Spanish and Portuguese adjectives. Ringniar forms of other genderless Spanish and Portuguese adjectives end in a consonant. The plural forms of all Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese adjectives follow the same rule: the plural form of the adjective is like the plural form of a noun with the same singular ending.

The following examples therefore illustrate all essential rules for use of the Italian adjective;

356 The Loom of Language

un libro giallo (a yellow book) un Duce loquace (a talkative leader)

libri gialli (yellow books) Duci loquaci (talkative leaders)

una nazione ricca (a rich nation) una macchina forte (a strong machine)

nazioni riccke (rich nations) macchine ford (strong machines)

The Spanish equivalents for blacky poor> and common sufficiently illustrate the use of appropriate forms of the Spanish or Portuguese adjective:

pobre comun

pobres comunes

There is one noteworthy exception to the rules illustrated by these examples. Adjectives signifying nadonality take the feminine terminals -a or -asy even if the masculine singular ends in a consonant, e.g. ingles- inglesay espanol-espanola .

Representative exhibits of Portuguese noun-adjective concord are:

o navio novo the new ship a pessoa simpddca the congenial

person

os navios novos the new ships as pessoas simpdticas the congenial

persons

o(a) aIuno(a) inteligente the intelligent pupil

os(as) alunos(as) inteligentes the intelligent pupils

Genderless Portuguese adjectives ending in -l have contracted forms in the plural, e.g. neutraly fdcil, azul (blue) — neutraesyfdceis, azuis.

The genderless class of French adjectives is relatively small. About the time of Agincourt the old genderless adjective got drawn into the orbit of the two-gender class. It assimilated the feminine ending -By so that /bn? (strong), originally a common gender form, has now separate masculine (fort) and feminine (forte) singular and corresponding plural forms (forts-fortes). Genderless are bravey largey juste , richey vide (empty), triste (sad), facile (easy), difficihy rouge (red), tiede (lukewarm), terribhy humbky capabhy and others which end in -ble. The plural suffix of all these is -S (rougeSy facilesy etc.). This rule applies to the separate masculine or feminine plural forms of most French adjectives which do not belong to the genderless class.

If we want to write down the feminine equivalent of the masculine singular of most French adjectives, all we have to do is to add -E. What happens in speech is another story. The final consonant (p. 257) of most French words is silent. When the masculine singular form of

Sing. Masc. Sing . Femin.

Plur. Masc. Plur. Femin.

- negro negra

negros

negras

}

}

Modem Descendants of Latin 357

the paper adjective ends in such a silent consonant (-T, -S, -ER, -N) addition of the -E makes the latter articulate. Thus the pronunciation of vert (masc.) and verte (fern.)* meaning green, is roughly vair-vairt. Sometimes the final -T or -S is double in the written form of the feminine equivalent, e.g. net-nette (clean, distinct), sot-sotte (stupid), gros-grosse (big), gras-grasse (fat). Six adjectives ending in -et do not double the final consonant (complet-complete, concret-concrete, discrete discrete, inquiet-inquiete, uneasy, replet-replete, stout, secret-secrete). Those ending in -er change to -ere, with change of vowel colour, e.g. premier-premiere , rigulier-reguliere. Vowel change also occurs if the masculine singular terminal is -N. This silent consonant symbol labels the preceding vowel as a nasal (p. 257). The vowel of the feminine form is not nasal. A silent -N becomes an explicit -NE or -NNE, e.g. bon-bonne (good), plein-pleine (full). Doubling of the last consonant before the final -E of the written form of the feminine also occurs if the masculine singular ends in the articulate terminals -EL or -UL, e.g. cruel-cruelle or nul-nulle (no). In the spoken language these adjectives belong to the genderless class.

A few irregularities among gender forms of the French adjective recall feminine forms of couplets which stand for persons (e.g, masseur-masseuse). Thus -eux becomes -EUSE, e.g. glorieux-glorieuse, fameux-fameuse. Similarly we have a berger-bergere (shepherd-shepherdess) class repre¬ sented by premier-premiere. As -eux becomes -euse, -aux, and -oux become -AUSSE and -OUSE, e.g. faux-fausse (false), jaloux-jalouse (jealous). As with the couplet veuf-veuve (widower-widow), -/ changes to -VE, e.g. neuf-neuve (new), href-breve. Four apparent exceptions to rules given depend on the fact that there are alternative masculine singular forms. One which ends in a vowel precedes a word beginning with a consonant. The other precedes a word beginning with a vowel or h. These masculine couplets are nouveau-nouvel (new), beau-bel (beautiful), vieux-vieil (old), mou-mol (soft), as in un vieil komme (an old man), un vieux mur (an old wall) or un beau g argon (a fine boy), un bel arbre (a beautiful tree). The feminine derivatives correspond to the second or older number of the couplet in conformity with the rules stated, i.e. nouvelle, belle , vieille, molle , e.g. urn vieille femme, or une belle dame.

The few irregular masculine plural forms of the adjective recall those of nouns with the same singular terminals. If the singular ends in -s or -x there is no change. Thus il est heureux = he is happy, and Us sont heureux = they are happy. If the masculine singular ends in -EAU or -AL, the masculine plural terminals are respectively -EAUX or -AUX, as in beau-beaux, nouveau-nouveaux, or cardinal-cardinaux. The corre¬ sponding feminine forms are regular, e.g. nouvelles or cardinales. The masculine plural of tout (all) is tous. The corresponding feminine forms are regular (toute-toutes). When tous stands by itself without a noun the final s is always articulate.

35^ The Loom of Language

The position of the epithet adjective in Romance languages is not as rigidly fixed as in English. As a rule (which allows for many exceptions) the adjective comes after the noun. This is nearly always so if the adjective denotes colour, nationality, physical property, or if it is longer than the noun. The two ubiquitous Spanish adjectives bueno and malo usually precede, and the masculine singular forms are then shr>rfpued to burn and mal , e.g. un bum vino (a good wine), un mal escritor (a bad writer). French adjectives usually placed before the noun are:

beau-belle (beautiful), joli-jolie (pretty), vilain-vilaine (ugly), bon-bonne (.good), mauvais-mauvaise { bad), mechant-mSchante (wicked), meilleur- mrfi- (bett.er)3 Srand-grande (great, tall), gros-grosse (big), 'petit-petite fsmall), (young), nouveau-nouvelle (new), viewc-vieille (old), lons- longue (long), court-courte (short).

Both in Spanish and French almost any adjective may be put before the noun for the purpose of emphasis, e.g. une formidable explosion , though

J* effe? 1S achieJed by leavinS k at its customary place and stress¬ ing it. This shunting of the adjective is much less characteristic of everv- day language than of the literary medium which pays attention to such

nf^nnfiHrf rhytiun’. euphony, and length of words. Sometimes a difference of position goes with a very definite difference of meaning. Where there is such a distinction the adjective following the noun has a literal, the adjertwe preceding it, a figurative meaning. When gran appears before Ae Spanish noun it _ signifies quality, e.g. un gran hombre, a great man: when placed after , size, un hombre grande , a tall man. The same is true

^ Fre^h m bTaVe h°mme is a decent chaP> un bomme brave sm % booTU 5 m ^ tmte U a Sad £0n °f hook’ m triste livre is a P°or

the article in the romance languages

All forms of the Romance definite article (as also of the Romance pronoun of the third person) come from the Latin demonstrative TT .T T? etc (p. 329). The form of the definite article depends on the number and gender of the noun, but the choice of the right form is complicated y _ e imt^ sound of the noun itself, and by agglutination with pre¬ positions. When it is not accompanied by a preposition, the range of choice is as follows :

Masc. Sing. Fem. Sing.

Masc. Pint.

Fem. Plur.

FRENCH	PORTUGUESE	SPANISH
	O	EL
LA J	A	LA (or EL)
y LES	OS	LOS
J	AS	LAS

ITALIAN IL(orLO) \ LA JL

I (or GLI-GL’)

LE or L*

Modem Descendants of Latin 359

Our table shows a bewildering variety of alternatives. So far as Spanish* is concerned, the only choice which calls for explanation is the occasional use of el before singular feminine nouns. La. precedes all feminine singular nouns except those which begin with a stressed A (or HA), e.g. el agua — las aguas (the water-s). This also applies to the indefinite article. For the sake of euphony the masculine form un re¬ places the feminine una> e.g. un aria (a tune), un hacka (an axe). If a Spanish feminine noun begins with an unstressed a (la ambicidn)> we have to use the ordinary feminine form. If a French singular noun of either gender or if an Italian singular masculine noun begins with a vowel (or h in French) we have to use the truncated l\ as in the table below. Exceptions to the rule that V precedes words beginning with H are' words (p. 258) of Teutonic and of Greek origin (e.g. keros). Choice of the Italian article is complicated by: (a) the existence of a special singular form (lo for masculine nouns which begin with Z or with S followed by another consonant (SB, SP, ST) cf. il padre (the father), lo zio (the uncle); (b) the masculine gli which replaces i before plural, nouns beginning with (a) vowels, (h) with Z or with S followed by a consonant. The next table illustrates these rales:

ENGLISH	FRENCH	PORTUGUESE	SPANISH	ITALIAN
(a) afield the field the fields	un champ le champ les champs	um campo 0 campo os campos	un campo el campo los campos	un campo il campo i camp!
(b) a door the door the doors	une porte la porte les portes	uma porta a porta as portas	una puerta la puerta las puertas	una porta la porta le porte
(c) a friend the friend the friends	un ami Fami les amis	um amigo 0 amigo os amigos	un amigo el amigo los amigos	un amico Famico : gli amici

Unfortunately, our troubles with the vagaries of the Romance article

do not end here. Both the definite articles and the demonstratives of Romance languages are addicted to romantic attachments to preposi-

* The table omits one form of the Spanish article. Spanish preserves a separate neuter article, lo. It has the sole function of raising a singular adjec¬ tive, participle, etc., to the status of a noun, e.g. lo Americano, what is American; lo util, what is useful; lo dicho, what has been said.

3 ^° The Loom of Language

tions. The preposition of Vulgar Latin was unstressed, like the demon¬ strative (definite article) which often went with it. So the two got fused Such agglutination did not go very far in Spanish. It is confined to the singular masculine article and the two prepositions de and a; de el became - del (of the), and a + el became al (to the, by the), e.g. el mal humor del maestro = the bad mood of the teacher (but de los maestros)- el bote al faro = the boat at the lighthouse (but a los faros). In written Spanish these two are the only contractions of the land. In French agglutination is confined to the same prepositions, but extends to the' plural form, as shown in the following table:

	OLD FRENCH	MODERN FRENCH
Sing.	del (de -f- le)	du
Plur.	dels (de -f les)	des
Sing.	dl (d -J~ le)	au
Plur.	cils (a -}- les)	aux

rir.aiv.Tm>* T h the masculine singular and plural article also agglu- trnated with the preposition en (Latin in) to el and es. The formeTled out. Tne latter survives in the titles of University degrees such as 'doctor es lettres, doctor of literature, docteur es sciences , doctor of science.

^From this point of view, French is a half-way house between Spanish

Si "Tf £Se‘ is 2 half-way hou*e between French and

, . ,\TT aSSlutmaUon of Portuguese prepositions to the article which has lost the initial Latin L, are as follows : ’

PREPOSITION (Latin equivalent in italics)	DEFINITE ARTICLE
O	A	OS	AS
a (= ad) de em (= in) por (= per)	ao do no pelo	a da na pela	aos dos nos pelos	ks das nas pelas

The Portae prepositions de and em also agglutinate to the pomteMrords of which the masculine singular f„r£

<^u. Tin, gives rise ,o dSs„, dhu, ^ ^

Modem Descendants of Latin 361

and corresponding feminine singular, masculine plural, or feminine plural forms. Italian has a luxuriant over-growth of such fusions between preposition and article:

	IL	r	LO	GLI	LA	LE	1/
diy of da3 from, by a, to in, in con, with su3 on per, for	del dal al nel col snl pel	del dal ai nei coi sui pei .	dello dallo alio ' nello collo snllo per lo (pello)	degli dagli agli negli cogli sugli per gli (pegli)	della dalla alia nella colla sulla per la (pella)	delle dalle ! alle nelle colle sulle per le (pelle)	dell5 dall5 all5 nelF coll5 s nil5 perl* (pell5)

In modem Romance languages, and in none more than in French, the definite article is now an almost inseparable bedfellow of the noun! Consequently it has lost any personality it once had. We have to use it in many situations where no Anglo-American article occurs. Thus it appears before collective or abstract nouns, e.g. Vliomme or la nature , names of substances, e.g. lefer (iron), names of countries, e.g. le Canada , names of colours, e.g. le bleu (blue) and the generic plural, e.g .j’aime les pommes (I like apples). It was not always so. In early French, as in other Romance languages,it was not the custom to put thedefinite article before an abstract noun, e.g. covoitise est radne de toz mals for la con- voitise est la radne de torn les maux (envy is the root of all evils). This accounts for its absence in some set expressions (see also p. 390) such as : m French, avoir raison (be right), avoir tort (be wrong), prendre garde ( ake care), prendre congi (take leave), demander pardon (ask forgiveness); m Spanish, oir misa (hear mass), tracer fiesta (take a holiday), dar fin (finish); m Italian, far onore (do honour), correr pericolo (run a risk), prender moglie (take a wife). Where we use the indefinite article a or an before names of professions and trades, its equivalent is absent in Romance languages, as in German. Thus the French say il est midedn ne is, a doctor, and the Spaniards say es medico .

One of the pitfalls of French is correct use of what grammar-books call the partitive article. Wherever English-speaking people can use .some or any to signify some indefinite quantity of a whole, as in I had some beer, the French must put before the object the preposition de together with the definite article (i.e. du, de la, des). Thus the French

M*

362 The Loom of Language

say: buvez du lait (drink milk)* fai achete de la farine (I have bought flour)* est-ce que vous avez des pokes? (have you pears?)* and even abstractly* il me temoigne de Vamitie (he shows me friendship). This article partitif is a trade-mark of modern French. The habit goes back to late Latin, It occurs in the Vulgate and tallies with the idiom of the Mayflower Bible* e.g. catelli edunt de micis = the dogs eat of the crumbs (Matt, 15* 27). The partitive article may even be prefaced by a preposition* as in je le mange avec du vinaigre (I eat it with vinegar). The French de is used alone * i.e. without the definite article:

(a) after beaucoup (much* many %peu (little* few)* pas (no)* plus (more)* trop (too much* too many)* e.g. je rial pas de monnaie (I have no money)* fai trop de temps (I have too much time);

(h) if the noun is preceded by an adjective* t.g.fai vu de belles maisons (I have seen some nice houses).

The second of the two rules is generally ignored in colloquial French.

The partitive article occurs also in Italian* e.g. dammi del vino. It is not compulsory. Spanish and Portuguese usually do without it* but have a peculiar plural equivalent for some^ not comparable to that of other European languages. The indefinite article has a plural form* e.g. :

SPANISH PORTUGUESE

a book un libro urn livro

some books unos libros uns livros

a letter una carta

some letters mas cartas

uma carta umas cartas

THE ROMANCE PERSONAL PRONOUN

Our tables of personal pronouns (pp. 331, 332, and 363) and posses¬ ses (p. 369) do not give equivalents for IT or ITS. The reason is that Romance nouns are either masculine or feminine, W hat is given as the French, Spanish, or Italian equivalent for SHE is the subject pronoun which takes the place of a female human being, a female domestic animal and any group, inanimate object, or abstraction placed in the feminine gender class. Analogous remarks apply to any other pronoun of the third person. Equivalents of he, him, his stand for pronouns which replace a masculine noun; equivalents for she, her, hers for pronouns which replace a feminine noun; and what is listed as the equivalent of he or him, she or her would correspond to our it, when the latter refers to anything sexless.

The pronoun of Romance, as of other European languages, has been more resistant to flexional decay than the noun, and choice of the

Modem Descendants of Latin 363

correct form is one of the most troublesome things for a beginner. This is so for several reasons :

ROMANCE PERSONAL PRONOUNS— Stressed* Forms

	ME	(thee)	HIM	HER	us
FRENCH	MOI	TOI	LUI	ELLE	NOUS
PORTUGUESE	mim	TX	ELE	ELA	NOS
SPANISH f	1 MI	TI	EL	ELLA	NOSOTROS
ITALIAN	ME	TE	LUI (ESSO)	LEI (essa)	NOX

	YOU	THEM (m.)	THEM (f.)	REFLEXIVE
FRENCH	VOUS	EUX |	ELLES	SOI
PORTUGUESE	VOS	ELES	ELAS	SI
SPANISHf	VOSOTROS	ELLOS	ELLAS	SI
ITALIAN	VOI	LQ] (essi)	RO (esse)	SE

* Stressed forms always used when preceded by a preposition.

_ tJrh“e a ,stressed neuter Spanish pronoun ello (= it): see footnote P- 359- -tor lemmme forms of nosotros, vosotros see p. 331.

(i) Pronouns of the third person have separate direct object (accusative) and indirect object (dative) forms ;

(ii) Pronouns of all three persons have separate unstressed (conjunctive) rorins as subject or object of an accompanying verb and stressed (disjunc-

for use after a Preposition and in certain other situations;

(m) The rules of concord for the possessive of the third person have nothing to do with the gender of the possessor;

(iv) Pronouns may agglutinate with other words;

(v) Pronouns of the second person have different polite and familiar

The personal flexions of the Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian verb are still intact. It is customary to use Portuguese, Spanish, or Italian verbs without an accompanying subject pronoun, though the latter is handy for emphasis or greater clarity, e.g.:

ENGLISH FRENCH PORTUGUESE SPANISH ITALIAN

he is good il est boti e bom es bueno e bucno

3^4 The Loom of Language

We cannot omit the French subject pronoun. Indeed, it has no

separate existence apart from the verb. In answer to a question, the Spaniard, Portuguese, or Italian will use yo, eu, to. Except in the legal je sousdgniy the Frenchman does not us tje in answer to a question, he uses the stressed moi where we usually say me, e.g.:

Qui Va fait? Moi

Who did it? Me (= I did).

This rule applies to French pronouns of all persons in so far as there are distinctive stressed forms (moi, toi, ltd, eux ). In the same situation the Italian uses the stressed form for the third person (lui, loro). The French- man uses the stressed forms whenever the pronoun: (a) is detached from

its verb, (b) stands alone. Frenchmen never use them next to the verb

e.g. : 3

(a) Lui, man ami! He, my friend!

(b) Moijje n’en sais rim. I (myself) know nothing about it.

(c) Je ferai comme toi. I’ll do as you (do).

There are emphatic French forms of myself, himself, etc.: moi- meme,> Im-mtme, etc. The Spanish equivalent of meme is mismois )-

misma{s). The unstressed subject form precedes it, unless it emphasizes a noun, e.g. :

lo hago yo mismo I do it myself.

mimujermisma my wife herself.

In all the Romance languages dealt with in this chapter the stressed forms are the ones we have to use after a preposition, and they take up the same place in the sentence as the corresponding noun, e.g. :

I came without her.

Je suis venu sans elle.

Tenho vindo sem ella.

He venido sin ella.

Sono venuto senza ella.

The unstressed direct or indirect object form is overshadowed by the verb, which it immediately precedes or Mows. We always have to use it when there is no preceding preposition in a statement or ques¬ tion. It always comes before the French verb, and nearly always does so in Spanish and Italian statements, e.g. Je taime beaucoup (French) Te amo tmcho (Span.), Ti arno molto (Ital.) = I love you a lot. Portugese is out of step with its sister dialects. In simple affirmative Portuguese

themTg •the °b]eCt USUaUy f°U0WS VCrb 311(1 3 hyphen connects

English

French

Portuguese

Spanish

Italian

ele procura-me = he is looking for me. dd-me o livro = he gives me the book.

Modem Descendants of Latin 365

In negative statements of all the four principal Romance languages, the object pronoun (whether direct or indirect) precedes the verb, e.g. :

English I don’t see it.

French Je ne le vois pas.

Portuguese Nao o vejo.

Spanish No lo veo.

Italian Non lo vedo.

The rules on p. 156 for placing the object in a statement do not tell us where to put it in a command (or request) on the one hand, and a question on the other. The Romance object pronoun always comes after list imperative verb, if the imperative is affirmative, but before the verb if a prohibition, e.g. French embrasse-la (kiss- her \),ne 1’embrasse pas (don’t kiss her!). The direct object is always the accusative un¬ stressed form; but in French, mot and toi replace me and te as the indirect object, e.g. donnez-moi de Veau (give me some water).

In French and Portuguese, the hyphen indicates the intimate relation °t the unstressed form to the verb imperative, as in the following examples, which illustrate agglutination of two pronoun objects (me-o = mo) m Portuguese :

di-me um Hvro = give me a book. di-mo o senhor = give it (to) me (Sir).

It is customary to write the Spanish and Italian imperative, infinitive and participles without a gap between it and the object, e.g.:

ENGLISH SPANISH ITALIAN

show me muestrame mostrami

/ want to speak to him quiero hablarle voglio parlargli

Fusion of verb to its pronoun object goes further in Italian: (a) the infinitive (e.g. parlare) drops the final E as in the last example; (Jb) the mnmtive drops -RE if it ends in -RRE (e.g. condurre ) as in condurlo = to direct him; (c) there is doubling of the initial consonant of the pronoun if the imperative ends in a vowel with an accent, e.g. dammi = give me, dillo — say it. With con (with) the stressed Italian pronouns me, te> se fuse to form meco (with me), teco (with thee), (with him or with her). The three Spanish stressed pronouns mi, ti , si, get glued to con to form conmigo , contigo, consigo . Agglutination goes further in Portuguese. With com we have contigo , contigo , consigo , cormosco , convosco (with me, with thee, etc.). Similarly the unstressed Portuguese me, te , Ike, glue on to the direct object of the third person to form mo-ma-mo$-mas, to, etc., and Iho, etc., e.g.:

Dd-tos = he gives them to you (thee).

3^6 The Loom of Language

. Portuguese c^rect object forms of the third person have alterna¬ tive forms lo~la~los-las for use after -R, -S, or -Z. If the preceding pro¬ noun is nos or vos9 the latter drop the S :

Da-no-lo — he gives it to us.

Da-vo-lo = he gives it to you.

Thus the same rules for the position of two pronoun objects do not apply to French on the one hand and Spanish or Italian on the other:

(a) The Spanish and Italian direct object pronoun follows the indirect* e.g. no te lo dare = I shall not give it to you = non ti lo dard . This rule applies to statement, question, or command (request), e.g. in Spanish eorregidmelos correct it for me.

If the French indirect object is a pronoun of the first or second person the same rule holds for a simple statements e.g. je ne te le donnerai pas = I shall not give you it.

If the French indirect pronoun object is of the third person, it , - _/oil°ws ^ direct obiect> le lui dirai = I shall tell him it. {d) r he French direct object precedes the indirect one in a positive command, and the indirect object has the stressed form, e.g. comgez-U-moi = correct it for me.

(e) If both Spanish pronoun objects are of the third person SE takes

the place of the indirect object which retains its usual place, e.g. se lo diri = I shall tell him it.

(f) Negative commands of a& four languages have the samp WOrd

order as statements.

(*)

0)

Our list of unstressed French pronouns should include two peculiar forms which are troublesome. These are en and y. In colloquial French the former refers to persons and things’(or propositions), whereas the mter is generally used for things (and propositions) only. Both are descendants of Latin adverbs of place, en from inde (thence), y from tbt (there). Both en and y may preserve this old locative meaning, en or m , to, from, etc., andy for here, there, thither , e.g. en province (in the country), j’j; serai (I shall be there). In Vulgar Latin inde and ibi often replaced die pronoun of the third person, e.g. si potis inde manducare, x-e., ht. if you am eat (from) it; adjice ibi ovum, i.e. add an egg there (— to it). The French often use the pronoun en where we say some or any, e.g. en avez-vous? (have you any?), or where we say of it, about it, from it, e.g .j’en aiassez (I have enough of it), nous enparlercms (we shall talk about it), ilenfourrait mourir (he might die of it). Also note: En voila me surprise! — what a surprise!

As pronouns equivalent to IT, en and y keep company with a special class of verbs. The French equivalents for some English verbs which do not precede a preposition always go with de (of or from), e.g se

Modem Descendants of Latin 367

servir de = to use. If the inanimate object IT then accompanies the English verb, we translate it by en which always follows another pro¬ noun object, t.g.je nten sers = I use it. Another expression of this class is avoir besom de, t.g.fen ai besoin = I need it. In the same way y is the equivalent for it or to it when the preposition d follows the French verb. Since penser a means to think (about), fy pensais means I was thinking about it.

The Italian descendant of inde is ne, as in quanto ne volete?, how much do you want (of it) ?, me ne ricordo , I remember it. For both functions of the French y, Italian has ci (Latin ecce-hic), vi (Latin ibi). These are interchangeable, e.g. ci penserd (I shall see to it), vi e stato (he has been there). Neither inde nor ibi has left descendants in Spanish or Portu- guese. For French fy penserai the Spaniard says pensari en ello.

We have still to discuss the reflexive and possessive forms of Romance. ■■ personal pronouns. Our own words myself, yourself, etc., have to do two jobs. We can use them for emphasis, and we can use them reflexively. Whenever we use them reflexively (e.g. wash yourself) in the first or second persons, the equivalent word of a modem Romance dialect is the corresponding unstressed direct object form. For the third person there is a single reflexive pronoun for singular or plural use. It is a current Anglo-American habit to omit the reflexive pronoun when the context shows that we are using a verb reflexively. This is never per¬ missible in Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Italian. The identity of the reflexive and direct object pronoun is illustrated by the first two of the following. The last illustrates the use of the common singular and plural reflexive of the third person:

I wash we wash they wash

FRENCH

je me lave nous nous lavons Us se lavent

SPANISH me lavo nos lavamos se lavan

Romance languages have many psmfe-reflexive verbs, such as the' French verbs se mettre a (Italian metiers!) to begin, se promener, to go for a walk (Spanish pasearse), im alter to go away (Spanish irse), se souvenir, remember (Spanish acordarse), or the impersonal il s'agit de. .. (it is a question of):

elle se mit d pleurer she began to cry

no me acuerdo de eso I don’t remember that

allez-vous-en go away (beat it)

ella se pasea en el parque she walks in the park

368

The Loom of Language

The reflexive pronoun may give the verb a new meaning. In French

rST": 1 d“bt

The Latin reflexive se of the third person is common to Portuguese Spanish, and French. The unstressed Italian reflexive is si, stressed si. The Portuguese reflexive follows the verb like an ordinary Portuguese pronoun object,e.g. levanto-me (I get up). The Spanish * does mo jobs. When the direct and indirect object are both of the third person a Spaniard uses se for the indirect object (&, les), or for the unstressed dative form, e.g. se lo digo (I tell it to him = I say so to him).

Possessive pronouns and adjectives (p. 115) of modem Latin dialects are descendants of the old Latin forms meus (my), tuus (thy), suus (his, her, its, their) or of illorum (of those), and noster, voster (our, your). French and Italian derive the possessive of the third person plural from die Latin genitive illorum (French leur, Italian loro), Spanish and I ortuguese from the reflexive suus. Like English, Spanish and French have two sets of possessives (cf. my-mine), contracted (possessive adjec¬ tives) which accompany a noun, and fuller ones (possessive pronouns) which stand alone. For an English-speaking student of the Romance anguages the chief difficulty about possessives is mastery of the gender- forms. Our single surviving trace of possessive concord involved in the choice between his-its-her refers solely to the possessor. Neither the grammatical gender nor the sex of the possessor shows up in the form ot the Romance possessive adjective or pronoun. In French:

son pere = his or her father.

sa mere = his or her mother.

ses parents = his or her parents.

Thus the gender form of the Romance pronoun depends on the thing or person possessed. The masculine singular French forms man,

7; r£PIaCe « before • feminine noun beginning with a

TT n ef m0n amk (my girl-friend) md mo” (my boy- fnend). Unlike the unstressed invariant dative leur, the possessive leur

™ cpUnf (Ieurs^’ e-S- leur mctison—leurs maisons = their house(s) The Spanish su does the job of his, her, its, their, or your in any context unless ambiguity might arise; and countless ambiguities can arise from this type of concord. If the Spaniard wishes to make it clear that su casa stands for his house, he says sa casa de il, in contradistinction to su casa de ella (her house) or su casa de ellos (their house). Similarly the Frenchman may say son pire d lui (his father) or son pire d die

Modern Descendants of Latin 369

(her father). The combinations a moi, d lui, etc., can replace le mien la sienne, etc., as in c’est a moi (it is mine), c’est d lui (it is his).

ItaIlan a?d Portug^ese the possessive adjective has the same form as the possessive pronoun. When used attributively, the possessive takes die definite article, e.g. Italian:/ mio braceio (my arm), Porn™

rUv rff°y ,e de®n^te 1S omitted after essere or ser, meaning belong

The' S JS? ^ • ma(^ h°USe iS Port“gttese u cow i minhl

illT mish posse®slve Elective has two forms, a shorter which pre- mf°Ut ******> e-S- ndcasa, and a more emphatic Wr ^ IS pm after ^ noun with ^ articIe= e-g- la casa mia. The PWfc “* °n aCf -5s. pronou?> 313(1 311 this capacity takes the article as in rrencn, e^a dlmdo el suyoy i.e. saco (she forgot hers, i.e. bag).

(d) Adjectives:	FRENCH	PORTUGUESE	SPANISH	ITALIAN
MY	tncm(m.) ma( £.]	) meus minha	mi( s)	mioy etc.
	mes($L)	meuSs tninhas
THY	ton^ etc.	teUs tUGs teuss tuas	tu{ s)	tuoy etc.
HIS, HER, ITS	sony etc.	setts etc.	su( s)	suos etc.
OUR		(like teu)
notres nos (pi.)	nossos etc.	nuestros etc.	nostroy etc.
YOUR	votres vos (pi.)	vossOy etc.	vuestrOs etc.	vostroy etc.
THEIR , 1	leur( s)	seuy etc.	, su( s)	loro
( h ) Pronouns:
MINE	le miens la miennes	as above	mios etc.	as above
	les mienss	preceded		preceded
	les miennes	by the		by the
THINE	le tiens etc.	definite article	tuyos etc.	definite article
HIS, HERS, ITS	le sieus etc.		sttyos etc.
OURS	le or la notre
	les notres .		(as above) ’
YOURS	le votrcs etc.
THEIRS	Us las Us leur(s)		suyo(s)

POLITE ADDRESS

One of the booby-traps of the Romance languages is choice of pro¬ nouns (and possessives) appropriate to intimate or formal address. Roman citizens addressed one another as tu. The thou- form of French*

37° , The Loom of Language

Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian is now the one used to address husband or wife, children, close relations, and intimate friends. There is a French verb tutoyer (German duzen) which means to speak fami¬ liarly, that is, to address a person as tu in preference to the more formal vous (French vouzoyer , German siezen ).

In the days of the Roman Empire, nos (we) often replaced the em¬ phatic ego (I). This led to the substitution of ms for tu. The custom began in the upper ranks of Roman society. Eventually vos percolated through the tiers of the social hierarchy till it reached those who had only their chains to lose. So vous is now the polite French for you. The verb which goes with it has the plural ending, while the adjective or past participle takes the gender and number of the person addressed. Thus the Frenchman says Madame , vous etes trop bonne (how kind of you. Madam), but Monsieur , vous etes trop bon. In spite of the Revolu¬ tion of 1789, the French often use Monsieur , Madame, and Mademoiselle with the third person, e.g. Madame est trop bonne.

Spaniards and Italians have pushed deference further by substi¬ tuting a less direct form for the original vos (Span.) or voi (ItaL). The Italian uses lei (or more formally ella) = she, with the third person singular, e.g. lei e americano? (you are American?). Lei is the pronomial representative for some feminine noun such as vossignoria (Y our Lord- ship). The plural of lei is loro. In Italian conversation we can often omit lei and loro. Instead we can use the third person without pronoun, e.g. ha mangiato? (have you eaten?).

When a Spaniard addresses a single individual who is not an intimate or a child, he uses usted (written V. or Vd. for short) instead of tu. The corresponding pronoun for use when addressing more than one person is ustedes (Vs. or Vds.). Usted is a contraction of vuestta merced (Your Grace)* Consequently the verb appears in the third person, as in Italian, e.g. como se llama usted? (what is your name?), como se llaman ustedes? (what are your names?). In very short statements or questions we can omit usted, e.g. que dice? (what do you say?).

Portuguese is more extravagant than either Spanish or Italian. The usual equivalent for our you when it stands for a male is 0 senhor , and for a female a senhora, or (in Brazil) a smhorita. So the Portuguese for the simple English have you got ink? is tem 0 senhor (or a senhora) tinta? Our catalogue of polite behaviour would be incomplete without the Balkan equivalent. The Rumanian for the polite you is the periphrastic domnia voastra (Latin domina vostra. Your Lordship). The polite forms of our invariant YOU in Italian and Spanish are in the table below.

Modem Descendants of Latin

371

	SPANISH	ITALIAN
	Singular	■ Plural	Singular	Plural
Masc.	Fern.	Masc.	Fern.	Masc.	Fem.	Masc.	Fem.
Subject (you)	USTED	USTEDES	LEI	LORO
Indirect Object (to you)	LE	LES	LE (GLIE)
Direct Object (you)	LE, LO	' LA	LES,LOS	j LAS	LA	LI	LE

IMPERSONAL ROMANCE PRONOUNS

Five English words (p. 144) make up a battery of what we shall here call impersonal pronoun-adjectives. They are: this, that , which , soAo*, who(m). All except the last (who or whom) can stand as pointer-words alone (demonstrative pronouns) ox before a noun (demonstrative adjec¬ tives). In questions the last three can also stand alone (interrogative pronouns) or in front of a noun (interrogative adjectives). All of them except this can introduce a subordinate clause. They are then called relative (or link) pronouns. To this battery of five essential words corresponds a much larger group in any Romance dialect. Choice of the right equivalent for any one of them is complicated by several circumstances, in particular:

(a) Romance equivalents of any one of them may have distinct forms as adjectives or as pronouns comparable to the separate adjective and pronoun forms of our possessives (e.g. my -mine) y

(h) The Romance equivalent for any one of them may depend on whether it occurs in a question, whether it links two statements, or whether it is a pointer-word.

To help the home student through this maze, there are separate tables (pp. 373-375) which the same five English impersonal pronouns turn up. Capitals or small letters respectively show whether the Romance equivalent is: (a) the pronoun form which stands alone (e.g. read that , or what?), (b) the adjective form before a noun (read this book, or which book?). Italicized capitals signify that the word given can be either.

372 The Loom of Language

Some are unchangeable, like what. Others like this or that take endings in agreement with the nouns they qualify or replace. If so, the final vowel is italicized to show that it is the masculine singular ending. We then have to choose from one of all four possible regular forms. The tables show which ones are irregular, and give appropriate forms in full.

Corresponding to two singular demonstratives this and that of Anglo- American, some British dialects have this , that, and yon. The three grades of proximity in this series correspond roughly to the Latin sets of which the masculine singular forms were hie, isle, ille. Two of them went into partnership (cf. this . . . here) with ^(behold),' which sur¬ vives in the French cet (Latin ecce iste) and celle {ecce ilia). m Spanish and Portuguese preserve the threefold Latin Scots distinc¬ tion. este, esta, estos, estas = this {the nearer one), ese, esa, esos, esas

that {the further), aquel, aquella, aquellos, aquellas == yon (remote from both speaker and listener). All three sets can stand alone or with a noun like our own corresponding pointer-words. When they stand alone (as pronouns) they carry an accent, e.g. esta golondrina y aquella (this swallow and yonder one). All three, like the article lo (p. 357) have neuter forms, esto, eso, aquello, for comparable usage. The corresponding threefold set of Portuguese demonstratives are: iste {-a, -es, -as), esse {-a, -es, -as), aquele {-a, - es , -as). Spaniards like the Germans, reverse the order for the former . . . the latter = este (the nearer) . . . aquel (the further). The Italian order quello . . . questo is the same as ours.

The distinction between the adjective and pronoun equivalents of this-these and that-those in French involves much more than an accent on paper. Where we use them as adjectives the French put ce or cet (masc. sing.), cette (fern, sing.) or ces (plur.) in front of the noun, and ci (here) or Id (there) behind it, as in :

ce petit paquet-ci this little parcel ce petit paquet-ld that little parcel

cette houteille-ci this bottle cette bouteille-ld that bottle

ces poires-ci these pears ces poires-ld those pears

In colloquial French the la combination has practically superseded the a form, and serves in either situation.

To translate the adjective this-these (in contradistinction to that-those) we can use the simpler from ce, etc., without -ci, e.g. ce journal (this newspaper), cet ouvrier (this workman), cette jeune fille (this young woman), ces instruments.

Where we would say here or there is {was or were), look there goes or ler and behold, French people use the invariant pointers void or voild. Historically they are agglutinations between the singular imperative of

Modern Descendants of Latin 373

voir (to see) and the locative particles ci (= id) and la. So void (Old French voi d) once meant see here , and voild (Old French voi la) see there. Both occur in modem French, but conversational language tends towards using voila without discriminating between here and there. The following examples show how these gesture substitutes are used: void man cheque (here is my check!), la voila {here or there she is!), le voila parti {off he goes or wentl), voild deux ans que (it is now two years that).

The Italian equivalent is ecco (Latin eccum ), as in eccolo (here he is!), ecco unfiammifero (here is a match!).

ROMANCE POINTER WORDS and RELATIVE PRONOUNS

	FRENCH	SPANISH	ITALIAN
(a) Demonstratives
this	1 CELUI-CI (CECI) CELLE** CI (/) ce(t) ....oh cette . ci l ces . .ci J	ESTE(-A, -OS, -AS)	QUESTO (-A, -/, -E)
that	celui-lA (ca) celle-la (7) ce(t) . la'i cette . la > ces . la j	ESE(-A-OS, -AS) AQUEL (-LA, -LOS, -LAS)	QUELLO (-A, -E)
which (b) Link pronouns —	quel (-/<?, -5, -les) - never omitted	cual (-es)	quello (~a3 -i3 -e)
THAT	QUE 1	CHE
WHAT	CE QUE '	■	CI6 CHE
WHO, WHICH (that) (as subject)	QUI	“ QUE	1 I 1
WHOM, WHICH (that) (as object)	QUE		j* CHE I
WHOM (after a preposition)4	QUI		J
WHICH (after a preposition)	LEQUEL (laquelle, LESQUELS, LESQUELLES)	► QUIEN (-ES)	j XL or LA QUALE ^ I Of LE QUALI
WHOSE, OF WHICH — _ 1	DONT DE QUI (persons) DUQUEL, etc., P* 376 (things)] J i	DE QUIEN (-ES) (CUYO,-A, -OS, -as)	IL or LA 1 I or LE J CUI

374 The Loom of Language

The following French examples illustrate the use of the eight pro-

nouns corresponding to this-these or that-those (see table p. 373), when they refer to (a) le chapeau (the hat), (b) les chapeaux (the hats)* (c) la noix (the nut), (d) les mix (the nuts) :

(a) je prefere celui-ci je prefers celui~la

I prefer this one I prefer that one

( b ) Ceux-ci sont trop chen Ceux-la sont trop chers

These are too dear Those are too dear

ic) Casse celle-ci Casse celle-ld

Break this one Break that one

id) Elle a achete celles-ei Elle a achete celles-ld

She has bought these She has bought those

There are two other French pronouns, ceci and cela (commonly abbreviated to fa) corresponding respectively to this and that, e.g. ne dites pas fa = don’t say that. We can never use them for persons . Ce id) often stands for it, e.g. dest vrai = it is true, dest triste = it is sad. After the invariant ce , the adjective can keep the masculine singular form, e.g. dest bon may mean either il est bon or elle est bonne according as il refers to le vin or elle to la biere. This is useful to know, when we are in doubt about the gender of a noun. The French for the former . . . the latter is celui-la . . . celui-cu

This is a pointer-word pure and simple. That can also be a link-word, and as such appears twice in the table of link pronouns. It does so because we use it in two ways :

(a) THAT so printed occurs after such verbs as know , doubt, deny, hope,

wish, fear, dread, . We can usually omit it, but we can never replace it by who or which . Its Romance equivalent as given in the table cannot be left out, e.g.:

English I know that he is lying.

French je sais qu’il ment.

Portuguese sei que minte.

Spanish se que miente.

Italian so che mente.

(b) that so printed may refer to some word in the preceding clause and

is then replaceable. We can put who , whom, or which in place of it (e.g. the house that J ack built = the house which Jack built).

To translate that in all circumstances we therefore need to know equivalents for who, which, whom, and whose when such words link two clauses. Choice is complicated : (a) by case-forms like whom or whose for use with or without an accompanying preposition, (b) by the distinc-

375

Modem Descendants of Latin

ROMANCE INTERROGATIVES (see p. 371)

	FRENCH	SPANISH	ITALIAN
(a) Adverbial.
how?	comment	como	come
how much? how many?	combien	cuanto (-a, etc.)	quanto (a3 etc.)
when?	quand	cuando	quando
where?	oil	ddnde	dove
why ?	pourquoi	por que	perche
(b) Pronouns and Adjectives.
which?	quel (etc.) LEQUEL (etc.)	CUAL (rES)	QUALE (r)
who? whom?	QUI	QUIEN (-ES)	CHI
what? (subject or object)	QUE
what? (after a preposition)	QUOI	QUE, QUE COSA	CHE, CHE COSA

tion between persons {who) and animals or things {which or what), {c) by the existence of interchangeable forms analogous to our own that-whick couplet. For self-expression we need only know one correct substitute, preferably the . most common. For illustrations of the use of the table on p. 373 we shall confine ourselves to Spanish and French.

As subject or object of a subordinate clause the common Spanish equivalent for who , whom or which is the invariant QUE, e.g. :

el medico que me ha curado — the doctor who has cured me. los libros que hemos lecho = the books (which) we have read.

In all circumstances que is the correct Spanish equivalent for the link- pronoun which or that , but it cannot replace whom when a preposition accompanies the former of the two. The correct substitute for whom is then QUIEN or its plural quienes , e.g. los politicos de quienes hablamos = the politicians of whom we are talking. A special Spanish relative pronoun CUYO (~ a , -os, -as) equivalent to whose or of which can refer alike to persons or things, e.g. :

el tren cuya partida = the train, whose departure. ...

las tslas cuyas rocas = the islands, of which the rocks. . . .

37^ The Loom of Langmge

French offers a bewildering choice of possibilities for words of this class, some appropriate to persons only, some to persons and things.

The following rules apply to persons or things alike :

(a) QUI can always replace who or which as subject of a clause, e.g Fhomme qui Fa dit = the man who said it, le train qui est arrive = the train which came in.

{h) QUE can always replace whoirri) or which as object, e.g. le medecin qua fat consuhe = the doctor whom I consulted, les biscuits que fai manges = the biscuits I ate.

(c) DONT can always replace whose or of which, e.g. :

la femme dont le mari est prisonnier — the woman whose husband is a prisoner.

(d) LEQUEL {laquelle, lesquels , lesquelles) can always replace whom or

which preceded by a preposition (or, what comes to the same thing, that followed by a preposition at the end of the subordi- nate clause). Lequel, etc., has agglutinative contractions with d and de, i.e. auquel, auxquels , auxquettes (but d laquelle), duquel , desquels , desquelles (but de laquelle).

la femme pour laquelle il a donne sa vie. the woman for whom he gave his life.

The words who, whom, whose, which, as also what, can turn up in questions as interrogative pronouns. Both which and what can also- accompany a noun in a question. The choice of the correct French substitute depends on whether they do or do not. The French inter¬ rogative adjective is QUEL {quelle, quels, quelles), e.g. quelle route dois-je suivre? (which road must I follow?). Quel, etc., has also an exclamatory use (e.g. quel dommage! = what a pity!). When a question involves the verb to be followed by a noun, what or zohich are really predicative (p. 156) adjectives. So we can say:

quelle est votre opinion? what is your opinion ?

quels sont leurs amis? which are their friends ?

The French pronoun substitute for which ? is LEQUEL (etc.). Like QUI, which can stand for who? or whom?, lequel, etc., can follow a preposition. The French for what? falls out of step. As subject or object it is QUE. After a preposition the correct equivalent is the stressed form QUOI* The use of these pronouns is illustrated by:

* Both French qui (who?) and que (what?) have alternative forms. We

t7J^rrCe qUf uT qUi?yr°r qu>est~ce $ue for $ue? Spoken French favours the longer of the two forms, e.g. qui est-ce qui veut venir avec

mot. - qui veut avec avec mot? (who wants to come with me?), qu’est-ce ZST mteZ’ m°nneUr?==qm d™rez-vous, monsieur? (what do you

Modern Descendants of Latin

Lequel de ces enfants est votre fils?

Duquel parles-tu?

Qui Pa dit?

De qui parle-t~il?

Que dit-il?

De qtioi parle-t-il?

377

Which of these children is your boy?

Of which are you talking?

Who said so?

Of whom is he talking?

What does he say?

What is he talking about?

The Spanish for who?, whom? is quien, for what?, qui. In conversation we usually replace que by que cosa. Which is cudl (plural cudles): quiin canto? who is singing?

que ha dicho? what did he say ?

cudl de las vinos?. which of the vineyards?

Cud takes the place of que (what) before ser (to be) when the noun follows, e.g. mdl es su impresidn? (what is your impression?).

ALL

ENGLISH

AS

BOTH CERTAIN

ONE

ENOUGH EVERYTHING LITTLE, FEW

much, many no (ad}.)

NOBODY

NOTHING

OTHER

ONE

ONLY (SOLE) SAME SEVERAL SOME (A FEW)

SOMEBODY

SOMETHING

SUCH

TOO MUCH (MANY) WHOEVER

FRENCH	SPANISH
tout (-e), tons, toutes	todo (-a, -os, -as)
) autant de . . . que	tanto (-a, etc.) . . . como
tons (toutes) les deux	ambos (-as)
certain (~e)	cierto (-a)
.) chaque*	cada*
i chacun (-e)	cada uno (-a)
assez de	bastante (-s)
tout	todo
pen de	poco (-a)
beaucoup de	mucho (-a)
aucun (-e)	ninguno (-a)
personne	nadie
rien	nada 1
autre (-s)	otro (-a)
on	se, uno
seul (-e)	dnico (-a)
meme (-s)	mismo (-a) «
plusieurs	3 varios (-as) ]
quelques	algunos (-as) j
(see p. 361)	nnos (-as) (see p. 361)
quelqu’un (-e'i	alguien <
quelque chose	algo c alguna cosa
tel (~3e), tels, telles	tal (-es) t
trop de	demasiado (-a) t
quiconque	cualquiera c

ITALIAN tutto (-a, -I, -e) tanto (-a, etc.)

. . . come ambedue certo (-a) ogni*

tiascuno (-a) ognuno (a) ciascuno (-a) abbastanza* tutto

poco (-a), pochi poche molto (-a) nessuno (-a) nessuno (-a^ niente nulla

parecchie lcuui (-e) (see p. 361)

* Invariable.

378 The Loom of Language

Our list of personal and impersonal pronouns in the tables given makes no allowance for situations in which the agent is indefinite or generic (e.g. you never can telly one wouldn't think that . . ., they say that . . .). In medieval Latin, and perhaps in the popular Latin of Caesar’s time, the equivalent of our indefinite pronouns one {they or you)y was homo {mari)y e.g. homo debit considerare (one must consider). Since homo was unstressed in this context, it shrunk. In French it became ony in contradistinction to homme (man). To avoid a hiatus, on becomes Von after et (and), si (if), ou (or), and oil (where). Parallel evolution has produced the indefinite German, Dutch, or Scandinavian marly which is derived from Manny etc. The French equivalent on has a far greater range than the English one. We must always use it as subject of the active verb when there is no definite agent of the equivalent English passive construction. The following examples illustrate its variegated use:

on pourrait dire on dit on feme!

on demande une bonne on sonne si Von partait

on pardonne tant que Von aime

There is no equivalent idiom in Spanish or Italian. The indefinite pronoun of Spanish or Italian is the reflexive. Thus the Spaniard says se dice (or simply dicen) for it is said (= they say), se cree (or creen) — it is believed (they believe). Similarly the Italian says si crede (one believes), si sa (one knows).

THE ROMANCE VERB

During the break-up of Vulgar Latin and subsequent evolution of its descendants, simplification of the verb did not go nearly so far as that of the noun. Even to-day the tense-system of the Romance languages is more elaborate than that of the Teutonic languages has ever been. According to the character of their tense or personal endings, the verbs of Romance languages are arranged in classes called conjugations (p. 107).

We can group regular French verbs in three conjugations (p. 37). The first, like our weak class, includes the majority of verbs in the language, and nearly all new ones. It consists of those (about 4,000) like chanter (sing), of which the infinitive ends in ~ER. The second fairly

one might say. they say — it is said, closing time — time, please ! wanted, a maidservant, somebody is ringing, what about leaving? we forgive as long as we love.

regular french verb types

Present	CHANTER clxant-e chant-es chant-e chant-ons chant-ez L chan t-ent	VENDRE vend-s vend-s vend vend-ons vend-ez vend-ent	FINIR fin-is fin-is fin-it fin-issons Sn-issez fin-issent	J partir par-s par-s par-t part-ons part-ez part-ent
Imperfect -	chant-ais chant-ais chant-ait chant-ions chant-iez chant-aient	vend-ais vend-ai’s vend-ait vend-ions vend-iez vend-aient	fin-issais fin-issais fin-issait fin-issions fin-issiez fin-issaient	part-ais part-ais part-ait part-ions part-iez part-aient
Past Definite	chant-ai chant-as chant-a chant-ames chant-ates chant-erent	vend-is vend-is vend-it vend-imes vend-ites vend-irent	fin-is fin-is fin-it fin-imes fin-ites fin-irent	part-is (see fin-.)
Future -	chant-erai chant-eras chant-era chant-erons chant-erez chant-eront	vend-rai vend-ras vend-ra vend-rons vend-rez vend-ront	fin-irai 1 fin-iras fin-ira fin-irons fin-irez fin-iront	part-irai (see fin-.)
Con¬ ditional	! chant-erais chant-erais chant-erait chant-erions chant-eriez chant-eraient	vend-rais vend-rais vend-rait vend-rions vend-riez vend-raient	fin-irais fin-irais fin-irait fin-irions fin-idez fin-iraient	part-irais (see fin-)
Present Sub¬ junctive	chant-e chant-es chant-e chant-ions chant-iez chant-ent	vend-e vend-es vend-e vend-ions vend-iez vend-ent	fin-isse fin-isses fin-isse fin-issions fin-issiez fin-issent	part-e part-es part-e part-ions part-iez part-ent
Imperative Present 1 Participle J Past 1 Participle J	^chant-e fchant-ez chant-ant chant- 6	vend-s vend-ez vend-ant vend-u	fin-is fin-issez fin-issant fin-i	par-s part-ez part-ant part-i

* Singular of familiar form.

t Plural of familiar form, and singular and plural of polite form.

380 The Loom of Language

large class (about 350) embraces verbs like finir (finish) of which the infinitive ends in - IR . The third is made up of about 50 verbs like venire (sell), of which the infinitive ends in -RE. A small group of

about twenty verbs which end in -IR are also worth considering as a separate family. It is made up of words like partir (go awray), and dormir (sleep), which are in constant use. These verbs lack the trade¬ mark of the finir conjugation. Verbs of the finir , class have a suffix added to the stem throughout the plural of the present, through¬ out the imperfect tense and the subjunctive. This suffix, -ISS, comes from the Latin accretion -ISC or -ESC which originally indicated the beginning of a process. Thus the Latin verb for to burst into flower is florescere. The same suffix, which survives in evanescent , putrescent, incandescent, adolescent, lost its meaning through too frequent use in Vulgar Latin.

. With the models shown in the table on p. 379 to guide him (or her) and the parts listed in any good dictionary, the home s tudent of French can add to the stem of most (footnote p. 391) irregular verbs the ending appropriate to the context. The overwhelming majority of verbs are regular, and fall into one of the conjugations listed. To write French passably, it is therefore essential to learn a model of each conjugation as given in the table on p. 379 and to memorize the personal terminals of each tense. To lighten the task the home student may find it helpful to make tables of (a) personal terminals common to all tenses, (b) personal terminals common to the same tense of all conjugations. Fortunately, we can get by in real life with much less (see p. 391). For reading purposes what is most essential is to be able to recognize the tense form.

Within the three conjugations a few deviations from the rule occur: -er verbs which have a silent E or an £ in the second last syllable, change E or £ to E before the endings - e, -es, and -ent, e.g. mener (lead), je mens (I lea d),posseder (possess),/*? possede (I possess). Most verbs ending in -lev or -ter, double L or T instead of having E, e.g. appeler (call), fappelle (I call), jeter (throw), je jette (I throw). Verbs in -ayer, -oyer, -uyer, substi¬ tute I for Y before a silent E or a consonant, e.g. essayer (attempt), p ess ate (I attempt). If C before A or O has the value of a sibilant, a cedilla (5) is added, e.g. percer (pierce), nous persons (we pierce). G in the same situation takes a silent E unto itself, e.g. manger (eat), nous mangeons (we eat). If the third person singular of the verb in a question has a final vowel and precedes a pronoun beginning with a vowel, a T is inserted to avoid a hiatus, e.g. aime-t-il, parle-t-on, viendra-t-elle.

We may also arrange Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian, like French verbs, in three main conjugations, of which there are models set out in

Modem Descendants of Latin 381

tables, on pp. 381 and 382. The largest Spanish group, corre- spending to the chanter conjugation in French., is represented by cantor with the. infinitive ending.-^. Vender, like the French (third) venire conjugation, is representative of a second class with the infinitive ending -ER. A third, represented by partir, has the infinitive ending -IR_

REGULAR SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE VERB TYPES

	(a) SPANISH	I (B) PORTUGUESE
Present	cant-o cant-as cant-a cant-amos cant-ais . cant-an	vend-o vend-es vend-e vend-emos vend- eis vend-en	part-o part-es part-e part-imos part-is part-en	cant-o cant-as cant-a cant-amos cant-ais cant-a m	vend-o vend-es vend-e vend-emos vend-eis vend-em	part-o part-es part-e part-imos part-is part-em
Imperfect	cant-aba cant-abas cant-aba cant-dbamos cant-abais cant-aban	vend-ia vend-ias vend-ia vend-iamos vend-iais vend-lan	part-ia part-ias part-ia part-iamos part-iais part-ian	cant-ava cant-avas vant-ava cant-avamos cant-aveis cant-avam	vend-ia vend-ias vend-ia vend-iamos vend-ieis vend-iam	paxt-ia part-ias part-ia part-iamos part-ieis part-xam
Past Definite	cant-e cant-aste cant-6 cant-amos cant-asteis cant-aron	vend-i vend-iste vend-16 vend-imos vend-isteis vend-ieren	part-1 part-iste part-io part-imos part-isteis part-ieron	cant-ei cant-aste cant-ou cant-dmos cant-astes cant-aram	vend-i vend-este vend-eu vend-emos vend-estes vend-eram	part-i part-iste part-iu part-imos part-istes part-iram
Future	cant-ar6 cant-aras 1 cant-ara cant-aremos cant-areis cant-aran	vend-ere vend-erds vend-era vend-eremos vend-er eis vend-eran	part-ir e part-iras part-ira part-iremos part-ir eis part-iran	cant-arei cant-aras cant-ara cant-aremos cant-areis cant-ar2o	vend-erei vend-erds vend-erd vend-eremos vend-ereis vend-erao	pait-irei part-irds part-ird part-iremos part-ireis part-irao
Conditional	cant-aria cant-arias cant-aria cant-ariamos cant-ariais cant-arian	vend-eria vend-erias vend-eria vend-eriamos vend-erfais vend-erian	part-iria part-irlas part-iria part-iriamos part-iriais part-irian	cant-aria cant-arias cant-aria cant-ariamos cant-arieis cant-ariam	vend-eria vend-erias vend-eria vend-eriamos vend-erieis vend-eriam	part-iria part-irias part-iria part-iriamos part-irleis part-iriam
Present Subjunctive	cant-e cant-es cant-e cant-emos cant- eis cant-en	vend-a vend-as vend-a vend-amos vend-dis vend-an	part-a part-as part-a part-amos part-ais part-an	cant-e cant-es cant-e cant-emos cant-eis cant-em	vend-a vend-as vend-a vend-amos vend-ais vend-am	part-a part-as part-a part-amos part-ais part-am
* t t §	cant-a cant-ad cant-ando cant-ado	vend-e vend-ed vend-iendo vend-ido	part-e part-id part-iendo part-ido	cant-a cant-ai cant-ando cant-ado	vend-e vend-ei vend-endo vend-ido	part-e part-i part-indo part-ido

The student of Spanish, even more than the student of French, has to concentrate on the correct use of the verb. The terminate 0f ^

™ singular (femiliar form). For imperative of polite address

see p« 399.

t Imperative plural (familiar form), t Present participle (gerund).

S Past participle.

382

The Loom of Language

REGULAR ITALIAN VERB TYPES

	CANTAKB	VENDERS	FINIRE	PARTIRE
		cant-o	vend-o	fin-isco	part-o
		cant-i	vend-i	fin-isci .	part-i
Present <		cant-a	vend-e	fin-isce	part-e
		cant-iamo	vend-iamo	fin-iamo	part-iamo
		cant-ate	vend-ete	fin-ite	part-ite
		cant-ano	vend-ono	fin-iscono	part-ono
	'	cant-ava	vend-eva	fin-iva	part-iva
		cant-avi	vend-evi	fin-ivi	part-ivi
Imperfect -		cant-ava	vend-eva	fin-iva	part-iva
		cant-avamo	vend-evamo	fin-ivamo	part-ivamo
		cant-avate	vend-evate	fin-ivate	part-ivate
		cant-avano	vend-evano	fin-ivano	part-ivano
		cant-ai	vend-ei	fin-ii	part^ii
		cant-asti	vend-esti	fin-isti	part-isti
Past _ . ■<		cant-6	vend-e	fin-i	part-1
Definite		cant-ammo	vend-emmo	fin-immo	part-immo
		cant-aste	vend-este	fin-iste	part-iste
		cant-arono	vend-erono	fin-irono	part-irono
		cant-ero	vend-er6	fin-ir6	part-ir6
		cant-erai	vend-erai	fin-irai	part-irai
Future -		cant-er&	vend-era	fin-ira	part-ira
		cant-eremo	vend-eremo	fin-iremo	part-iremo
		cant-erete	vend-erete	fin-irete	part-irete
		cant-eranno	vend-eranno	fin-iranno	part-iranno
		cant-erei	vend-erei	fin-irei	part-irei
		cant-eresti	vend-eresti	fin-iresti	part-iresti
Con¬		cant-erebbe	vend-erebbe	fin-irebbe	part-irebbe
ditional		cant-eremmo	vend-eremmo	fin-iremmo	part-iremmo
		cant-ereste	vend-ereste	fin-ireste	part-ireste
		cant-erebbero	vend-erebbero	fin-irebbero	part-irebbero
		cant-i	vend-a	fin-isca	part-a
Present		cant-i	vend-a	fin-isca	part-a
Sub¬		cant-i	vend-a	fin-isca	paxt-a
junctive		cant-iamo	vend-iamo	fin-iamo	part-iamo
		cant-iate	vend-iate	fin-iate	part-iate
i		cant-ino	vend-ano	fin-iscano	part-ano
Imperative J	cant-a	vend-i	fin-isci	part-i
„ A Present 1	cant-ate	vend-ete	fin-ite	part-ite
Participle J	cant-ando	vend-endo	fin-endo	part-endo
Past 1
Participle j	cant-ato	vend-uto	fin-ito	part-ito

Modem Descendants of Latin 383

Spanish, verb are much closer (p. 183) to those of its Latin parent than are those of the French or Italian, verb; but change of stress has led to changes of the stem vowel* and irregularities so produced have been levelled less than in French. So the stem of a verb* whose French equivalent usually has the same vowel throughout, may ring the changes on O, UE, and U as in: duermo (I sleep), dortmmos (we sleep).

TO HAVE in the Romance Family

Present «	FRENCH pai tu as • 11 a nous avons vous avez ils ont	PORTUGUESE hei has ha havemos haveis or heis hao	SPANISH he has ha hemos habeis han	LATIN habeo habes habet habemus habetis habent	ITALIAN ho hai ha . abbiamo avete hanno
Imperfect j	favais tu avals il avait nous avions vous aviez ils avaient	havia havias havia haviamos havieis haviam	habia habias habia habiamos habiais habian	habebam habebas habebat habebamus habebatis habebant	avevo avevi aveva avevamc avevate avevano
Past Definite	feus tu eus il eut nous eumes vous eutes ils eurent	houve houveste houve houvemos houvestes houveram	hube hubiste hubo hubimos hubisteis hubieron	habui habuisti habuit habuimus habuistis habuerunt	ebbi avesti ebbe avennno aveste ebberc
Future -	faurai tu auras il aura nous aurons vous aurez ils auront	haverei 1 haveras havera haveremos havereis haverao	habre habr&s habra habremos habreis habran	see P. 183	avro avrai avra ! avremo avrete avranno
Con- J ditional |	faurais tu aurais il aurait nous aurions vous auriez ils auraient	baveria haverias haveria haveriamos haverieis haveriam	habria habrias habria habriamos habriais habrian	see p. 183	avrei avrestl avrebbe avremmo avreste avrebbero
Present Sub- 1 junctive	j’aie tu aies il ait nous ayons vous ayez ils aient	heja hajas haja hajamos hajais ha jam	haya hayas haya hayamos hayais hayan	h. abeam habeas habeat habeamus habeatis habeant	abbia abbia or abbi abbia abbiamo abbiate abbiano
Imperative^ Present \ Participle / Past \ Participle j Infinitive _	aie ayez ayant eu AVOIR	ha havei havendo havido HAVER	h£ habed habiendo habido HABER	babe habete habens habitum HABERE	abbi abbiate avendo avuto AVERE

durmiendo (sleeping). The modem French equivalents are je dors, nous dormons , dormant .

Other internal irregularities of the written language are purely ortho¬ graphic, i.e. they are penalties of the regularity of Spanish spelling. Thus a final -C standing for the hard K sound in the stem of a Spanish verb becomes QU, if the verb ending begins with E or I. This change, which

3^4 The Loom of Language

conceals the relation of different parts of a verb when we meet them on the written page* adds to the difficulty of using a dictionary. It is made to preserve the rule that the Spanish C before I and E, like the Spanish Z, stands for the TH sound in thin . Thus both toque (I touched) and toco (I touch) belong to the infinitive tocar, as listed in the dictionary. The QU reminds us that the hard K sound of the stem goes through all its deriva¬ tives. The most important of these spelling changes "‘are the following:

(1) The letters C and G when to be pronounced hard before E and /*

are written QU and GU respectively* e.g. pagar (pay)* pago (I

pay)* pagui (I paid).

(2) To indicate that G before A, O* 17* stands for the CH in Scots

loch, J is written instead* e.g. coger (gather)* cojo (I gather).

(3) Verbs ending in ~cer or -cir, preceded by a consonant change C to Z

before A and O* e.g. veneer (vanquish)* venzo (I vanquish).

It is not possible to give the precise Anglo-American equivalent of the various tense-forms listed in these tables without recourse to roundabout expressions* and there are alternative compound tense- forms corresponding to some of them. Before discussing use of simple tenses* we should therefore familiarize ourselves with the Romance idiom appropriate to various situations in which we ourselves use the helper verbs he and have. This is a long story.

AUXILIARY VERBS

Some Aryan languages have no possessive verb to have. Russian has not. It is possible to sidetrack the possessive sense of to have by the use of the verb to he with a possessive or with a preposition. Thus a French¬ man can say e’est a moi (Latin mihi est) = this is mine (I possess this). That the Latin verb habere is equivalent to our have is true in the sense that both denote possession (e.g. hahet duas villas = he has two farm¬ houses). Latin authors occasionally used a past participle with habere * as when Cicero says cognitum habeo (I have recognized). In late Latin habere was becoming a helper to express perfected action as in Teutonic languages. To say that the Latin verb esse corresponds with our verb to be is also true in so far as both can :

(a) denote existence as in the Cartesian catchphrase cogito ergo sum (I think* therefore I am);

(h) act as a copula (link) between person or thing and a characteristic of one or the other* as in leo ferox est = the lion is fierce *

(c) indicate location, as in Caesar in Gallia est = Caesar is in Gaul;

(d) state class membership * as in argentum melallum est = silver is a

metal;

( e ) S° with the past participle in a passive construction such as ah

omnibus amatus est = he was loved by everyone;

(f) state pure identity * as Augustus imperator est = Augustus is the

emperor.

Modern Descendants of Latin 385

The fate of habere is a comparatively simple story. Its modem repre¬ sentatives in Italian (AVERE) and in French (AVOIR) still have a pos¬ sessive significance. The French and Italians also use parts of avere or avoir as we use have or had in compound past tense-forms of all verbs other than: (a) those which are reflexive (or pseudo-reflexive), (h) most mttansmve verbs (including especially those which signify motion). This is in keepmg (pp. 271) with the use of the German haben and Swedish hava We can use the Spanish HABER to buildup compound past tenses of all verbs, but it never denotes possession. The Spanish

^ “ 3 possessive sense is TENER (Latin tenere = to S™ , sometimes invades the territory of the Spanish HABER as a helper. The Portuguese equivalent TER has completely taken over the function of habere, both in its original possessive sense and as a helper to signify perfected action. The Mowing examples illustrate the use of modem descendants of habere and tenere as helpers :

Conjugation of TENER (Spanish), TER (Portuguese), TENERE (Latin)

	TENER	TER	TENERE		TENER	TER
Present	tengo tienes tiene tenemos tennis tienen	tenho tens tem temos tendes t6m	teneo tenes tenet tenemus tenetis tenent	jf	tendx£ tendras tendril tendremos ’ tendreis tendran	terei ter&j ter& teremos tereis teiao	see P* 339
Imperfect	tenia tenias tenia teniamos teniais tenian	tinha tinhas tinha tinhamos tinheis tinham	tenebam tenebas tenebat tenebamus tenebatis tenebant	II	tendria tendrias tendria tendriamos tenriais tendrian	teria terias teria teriamos terieis teriam	see P. 339
Past Definite	tuve tuviste tuvo tuvimos tuvisteis tuvieron	live tiveste teve tivemos tivestes tiveram	tenui tenuisti tenuit tenuimus tenuistis tenuerunt	Sff 1 co L	tenga tengas tenga tengamos tengais tengan	j tenha tenhas tenha tenhamos tenhais tenham	ten earn teneas teneat teneamtis teneatis teneant
Imper.	/ ten \ tened	tem tende	tene tenete	Past \ Part./	teniendo tenido	tendo tido	tenendo tenitum

English

French

Portuguese

Spanish

Italian

he has money il a de Fargent tem dinheiro tiene dinero ha denaro

he has paid il a paye tem pagado ha pagado ha pagato

he had paid il avait paye tinha pagado habia pagado aveva pagato

Important set expressions in which habere survives in Portuguese as well as in French and Spanish are:

3 86 The Loom of Language

FRENCH

There is or are 11 y a

There was or were i! y avait

There will be il y aura

There has (or have) been il y a eu

PORTUGUESE

ha

havia havera tem havido

SPANISH

hay (ha + y)

habia habra ha habido

Besides denoting possession and indicating time* our own verb have expresses necessity* as in we have to eat before we can philosophize. So also* the French for have to is avoir a, the Spanish hater de, or (more emphatically) tener que, followed by the infinitive* e.g. :

I have to go out = fai a sortir = he de (or tengo que) salir.

What is called the complete conjugation of esse, like that of our own verb to be * includes derivatives of several different roots. In Vulgar Latin stare (to stand) shared some of the territory of esse . Though the French etre and the Italian essere are mainly offspring of esse, some of their parts come from stare. The Italian essere, like its Latin parent* keeps company with the past participle in passive constructions* e.g. il fanciullo fu lavato (the child was washed). In French also it Is possible to write il est aime de tout le monde (he is loved by everybody) * but such passive expressions rarely turn up in daily speech. It is more usual to rely upon:

(d) a reflexive construction* e.g. la propriety se vendra samedi (the property will be sold on Saturday).

(b) an impersonal' expression involving the use of on, e.g. on rapporte de Moscou que (one reports from Moscow that = it is reported from Moscow that).

The French-Italian verb to be has an auxiliary use comparable to that of its Teutonic equivalent. That is to say* it takes the place of to have in compound past tenses if the verb is reflexive or if it is intransitive (especially if it expresses motion) :

English; I washed without soap. we arrived too late.

French: Je me suis lave sans savon. nous somm.es arrives trop tard.

Italian: Mi sono lavato senza sap one. siamo arrivati troppo tardi.

The Latin and Italian verb stare survives in Spanish and Portuguese as ESTAR. The latter is equivalent to our verb to be in three situations* one of which calls for more detailed treatment. Spanish examples will suffice to illustrate the other two* viz :

(a) when our be signifies location* ownership* profession* e.g. :

Budapest estd en Hungria.

Modern Descendants of Latin 387

(b) when our be connects a noun with an accidental or temporary attribute, but never when be precedes a noun complement, e.g.

la sehora estd enferma = the lady is ill.

Italians often use stare as the equivalent of our verb to be , e.g.:

come sta? = how are you ? sto bent = I am well.

A third use of estar or of its Italian equivalent stare, involves a unique and agreeably familiar construction, peculiar to Spanish, Portuguese,' and Italian on the one hand and to Anglo-American on the other. It is a helper equivalent to be in expressions which imply duration , e.g.:

English; he is waiting

Portuguese; )

Spanish: j esta esPerando

Italian: sta aspettando

we were working, estavamos trabalhando. estabamos trabajando. stavamo lavorando.

. B not t0 couple the French verb etre with a present parti-

aple such as mangeant or travaillant. To emphasize continuity or dura¬ tion, French people can use the idiomatic expression etre m train de (to e m the process of), as mje sms en train de manger (I am busy eating), or if the past is involved, the imperfect tense form, e.g. elle pleurait quandje suis arrive (she was crying when I arrived). Customarily there is no distinction between transitory (elle danse maintenant = she is mncrng now) and habitual (elle danse bien = she dances well) action in French. Only the context tells us when elle parle au canari meanc she is talking to the canary or she talks to the canary.

What is sometimes called the present participle of a Spanish or Portu¬ guese verb (e.g. trabajando ) is not historically equivalent to the present participle of a French verb. Latin had two verb forms corresponding to the single English one ending in -ing. One, the gerund, corresponds to the use of the -mg form as die name of a process (we learn by teaching): the other, the present participle, was a verbal adjective (she died smiling).

nly the latter left a descendant in French* always with the suffix -ant (chantant, vendam, finissant). This French -ant derivative is equivalent to

the English -mg derivative in three of six ways in which the latter is used:

(a) as an ordinary adjective, e.g. de I’eau courante (running water);

(b) as a verbal adjective, i.e. an adjective with an object following it,

e.g. cet arbre dominant le paysage (this tree dominating the

scenery); &

(c) in adverbial phrases* e.g. Pidee rtfest venue en parlant (the idea

came to me while talking).

388 The Loom of Language

THE SPANISH-PORTUGUESE VERBS SER and ESTAR

SPANISH

PORTUGUESE

SPANISH

Present -J

soy

eres

es

somos

sois

son

son

es

e

somos

sois

sao

estoy

estas

estd

estamos

estais

estan

Imperfect J

era

eras

era

eramos

erais

eran

era

eras

era

eramos

ereis

eram

estaba

estabas

estaba

estdbamos

estabais

estaban

Past

Definite

fin

fuiste

fud

fuimos

fiiisteis

fiieron

fiii

foste

foi

fomos

fostes

foram

estuve

estuviste

estnvo

estuvimos

esnxvisteis

estuvieron

Future \

sere

seras

sera

seremos

sereis

seran

serei

seras

serd

seremos

sereis

serao

estard

estaras

estard

estaremos

estareis

estardn

Con- J ditional 1

seria

serfas

seria

serfamos

seriais

serfan

seria

serias

seria

serfamos

serfeis

seriam

estarfa

estarfas

estarfa

estarfamos

estarfais

estarfan

Present

Sub¬

junctive

sea

seas

sea

seamos

sedis

sean

seja

sejas

seja

sejamos

sejais

sejam

este

festes

este

estemos

esteis

esten

Imperative j	se sed
Present 1
Participle J	siendo
Past 1	sido
Participle J

sd

sdde

sendo

estd

estad

estando

sido

estado

PORTUGUESE estou ' estds estd

estamos

estais

estao

estava

estavas

estava

estdvamos

estdveis

estavam

estive

estiveste

esteve

estivemos

estivestes

estiveram

estarei

estards

estard

estaremos

estareis

estarao

estaria

estarias

estaria

estarfamos

estarfeis

estariam

esteja

estejas

esteja

estejamos

estejais

estejam

estd

estai

estando

estado

Modem Descendants of Latin 389

^ iS n0t cot»ct t0 use Ae “present

auxiliary be- anH ^ & & ^ ^ngbsb ■*”£ ^orm when accompanied by the t^fr^ • d ,We cannot use 11 “ translate our ring derivative when

^ object llTelHn?Ty!n?Un {TlUng h difficUk)’ 01 3 verbal noun with usaae corrS^f t fJ , WOr* 1S <&«**)■ For the last two French ^ ? 77 % F , d t0 ^ altemattve English infinitive construction e e Thflfrif^ WOrf‘ > = ePeler (<*« mots anglais) est difficile

taSiiSdrT?' ^ pr“» wkw. Li i dats ^

or -7^r^;P r gd^The,.PreSeilt P^ciP^ which ended in -ans,-ens, worS^Sch^ir^ t0 bSapart ofthe Spanish verb system. Spanish iectivM nt * nd m/ante 01 ~lente are> with few exceptions, simple ad-

foZ of thfEi^' depfldlente (dependent), estudiante (student). The reSar vSh nfT, IfT? .m ** verbal suffix (for the

irSL^bsV'T^' i f ~lef° (&r 311 0ther “d most

e^bTnot~te * by *e -- fo-

Accompanied by estar, as well as by ir (go), and venir (cornel it ev-

taSS) ItmTvaf3^ °i-ft ^ continuity (compare Enghsh: he went on as also the «vh-^T qU3^ 3 Vfbj e,g- oia sonriendo (he listened smiling), ffiata (I te tlZ?rS ,eCt "*> "» aZ muchacho jugando enla

adiective b?ypIaymg.mthe square). Though never an ordinary

h » „j’j Pamards do use it as a verbal adjective with an object, e g

•LSlSi " tmiia 3 recd"d **

Besides the regular verb estar there is another Spanish-Portuguese equivalent of to be. It is SER, a mixed verb, mainly descended from the Latin s, hke the French etre, but partly derived from sedere (to sit), rhe simple copula between two nouns is always a tense form of ser, as is the copula which connects a noun to an attribute which is more or less permanent or characteristic, e.g. in Spanish

mi hermano era pintor = my brother was a painter. la sertora es hertnosa = the lady is beautiful.

Occasionally ser turns up in passive constructions, e.g. el doctor es respetado de todos (the doctor is respected by all), and the parti¬ ciple then takes the gender and number terminals (-<?, -a, -os, -as) appropriate to die subject. Both participles are invariant in other compound Spanish-Portuguese tense-forms, i.e. (a) HABER or TER with the past participle (to signify perfected action), ( b ) ESTAR with die present ' participle (to signify duration or continuing action). Spaniards, like the French, avoid using passive constructions. So the choice of the right terminal rarely crops up at least in conversation

39Q The Loom of Language

When Italians or Frenchmen use ESSERE or ETRE to express perfected action (i.e. with the past participle of a reflexive verb or a verb of motion) the participle takes a gender-number terminal appropriate to the subject, e.g.:

Vhomme est venu the man came

la femme est venue the woman came

les hommes se sont suicides les femmes se sont suiddies the men committed suicide the women committed suicide

When coupled with AVERE the Italian past participle (masc. sing, form) is invariant. The same is true of the French, past participle when conjugated with AVOIR.

Grammar books often give the rules; (a) it is invariant when the object follows the verb^ takes the terminal appropriate to the number and gender of the object if the latter precedes the verb* e.g. fat repu une carte (I have received a card) and la carte que fai regue (the card which I have received).

In many common expressions our verb to be is not equivalent to ETRE or ESSERE in French or Italian* nor is it equivalent to the Spanish-Portuguese pair SER and ESTAR. The French for to be right > wrong, afraid , hot, cold, hungry, thirsty, sleepy, is avoir raison, avoir tort, avoir pmr, avoir chaud, avoir froid, avoir faint, avoir soif, avoir sommeil. In the Spanish equivalents tener takes the place of the French avoir and English be: tener razdn, no tener razdn, tener miedo, tener color, tener frto, tener kambre, tener sed, tener sueno . When they comment on the weather* Spanish and French people use verbs equivalent to the Lstinfacere (French faire, Spanish kacer ) which meant to do or to make. This usage is traceable to Vulgar Latin* e.g,:

it is cold 11 froid hace frlo

U is fresh il fait frais hace fresco

it is hot H fait chaud hace calor

it is windy il fait du vent hace viento

it is fine (weather) il fait beau (temps) hace buen tiempo

%t is daylight E fait jour haceluz

USE OF TENSES .

Anglo-American* like the Teutonic languages* has only two simple tenses* present (e.g. I have) and past (e.g. 1 had). Otherwise* we indicate tune, or aspect, by particles* adverbial expressions* or compound tenses

Modem Descendants of Latin 391

made up of a participle and a helper verb. Modem Romance languages have at least four simple tenses, the present, the future, and two which refer to the past, the imperfect and perfect (or past definite). It is possible, most of all in French, to lighten the heavy burden of learning such flexional wealth, by resorting to turns which may not be specially recommended by grammar books, but are in harmony with rnmmnn usage. For everyday French conversation or correspondence it is usually sufficient to know the present tense form, the imperfect, infinitive, present and past participle of an ordinary verb, the present and im¬ perfect of etre and avoir, together with the present of the irregular helpers alter . (to go)* and venir (to come). Of all tenses the present stands, first in importance. Apart from expressing what its namp im¬ plies, it serves in situations analogous to the show opens to-morrow, and may legitimately and effectively be used in narrative, e.g. f arrive a deux hemes du matin, et qtlest-ce que je dicouvre? EUe est morte, raids morte (I arrive at two in the morning, and what do I discover? She is dead, stone dead). For the more immediate future conversational French habitually uses oiler + infinitive (Spanish ir a + infinitive), which re¬ duces flexion to a bare minimum and tallies with English he going to + e.g. French je vais t&Uphoner? Spanish voy a telephones. To

indicate the immediate past, as in I have just swallowed a tooth (i.e. have just + past participle) French and Spanish have their own ex¬ pressions. The French one is venir de -f- infinitive, the Spanish acabar de + infinitive, e.g. he has just gone out = il vient de sortir = acaba de salir.

In everyday speech French people always use a compound tense form to express what is more remote, e.g. I met him yesterday = je l ai rencontri hier. This construction is made up of the past participle and the present tense of avoir (or etre, if the verb is reflexive or signifies motion). This roundabout way of saying I came, I saw, I lovedlooms as large in French conversation as does the present, and the English student of French will be wise to use it liberally. The beginner must also acquaint himself with the so-called imperfect. This tense implies customary, repetitive, or continuous past action in contrast to a com¬ pleted process. Thus it is always right to use the imperfect when we can substitute used to + infinitive for the simple past of an English

* Th? conjugation of ALLER like that of etre, is built up from several verbs, two of them, one of which is derived from Latin voders, the other from ambware,' form the present tense, e.g. il va (he goes), nous aliens (we go). The

(Ishallgo) 1S the Latm tTe> °CCUrS ^ ^ future 311(1 the conditional,- e.g. fired

392 The Loom oj Language

statement, or when we could alter the English sentence to was or were + the ~ing form of the verb* e.g. :

(a) Quandj’avais vingt am jefumais quarante cigarettes par jour.

At twenty years of age I smoked Caused to smoke ) forty cigarettes a

day.

(b) Ellefaisait la cuisine quandje suis arrivi.

She was cooking when I arrived.

The second of the two statements could also be given the form Elle itait en tram de fane la cuisine, etc. This is useful to know because by resorting to etre en tram de (be in the act of, be busy with) you can get round the imperfect form of the verb. 6

Another tense form, the past definite or preterite , has completely dis¬ appeared from conversational French, and is now the hall-mark of the literary language. It means that the event in question took place once for all at a certain, time, and as such corresponds to the simple past of spoken and written English, and to the compound past of spoken French (e.g. U se rapprocha for il s’est rapprocU = he came nearer).

literature it is the tense of sustained narration, hence also railed the past histone. The first impression of the beginner who reads a French narrative is that alternating use of perfect and imperfect is quite capri¬ cious. In reality this is not so. When two actions or processes are going on at one and the same time, the perfect expresses the pivotal one. For what is descriptive, explanatory, or incidental to the main them* “Pfect replaces it. A passage from Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard by Anatole France illustrates this rule, which applies to all the Romance languages :

nJ’Td°Cha{ (past, historic) du foyer man fauteuil et ma table volante (I pulled my easy-chair and little table up to the fireside), et ie oris (nact histone) au feu la place pdHamlcar deignait (imperfect) me lancer (and

S' °f "y, Pl"e 5* »

allow me) . Hamilcar, a la tete des cheneis, s\ir un coussin de plume , etait (imperfect) couche en rond, le nez entre set pastes (Hamilc&r was ]yin°- in front of the andirons, curled up on a feather-cushion, wil l^ nose between his paws). Un souffle egal soulevait (imperfect) safourrure epaisse et legere (his thick, fine fur rose and fell with Ms regular bZZ A mi aJ>pr°.che’ tlcofa (past historic) doucement ses pnmelles d’ agate entre ses pauses mt-closes qu’tl referma (past historic) presque aussitot en sZgeanf

CeneSt ,est ,, (At myapproach^s *

at me from between Ms half-opened lids, wMch he closed 4noT at once, thinking to himself : “It is nothing, it is only my master”!)^

: phe “°n ofthe^ definite everyday speech is confined to French. In Spamsh, Portuguese, and to a lesser degree, in Italian

Modem Descendants of Latin 393

conversation it is still going strong, and the student of Spanish who has previously learned some French will therefore feel tempted to say hf m sombrero (French j’ai achete un chapeau) where the

Spaniard would use the preterite {compve un sombrero).

THE INFINITIVE VERB

We have seen (p. 263) that the Anglo-American equivalent of the verb form called the infinitive of Teutonic languages is identical with me first person present, and is recognized as such whenever it imme¬ diately follows (a) the particle to, or (b) any one of the helper verbs shall, mil, may, must, can, let, make (meaning compel), (c) the verbs see, hear, help, and (somewhat archaically), dare. The infinitive 0f a modem omance language, like that of a typical Teutonic language, has its own characteristic terminal and has the same relation to our own usage. That is to say, it is the verb form which occurs after a preposition, or after one of the following auxiliaries, which do not take a preposition:

guerer (want to) vouloir

deber (shall, must) devoir

poder (can, be able to) pouvoir

osar (dare) oser

saber (know) savo{r

hacer (make, cause) faire

dejar (let, allow) laisser

The infinitive without a preceding preposition can also occur after other trench and Spanish verbs. A second group which do not take a preposition includes verbs of seeing and hearing, French voir (see), entendre (hear), sentiriteel); Spanish yer, oir, sentir. Of the remainder the more important are: French aimer mieux (prefer), compter (count on), desirer (desire), en- voyer^ (send), esperer (hope), faillir (to be on the point of), paraitre (appear); Spanish parecer (appear), desear (desire; want), temer (fear), esperar (hope).

One of the helper verbs given in the two columns printed above calls for comment. The Spanish-French couplet DEBER-DEVOIR, like the Portuguese DEVER and Italian DOVERE literally mean to owe ; but they can be used as helpers in a compulsive sense by a process of metaphorical extension parallel to the formation of our word ought, originally a past tense form of owe. The French present, je dois, may mean I owe or I must, the past fat du, I had to, the future je devrai, I shall have to, and the conditional je devrais, I ought to. To use either devoir and pouvoir or their equivalents in other Romance languages correctly, we have to be on the look-out for a pitfall mentioned in

N*

394 The Loom of Language

Chapter IV (p. 152). This is the peculiar Anglo-American construction I should have (French paurais du)> I could have (French paurais pu).

The French often resort to a peculiar construction for must. It in¬ volves the impersonal verb falloir (to be necessary that)-, e.g. :

il faut sertir 1

ilfaut queje sorte >■ I must go out.

je dois sortir J

When onr own equivalent of a Romance infinitive comes after a preposition, the latter is always to. Several prepositions may stand immediately before the infinitive of a Romance language. The two chief ones are descendants of the Latin de (from or of) and ad (to). Both in French and in Spanish they survive as de and d or a respectively. The first has become more common, as in the following sentence, which also illustrates the rule that the pronoun object precedes the infinitive: je suis lien heureux de te voir (I am very happy to see you). Correct choice of the appropriate preposition depends arbitrarily on the preceding main verb, noun, or adjective, and we find it with them in a good dictionary. Where we can replace to by in order to, Romance equivalents are pour (French), para (Span.), per (Ital.), e.g. I am coming j:o repair it = je mens pour le reparer = vengo para repararlo = vengo per ripararlo.

Italian has a distinctive preposition da derived from the fusion of two Latin ones (de + ad). In different contexts it can mean from, at or for. When the infinitive has a passive meaning we can usually translate to by DA, e.g.:—

Egli ha un cavallo da venders. he has a horse to sell (— to be sold).

Questa e una regola da imparare a memoria.

this is a rule to learn by heart (= to be learned by heart).

In all Romance, as in Teutonic, languages the infinitive form of the verb (see Chapter IV, p. 139) is the one which replaces our -ing form when the latter is a verb-noun, e.g. voir, c'est croire (seeing is believing). The Portuguese infinitive has peculiar agglutinative possessive forms equivalent, e.g. to your seeing (VERes), our doing (FAZERmos), their asking (PREGUNTARem), with the endings -es (your), -mos (our), -em (their). The following example illustrates this construction: passed sem me verem = I passed without their seeing me.

MOOD

Up till now nearly all our illustrations of Romance verb behaviour

Modem Descendants of Latin 395

have appeared in what grammarians call the indicative mood. Two other moods, the subjunctive and the conditional , require special treatment. The -latter is still very alive, both in spoken and written French, Spanish, or Italian. The former leads a precarious and uncertain existence in the spoken, that is, the living language, yet is usually given so much space in introductions to French (or German) that the beginner is scared out of his wits. A few facts may help him to regain his confidence. The first is that the subjunctive, except when it replaces the imperative as it does in Spanish or Italian (p. 399), is practically devoid of semantic significance, and for this reason alone no misunderstanding will arise if the beginner should ignore its existence. French grammars, for instance, are in the habit of telling us that the indicative states a fact whereas the subjunctive expresses what is merely surmised, feared, demanded, etc., and then illustrate this assertion by e.g. je doute quHl vienne .(indicative vient) = I doubt that he will come. Now this is palpable nonsense. The doubt is not signalled by the subjunctive form vienne, lx is expressed hjje doute, and the subjunctive of the dependent danse is as much a pleonasm as is the plural flexion of the verb in ils se grattent (they are- scratching themselves). There is another source of comfort. Of the two subjunctives in French, the present and the past, ' •the latter has disappeared from the spoken language; the former sur¬ vives, but is very restricted in its movements. If you should say, for instance, je ne crois pas qu’il est malade for . . . soit malade, as prescribed by grammar you are merely following what is common usage. You should also not feel unduly intimidated when you wish to express your¬ self in written French, because it is possible to travel a long distance without calling in the subjunctive, provided you take the following advice: Since the subjunctive is a characteristic of dependent or subordinate clauses, say what you have to say in simple straightforward statements, and use alternatives for expressions which are usually followed by this troublesome mood. The Spanish subjunctive has a wider range than the French one, in speech as well as in print; be¬ sides there are four different forms for the two in French (a present, two past, and a future subjunctive). The reader who wishes to acquaint himself with all the ways, by-ways and blind alleys of this mood will have to go outside The Loom for information. Here it must suffice to say that in all Romance languages grammar prescribes the subjunctive (a) after expressions denoting doubt, assumption, fear, order, desire, e.g. French dottier, eraindre. , ordormer, disirer, Spanish dudar, tenter , mandar, desear, Italian dubitare, temere, mandate, desiderate, (&) after

39^ The Loom of Language

the equivalents of English it is necessary that (French il faut qmy Spanish es menester que> Italian bisogna che\ (c) after certain conjunctions

of which the most important are :

FRENCH pour que afin que	SPANISH para que a fin de que	ITALIAN percM affinch6	ENGLISH in order that
quoique bien que	aunque bien que	sebbene benefit	although
sans que pourvu que a moins que au cas que	sin que con tal que a menos qae en caso que	senza che purch£ a meno che in caso che	without provided that unless in case that

All you have to do to get the conditional of a regular French verb is to add the personal endings of the imperfect to the infinitive. To under¬ stand its form and one of its functions we must go back to Vulgar Latin. Perhaps the reader of The Loom has already heard once too often about how Roman citizens of the later Empire could express future time by coupling the infinitive with the present tense of habere, e.g. credo quod ventre habet (I believe that he will come); but there is a good enough reason for mentioning it again. For I believed he would come, Romans would use past tense-forms of habere with the infinitive, i.e. credebam quod venire habebat, or credebam quod venire habuit. Just as the future tense of Romance languages (other than Rumanian) is based on agglutination of the verb infinitive with the present of habere, the conditional results from gluing the verb infinitive to imperfect (Spanish, Portuguese, French) or past historic (Italian) tense-forms of the sam» helper verb. This tells us the original function of the conditional mood, i.e. that we have to use it when we speak about a past event which had not yet happened at the time involved in the preceding statement. Its original past-future function survives in all constructions analogous to those ated above. The following examples show the ordinary future and the past-future (i.e. conditional) :

English: he says he will come. , he said he would come.

French: ddit qu’il viendra. il disait qu’il viendrait

Spanish: dice que vended. deefa que vendrfa.

Itahan: dice che verrd. diceva che verrebbe.

, The ****** has taken on another function, and derives its name rom it. We have to use it in the main dause of French conditional statements when fulfilment is unrealizable, or at least remote, e.g.

Modem Descendants of Latin 397

(a) if he came I should go; (b) if he had come I should have gone. Here, as in future-past expressions, illustrated above, the French conditional is equivalent to our construction involving should or would with the infinitive of the’ main verb. For our simple past tense-form of an ordinary verb of the ^/-clause, as in (a), or of the helper as in (b), the French equivalent is the ordinary imperfect (or pluperfect). The following examples illustrate French conditional statements :

(a) French: Si /’ avals de V argent je Facheterais.

English: If I had money I should buy it.

(£>) French: SHI avail eu de Fargent elle Faurait achete .

English: If he had had money she would have bought it.

Spanish usage is more tricky. Where we use the would-should con¬ struction, it is always safe to use the conditional in the main clause, and Spaniards will not misunderstand a foreigner who uses the ordinary (indicative) present or past in the ^/-clause. They themselves resort to the subjunctive form, as we use were for was, is, are:

Spanish : le darian el premio si fuese mas aplicado.

English: they would give him the prize if he were more industrious.

Spanish: Si tuviera dinero lo compraria.

English: If I had money I should buy it.

Spanish: Si hubiera tenido dinero lo habria comprado.

English: If I had had money I should have bought it.

. ^he ma*n thing for the beginner to know about thQ Romance subjunc¬ tive is how to leave it alone till he (or she) has mastered all the grammar essential to clear statement. The conditional turns up in many situations which more or less imply condition, e.g. suggestions, and in general where we use should-would with the infinitive in a simple statement. For instance, it is a useful form for polite request. In headline idiom the French conditional may indicate uncertainty or even rumour, as illus¬ trated by the last of the ensuing examples :

Je ne leferais pas ainsi. I shouldn’t do it like that.

Voudriez-vous bien m* aider un peu? Would you kindly help me a bit? Quefaimerais te voir ! How I should love to see you!

Darian rencontrerait Hitler. Will Darian meet Hitler?

It is important for anyone who is taking up French to know several common expressions which involve the conditional form of certain helpers, e.g. vouloir (to want) and devoir (to owe) in the sense would like to , and ought to, e.g. :

je voudrais bien te visiter. I should much like to visit you. il ne devrait point lefaire. He shouldn’t do it.

39^ The Loom of Language

The Latin verb had spedai forms— the so-called imperative mood— to express an order or request. Such spedai imperative forms of the verb are rare in modern European languages. What is called the French imperative has two forms, one identical with the first person singular of the present indicative, the other with the second person plural e g attrape-attrapez (catch!). Both occur in everyday speech. The first is used in familiar intercourse when addressing one person, the second m the same situation when speaking to more than one. The latter is also the imperative of polite address, singular and plural, e.g. prensz garde madam (take care!). If the verb is reflexive, the reflexive pronouL be¬ haves like any other objective pronoun (p. 3 66), i.e. it comes after the verb in an affirmative command, e.g. ouvriers de torn les pays, , unissez- vous (workers of die world, unite!), and before the verb in a prohibition e.g. nevousen allez pas (don’t go away!). Another way of making a

rec™endanon is ^ employing the infinitive. This is also &e Italian and German method, e.g. don’t lean out of the window French ne pas se pencher en dehors , Italian non sporgersi, German

wPrf ThC aUXffiarieS ** ««*. and wloir h2

ZIT 7 f0rmS"0rreSp0nding t0 Ae subjunctive (aie-ayez, sois-Soyez, sache-sachez, veuille-veuillez). y *

Interrogative expressions may take the place of an imperative For venez. (come!), we may say voulez-vous vemr? (will you come>) ne voulez-vous pas venir? (won’t you come?), vous viendrez, n'est-ce-pZ (you will come, won’t you?), etc. P

In Spanish, as in French, the form of a command or a polite request depends upon personal relations between speaker and listener When to a dnid, a. mthmne relation, or a ftiend, the

one iToTIT?30"' ‘S' ,iml° (ti*' Jt0- Ubc addresses more than ■ fi ses 3 form constructed by substituting d for the final r of the infinitive, eg. coned , mhos (run, boys!). This imperative is not verv mporant. because the beginner mil seldom hare a chance to use h The form wind. we habitually employ i, the third pemon sil Z rf the present subjuncdve followed by usted, when addressing one person or the third plural Mowed by ustedes when talking to more thm one’ e.g. dispense usted or dispensen ustedes (excuse me) *

„ reqUCStS °r “Vit3ti0ns ^ let us befriends again) the French

If fitst person plural of the ordinary present teL

fT’J m ^ Marseillaise: aliens , enfants de la patrie (let us go • forth, children of the fatherland), The.Spanish equivLt iPSelb-

Modern Descendants of Latin 399

junctive first person plural* e.g. demos un paseo (let us take a walk). If the request involves someone to whom it is not directly addressed* the third person of the subjunctive is used in both languages* e.g. in French* qu il attende (let him wait!)* in Spanish que no entre nadie (let nobody come in!).

NEGATION AND INTERROGATION

*Ihe predominant negative particle of Latin was nony which survives as such in Italian. The Spanish equivalent is no * Portuguese nao. The Spanish always precedes the verb and can be separated from it only by a pronoun object or reflexive. In its original form the Latin non (like our English no) survives in French as an answer to a question or as an interjection. In Spanish* double negation is common. The particle no accompanies the verb even when die sentence contains other words whicn have an explicitly negative meaning* e.g. ninguno (no)* nadie (nobody)* nada (nothing)* jamas or nunca (never). Thus a Spaniard says no importa nada (it doesn’t signify nothing = it doesn’t matter). Simi¬ larly* Italians use non with the verb of a sentence which contains nessuno3 niente3 nulla. Such constructions are analogous to the obligatory double- barrelled negation of French (ne . . , pas3 ne . . . jamais3 ne . . . rien3 etc.), explained in Chapter VIII (p. 34°) • Double negations (e.g. I donyt want no more nonsense) were not tabu in Mayflower English. The following are illustrative:

English : I do not see anybody.

French: je ne vois per some. Spanish: no veo a nadie. Italian: non vedo nessuno.

English; what does he say? . . ,

Nothing.

French: que dit~il?-rien.

Spanish: qui dice?~nada.

Italian : che dice?-mente.

The French words which go with the verb preceded by ne are : aucun (no* none)* nul (none)* personne (nobody)* rien (nothing)* plus (no more)* •amais ^(never)* e.g. il n* avail nen d dire (he had nothing to say)* aucun des deUgues ny est present (none of the delegates is present). When they stand alone in answer to a question* aucun, rien, jamais, personne are negative* e.g. who is here? Personnel, what did he say? Rien! In reply to a question demanding a straight^ or no * Romans repeated the verb of the question. To fecistine? (did you do it?)* the reply was sic feci (so did I)* or non feci (I did not). In Spanish* si derived from sic is the affimative particle (yes). French has two* si and oui (Old French oil, from Latin hoc ille). Si * or stronger* si3 sz3 denies a negative statement or suggestion* e.g. tu ne ' m’aimes plus? Si3 si! (You don’t love me any more? Yes* yes* I do).

Neither Teutonic nor Romance languages have a single clear-cut and

The Loom of Language

400

obligatory method of interrogation. Each offers several ways of putting a question. A Latin question to which the answer was yea, yea or nay nay, was marked as such by one of several particles (ne, num, nonne) equivalent to eh? None of these has survived. In spoken French or Spanish a question can be distinguished from an assertion by a device which is both primitive and well-nigh universal, i.e. by change of tone without change of word-order, e.g. French tu ne mens pas? (you are not coming?). As in Teutonic languages, verb-subject inversion also labels a question, e.g. French Vas-tu vu? (have you seen him?), Spanish tiene el tren un sleeper? (has the train got a sleeper?). Such inversion is not invariably interrogative. The Spanish verb often comes before its subject in constructions analogous to came the dawn, e.g. dijo la madre a su hija (said the mother to her daughter).

jTSk?0gltiOn h3S Several Pecuharities not shared by Spanish- ^ subject is a personal pronoun, it is joined to the verb by a yphen, e.g. n en desirez-vous pas? (don’t you want any?) If the third person of the verb ends in a vowel, a r is inserted Keen verbid pronoun, e.g. chante-t-elle? (does she sing?), (b) If the subject is a nol it remains at the beginning of the sentence, while the interrogative character of the sentence is indicated by the addition of a pleonastic p noun, e.g. French ta sosur3 est-elle mariee? (Is your sister married?')

“ » SP-i*. Rend, cf

? c Jf q Th ^ d began t0 emer§e m the sixteenth century, and is still gaining ground at the expense of simple inversion, e.g. est-ce oue

^fJTimeS l°mde Lonires? (Are we far from London?). The beginner should use this interrogative form freely because, apart from ite ™ fcmy it has the advantage of making inversion unnecessary. P P The reader who is learning French may one day meet the common people of France in the flesh. So it is useful to know beforehandTw

^?P , “ Spee,cb 1S fuiazingly rich in complicated interrogative turns e g on c Bst"~il Qxi 2/ £st? for oil est-iP -jo t,** on > . ^

r** cJr

tendency of popular French to avoid or to straighten onr * r

S? "i"8”"" “ » «» of SS

may write?1 COmm°n people French sPeak what their descendants ROMANCE AFFIXES

referenceTffi0f ^ °f 3 lan^e is without

reference to affixes other than those of the sort usually called flexions

opfe who speak Romance languages resort little to noun couplets

Mich as waterpower or compounds such as rubberneck or gumhoots The

French (cauliflower) is . of aZ£'c£

Modern Descendants of Latin 401

which is not gaining much ground. The same is less true of verb-noun couplets represented by the French compounds porte-monnaie (purse), gagne-pam (livelihood) or the Spanish mondadientes (toothpick) and rascaaelos (sky-scraper). Where Anglo-American puts two words together without any intervening link, Romance languages generally require a preposition. To indicate the purpose for which something is. meant French uses the particle d, Spanish para , and Italian da. Thus a tea-cup is tme tasse a the in French, hair-oil is aceite para el pelo in Spanish, and a typewriter is uiia macchina da scrivere in Italian. The insertion of prepositions which we can omit (e.g. trade cycle = cycle of trade) makes headlines bulge. Thus the French for workers' fashion plates \s planches de gravures de modes pour ouvrieres. Like noun coupling prefixation is not fashionable. Frenchmen or Spaniards do not lightly make up adjectives like pre-digested. Thus the vocabulary of French is kghly conservative. The same is tme of Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian it we use Anglo-American as a yardstick; but French is far less flexible than its sister languages, because it has no machinery for deriving words of a class relatively common in the latter.

Many languages have special suffixes to indicate dimensions of, disapproval of, or esteem for the thing or person of the word to which they stick. Almost any German noun which stands for a thing 0r animal becomes diminutive (and hence endearing or contemptuous) by addition of -chen, or less commonly -lein, e.g. Haus-Hauschen, Mann- Mamchen. The prevalence of this trick explains why diminutives are not fisted in German dictionaries. In English such couplets as duck¬ duckling, goose-gosling, or river-rivulet, book-booklet, are rare, as are French ones, e.g. maison-maisonette, jardin-jardinet; and we have to leam them individually. More like German than English or French, Spanish and Italian abound with words of which the suffixes signify size, appreciation, tenderness, contempt, according to context; and we are free to make up new ones.

Masculine forms of some Spanish diminutive terminals are -ito, -Jco, -itico, -cito, -illo. We recognize the feminine equivalent of the last one in guerrilla from guerra (war). Italian diminutive suffixes are the -ino of bambino, the -etto of libretto, also -ello, -cello, and -cino. Thus we get floricita (little flower) from the Spanish flor, and fioretto (cf. floret ) from ' the Italian fiore. From the Spanish names Carlos and Juan we get Carlitos, Juanito (Charlie and Johnnie). Such terminals can attach themselves to adjectives or adverbs. Hence the Spanish couplets ahora- ahorita (now — right now), adios-adiosito (good-bye — bye-bye), or Italian

402 The Loom of Language

povero-poverino (poor — poor dear)* poco-pochino (Tittle-wee). There is scarcely any limit to usage of this sort.

In Spanish* Portuguese* and Italian alike* the chief augmentative suffix comes from the Latin -one. Hence in Spanish hombre-hombron (man — big man)* in Italian libro-librone (book-tome). The Latin depre¬ datory suffix -aceus (or - uceus ) becomes -acho (or -mho) in Spanish* -acdo in Italian. Thus we have the Spanish couplet vino-vinacko (wine — poor wine)* or the Italian tempo-tempacdo (weather — bad weather). These affixes are fair game for the beginner. Alfred-acdo is good Italian for naughty Alfred . One prefix deserves special mention. It is the Italian a shortened form of the Latin dis-3 e.g. sbandare (disband)* sbarbato (beardless)* sbarcare (dis.embark)* sfare (undo)* sminuire (diminish).

FURTHER READING

Charles duff The Basis and Essentials of French.

The Basis and Essentials of Italian.

The Basis and Essentials of Spanish.

DE BAE2A Brush Up Your Spanish.

HARTOG Brush Up Your French.

tassinari Brush Up Your Italian.

Also French* Italian* Portuguese* Spanish in Hugo’s Simplified System* and Teach Yourself Spanish. Teach Yourself French * Teach Yourself Italian in the Teach Yourself Books (English University Press).

PART III

CHAPTER X

THE DISEASES OF LANGUAGE

In the remaining chapters of the Loom we are going to look at language as a man-made instrument which men and women may sharpen and redesign for human ends. Before we can take an intelligent interest in the technique of language-planning for a society which has removed the causes of war, it is helpful to recognize the defects and merits inherent in languages which people now use or have used in the past. The aim of this chapter is to give relevant information about some languages which have been mentioned in passing elsewhere, and about others which have been left out in the cold.

In their relation to the progress of human knowledge we may divide languages into two groups. In one we may put those which have a written record of human achievement extending back over hundreds, if not thousands, of years. To the other belong those with no rich or time-honoured secular literature which could be described as indi¬ genous. The first includes representatives of the Hamitic, Semitic and Aryan families, Chinese and Japanese. The latter is made up of the Bantu languages, the Amerindian dialects, and members of the Malayo- Polynesian group. Though many of them are by now equipped with scripts through the efforts of Buddhist, Moslem, and Christian mis¬ sionaries, such literature as they possess is largely sacred and derivative. Till quite recently the same remark could have been made with more or less justice about Finno-Ugrian* Turkish, Mongolian, Caucasian, and Basque. After the Revolution of 1917 the educational policy of the Soviet Union made script a vehicle for secular knowledge among Mongols, Mordvinians, Turco-Tartars, Caucasians, and other non- Aryan speech communities.

The 2,000 million people on this globe speak approximately 1,500 different languages. Only about thirty of them are each spoken by more than 10 millions. The daily speech of nearly half of the world’s population belongs to the Indo-European family, within which its Anglo-American representative takes first rank. Anglo-American is now the mother- language of over 200 millions, not to mention those ' who habitually use it as a means of cultural collaboration or rely on it for world communication. If we add to the figure for Anglo-Ameri-

4°6 The Loom of Language

can 120 million people who speak cognate languages (German, Dutch and Flemish, Scandinavian), we get the enormous total of about 320 millions for the Teutonic group. Nest come the Aryan tongues of India, spoken by some 230 millions, and the Romance languages, spoken by a total of 200 millions. Then follows the Slavonic-speaking people, of whom there are some 190 millions.

The preceding figure for German does not include Yiddish. Yiddish was originally a west German dialect taken to Poland and Baltic countries by Jewish refugees from persecutions of the late Middle Ages. Its phonetic pattern preserves many characteristics of Middle High German. Its vocabulary is still predominantly German with a considerable admix- tare of Hebrew words, of Polish words, and of words of languages spoken in countries to which emigrants have taken it. Yiddish can boast of a rich international literature, printed in Hebrew characters.

With the exception of the splinter-speech communities which use Basque, Turkish, and Caucasian dialects, all European languages belong to two great families, the Aryan or Indo-European, and the Finno- Ugrian (p. 197). European representatives of the latter are confined to Hungary, Esthonia, Finland, and Lapland. Major contributions to modem science are due to the efforts of men and women who speak languages belonging to the Romance and Teutonic languages, including Anglo-American, which is the hybrid offspring of both. These have been dealt with in Part II. The most ancient literature of the Indo- European family belongs to the Indo-Iranian group, which includes Sanskrit and Old Persian. Of languages spoken in modern Europe, the Baltic group which includes Lettish and Lithuanian stands nearest to primitive Aryan, and the Slavonic, headed by Russian, stands nearest to the Baltic group. Classical Greek with its parochial descendant, modem Greek, occupies an isolated position as a language clearly related to other Indo-European languages without being more clearly related to any particular group than to another. At the extreme Western geographical limits of the present distribution of the family, we find remains of the once widespread Celtic group with peculiar structural characteristics which separate it from all others. Albanian and Armenian are also Indo-European languages, but because both have assimilated many loan-words from Semitic, Caucasian, or Turkish neighbours, linguists did not generally recognize their relation to other members of the family till the latter half of the nineteenth century.

THE INDIC GROUP

Widely separated branches of the Indo-European family have a long

The Diseases of Language 407

literary past, and we are therefore in a position to recognize similar processes independently at work in the evolution of different groups. The early literature of the Eastern, like that of the Western members of the Indo-European family, introduces us to a complexity of gram- matical usage in sharp contrast to that of its modem evolutionary forms. In the Western branch, simplification started first and went furthest in English. In the Eastern branch, simplification of Persian began earlier and has gone almost as far.

The most ancient stage of Indie is known as Vedic or Vedic Sanskrit , the language of the Vedas, a collection of hymns, litanies, prayers, incantations, in short, the Bible of the Brahmanic cult. The oldest part is the Rig Veda, based on oral tradition transmitted for several centuries before the introduction of writing. Possibly it is as old as 1000 b.c. — several hundred years before the art of writing reached India. By that time the Old Indie of the original Vedaistic incantations had made way for a language which became the standard among the priestly caste as well as the medium of high-class secular literature. Perhaps to preserve its purity from contamination with lowbrow idiom, ' priestly gram¬ marians drew up a code of correct usage. Sanskrit means arranged, ordered, 01 correct.

In this state of arrested development it continued to exist side by side with living dialects, as Latin, the occupational medium of the church and universities, coexisted for centuries with its new evolutionary forms, the Romance languages. In the drama of the classical period of Indian literature, petrified Sanskrit is used, together with a newer Prakrit, separated from it by a social barrier. Men of elevated rank, such as kings and priests, speak Sanskrit. The lowly, including women, speak Prakrit. Some of the Prakrit or Middle Indie dialects became literary languages, that is, stagnant, while popular speech moved further. One form of Prakrit, Pali, was carried by missionaries to Ceylon, where it became the sacred language of the Buddhist cult.

The chief representatives of Indie in its present-day form ar t Bengali (53 Bullions), Western Hindi (72), Bihari (34), Eastern Hindi (23), Marathi (21), Panjabi (16), Gujarati (n), Rajasthani (13). The language of the Gypsies, who hail from the north-west of India and invaded Western Europe first in the fifteenth century, is also of Indie origin. Closely related to Old Indie is Old Iranian . Its earliest stage is represented by two forms, Zend or Avestan, that is, the sacred language of the Zoroastrian faith, and Old Persian, of which the best-known specimen is a rock-inscription of Darius I (522-486 b.c.) at Behistun. The next evolutionary phase of Persian is called Pehlevi (i.e. Parthian ).

4°8 The Loom of Language

Modern Persian begins with the tenth century. It has changed but litde during the last thousand years.

More than two thousand years ago the Vedic texts had already burdened the Brahmanic priesthood with competing versions. They had to harmonize them, to explain archaic forms and to clarify dim meanings. The Vedic hymns were inviolable. For centuries priests had chanted them with punctilious attention to the time-honoured fashion. They believed, and had an interest in making others believe that correct observance decided whether the gods would dispatch bliss or otherwise. So training in priestcraft, as to-day, inrlnrf^ careful schooling of the ear for sound, for rhythm, and for speech- melody. For this reason ritual requirements eventually gave rise to one of the major cultural contributions of Hindu civilization. The Hindu priests were pioneers of the rudiments of a science of phonetics. Subsequently this preoccupation of the priest-grammar^ with the sacred texts extended to secular literature. It culminated in the Sanskrit grammar of Panini (ca. 300 b.c.). Panini took a step that went far beyond the trivial exploits of Attic Greece, and had a decisive influence upon the course of nineteenth-century investigation when it became known to European scholars. He, and presumably his forerunners, were the first to take words to pieces, and to distinguish roots from their affixes. Hence grammar is called vayakarana in Sans¬ krit, that is, “separation,” “analysis.”

Owing to this precocious preoccupation with grammar we have a very clear picture of what Sanskrit was like. With its eight cases and dual number, the flexional apparatus of the Sanskrit noun was even more elaborate than that of Latin or Greek, and the Sanskrit adjective with its three gender forms reflects the luxuriance of its partner. As we retrace our steps to the earliest source of our information about the beginnings of Aryan speech we therefore approach a stage which recalls the state of affairs in Finnish with its fifteen sets of singular and plural postpositions defining the relation of a noun to other words in the same context. It may well be that we should arrive at such a goal if we could go back further; but the fact is that the use of Sanskrit case- forms was not clear-cut and the case-affixes were not, like those of Finnish, the same for every noun. This is shown by the following examples of Sanskrit genitive case-forms :

NOMINATIVE SINGULAR GENITIVE SINGULAR

devds (god) devdsya

Qgnis (fire) ' denes

The Diseases of Language 409

NOMINATIVE SINGULAR GENITIVE SINGULAR vari (water) varinas

fatrus (enemy) pdtros

jas (progeny) jds

svdsd (sister) svasur

Many pages of this book could be filled if we set out all the flexions of a single Sanskrit or a single Greek verb with respect to time , person, voice, and mood . The following example illustrates only the personal flexions of one tense (present ) and of both voices (active and passive). The mood is indicative, i.e. the form used in simple statements :

	ACTIVE	PASSIVE
SANSKRIT	GREEK	SANSKRIT	GREEK
f x*	dadhami	didomi	dadh<§	didomai
Sing. 1 2.	dadhasi	didos	dhatse	didosai
13-	dadhati	didosi(n)	dhatte	didotai
f1’	dadhvas		dadhvahe
Dual -1 2.	dhatthas	didoton	dadhathe	didosthon
13-	dhattas	! didoton	dadhate	didosthon
f x*	dadhmas	didomen	dadhmahe	didometha
Plur. \ 3.	dhattha	didote	dhaddhve	didosthe
13-	dadhati	didoasi(n)	dadhate	didontai

The Anglo-American equivalents would be I, you, we, or they give and he gives (active), and I am, you, we, they are, he is given (passive), making altogether three forms of the verb give and three of to he, or six in all to represent the meaning of eighteen Sanskrit words. For eight different forms of a modem English verb we can make above thirty-six corresponding forms of the Sanskrit or Greek verb. The complete Sanskrit verb finite, that is the verb without its infinitives, participles, and verbal adjectives plus their flexions, has 743 different forms, as against the 268 of Greek. From a complete Greek verb we get the enormous number of 507 forms, from a Latin one 143, and from a Gothic verb 94. The English verb usually has four, or at most five forms (e.g. give, gives, gave, giving, given). If we add seven forms of to he, four of to have, together with shall or will and should or would.

410 The Loom of Language

for construction of compound tenses, we can express with 20 words everything for which Sanskrit burdens the memory with nearly forty times as many different vocables.

MODERN LANGUAGES OF THE EAST

During the past two thousand years there has been a universal drift among Aryan languages towards reduction and regularization of flexion. This tendency towards economy of effort is as striking on the Eastern front as on the Western, and in no language more than in modem Persian and Hindustani. After the Islamic conquest, Persian suffered a heavy infiltration of Arabic words. Consequently its present vocabu- lary is as Semitic as it is indigenous. Even Semitic grammatical forms crept in, but these affect only Arabic words. There can be little doubt that the decay of Persian flexions was accelerated by the Moslem conquest. In fact, Persian and Anglo-American provide an impressive example of parallel evolution from similar beginnings. Both have abandoned the distinction of grammatical gender. If the sex of an animate being is to be explicit, Persian prefixes equivalents to our words

man or woman for human beings, and male or female for non-human beings.

Like Anglo-American, Persian has discarded the case-system. In both languages words which correspond to French or German, Latin or Greek adjectives are invariant, as in Chinese. The comparison of the Persian adjective is quite regular. To form the comparative we have to add -tor, to form the superlative, -tarin, e.g. bozorg (big), bozorgtar (bigger), bozorgtarin (the biggest). Persian has no distinct adverbial form. The battery of Persian personal pronouns is even smaller than ours, because die single u (literary) or an (colloq.) stands for he, she, it alike. The Persian verb has a present and two simple past tense-forms (past and imperfect), with full personal endings which ordinarily do the work of the pronoun subject, as in Spanish and Italian. There is one conjugation, and the personal endings are with one exception the same for all three tenses. Apart from the third person singular they are like the corresponding parts of the verb to be (budan). The present of budanisx

am, I am. i«, we are.

1, thou art. id, you are.

ast, he, she, or it is. and, they are.

The present and imperfect tense-forms have the prefix mi- attached to

The Diseases of Language 41 1

the present stem and past stem respectively. Thus the present tense of the verb kharidan (to buy) is:

tnikharam v mikkarim

mikhari mikharid

mikharad tmkharand

The. corresponding past tenses are: kharidam , kharidi , etc. (I bought,

you bought, etc.), and mikharidam3 mikkaridi9 etc. (I was buying, you were buying, etc.). For perfected action, future time, and the passive voice, constructions involving helper verbs do service: budan for the first, khasian (to wish) for the second, and shodan (to become) for the third.

Though the modem Indie languages of Aryan origin have not covered the same distance as Persian, they have travelled in the same direction. Sir George Grierson, who was in charge of the Linguistic Survey of India3 writes of the Hindi dialects :

Some of these dialects are as analytical as English, others are as syn¬ thetic as German. Some have the simplest grammar, with every word- relationship indicated, not by declension or conjugation, but by the use of help-words; while others have grammars more complicated than that of Latin, with verbs that change their forms not only in agreement with the subject, but even with the object.

According to the prevalence of isolating and flexional features, we can divide modem Indo-Aryan vernaculars (17 standard languages with 345 dialects, spoken by some 230 millions) into two classes, one covering the centre of the North Indian plain, called Midland, the other, called the Outer, surrounding it in three-quarters of a circle. The former is represented by Western Hindis Panjabi3 Rajasthani , and Gujarati , the latter by vernaculars such as Lahnday Sindhi, Marathiy Biharis Bengali. Grierson says:

“The languages of the Outer sub-branch have gone a stage further in linguistic evolution. They were once, in their Sanskrit form, synthetic; then they passed through an analytical stage — some are passing out of that stage only now, and are, like Sindhi and Kashmiri, so to speak caught in the act — and have again become synthetic by the incorporation of the auxiliary words, used in the analytical stage, with the main words to which they are attached. . . . The grammar of each of the Inner lan¬ guages can be written on a few leaves, while, in order to acquire an acquaintance with one of the Outer languages, page after page of more or less complicated declensions and conjugations must be mastered.”

Bengali is spoken in the delta of the Ganges, and north and east to

The Loom of Language

412

it, by a population equivalent to that of France. The gap between the written and the spoken word forces the foreigner to learn two different languages. This complete separation of the spoken from the written medium is the work of the Pundits of Calcutta who recently borrowed an enormous number of Sanskrit words with a spelling fashionable two thousand years ago. The Bengali verb has eight synthetic tenses. There are but three irregular, but only slightly irregular, verbs (give, come, go) Bengali developed a synthetic though as yet very rudimentary declen¬ sion 0 e noun, e.g. gkar (house), genitive gharer, agent case ghare. It has gender-distmctaon, but Bengali gender is a paragon of orderly behaviour m comparison with that of Sanskrit. All male animals are masculine, all female feminine. All inanimate things are neuter. Only masculine and feminine nouns take the plural ending.

Hindustani is a dialect of Western Hindi. It is the daily speech of a population slightly larger than that of England; but it is better known as a lingua franca, current oyer all India. According to the Linguistic 10 vey, it developed as such in the bazaar attached to the Delhi Court From there, officials of the Mogul Empire carried it everywhere. One

fZL? fpSt3m “ Urdu- ItS Scd^ is Persian> “d it has a strong dmrnure of Persian and Arabic words. Owing to expansion over a

miZT “ C°°tact *** Pe°PIes. * diverse speech communities

With fp S™11™31 has many irregularities and superfluities. With few exceptions the verb follows one and the same pattern The

CnarT 1P3St ^ ^ ^ ^ t0 be) «™bine with mo participles to do most of the daily work of a tense system. Like

the Romance languages Hindustani has scrapped the neuter gender

A,?™6 T SySt6m h? ““P16^ ^appeared. Partides* placed after the noun postpositions) do the job of our prepositions, e.g. :

mardke of man mardon ke of men

mardko toman mardon ko to men ■

THE BALTIC AND SLAVONIC GROUPS

^ m°de™ Indo-European languages, those of the Baltic and

earinTthfflUPS *71 entirely escaPed this tendency towards

Z? ^he Bh ' They Stm PrCSerVe a Wdter of

lorms. The Baltic group survives in a region north-east of Germany It

West meet in the scholarly tradition of SSwS ■E“t

The Diseases of Language 413

has two living representatives. Lithuanian is the daily speech of some two and a half million people, Lettish that of about one and a half million in the neighbouring community, Latvia. Of the two surviving members of the Baltic group, Lithuanian is the more archaic. The accompanying table which gives the singular forms of the Lithuanian word for son side by side with the oldest Teutonic (Gothic) equi¬ valents, shows that Lithuanian actually outstrips the latter, as it also outstrips Latin, in die variety of its case-derivatives .

		LITHUANIAN
Nom.	Sing.	sunus
Acc.	yy	sunu
Gen.	y>	sunaus
Dat.	yy	sunui
Instr.	yy	sunumi
Loc.	yy	sunuje
Voc.	yy	sunau

GOTHIC

sunus

sunu

sunaus

sunau

sunau

East and south of the Baltic and Teutonic regions we now find the kuge group of Slavonic languages^ spoken by some 190 million people. Philologists classify them as follows:

A. EAST SLAVONIC:

1. Great Russian (100 millions)

2. Little Russian (30 millions)

3* White Russian (12 millions)

B. WEST SLAVONIC:

1. Slovak and Czech (12 millions)

2. Polish (23 millions)

C. SOUTH SLAVONIC:

1. Bulgarian (5 millions)

2. Serbo-Croatian and Slovene (12 millions)

At the beginning of our era the Slavs still inhabited the region . between the Vistula, the Carpathian Mountains, and the Dnieper. Dining the fifth and sixth centuries, they swarmed over huge tracts of Central and Western Europe. At one time they were in possession of parts of Austria, Saxony, and the North German plains to the Elbe. During the Middle Ages, Slavonic surrendered all this territory to Germany; but Polcibian, a Slavonic dialect, persisted in the lower regions of the Elbe up to the eighteenth century, and even to-day Germany harbours a minute Slavonic language-island, the Serbian of Upper Saxony. While Slavonic has had to retreat from the West, it

4*4 The Loom of Language

is still gaining ground on the Asiatic continent as the vehicle of a new civilization. Russian is now pushing as far North as the White Sea and as far East as the shores of the Pacific Ocean.

The earliest recorded form of Slavonic is Old Bulgarian, into which two Greek missionaries, Kyrillos and Methodos, both from Salonika, translated the Gospels in the middle of the ninth century. This Bible language, also called Church Slavonic , became the official language of the Greek Orthodox Church. It still is. Since the art of writing was then the exclusive privilege of the priest-scribe class. Church Slavonic also became the secular medium of literature. The Russians did not begin to emancipate themselves from the literary tyranny of the Church, and to create a written language of their own, till the end of the eigh¬ teenth century. Its basis was the speech current in the region of Moscow. As a hangover from their church-ridden past, citizens of the U.S.S.R. still stick to “Kyrilliza,” a modified form of the Greek alpha¬ bet (Fig. 12) once current in Byzantium. The Poles and the Slovaks— but not the Serbs or Bulgarians— are free from this cultural handicap. When their forefathers embraced the Roman form of Christianity, an internationally current alphabet was part of the bargain.

. Semitic family, the Slavonic group shows comparatively

little internal differentiation. Slavonic languages form a clearly recog¬ nizable unit, including national languages which differ no more than Swedish and Danish or Spanish and Italian. It is easier for a Pole to understand a Russian than for a German to understand a Swede, or for a Parisian to understand a Spaniard or an Italian. For a long time Slavonic-speaking peoples remained cut off from Mediterranean influ¬ ence. What reached them was confined to a thin and muddy trickle that percolated through the Greek Orthodox Church. The compara¬ tively late appearance of loan-words in the Slavonic lexicon faithfully reflects this retardation of culture-contact with more progressive communities. Since the Soviet Union embarked upon rapid indus- tnahzauon there has been a great change. Assimilation of international technical terms has become a fashion. To this extent linguistic isolation is breaking down. Meanwhile in Russia, as elsewhere, Slavonic lan¬ guages constitute a fossil group from the grammatical standpoint. They preserve archaic traits matched only by those of the Baltic group. Noun-flexion, always a reliable index of linguistic progress, is not the least of these. Slavonic languages carry on a case system as complicated

as that of Latin and Greek, Bulgarian alone has freed itself from this incubus.

[Reproduced from a stamp kindly lent by Stanley Gibbons , Ltd.

Fig. 40— Postage Stamp of Kemal Ataturk Teaching (p. 4^6) the Turks to Use the Roman Alphabet

Some people say that we cannot change people’s language habits by Act of Parliament. This picture shows that it can be done.

Reproduced from a stamp kindly lent by Stanley Gibbons, Ltd.

Fig. 41— -Mongols Learning the Latin ABC

The Diseases of Language 415

It would be congenial to announce that the Loom of Language can simplify the task of learning a language spoken by more than a twen¬ tieth of the world’s inhabitants, and used as the vernacular of a union of states which has undertaken the first large-scale experiment in economic planning. Unfortunately we are not able to do so. It is a commonplace that Russian collectivism originated in a country which was in a backward phase of technical and political, evolution. It is also, and conspicuously, true that it originated in a country which was in a backward phase of linguistic evolution. Because other Aryan languages such as Danish, Dutch, or Persian have discarded so much of the grammatical luggage which their ancestors had to carry, it is possible to simplify the task of transmitting a working knowledge of them by summarizing the relatively few essential rules with which the beginner must supplement a basic vocabulary. There is no royal road to fluency in a language which shares the grammatical intricacies of Sanskrit, Lithuanian, or Russian. It is therefore impossible to give the reader who wishes to learn Russian any good advice except to take the precaution of being bom and brought up in Russia. Some reader may doubt whether this is a fair statement of the case. Let us look at the evidence:

(1) Like that of Lithuanian, the Russian noun is burdened with

locative and instrumental case-forms which some other Aryan languages had already discarded a thousand years B.c.

(2) Russian shares with German and Icelandic the three genders,

masculine, feminine, neuter. Like German, Icelandic, and Lithuanian, it possesses two adjectival declensions, one for use when the adjective is attributive, the other when it is predi- * cative (dom novy “the house is new” — noviy dom , “the new house”). The irregularities of adjectival behaviour make those of Latin fade into insignificance.

(3) The numbers 2, 3, 4 with fully developed case and gender flexions

form a declensional class of their own. From 5 ^ 3® numbers are declined like certain feminine nouns. From 50 to 80 both parts of the number are declined. From 5 upwards the things counted must be put into the genitive plural. The numbers 2—10 carry a subsidiary set of forms called collectives for use where we would say, e.g., we were five of us , or she has six sons.

(4) The essential Russian vocabulary, like that of German, is inflated

by a wasteful luxuriance of verb-forms. Thus there are couplets distinguished by presence or absence of an infix which denotes repetition, or by one of several prefixes which signify com¬ pletion. For instance, dyelat and dyelivat signify to do once and to do repeatedly 3 ya pisdl means 1 was writing , and ya napisdl

4*6 ^ The Loom oj Language

means I have written. If you say write to him (at once) you have to use the perfective form napishi y emu. If you say write better (in future), you use its imperfective co-twin, pishi lushye.

Britain has relinquished the incubus of gender without discarding the bishops’ bench, and Americans who have no use for case-concord still condone lynching. So it goes without saying that shortcomings of the Russian language reflect no discredit on the Soviet system, still less on the citizens of the U.S.S.R. themselves. What they do signify is the existence of a powerful social obstacle to cultural relations between the Soviet Union and other countries. The archaic character of the Russian language is a formidable impediment to those who may wish to get first-hand knowledge of Russian affairs through foreign travel. Because such difficulties beset a foreigner, it is disappointing to record lack of revolutionary fervour in the attitude of Soviet leaders to the claims of language-planning. While the Kremlin curbed the power of the Greek Orthodox Church, it made no attempt to bring itself into line with Europe, America, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand by liquidating the cultural handicap of the Kyrillic alphabet. That there is no insurmountable obstacle to such a break with the past is shown by the example of Turkey, which has replaced Arabic by Latin script. The task of reform was simplified by the pre-existence of illiteracy in Russia, as in Turkey.

Russia has always been, and still remains, a Tower of Babel. Within the boundaries of the Soviet Union we find representatives of the Indo- European, the Finno-Ugrian, the Turco-Tartar, the Mongolian, and the Caucasian families of speech— all in all some hundred languages and dialects, most of which are mutually unintelligible. The situation is deplorable enough if we confine ourselves to the three Russian languages: Great Russian , spoken in the north-east, with Moscow as the centre j Little Russian , or Ukrainian; and White Russian , current in the north- west along the confines of the Baltic group. These languages are separated by such small differences that they are mutually intelligible. Formerly the written language common to all of them was Great Russian. But to-day the White Russians as well as the Little Russians have written languages of their own.

THE CELTIC TWILIGHT

The unequal decay of flexion in the Indo-European family does not direcdy reflect the progress of civilization. We can see this by con¬ trasting Russian or Lithuanian with the Celtic languages. Celtic speech is now confined to the western fringe of Europe. It was once possible to

The Diseases of Language 417

hear it over a territory as vast as the Holy Roman Empire. At the time of Alexander the Great, Celtic-speaking tribes inhabited Britain* most of France and Spain* North Italy* South Germany* and the valley of the Danube down to the Black Sea. Hordes from Gaul crossed to Asia Minor* and established themselves in the district still called Galatia. Within a short time* Celtic dialects were displaced everywhere except in Gaul. By the middle of the first century* Gaul itself surrendered. The Gauls were Romanized* and Latin wiped out Celtic. Five hundred years later, the Celtic-speaking remnant had reached vanishing point.

Documentary remains of its former existence are place names* a handful of meagre inscriptions from France and Lombardy* and individual words which lie embedded in French and other languages. During the four hundred years of Roman rule* the Celtic dialects of Britain escaped the fate of their Continental kin. They were still intact when Emperor Constantine withdrew his legions. After this brief respite* they succumbed to successive waves of Teutonic invaders. Wherever the German hordes settled* Celtic had to make way for the language of the conqueror. It has persisted only in Wales* in West Scotland* and in Ireland.

As it now exists* the Celtic group can be divided into two branches* the Goidelic (Gaelic) and Brythonic (British). The former includes Irish or Erse, said to be spoken by some 400*000 people; Scots-Gaelic of the “poor whites” in the Western Highlands* and Manx * an almost extinct dialect of the Isle of Man. The oldest Irish documents are the so-called Ogam runic inscriptions (p. 76)* which may go as far back as the fifth century a.d. To the Brythonic dialects belong Welsh and Breton, each spoken by a million people* and Cornish * which disappeared at the death of Dolly Pentreath in the year 1777. Welsh is still a living language. A high proportion (about 30 per cent) of people who live in Wales are bilingual. Breton is not a splinter of the ancient language of Gaul. It is an island Celtic brought over to Latinized Brittany by Welsh and Cornish refugees in the fifth and sixth centuries.

Remarkable structural similarities unite the Gaelic and Brythonic dialects. Clear-cut differences distinguish them. Of the latter, one is specially characteristic. Where Old Irish inscriptions exhibit an initial qu, represented by a hard c in Erse (qu- in Scots Gaelic)* Welsh has p. For this reason the two branches are sometimes called Q and P Celtic. A few examples are given below:

o

4x8

The Loom of Language

WELSH		ERSE
pa?	(what?)	ca
pen	(head)	ceann
pedwar	(four)	cathair
par	(couple)	coraid

Apart from Basque* the Celtic group remained a playing-field for fantastic speculations longer than any other European language. Even when most of the European languages were brought together* with Sanskrit and Iranian* in happy family reunion* Celtic stayed out in the cold.* The large number of roots common to Celtic and other Aryan languages now leaves little doubt about the affinities of Celtic* especially to Latin and to other Italic tongues. Were it otherwise* there would be little to betray the Celtic group as a subdivision of the Aryan family.

The Celtic languages lack any trace of many flexions which are common to other members of the Aryan family. In so far as the Celtic verb exhibits flexion with respect to. person* the present endings have not passed beyond the stage at which we can recognize them as pro¬ nouns fused to the verb-root. The same is true of some frontier dialects in India* where the Old Indie personal endings of the verb have disappeared completely and analogous endings have emerged by fusion of the fixed verb stem with existing pronouns. Fron this point of view, the grammar of Celtic is more like that of Finno-Ugrian languages than that of Sanskrit* Armenian* or Swedish.

Two features* which have been illustrated already* emphasize this essentially agglutinative character of Celtic grammar:

(a) among Celtic languages we find a parallel use of a contracted or

agglutinative form of the verb used without an independent pronoun (p. ioo)* and an unchangeable verb-root used together with a pronoun placed after it;

(b) in all Celtic languages prepositions fuse with personal pronouns

so that directives have personal terminals analogous to those of verbs.

The parallelism between the conjugation of the preposition and the verb is common to the P and Q representatives of the group* and the characteristics of each throw light on the origin of the other. For in¬ stance* we have no difficulty^ in recognizing the origin of the personal flexions of the Gaelic preposition le (with) when we compare them with

* A Scotsman* Andrew Murray* wrote in 1S01 two remarkable volumes called a History of European Languages emphasizing inter alia the relation between Gaelic and Sanskrit.

The Diseases of Language 419

the corresponding usage of the invariant verb tha when arranged in parallel columns:

tha mi3 1 am. leam3 with me (= le + mi),

tha thu3 thou art. leat3 with thee (= le + thu).

tha sirnty we are. leinn3 with us (== le + sinn).

tha sibk3 you are. leibh3 with you (= le + sibh).

tha iad3 they are. leotha, with them (= le 4- tad).

We can invert this process of interpretation by using the personal conjugation of the preposition as a clue to the personal flexion of Welsh verbs in the two following examples, which illustrate two types of con¬ jugation corresponding to the two different forms (fi and tm) of the Welsh pronouns of the first person:

(i)

danafy (=dan-[-fi) under me. wyf3 I am (—wys+fi).

danaty ( =dan+ti ) under thee. wyt$ thou art (—zoys+ti).

danochy ( =dan+chzoi ) under you. ych3 you are (—wys+chwi). danynty (—dan+hwynt) under them. ynt3 they are ( = zoys -{- kzuynt).

(ii)

mty (=i-\-mi) to me. btm3 I was (=bu+mi).

it3 to thee. buost3 thou wert (—bu+ti).

iwchy (=i-t-chzvi) to you. buoch3 you were (=bu-\-chwf);

iddynty (=i-\-hwynt) to them. burnt 3 they were (=&«-{- hwynt).

The Celtic languages have many substitutes for the very hetero¬ geneous system of roots which we call the verb to be. The Irish as or is3 the Welsh oes (cf. our own am or is3 German ist3 Sanskrit ami)3 the Gaelic bu3 Welsh bod (cf. our be3 German bin3 Persian budan3 Old Saxon bium3 Sanskrit bhavami)3 are common Aryan roots. To these we must add other peculiarly Celtic roots., such as the Gaelic tha and Welsh mae. The several forms of the verb to be are very important in Celtic usage. Like Basic English, Celtic is remarkably thrifty in its use of verbs. Where we should say I feel3 the Celt would say there is a feeling in me. Here is an Irish example of this characteristic Celtic idiom: creud adhbhar na moicheirghe sin art? In our language this reads: why did you rise so early? Literally it means what cause of this early rising by you? A Scots highlander can use expressions containing the equivalent to is to do the work of almost any other verb. In his idiom:

It will surprise you to hear this == There is a surprise for your ears.

The Celtic languages have several merits which might commend themselves to the designer of an international auxiliary. One great virtue

420 The Loom of Language

they share is that they are not highly inflected. There is little trace left of gender or number concord of the adjective and noun. Case-distinction of the latter is vestigial. So such flexions as exist are not difficult to learn. A second virtue is a thrifty use of verbs. These conspicuous merits are insignificant when we place on the debit side a characteristic which isolates Celtic dialects from all other members of the Aryan group, and places them among the most difficult of all the Aryan languages for a foreigner to learn.

The flexional derivatives of other Aryan languages depend on endings. So they easily accommodate themselves to the convenience of alphabetical order in a standard dictionary. The special difficulty of the Celtic languages is that the initial consonant of a word may change in different contexts. For instance, the Welsh word for “kinsman” may be car, gar, char, or nghar, e.g. car agos “a near kinsman,” ei gar “his kinsman,” ei char “her kinsman,” ,/y nghar “my kinsman.” In short, the beginning and end of a word may change to meet the dictates of Celtic grammar. So the use of the dictionary is an exploit which the foreigner undertakes with imminent sense of danger, and little confi- dence of success. A quotation from a book by a Breton nationalist will ' scarcely give the reader an unduly harsh statement of the difficulty: “As for reading, to look up a word in the dictionary, it is enough to know the few consonants which are interchangeable— K, P, T with C’H, F, Z, or with G, B, D; G, D, B, with K, P, T, or with C’H, V, Z; M with V, and GW with W.”

THE SEMITIC LANGUAGES

Nine hundred years ago, the Moslem world was the seat of the most progressive culture then existing. China could point to a rich secular tradition of literature coeval with the sacred texts of Aryan India. The Aryan languages did not as yet enjoy the undisputed prestige of Anglo- American, French, and German in our own age. If we go back to more remote antiquity, Aryan, Semitic, and Chinese yield place to the languages of Egypt* and Mesopotamia, where the permanent record of human striving began.

narnifrnm ‘fu rHamltlc languages. They derive their

?am%th/ bibhcal brother of Shem. Besides Ancient Egyptian, they mdude Cushittc (of which Somali and Galla are the chief representatives), together with the Berber dialects of North-West Africa. Though the Semitic and Hamitic group diverge widely, their kinship is generally recognized They share more root-words than can be explained by borrowing; andthey ha vl some common grammatical peculiarities.

The Diseases of Language 421

Nearly three thousand years ago, when Aryan-speaking tribes were letterless savages, Semitic trading peoples hit on the device embodied in our own alphabet. Fully a thousand years before the true relation¬ ship between the principal European languages and Indo-Iranian was recognized, Jewish scholars, who applied the methods of their Muslim teachers, had already perceived the unity of the Semitic dialects then known. The Rabbi’s interest in language problems was half-super¬ stitious, half-practical, like that of the Brahmanic priest or the student of the Koran. His aim was to perpetuate the correct form, spelling, and pronunciation of the Sacred Texts; but there was a difference between the Brahmin and the Jew. Because he often lived in centres of Muslim learning such as Damascus, Seville, and Cordova, and also because he had mastered more than one tongue, the Rabbi could easily transgress the confines of his own language. Inescapably he was impressed by similarities between Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic, and compelled to assume their kinship. Though he used the discovery to bolster his belief that Hebrew was the parent of Arabic, and incidentally of all other languages, he planted the seed of comparative grammar.

The linguistic preoccupations of the medieval Jews, and of their teachers the Arabs, were continued by European scholars of the six¬ teenth century. Protestant scholarship intensified interest in Hebrew, which took its place with the Latin of the Vulgate and New Testament Greek; and Ethiopian joined the scholarly repertory of known Semitic dialects. Babylonian-Assyrian (Accadian) was not deciphered and identified till the nineteenth century. The family as a whole derives its name from Shem, the son of Noah in the Hebrew myth. It is now commonly divided in the following way: East Semitic, Babylonian- Assyrian (Accadian) ; West Semitic, (i) Aramaic, (2) The Canaamte dialects ^Hebrew, Phoenician, Moabitic); South Semitic, (1) Arabic, (2) Ethiopian.

The Semitic languages form a unit far more closely knit than the Aryan family, and have changed comparatively little during their recorded history. As a literary language, modem Arabic stands closer to the Arabic of the Koran than does French to the Latin of Gaul in the time of Mohammed. This suggests one of the reasons why the Semitic tongues have repeatedly superseded one another. Three Semitic lan¬ guages have successfully competed for first place, and have become current far beyond their original homes. They are : Babylonian-Assyrian, Aramaic, and Arabic. The oldest representative of which we possess documents, and the first to assume international importance, was

The Loom of Language

422

Acadian. Accadian was the speech of people who inhabited the plains

T 7 kTOded Ae fertile “ of ^ Euphrates and ligns. There they came into contact with the Sumerians, and adopted

a superior culture, together with a system of syllabic writing, known as cuneiform. A wealth of cuneiform inscriptions and libraries of records engraved on cylinders and bricks of burnt clay have preserved the Babyloman-Assynan language. The oldest assessable document goes bade to the tune of the great conqueror, Sargon I («. 2400).

For centuries Accadian was a medium of commerdal and diplomatic correspondence throughout the Near and Middle East. We find evi¬ dence of its wide currency in letters which Palestinian princes addressed Amenophis IV m the fifteenth century b.c. They were unearthed at 1 d-el-Amarna, m Egypt. By the time of Alexander the Great, Accadian had ceased to exist as a living language. The medium that took its pkee was Aramaic. The Arameans were a trading people. After rehnquishmg desert life, they came to occupy the so-called Syrian

nosirio “.h 2 NOrth;WeSt °f Mes°Potamia- T^nks to this strategic posmon, they were then able to command the commerce that went

dong the land routes between the Mediterranean and the Middle East

JhTRahT1*6 ei!hf CCntUry B-G- onwards> began to filter into Babylonian and Assyrian empires. With them went their language

Heb^P ’ fp.m ^ displaced not only Accadian, but also

Hebrew and Phoenician. It even penetrated Arabic-speaking regions and became one of the official languages of the Persian Empire. °

A.D. 781, and reports in parallel Chinese and Syriac inscriDtiom rh<»

rSncTiST **5 ^

Aramaic, not Hebrew, was the mother-tongue of Palestine during .. penod TOth whlch the g0SPel narrative deals. When the Evah-

!v 2qr ? rrf°fehriSt’ lan^e is Aramaic, notHebrew.

dialea in which the earlier parts of the Old Testament were written was already a dead language. The decline

wfficfhl SCtm •thC deStmction of Jerusalem and the Captivity

Aramaic ^ IfiT Smh Century E-C' Tt was soon superseded by Aramaic, which became the literary as well as the spoken medium of

The Diseases of Language 423

the Jews after the Maccabean period. Hebrew survived only as a language of scholarship, and ritual, like Latin in medieval Christendom. It never quite ceased to be written or spoken. Its uninterrupted, though slender, continuity with the past has encouraged Zionists to increase the difficulties of existence for Jews by trying to revive it as a living tongue.

Another Canaanite dialect, Phoenician, is closely related to Hebrew. At a very early period the Phoenicians had succeeded in monopolizing the Mediterranean trade, mainly at the expense of Crete and Egypt. Phoenician settlements were to be found in Rhodes, Sicily, Marseilles, and countless places along the North African coast. In the fourth century B.c. Phoenician ships were trading with South Britain, and had even skirted the shores of West Africa. As the result of this vigorous commercial expansion, the Phoenician language,and with it the Phoeni¬ cian alphabet which became the mother of most of the world’s alphabets, was distributed throughout the Mediterranean basin. Only in Carthage, the richest Phoenician colony, did it become firmly established as a medium of speech. Several centuries after it had ceded place to Aramaic in. the more ancient Phoenician communities of Tyre and Sidon, it maintained itself, in the African colony. There it persisted till the fourth or fifth century a.d. According to St. Augustine, who came from North Africa, Carthaginian Phoenician, sometimes called Purdc, differed little from Hebrew. Phoenician is preserved in many but insignificant inscriptions from the home-country and from its colonies, and in ten lines which the Roman playwright, Plautus, inserted in his Poenulus .

During the four centuries after Mohammed, the spectacular spread of Islam pushed aside nearly all other Semitic languages in favour of Arabic. The Koran had to be read and chanted in the language of the prophet himself. Unlike Christianity, Muslims never proselytized for

their faith by translation. The various Arabic dialects now spoken from Morocco to the Middle East differ greatly, but a common literary language still holds together widely separated speech communities. The Muslim conquests diffused Arabic over Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, the north of Africa, and even parts of Europe. Its impact left: Persian with a vocabulary diluted by addition of Semitic, almost equal in number to indigenous words. Even European languages retain many to testify to commercial, industrial, and scientific achievements of Muslim civilization. Familiar examples are: tariff, traffic, magazine, admiral, muslim, alcohol, Aldebaran, nadir, zero, cipher, algebra, sugar.

The Loom of Language

424

Between the beginning of the ninth and the end of the fifteenth century A.D., Europe assimilated the technique of Muslim civilization as Japan assimilated the technique of Western civilization during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Scholars of Northern Europe had to acquire a knowledge of Arabic as well as of Latin at a time when Moorish Spain was the flower of European culture, a thriving centre of world trade, and the sole custodian of all the mechanics, medicine astronomy, and mathematics in the ancient world. While Arabic scholars of lie chief centres of Muslim culture, such as Damascus, Cairo Cordova, and Palermo refused to deviate from the classical Arabic of pre-Islamitic poetry and the Koran, the speech of the common people evolved further and split mto the several vernaculars of Syria, Tripoli Iraq, Algeria, Tunis, Egypt, and Morocco. Their common charac¬ teristics are a reduction of vowels, the decay of the fiexional system, and heavy admixture of non-Arabic words. To-day Arabic is spoken by about forty million people.

About lie fourth century a.d., Ethiopia responded to the efforts of Coptic missionaries, and embraced the Christian faith. Thereafter Abyssinian Semitic, known as Ge'ez or Ethiopic, became a medium of literary activity. It died out as a spoken language in the fourteenth century, but like Sanskrit, Latin, and classical Arabic, continued to function as a medium of religious practice, and as such is still the liturgical language of the Abyssinian Church. Its firing descendants mre Amkanc, Tigrina of Northern Abyssinia and Tigre of Italian ntrea, Maltese, which is of Arabic origin, is the language of a Christian community. It is transcribed in the Latin alphabet. - The reader of The Loom of Language will now be familiar with two outstanding peculiarities of the Semitic group. One is called triliter- aism (p. 70) The other is the prevalence of internal vowel change. When relieved ofaflSxes and internal vowels the majority of root words have a core of three consonants. Within this fixed framework great variety

wvi?SS1 t the changes on different vowel combinations.

ith only five simple vowels it is possible to make twenty-five different vocables of the pattern b-g-n, in the English trifiteral grouping; begin-began-legun. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that a Semitic language exhausts most of the conceivable possibilities of internal vowel change consistent with an inflexible triple-consonant frame.

A distinct arrangement of three particular consonants has its charac¬ teristic element of meaning. Thus in Arabic, qatala means “he killed,” qutila means “he was killed,” qatil means “murderer,” and qitl means

The Diseases of Language 425

■“enemy.55 The range of 'root-inflexion in the Semitic family vastly exceeds what we find in any Aryan language. Within the Aryan group internal vowel change always plays second fiddle to external flexion. Even in German* where it looms large* the variety of derivatives distin¬ guished by affixes is much greater than the variety of derivatives distinguished by modification of a stem vowel. Among the Semitic dialects modification of the vowel pattern is orderly and all-pervading.

The Semitic noun has possessive affixes like those of Finno-Ugrian languages (p. 198). In other ways the grammar of Semitic dialects recalls features more characteristic of the Aryan tribe. The verb has two tense-forms* imperfect and perfect* denoting aspect (p. 103). The noun has subject and object forms* singular and plural. The older Semitic dialects had dual forms. The Arabic dual disappeared in the seventh century a.d. Pronouns of the second and third person* like adjectives* have endings appropriate to two noun-classes* respectively called masculine and feminine* with as much and as little justice as the so-called masculine and feminine nouns of French or Spanish. Gender-distinction has also infected the verb. Thus the third person of the Arabic verb has the suffixes a (masculine) and at (feminine). The absence of explicit vowel symbols in the old Semitic script adds to the difficulties which this load of grammatical ballast imposes on anyone who wishes to learn Arabic or Hebrew.

CHINESE

Two characteristics make a language more easy to learn than it would otherwise be. One is grammatical regularity. The other is word- economy. Nearly all the languages previously discussed in this chapter are over-charged with irregularities or with devices which unneces¬ sarily multiply the number of word forms essential for acceptable communication. The difficulty of learning Chinese and related languages is of a different sort.

Chinese vernaculars make up one of three branches of the great Itido-Chinese family. The other two are represented by the Tibeto- Burmese group and the Tai languages* including Siamese and An- namese. The several members of the family are geographically con¬ tiguous and have two outstanding similarities. One is that they are tone languages. Otherwise identical words uttered in different tones may have great diversity of meaning. In fact* tone differences do the same job as the vowel differences in such a series as pat, pet, pit, pot, put Their second peculiarity is not equally characteristic of the

Q*

426 The Loom of Language

Tibeto-Burmese group which has agglutinative features. With this qualification, it is broadly true to say that all the root words— ie. all words excluding compounds made by juxtaposition of vocables with an independent existence like that of ale and house in alehouse— are

monosyllabic. For what we can convey by internal or external flexion Chinese languages rely wholly on position* on auxiliary particles and on compounds.

For the common ancestry of all the members of the family one clue is lacking. In their present form they have no clear-cut community of vocabulary; and we have no means of being certain about whether

Gmpbimd Character'	*?£ rst Component	, - -j beeona Ccnrpowmtr
fc/jg ^	•• 2 Cf sun	P) M moon
Jk$r 8°°d	daughter	son.
j j waZfc	A che^ J left step	^ dm2 J riQktsbzp
4-J-- 1 in2 "J wools	•4-** mix4 wood	Jp mix4 wood

Fig. 42. — Compound Chinese Characters with Two Meaning Components • (Adapted from Firth’s The Tongues of Men)

they ever had a recognisably common stock of word material. The literature of China goes back several thousand years* but it does not give us the information we need. Chinese writing is a logographic script (p. 57). It tells us very little about sounds corresponding to the written symbols when writing first came into use. When the Chinese of to-day read out a passage from one of their classical authors* they pronounce the words as they would pronounce the words of a news¬ paper or an advertisement.

Some 400 million people of China* Manchuria* and part of Mongolia now speak the vernaculars which go by the name of Chinese. They include: (a) the Mandarin dialects* of which the North Chinese of about 250 million people is the most important; (b) the Kiangsi dialects; (c) the Central-Coastal group (Shanghai* Ningpo* Hangkow); (d) the

The Diseases of Language 427

South Chinese dialects (Foochow, Amoy-Swatow, Cantonese-Hakka).

The dialects north of the Yang-tse-Mang are remarkably homogeneous if we take into consideration their geographical range; but it is mis¬ leading to speak of the vernaculars of all China as dialects of a single language. The Southerner who knows only his own vernacular cannot converse with the Northerner. China has no common medium of speech in the sense that Britain, France, or Germany have one; but is

Compound Character	Compowznif	‘Sound? Ccmpmzcdr'
	V dzu.2 foot	& w
fix	K .sW3 /jV mdsr	Jtf- 's13*#4 common.
vL j\ to £y	x)y We3 yV fr™	dza.4 v* suidm
tjrJSfl (JV ask	Y 2n'2 Q words	O-.fsmg1 Js drecnon or v square

Fig. 43. — Compound Chinese Characters with Meaning and Phonetic Component (Adapted from Firth’s The Tongues of Men)

now in the process of evolving a common language based on the northern dialects, more especially Pekingese."*

There are very few exceptions to the rule that all Chinese words are monosyllabic. Such as they are, some are repetitive or onoma¬ topoeic, e.g. KO-KO (brother) or HA-HA (laughter), and others would probably prove to be compounds, if we were able to delve back into the past. Our own language has moved far in the same direction. In the course of a thousand years there has been wholesale denudation of final vowels and assimilation of terminal syllables. The result has been a large increase of our stock-in-trade of monosyllabic words. Though it is far from true to say that all our words are now of this class* it is by no means hard to spin out a long strip of them. In fact , you have- one in front of your eyes as you read this. If you try to do the same , you will find out that the ones you. choose are the words you use, or at least * The examples given in what follows represent Pekingese,.,

428 The Loom of Language

the words that most of us use, most of the time. The ones we have most on our lips are just these small words. By the time you get as far as the next full stop you will have met more than six score of thetn with no break; and it would be quite a soft job to go on a long time in the same strain as the old rhyme Jack and J ill.

This is not the only way in which Anglo-American approaches Chinese. The reader of The Loom of Language no longer needs to be told that English has discarded most of the flexions with which it was equipped a thousand years ago or how much we now rely on the use' of unchangeable words. True the process did not complete itself; but there are now few ways in which we have to modify word-forms. Our stock of essential words includes a small and sterile class with internal changes such as those of sing-sang or foot-feet. Otherwise the terminal ~s the plural noun, the endings -s, -ed and -ing of the verb together with the optional affixes -er and -est which we tack on to adjectives circumscribe the flexions which usage demands. It is a short step to Chinese vernaculars of which all words are invariant. With very few exceptions the Chinese word is an unalterable block of material. It tolerates neither flexions* nor derivatives affixes such as the -er in baker . In general* its form tells us nothing to suggest that it denotes an act* a state,, a quality* a thing* or a person.

One and the same word may thus slip from one grammatical niche to another; and what we call the parts of speech have little to do with how Chinese words behave. The word SHANG may mean the above one, * i.e. ruler, and then corresponds to an Aryan noun. In SHANG PIEN {above side) it does the job of an Aryan adjective. In SHANG MA {to above a horse, i.e. to mount one) it is a verb-equivalent. In MA SHANG {horse above, i.e. on the horse) it does service as post- posited directive corresponding to one of our prepositions. Here again we are on familiar ground. We down a man* take the down train and walk down the road. We house our goods* sell a house and do as little house work as possible. This is not to say that all Chinese names for things may also denote actions. The word NU (woman) is never equivalent to an Aryan verb* though jfiN (man) may mean performing the act of a man, a one-sided way of expressing the act of coitus. Anglo- American provides a parallel. We man a boat but we do not woman a cookery class. We buy salt and salt our soup* bottle wine and drink from the bottle * but we do not as yet mustard our bacon or cupboard our pants.

Whether a particular* Chinese sound signifies thing* attribute* direc-

The Diseases of Language 429

tion, or action depends in part on context, in part on word-order, as illustrated above by MA SHANG and SHANG MA. In everyday speech there is an incipient tendency to mark such distinction by affixation as we distinguish the noun singer from the verb sing or by pronunciation, as we distinguish between the noun present and the verb present (i.e. make a present). For example, the toneless TZU (pronounced dze)y a literary word for child, attaches itself to other words, forming couplets which stand for things*, e.g. PEN-TZU (exercise hook). So TZU is now the signpost of a concrete object in the spoken language, as -ly (originally meaning like) is now a signpost of an English qualifier (adjective or adverb). In the fourth tone (p. 433) PEI means the back , and in the first tone it means to carry on one's hack. Difference of tone also distinguishes CH£ANG (long) from CHANG (to get long , i.e. to grow). A strong aspiration after the initial CH further distinguishes the first from the second number of the couplet.

There is no trace of gender in Chinese vernaculars. Thus a single pronoun of the third person does service (T£A in Pekingese) for male or female, thing or person alike. By recourse to separate particles such as our words fewy manyy several^ plurality becomes explicit for emphasis or when confusion might arise. To express totality Chinese resorts to the age-old and widespread trick of duplication. Thus JEN-JEN means .off men and TTEN-TTEN means everyday. One plural particle MEN (class) attaches itself to names for persons, e.g. HSIEN SHENG MEN (teachers) or to personal pronouns. Thus we have:

WO J, me WO-MfiN V)e3 us

NI thou, thee , NI-MfiN you

TCA he, she, it, him, her T‘A-MfiN they, them

Like the noun, the Chinese pronoun has no case forms. Before the indirect object the particle KEI which means give does the work of to in English or of the dative terminal in German. Thus WO CHIE KEI LAO-JE LA means I lend give gentleman finished , i.e. I have lent it to the gentleman. In literary Chinese juxtaposition does the work of the genitive terminal, e.g. MIN LI {people power) means the power of the people, as money power means power of money and mother love mpans love of a mother. Colloquial Chinese inserts a particle TI between MIN (people ) and LI (power), as we can preposit of in the preceding. The postposited particle TI may also attach itself to a

43° The Loom of Language

pronoun. So WO-TI means mine , of me. If Karlgren is right TI began its career as a pointer word, but it no longer exists as an independent word. It is now comparable to a flexional affix such as the in people's.

Needless to say, Chinese has no special marks for person, tense mood, or voice. As in colloquial Italian and Spanish, it is the usual thing to leave out the personal pronoun when the situation supplies it In polite or submissive speech a depredative expression takes the place of the ego (WO in Pekingese), and a laudatory one (“honorific”) does service for you. Since there is no flexion the same syllable LAI may mean go, went, going, etc. In the absence of another word to stress that a process or state is over and done with, or that the issue is closed, the perfective particle LA can follow the verb LA is a tondess and contracted form of LIAO meaning complete or finished.

uture time can be made explidt: (a) with an adverbial particle equivalent to soon, henceforth, later on, etc.; (b) by the helper YAO which has an independent existence equivalent to wish or want, the original meaning of our own helper will. Thus we may say; TCA LAI e comes, he is coming; T‘A LAI LA he has come. He ca>m\ T‘A YAO LAI he mil come. The particle PA (stop) is the signal of a peremptory command, e.g. CH tl PA (clear out)-, but it is more polite to use YAO

exactly as we use mil and the French use vouloir in will you tell me or

veuulez me dire.

It goes without saying that a language with complete absence of flexion and a large number of ambiguous words must have rules of word-order no less rigid than those of English. What is surprising is that so many of the syntactical conventions of Chinese agree with our own. In a straghtforward statement, the order in both languages is subject verb object. This is illustrated by the following:

I do not fear him. WO PtJ peA xcA

He does not fear me. TCA PU P’A WO

These sentences show that position alone stamps WO as what w call the subject of the first and the object of the second. The object i placed for emphasis at the head of the sentence only where misunder s aiding is impossible. In such a statement as the following, th

subject is still immediatdy in front of the verb :

CHE-KO HUA WO PU HSIN == l^lS ^an£ua&e f not believe

(i.e. I don’t believe that)

The Diseases of Language 431

The position of the adjective equivalent is the same in Chinese as in Anglo-American. The attributive adjective comes first as in HAO JEN (a good man). The predicative adjective comes after the noun but without a copula equivalent to be. Thus jfiN HAO means the man is good.

At other points Anglo-American and Chinese rules of syntax diverge to greater or less degree. Conditional statements and interrogation are two of them. Chinese uses if sparingly. It gets along by mere juxta¬ position as in conversational English :

TeA-MEN MAN-MAN-TI SHUO WO CHIU MING-PAI

they slowly speak I then understand

(i.e. if. they spoke slowly I should understand)

There is no inversion of word order in a question of the yes-no type. A Chinese question may be a plain statement with an interro¬ gative particle equivalent to eh? at the end of it, e.g. TCA LAI MO he comes eh , i.e. is he coming? Instead of adding MO {eh?) to TCA LAI (he is coming) it is possible to add a negation reminiscent of the nursery jingle she loves mey she loves me not Thus TeA LAI PU LAI (he come, not come) means the same as TCA LAI MO. One feature of Chinese has no parallel in European- languages. What corresponds to a tran¬ sitive verb must always trail an object behind it. In effect the Chinese say he does not want to read books or he does not want to write characters where we should simply say he does not want to read or he does not want to write. Omission of an object confers a passive meaning, e.g. CHE-KO JEN TA-SSU LA (this man kill finished) means this man has been killed .

Everything said so faj underlines the likeness of the Chinese to our own way of saying something, and there would be nothing left to write about, if the sound-pattern of Chinese were comparable to an English purged of polysyllables. With no rules of grammar but a few common- sense directions about the arrangement of words, with no multiplicity of words disguised for different grammatical categories, as we disguise bible in biblical or as German duplicates its transitive and intransitive verbs, a Chinese dialect would be the easiest language to learn. In fact, it is not.

The range of elementary' sounds, i.e. simple vowels and consonants, in no language exceeds about forty. So it stands to reason that the number of pronounceable syllables cannot be equal to the number of

The Loom of Language

432

stars. In Chinese, the possible maximum is reduced by two character¬ istics of the spoken language. One is that the Chinese syllable never tolerated initial consonant clusters other than TS, DS, and CH i.e no Omese words have the same form as our spree, clay, plea. The’second is that the monosyllable ends either in a vowel or in one of a small range of consonants. Even in ancient times the terminal consonants

S,?? T£ Sf “ nUmber *> k> m> ", "g)s and in the northern ect to-day, only the last two (n, ng) occur. That is to say, nearly all words are monosyllables of the open type like our words by, me, so. Withm the framework of these limitations, the number of pronounce¬ able syllables which can be made up is very small compared with the size of our vocabulary. Indeed, it is a tiny fraction of what the vocabu- ary of a monosyllabic language would be if it admitted closed syllables like stamps or clubs, with double or treble consonants at each end The reader will not be slow to draw one inference. At an early date Chinese was encumbered with a large number of homophones, i.e. words with the same sound and different meanings. When further reduction of final sounds took place, the number multiplied. At one mne the language 0f North China distinguished between KA (song) KAP (frog), KAT (cut), and KAK (each). Now the four different words have merged in the single open monosyllable KO. This loss of word-substance, together with limitations set upon the character of the

Sy •ifw ?3t ksS than five hundred monosyllables are now

available for all the things and ideas the Chinese may wish to express

by single or compound words. Professor Karlgren describes what this entails as follows :

Ia‘^aS“all.diCti?nar^ mcluding only the very commonest words of the language, gives about 4,200 simple words, which gives an average of ten different words for each syllable. But it is not to be expected that ^e ?0Uld be eve?ly districted among the syllables ;Pthe number of SKfiT m a SmeS 1S dlerefore sometimes smaller, sometimes larger

bm^o rWW1 1?°° WOTdS ^ 316 0Dly ^ tfaat are pronounced fun, but 69 that have the pronunciation i, 59 shi, 29 ku, and so forth.” 3

Homophones exist m modem European languages though we often overlook their presence because of spelling differences (to-too-two), of gender, as m die German words der Kiefer (the jaw) and die Kiefer (the

J’ °f as m French words leporc (the pork) and la pore

(the pore). They are particularly frequent in English. Even if we limit ourselves to those homophones which are made up of an initial con¬ sonant and a vowel, like a typical Chinese word, we find such

The Diseases of Language 433

examples as bay (colour), bay (tree), bay (sea), bay (bark)*; sea, see. See or so , sew , sow, or the following pairs :

be.	bee	doe ,	dough	roe ,	row
boy.	buoy	hie.	high	toe,	tow
bow,	bough	nay.	neigh	we,	wee
die.	dye	no.	know	way.	weigh

This enumeration does not include words which are also homophones because of the silent English (as opposed to American and Scots) r, e,g. maw , more; saw, soar . In spite of their great number, English homo¬ phones cause no embarrassment in speech because the intended mean¬ ing is indicated by the sentence in which they occur, and by the situation in which speaker and hearer find themselves. For this reason, no naval decorator has painted the boys when asked to paint the buoys. No difficulty arises in real life because flag signifies a piece of bunting, as well as a harmless English water-flower, or because spirit stands for an intoxicant and part of a medium’s stock-in-trade.

Though homophones are more abundant in English than in any other European languages, English homophones are few compared with the total number of words in common use. Indeed, we may well ask how it is possible to communicate with only little over four hundred monosyllables, most of which stand for scores of unrelated things. The answer is that Chinese possesses several peculiar safeguards against confusion of sound and meaning. To begin with, most of Chinese homophones are not true homophones of the English by-buy type. On this page LI (pear), LI (plum), and LI (chestnut) look exacdy the same. In speech they are not. Difference of tone keeps them apart. Tone differences which go with a difference of meaning exist in other languages, as when we pronounce yes or yeah in a matter of fact, interrogative, ironical, or surprised manner; but such differences are casual. The tone differences of Chinese are not casual intrusions. Its proper tone is an essential part of the word. The number of tones varies in different Chinese languages. Cantonese is said to have nine. Pekingese has now only four. It is impossible to convey the differences on paper; but we can get a hint from the language of music. The first

is the high level tone EgE; the second the high rising .

the third the low rising Hi ; the fourth the high falling #

* (i) From French bat; (ii) from Old French bate, Latin bacca (berry); (Hi) from French bate, Latin baia; (iv) from Old French bayer. Modem French aboyer.

The Loom of Language

434

In the first tone FU means husband , in the second fortune, in the third government office, and in the fourth rich.

Nobody knows how this elaborate system arose. It would be naive to believe that the Chinese ever became aware of the dangerous turn their language was taking, and deliberately started to differentiate homophones by tone. It is more likely that some tones represent the pronunciation of old monosyllables, while other tones are survivals of words which were once disyllabic and as such had an intonation different from that of monosyllabic words. Though the existence of distinct tones greatly reduces the number of genuine homophones, many words spoken in one tone cover a bewildering variety of different notions. For instance, I in the first tone means one, dress, rely on, cure; in the second barbarian, soap, doubt, move; in the third chair, ant, tail; and in the fourth sense, wing, city, translate, discuss. Evidently therefore Chinese must possess other devices beside tone to make effective speech possible. The most important is the juxtaposition of synonyms or near-synonyms. An example will make this clear. Our words expire and die would both be liable to misunderstanding if listed as such in a vocabulary. Die may mean: (a) cease to live, (b) a metallic mould or stamp, (c) a small toy of cubical shape. Expire may mean: (a) breathe, outwards, (b) cease to live. We can make the first meaning 0f die explicit in our word list, if we write die— expire. The second meaning of expire comes to life in the same way, when we write expire- die. This is what the Chinese do when they combine KCAN (see or investigate) with CHIEN (see or build) to make K‘AN-CHIEN which means see alone. We might clarify the second meaning of die as given above by writing die-mould or die-stamp in which the second element is a generic term. This is what the Chinese do when they make up FU-CH IN from FU which in one tone means father, oppose, split, or belly and CHTN (a kinsman). The trick of sorting out homophones by making such couplets pervades Chinese speech and asserts itself when the labourer speaks Pidgin, e.g. look-see for see.

If we rank alehouse and housemaid as disyllabic words, colloquial Oiinese is rich in disyllables. It is a monosyllable language in the sense that it contains scarcely any trace of syllables which have no inde- pendent mobility^ e.g. the syllables -dom in wisdom or -e$ in houses. In nearly all such compounds as those illustrated above, one part like the syllable man in postman may carry a weaker stress, but like man still s a verbal life of its own. Daily speech accommodates a few syllables which, have as little autonomy as the -ship in friendship. We have

The Diseases of Language 435

already met TZU (p. 429), Then there is a suffix based on £RH,

■ a still extant word for boy. Originally it gave the word with which it went a diminutive meaning, and had the same function as the - ling in duckling or gosling. As such it became fused in such contractions

Parent Chinese Character	KATA’ KAHA	Sound	Parent ■ Chinese Character	tarn- KAMA	, Parent Sound Chinese Character	/MM* KAHA	Sound
n	T	a	t-	7		A	mu
	9	fl	nm	"J	tau		y	me
	9		% ;	T	ie		•=&	mo
K	x	e		Y	to	•tfc		ya
	dr	0 .		B	nu		.3.
ira	h	ka	tr	B;	ni	H	3
m	*	ki	n	%	nu	a	7	ra
A	>	ku	=p	T-	ne	m	■j	ri
4* If	tr	he	Tj	J	no	M	;i/ |	ru
B	Z3	ho	A	S'S	fa(ha)	?L	u	re
% ft*		■sa	tfc	h	fifhij	5	9
	is	shi ^	7 '	/«	a	9	wa
m	7	su			fe{he)	m	x	we
ifr		se			fo(hoj			wi
f	y	so		-v	ma	•v		wo
0		afmm	Hi	mi	—	—	—

Fig. 44. — Parent Chinese Characters of the Katakana (older) Japanese Syllabary

as LUCRH (little ass) from LU (ass), or FEKH (light breeze) from FENG (wind). Nowadays it has lost its former diminutive force, and is added to words to indicate that they are thing-words, e.g. CHU‘RH (owner).

Another trick which helps to reduce misunderstandings is the use of numeratives, words which usually follow a numeral, pointer word.

436

The Loom of Language

or interrogative as head follows the numeral in three head of cattle Different classes of words have different classifiers of this sort. We have already met one KO (piece) which keeps company, with TfiN (man) as in SAN-KO jBN (three piece men , i.e. three men). KO is the numerative of the largest class. Others are K‘OU (mouth) for things with a round opening such as a pot or a well, PA (handle) for knives spoons and the like, FENG (seal) for letters and parcels, KUA (hawing) or a necklace, heard, and other suspended objects, Classificatorv particles of this sort are widely current in the speech of preliterate communities the world over, and are highly characteristic of such (p- 311)- Seemingly the numerative of Chinese is not a new device for dealing with the homophones but a very ancient characteristic of human communication kept alive by a new need.

. If Regard tone differences the number of distinct root words m spoken Chinese is little more than 400, or slightly over 1,200 if we make allowance for them. These have to do the work of a much larger number of things, actions, and concepts. The written language (p. <7) is not embarrassed by the plethora of homophones. Each symbol has a particular meaning, and several symbols may therefore stand for the same sound. Thus ten symbols of Chinese script stand for the various meanings of LI m the second tone. Unhappily this advantage has its own penalty To become proficient in reading and writing the Chinese pupil has to learn a minimum of about 3,000 to 4,000 characters. This entaik several years of exacting work which might otherwise lay the foundations of more useful knowledge. So much thankless toil tempts us to wonder why the Chinese do not discard their archaic script in favour of our own more handy and more thrifty alphabet. Turkey has already given the world an inspiring object lesson. Under the benevolent espousm of Atatiirk it has exchanged the involved and unsuitable Arabic for Latin letters. The result is that Turkish boys and girls now

master the elements of reading and writing in six months instead of two or three years.

Admittedly Turkey’s problem is a simpler one. Turkish is an agglutmanve language, adapted as such to regular conventions of P . bu;t the Romanization of Chinese script would lead to hopeless confusion, ff it Mowed the customary practice of transcription in maps and Western newspapers. A satisfactory alphabetic orthography s 0 nng the tones to life; and there are several feasible ways of

5 Ҥht f ^ four Pekingese tones by diacritic

m the French series: e, £, e, e. In accordance with the system

The Diseases of Language 437

of Sir Thomas Wade we can put a number in the top right-hand comer, as in many primers for European students. A new and much better transcription is the National Language Romanisation (Gwoyeu Romatzyh) designed by a Chinese scholar for Chinese use. In the Gwoyeu Romatzyh the syllable has a basic core which corresponds to its pronunciation in the first tone, and carries a terminal element to distinguish the second, third, and fourth tones respectively. Where Wade gives TA1, TA2, TA3, TA4 the Gwoyeu Romatzyh puts DA, DAJR, DAA, DAH. Compounds are treated as single units like play¬ house and housewife. Absence of numeral superscripts or diacritic marks lightens the job of the stenographer and keeps down the size of the keyboard. Below is a sentence (I add yet another horizontal stroke) in Wade’s system and in the National Romanisation:

WOO TZAY JIASHANQ ' YIGEH HERNGL

WO3 TSAI4 CHIAX-SHANG4 X2-K£s H£NG2-£RH°

I again add-upon one-piece horizontal + dimi¬

nutive affix

The National Language Romanisation has made a promising start. Dictionaries, periodicals, and textbooks have been printed in it, and associations exist to advertise its far-reaching benefits. In the absence of other obstacles, its adoption in its present or an amended form would bring the art of reading within the reach of every Chinese boy and girl. Foreigners could learn Chinese without having to master the intricacies of a wholly alien script. Elimination of illiteracy would go hand in hand with diminishing prestige of scholars who have now a vested interest in the survival of worthless traditions.

The present form of writing shuts the door to the internationally current terminology of modem science and technology. Sometimes the Chinese assimilate foreign words in print by using the device mentioned in Chapter II (p. 68). To a large extent they rely on Ersatz products for new technical terms which they paraphrase in their own words. Thus a vitamin is what protects the people’s life and aniline^ less infor¬ matively, is foreign red. Electricity is the lightning air and gas is air of coal. In short, China is assimilating twentieth-century science through the medium of a seventeenth-century technique of discourse.

A social obstacle to reform remains while the Roman alphabet con¬ tinues to be a symbol of foreign exploitation and Western arrogance; but the advantages of phonetic writing do not necessarily entail the use of our own letters. A phonetic script based on 39 Chinese characters has been under discussion since 1913. In 1918 it won a place on the

43^ The Loom of Language

school syllabus. Missionaries alert to the advantages of the Chu-Yin- Tzu-Mu, as it is called, have used it in adult education. They claim that Chinese men and women who had never been able to read or write their own names mastered the use of it after 3-6 weeks of tuition One common objection to reform of Chinese writing is the plea that it would cut off China from her literary past. The truth is that contact with the classics through the medium of script has been the prerogative of a very small class for whom a classical education has been the master key to a successful career in the service of the government The Chinese masses who toil for a handful of rice cannot lose what they have never possessed.

Another objection is less easy to refute. As yet, rhino has no common spoken language which everybody everywhere understands The only language common to North and South is the written language" m which literate people of Peking or Canton, Foochow and Shanghai can read the same notices at the railway stations or the same advertise¬ ments by the roadside. The fact that they can do so depends upon the fact that the written language is not based directly on the diverse sounds they utter when they read them aloud. Happily the northern speech is gaining ground, and a common Chinese is taking shape, as a common English took shape in the fourteenth century, and as the dialect of Paris became the language of France.

The disabilities arising from the existence of the homophones extends beyond the boundaries of the Indo-Chinese group. Through- out its history Japan has continually borrowed Chinese words At one time this chieflyaffected discussion of religious, anistic,and philosophic topics. Of late years the range of the Chinese loan-words has broadened because the Japanese sometimes build up technical terms from Chinese as. we build them from Greek roots. Thus electricity is DEN-KI {light spirit ). The Japanese vocabulary is now supercharged with monosyllabic sounds .which mean many different things. When the Kana or. syllabic writing (p. 67) was new, Japanese writers would use it exclusively without recourse to Chinese characters as such. Gradually the habit of introducing the ideogram gained ground owing to the influence of Chinese models. The result is that modem Japanese is a mixture of two syllabic scripts and a formidable battery of characters The syllable signs represent the sound-values of the affiv~ and parades, the ideograms are used for the core of an inflected word Thus the Japanese pupil has to learn the two syllabaries (Hiragana and Katakana) together with about 1,500 Chinese characters. Educated

The Diseases of Language 430

Japanese acutely realize their handicap, but the ambiguities which would arise from an enormous number of imported homophones are

an almost insurmountable obstacle to the plea for exclusive use of one

Parent

Chinese

Character

HIRAGANA	Sound
	mu
*>	me
%	mo
*	ya
o	yu
1	yo
b	ra
0	ri
3	ru
a	re
5	ro
&	wa
h	wi
H	we
m	wo

Fig. 45. — Parent Chinese Characters of the Hiragana (later) Japanese Syllabary „

44° The Loom of Language

or other of the syllabaries. Consequently there is a movement to introduce the Roman alphabet. It is somewhat more economical than the syllabaries, and it would have two more substantial advan¬ tages. One is the possibility of distinguishing between homophones as we do when we write, might, right, and rite. The other is that it is impossible to represent the compound consonants of Latin or Greek roots in international technical terms with Kana signs. , Westernization has brought about a new influx of foreign words

M

N

5

z

p

B

T

D

K

G

Y

R

H

w

A J U E O

7 A X- *

% % y *

f ■ /

Y y % a ')

f

0 € T © «K

x A !d?

jr y ism*. h

y s? y K

tt * 9 Jr a

w 9\ ff a*

7 A .X X 3

•I }V v £7

£ y -x .sfc

V 4 £. J

UN

y

tig. 46. — Japanese Katakana Syllabary

Some of the corresponding sounds are not exactly as indicated in the table, i e

fl 7 w JF “ £s“an.d HU =fhu. Note that -the voiced and voiceless pairs s-z, p-b, t-d, k-g are distinguished only by diacritic marks in the top right-hand corner. r 0

mainly from English sources, and Japanese has freely assimilated international technical terms in preference to compounds of Chinese monosyllables. In doing so it distorts them in conformity with its own phonetic pattern (Fig. 14 and p. 215). What is foreign red in Gbina is amrm, and spirit of coal is gasu. Typical of such distortions are peji (page), basu (bus), pondo (pound), doresu (dress), gurando (sports ground), kurimu (cream), taipuraitu (typewriter).

Till recent times European scholars did not doubt that the mono¬ syllabic uniformity of Chinese reflected human speech at its lowest level. There is now some evidence for the view that Chinese may not always have been an isolating language of monosyllables. Modem scholars beheve that Chinese once had disyllabic words which became shortened through phonetic decay and fusion, as the Old Fnglkb

Jr “8 been reduced t0 love> ^ Latin bestia (beast) to French bete. According to the researches of Professor Karlgren, the personal

The Diseases of Language 441

pronoun had still distinct forms in the nominative and accusative in the latter part of the Chou Dynasty (1122 b.c.-a.d. 249).

Unfortunately the ideographic nature of Chinese script prevents us from getting any information about the phonetic pattern of the lan¬ guage through its ancient literature. Knowledge of the structure and pronunciation of ancient Chinese is largely based on the sister-language Tibetan, with literary documents dating from the seventh century a.d. These documents were transcribed in an alphabetic script of Hindu origin. From what they disclose, and from evidence based on rhymes, corroborated by comparison of various modem Chinese dialects, scholars now conclude that the language of China has a disyllabic, inflected past. If their reasoning is correct, Chinese and English may be said to have travelled along the same road at different epochs of human history or pre-history.

This prompts us to ask whether the future evolution of Anglo- American may lead to greater similarities between the two languages, and if so, with what consequences. We have seen that Chinese has one gross defect. It has an immense number of homophones, and it is not sympathetic to the manufacture of new vocables by the use of affixes, or to importation of technical terms of alien origin. Fortunately, there is, no likelihood that English would reproduce these defects, if it ramp still closer to Chinese by dropping its last vestiges of useless flexions. English has two safeguards against impoverishment of meaning by depletion of its vocable resources. One is that it is constantly mining new technical terms by combination of borrowed affixes with native or alien roots. The other is that its inherent phonetic peculiarities permit an immense variety of monosyllables. So its stock of separate pro¬ nounceable elements would still be relatively enormous, even if all of them were monosyllables.

CONTACT VERNACULARS

In various parts of the world intercourse between Europeans and indigenous peoples has given birth to contact vernaculars. The best known are Beach-la-Mar of the western Pacific, Pidgin English of the Chinese ports, Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, etc., and the French patois of Mauritius, Madagascar, and the West Coast of Africa. The formative process has been the same for each of them. Partly from contempt, partly from an ill-founded belief that he is making things easier for the native, the white man addresses the latter in the trun¬ cated idiom of mothers — or lovers. Some people drop into such

442 The Loom of Language

tricks of expression when talking to a foreigner who is not at home m their own language. Thus a Frenchman will say to an American tourist moi, beaucoup aimer les americains, i.t.j'aime him les amiricains. On their side, natives of subject communities react to the white man by re-echoing the phraseology in which they receive their orders. Everywhere the new speech-product consists of more or less deformed European words strung together with a minirrmtn of grammar.

In Pidgin English, grammatical reduction does not amount to much because English has met Chinese half-way. French, which clings to more remnants of its flexional past, offers more to bite on. Thus the noun of French, as it is spoken by descendants of African slaves in Mauritius, has lost its gender. If the adjective has different masculine and feminine forms, the Creole eliminates one, e.g. ine bon madam (= une bonne madame). The demonstrative fa stands for ee, cet, ces , as well as for ceci, cela , celui, celle, ceux, celles. Mo (= moi) mwm / before a verb, and my before a noun. Li (— lui) means he or him. Simplifica¬ tion of the verbal apparatus is pushed to the uttermost. The Creole verb is the form most often used, i.e. the past participle or the impera¬ tive, e.g. vini (= verdr), manzi (= manger). To indicate time or aspect the Creole relies on helpers. Thus va (ox pour) points to the future,e.g. hva vini (he will come). The helper which signifies the simple past is te or ti (= ete), e.g. mo te manzi (I ate). In the same way fine or fini expresses completed action, e.g. mo fini causi (I have spoken, and won t say more). The form te or ti, which combines with the invariant verb stem is all that is left of the conjugation (or usage) of etre. There is no copula. For je suis malade, the Mauritian Creole says mo malade (1 sick). Smce te or ti has no other function, there is no literal equivalent for the Cartesian claptrap I think, therefore I am.

Orthodox linguists have paid scant attention to these vernaculars. Consequently there is little available information about them To the student of language-planning for world-cooperation, they have salu¬ tary lessons. Above all, they open a new approach to the question: what are minimal grammatical requirements of communication at a parti- ctdar cultural level? Apart from Steiner, the inventor of Pasilingua (i 5), none of the pioneers of language-planning seems to have considered them worthy of sympathetic study.

CHAPTER XI

PIONEERS OF LANGUAGE PLANNING

Our last chapter was about the diseases of natural languages. This one is about the pathology of artificial languages. To many people the last two words, like inierlanguage or world-auxiliary, are terms synonymous with Esperanto. In reality Esperanto is only one among several hundred languages which have been constructed during the past three hundred years; and many people who are in favour of a world-auxiliary would prefer to choose one of the languages which a large proportion of the world’s literate population already use. The merits of such views will come up for discussion at a later stage.

Language-planning started during the latter half of the seventeenth century. The pioneers were Scottish and English scholars. Several circumstances combined to awaken interest in the problem of inter¬ national communication at this time. One was the decline of Latin as a medium of scholarship. For more than a thousand years T .atin made learned Europeans a single fraternity. After the Reformation, the rise of nationalism encouraged the use of vernaculars. In Italy, which had the first modem scientific academy, Galileo set a new fashion by publishing some of his discoveries in his native tongue. The scientific academies of England and France followed his example. From its beginning in 1662, the Royal Society adopted English. According to Sprat, the first historian of the Society, its statutes demanded from its members a close, naked, natural way of speaking . . . preferring the language of the artisans, countrymen , and merchants before that of wits and scholars . About thirty years later the Paris Academic des Sciences followed the example of its English counterpart by substituting French for Latin.

The eclipse of Latin meant that there was no single vehicle of cul¬ tural intercourse between the learned academies of Europe. Another contemporaneous circumstance helped to make European scholars language-conscious. Since the sixteenth-century Swiss naturalist, Conrad Gessner, had collected samples of the Lord’s Prayer in twenty- two different tongues, an ever-increasing variety of information about strange languages and stranger scripts accompanied miscellanies of new herbs, new beasts, and new drugs with cargoes coming back from

444 The Loom of Language

voyages of discovery. Navigation and missionary fervour fostered new knowledge of near and middle Eastern languages, including Coptic, Ethiopic, and Persian. It made samples of Amerindian, of Dravidian, of Malay, and of North Indie vernaculars available to European scholars. In becoming Bible-conscious, Europe became Babel-conscious.

One linguistic discovery of the seventeenth century is of special importance, because it suggested a possible remedy for the confusion of tongues. The labours of Jesuit missionaries diffused new knowledge about Chinese script. To seventeenth-century Europe Chinese, a script which substituted words for sounds, was a wholly novel way of writing. Still more novel was one consequence of doing so. To the reader of the Loom it is now a commonplace that two people from different parts of China can read the same texts without being able to converse with one another. To seventeenth-century Europe it was a nine days’ wonder, and the knowledge of it synchronized with a spectacular, innovation. Symbolic algebra was taking new shapes. The invention of logarithms and the calculus of Leibniz, himself in the forefront of the linguistic movement, gave mankind an international vocabulary of computation and motion.

Without doubt, the novelty of mathematical symbolism and the novelty of Chinese logographic writing influenced the first proposals for a system of international communication through script. Leibniz corresponded with Jesuit missionaries to find out as much as possible about Chinese; and Descartes, the French philosopher-mathematician, outlined a scheme for a constructed language in 1629. Thanks to our Hindu numerals, anyone— and by anyone Descartes meant anyone except the common people of his time — can master the art of naming all possible numbers which can exist in any language in less than a days’ work. If so, the ingenuity of philosophers should be up to the job of finding equally universal symbols for things and notions set out in a systematic way. These would be the bricks of a language more logical, more economical, more precise, and more easy to learn than any lan¬ guage which has grown out of the makeshifts of daily intercourse. At least, that is what Descartes believed. He did not put his conviction to the test by trying to construct a universal catalogue of things and notions. Forty years later the dream materialized. In 1668 Bishop Wilkins published the Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language .

Willdns was not first in the field. George Dalgarno, of Aberdeen, also author of a language for the deaf and dumb, and inventor of a new

Pioneers of Language Planning 445

type of shorthand applicable to all languages , had undertaken the same task a few years before Wilkins. In 1661 Dalgamo published the Ars Signorum, or Universal Character and Philosophical Language. Dalgamo claimed that peoplewho spoke any language could use his for intelligible conversation or writing after two weeks. Essentially, this Art of Symbol was a lexicon based on a logical classification of “notions.” All know¬ ledge, or what Dalgamo and his contemporaries thought was know¬ ledge, was distributed among seventeen main pigeon holes, each indicated by a consonant, e.g. K — political matters, 1)1 = natural objects. Dalgamo divided each of the seventeen main classes into sub¬ classes labelled by a Latin or Greek vowel symbol, e.g. Ke = judicial affairs, Ki = criminal offences, Ku = war. Further splitting of the sub-classes into groups indicated by consonants and vowels successively led to a pronounceable polysyllable signifying a particular thing, individual, process, or relation.

Thus the four mammals called iliphant, cheval , ane and mulct in French, Elefant, Pferd, Esel, and Maulesel in German, or elephant , horse, donkey, and mule in English, are respectively Nrjka, N^kr}, Nrjke, and Nr]ko in Dalgamo’s language. The ambition of its engineer was to design something that would be speakable as well as writeable; and the grammatical tools he forged for weaving the items of his catalanguage into connected statements included genuinely progressive character¬ istics. The verb is absorbed in the noun, as in headline idiom (p. 131). Case goes into the dustbin. The single suffix -2 shows the plural number of all names. To show how it works, Dalgamo concludes the book with. a translation of the first chapter of Genesis, five Psalms, and two of Aesop’s Fables. Here is a specimen: Dam semu Sava samesa Nam trjn Nom = In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Two features of this pioneer enterprise are of special interest to-day. One is Dalgamo’s recognition that all grown languages* including Latin, are irrational, irregular, and uneconomical. The other is explicit in the introduction to his Didascalocophus or the Deaf and Dumb Maris Tutor (1680), which contains eloquent testimony to the author’s Baconian faith in the inventiveness of man:

“About twenty years ago I published ... a Synopsis of a Philosophical Grammar and Lexicon, thereby showing a way to remedy the difficulties and absurdities which all languages are clogged with ever since the Confusion, or rather since the Fall, by cutting off all redundancy, recti¬ fying all anomaly, taking away all ambiguity and equivocation, contract¬ ing the primitives (primary words) to a few number, and even those not

446

The Loom of Language

to be of a mere arbitrary, but a rational institution, enlarging the bounds of derivation and composition, for the cause both of copia and emphads In a word, designing not only to remedie the confusion of lan<mase bv givmg a much more easie medium of communication than anv vet known but also to cure even Philosophy itself of the disease of Sophisms and Logomachies; as also to provide her with more wieldy and manaeeahlc instruments of operation, for defining, dividing, demonstrating, etc.”

The Council of the Royal Society shared this faith. In 1664 the Royal Society appointed a committee for improving the F.nglis^ language. A minute of December 7th runs ; .

‘It being suggested that there were several persons of the Society whose genius was very proper and inclined to improve the English tongue, and particularly for philosophical purposes, it was voted °that there be a committee for improving the English language; and that thev meet at SSir Peter Wyche’s lodgings in Gray’s Inn.”

What the suggestions of the committee were we do not know. Ap¬ parently, no report was handed in, but we know from a letter addressed by the Royal Chancellery to Dalgamo that his language was recom¬ mended to the King for support by several Cambridge and Oxford dons, who stressed its value :

for facilitating the matter of Communication and Intercourse between people of different Languages, and consequently a proper and effectual Means of advancing all die parts of Real and Useful knowledge, CivilS

ancf Commerce!”21101181 Pr°pagatins ^ GosPe1’ increasing Traffique

In conclusion the letter observes that if the project of the Aberdonian was properly supported mankind would later on look back upon his age with admiration and, fired by its example, endeavour

“to proceed in a further repairing the Decayes of Nature, until Art Renewed ”ltS ^ ^ WhlCh iS m0St probable> Nature cease to be, or be

The letter is an impressive example of the Baconian faith in the un- hmited power of man over nature. Nearly three hundred years ago it egan to dawn upon a few human minds that language, instead of emg left to the hazards of a slow evolution, could be intelligently interfered with and directed towards a desirable goal.

Dalgamo’s Ars Sigmrum stimulated Bishop Wilkins to undertake something similar, but on a vastly more ambitions scale. The Royal

Pioneers of Language Planning 447

Society published the outcome of his efforts. Wilkins was one of its founders., an ardent Parliamentarian* husband of Cromwell’s sister* Robina* a man of great versatility and social idealism. He was the first man to popularize Galileo’s ideas in England* and did so in a scientific fantasy* published in 1642. In it he described a journey to the moon by rocket. Undoubtedly he was a genius. It would be pleasant to add that he acknowledged his indebtedness to an obscure Scots schoolmaster. He did not.

Bishop Wilkins starts from the fact that we already possess such symbols as +* — * x* $* $, ©* in the language of mathematics and astronomy. Though pronounced in different ways in different coun¬ tries, these symbols are the same on paper* and everywhere signify the same thing to the educated. From this he draws the Cartesian con¬ clusion:

“If to every thing and notion there were assigned a distinct Mark* together with some provision to express Grammatical Derivations and Inflexions; this might suffice as to one great end of a Real Character* namely* the expression of our Conceptions by Marks which should signify things* and not words.”

Wilkins realizes that if the number of marks is to be kept inside manageable limits some classification of things and notions is indis¬ pensable. He therefore compiles, as Dalgamo did* a systematic cata¬ logue as the foundation of his language. The whole body of contem¬ porary knowledge is fossilized in a hierarchy of forty different classes* such as plants* animals* spiritual actions* physical actions* motions* possessions* matters naval* matters ecclesiastical* etc. Each of the forty pigeon-holes has its subdivisions with the exception of the fifth class* which encloses HIM. The Bishop aptly remarks that the capitalized (and much hymned to) Him is not divisible into any subordinate species.

The world-lexicon of Wilkins is a pot-pourri of Aristotelean fiction* theological superstition* naturalistic fancy and much factual matter. The anthropomorphic outlook of the author and the low level of con¬ temporary knowledge embodied in the catalogue is illustrated by his treatment of Substance Inanimate . He divides it into vegetative and sensitive. The vegetative splits into imperfect such as minerals, and perfect, such as plants. The imperfect vegetative distributes what we should now call the materials of inorganic chemistry between stone and metal. Stones take the labels vulgar, middle-prized, and precious. Wilkins divides the last into less transparent and more transparent.

44^ The Loom oj Language

Having completed his hierarchy of knowledge, Wilkins now gets to grips with symbols for visual or auditory recognition. He begins with the Real Character, or written language, which everybody will be able to understand without learning how to speak the Philosophical language itself. The real character is to be like Chinese. Each word signifies a notion, not a sound. Wilkins is confident that about 2,000 symbols will cover all requirements. The form of this new ideographic writing and its relation to the catalogue is best illustrated by the commmtar which Wilkins appends to the word father in his attempted translation of the Lord’s Prayer into Real Character:

J - 1 This next character being of a bigger proportion, must

therefore represent some Integral Notion. The genius of it, viz. “f* is

appointed to signifie Oeconomical Relation . And whereas the transverse Line at the end towards the left hand hath an affix making the acute angle with the upper side of the Line, therefore doth it refer to the first difference of that Genus, which according to the Tables, is relation of Consanguinity: And there being an affix making a Right Angle at the other end of the same line, therefore doth it signifie the second species under this Difference, by which the notion of Parent is defined. ... If it were to be rendered Father in the strictest sense, it would be necessary that the Transcendental Note of male should be joyned to it, being a little hook on the top over the middle of the Character after this manner 5. And because the word Parent is not here used according to the strictest sense but Metaphorically, therefore might the Transcendental Note of

Metaphor be put over the head of it after this manner ^ j j »■

So far the Bishop’s catalogue and its written form. To use words in rational discourse & grammar is necessary. The minimum requirements of communication must be fixed. It would be an exaggeration to say that Wilkins made any outstanding contribution to grammatical analysis. He was still far too much under the spell of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. Indeed, he held that flexion is “founded upon the philosophy of speech and such natural grounds, as do necessarily belong to Lan¬ guage. None the less, he recognized that classical languages were not the last word; and Latin came in for a veritable trommelfeuer of criti¬ cism. He criticized its abundance of different flexions for one and the same function, the ambiguities and obscurities of its prefixes, the intrusion of grammatical gender into sex relations, its welter of excep¬ tions to all rules of conjugation and declension, the difficulties of concord, and so forth.

Wilkins keeps his own grammatical apparatus within the limits set

Pioneers of Language Planning . 449

by forty signs, consisting of circles and dots for particles, and hooks, loops, etc., for terminals. For the time, this was thrifty. Where the dictionary form of an English verb such as fear has only three deriva¬ tive forms (fears, feared, fearing), a single Greek verb may appear in over two hundred, and a Latin one in over one hundred costumes. The forty grammatical categories of all sorts in the Philosophical Language are a sufficient indictment of the irregularities, anomalies, and super¬ fluities of the two classical languages.

Though less interested in mere talk, Wilkins had the ambition to make his language audible. To do this he apes Dalgarno’s plan, in his own way. Each of his forty classes or genera has a simple sound-com¬ bination consisting of an open syllable of the Japanese sort. The fifth major class (God) is labelled by the “root” Da, the thirteenth (shrub) by Gi, the thirty-ninth (naval) by So, and the last (ecclesiastical) by Sy. Subdivisions follow the same plan. To form those of the first order we have to add a consonant to the root. Thus we get words such as Bab, Bad, Bag, etc. If you want to understand what is hitting your eardrum, you must therefore be aufait with the whole classificatory set-up. You may then have no difficulty in diagnosing De as “elementary,” Det as “meteor,” and Beta as “halo.”

To attack the Bishop’s project in the light of our incomparably greater scientific and linguistic knowledge would be equally fatuous and unchivalrous. The great defect of it is not that it imposes on the memory the almost superhuman burden of the Chinese characters. That would be bad enough. Its greater weakness is at the base, the catalogue of human knowledge. A Dalgamo or a Wilkins can construct such a catalogue only in the light of information available to his own contemporaries. Thereafter any addition to knowledge, a single dis¬ covery, a fresh interpretation, calls for a complete overhaul of the catalogue. The reference symbols of “each thing and notion” specified after the item added to it would call for revision. Had Wilkins’s plan come into use among scientific men, science would have been fossilized at the level it had reached in 1650, as Chinese culture was petrified in a logographic script several thousand years before Wilkins wrote.

With all his awareness of what is “improper and preternatural” in Latin, Wilkins failed to apply to its grammatical categories the test of functional relevance. So he never grasped the simplest grammatical essentials of effective communication. His continental contemporary Leibniz, famous for introducing the modem symbolism of the infini¬ tesimal calculus, did so. Leibniz knew something of Dalgamian as well

P

45° The Loom of Language

as Wilkinsian, and rejected both of them for not being “philosophical” enough Smce the age of nineteen he had dreamed of a language which was to be an algebra of thought” in the service of science and philo¬ sophy. He had little concern for its value as a medium of international communication. His own efforts to collect all existing notions, analyse em, reduce them to simple elements, and arrange them in a logical and coherent system is of no interest to people who live in the twentieth century. It was another wild-goose chase. What is more significant to our tune are the conclusions he reached. When he took up the task of

providing his dictionary or conceptual catalogue with a grammar, he

broke new ground. 5

Unfortunately he never put his views into book form. They remained unnoticed by all his successors with the exception of Peano, a twentieth- century mathematical logician who also invented Inierlingua. What puts Leibniz fax in advance of his time is that he recognized the scientific basis of intelligent language-planning. What the inventors of Volapiik

lldit%E^rantiS"nT graSped’ Ldbni2 saw LeibniL uaduy. The factual foundations of language-planning must be rooted

omparanve analysis of natural languages, living and dead. From the

a sue an ysis supplies we can learn why some languages are more

sudd^Si ? ^1°^' ThS VerSatUe equipment of Leibniz

supported him well in the task. He could learn lessons from the lingua

franca, a jargon spoken by sailors and street urchins of the Mediter¬ ranean ports; and he had an experimental guinea-pig to hand The guinea-pig was Latin.

As Leibniz himself says, the most difficult task for the student of a foreign language is to memorize gender, declension, and conjugation So gender-distmction goes overboard because “it does not belong to

othe^reffi31™1^’” -BeSldes getdng rid of gender, Leibniz advocates redLf iT'- C°Tm be dn*Iified. Personal flexion is a

suS t T?- TeTe PSrSOn iS indicated by accompanying

Loll th* f w LdbaZ S3yS n0tbing t0 startle Ae readers °ftihe Loom ffiough he is way in front of Esperanto. He shoots ahead of

ZLf r0rarfeinP0rarieS-Pean0 apart — 'wben he discusses the bj-flexion of the noun. What he intended to substitute we do not W, most probably equivalents to some, several, all, etc. Unlike the

concord that of Leibniz, like that of English, surrenders a battery of

ZZS teimmalS WWCh aCC°mpany a Bantu tt*31 chant to the

corresponding notin.

Pioneers of Language Planning 451

What remains for discussion is case™, mood-* and rime-flexion. Very properly Leibniz casts doubt on the raison d'etre of the first two with the following argument. As things are* case* and mood* flexions are

useless repetitions of particles. Either case* and mood-flexions can do without prepositions and conjunctions* or prepositions and conjunc¬ tions can do without case and mood terminal. Besides* it is impossible for flexion to express the immense variety of relations which we ran indicate by means of particles. After some wavering between a highly synthetic medium and an analytical one* Leibniz comes out in favour of the latter. When all this sanitary demolition is over* the only thing left with the verb is time-flexion. Leibniz considers this essential* but wishes to extend it to adjectives (as in Japanese)* to adverbs* and to nouns. Thus the adjective ridiculurus would qualify an object which will be ridiculous* the noun amavitio would signify the fact of having loved* and amaturitio the disturbing certainty of going to love. Leibniz’s next and most revolutionary step is to reduce the number of parts of speech. Clearly* the adverbs can be merged with adjectives because they have the same relation to the verb as adjectives have to a noun* i.e. they qualify its meaning.

Foi reasons sufficiently familiar to readers of The Loom (p. 125)*

distinction between adjective and substantive is also “of no great im¬ portance in a rational language.” The only logical difference between the two is that the latter implies the idea of substance or existence. Every substantive is equivalent to an adjective accompanied by the word Ens (Being) or Res (Thing). Thus Idem est Homo quod Ens hu - manum (Man is the same thing as Human Being). Similarly (as in Celtic idiom) every verb can be reduced to the single verb substantive to be and an adjective : Petrus scrtbit, id est: est scribens (Peter writes* i.e. is writing). So the irreducible elements of discourse boil down to the single noun Ens or Res * the single verb est (is)* together with a congeries of adjectival qualifiers and particles which bind the other parts of a statement together by exposing relations between them. A complete vocabulary is exhausted by a lexicon of roots and a list of affixes each with its own and sharply defined meaning.

All this tallies with the fruits of research in comparative grammar two hundred years later. Leibniz was far ahead of his time in other ways. He was alive to what Malinowski calls “the sliding of roots and meanings from one grammatical category to another” (p. 170)* and anticipates Ogden’s Basic (p. 473) by embarking on an analysis of the particles to ascertain their meaning and the requisite minimum number.

452

The Loom of Language

e regarded this as a task of the utmost importance, and carried it out with particular care. Notably modem in this context is a shrewd guess Leibniz suggests that metaphorical extension has expanded the field of reference of prepositions, all of which originally had a spatial signifi¬ cance. Thus we give them a chronological value, when we say: between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the future, before 1789,

The projects of Dalgamo and Wilkins had this in common with others put forward during the eighteenth and the first half of the nine¬ teenth century. They started from a preconceived logical system with¬ out reference to living speech. As late as 1858 a committee report of the rench Societe Internationale de Linguistique denounced the design of an international auxiliary built of bricks taken from natural languages The reason given was that ah natural languages, classical and modem

efbedded “ cultural levels which modem man had left behind him. A language “clear, simple, easy, rational, logical p osopfucal, rich, harmonious, and elastic enough to cater for ah the needs of future progress” must also be a language made out of whole

nnl^c/Tr °f 3 ^'on' langUageS conceived in these terms is easy to

ri t^f'pkming was CTadIed by needs scholar- caste cut off from the common aspirations of ordinary people, without

the guidance of a systematic science of comparative linguistics Inevi¬ tably the movement initiated by Dalgamo and Wilkins shared the fate of proposals for number reform put forward by Alexandrian mathe¬ maticians from Archimedes to Diophantus. Proposals for an interna¬ tional language with any prospect of success must emerge from the experience of ordinary men and women, like the Hindu number-

dtiTjmre. reVOlUUOni2ed mathematics after the eclipse of Alexan- Still it is not fair to say that the efforts of Dalgamo, Wilkins or

scientific^21" *1^ * ^ WeU be international refom of ’

wa^l n7l e mtatSd by ^ SyStema Natu™ of Linnaeus was catalysed by controversy which his more ambitious predecessor

provoked. The movement which came to a focus in the Systema Naturae

unr af;evisr °!.chemicai *^0^ which ^

author could not have foreseen. It created an international vocabulary of Latin mad Greek (p. 25o) roots. In a sense, though unwittingly revision of jhemical terminology realized Wilkins’s dream of a rlcd Character. Modem chemistry has a vocabulary of ideographic and

Pioneers of Language Planning 453

pictographic symbols for about a quarter of a million pure substances now known.

The efforts of the catalinguists were not stillborn. They continued to stimulate other speculations for fully a century. Diderot and D’Alem¬ bert, joint editors of the French Encyclopedie , allotted an article to the same theme. The author was no less a personage than Faiguet, Trea¬ surer of France. Its title was Nouvelle Longue (1765). Though merely a sketch, it anticipated and outdistanced proposals of more than a hun¬ dred years later. Like his forerunners in England, Faiguet recognized the wasteful and irrational features common to Western European languages, and had enough historical knowledge to notice the analytical drift in the history of his mother tongue. The outcome was a highly regularized, skeleton of grammar for a universal a posteriori language, i.e. one which shares features common to, and draws on, the resources of existing languages. In contrast to Faiguet’s mother tongue, the New Language had no article and no gender-concord. The adjective was to be invariant,. as in English, or, as the designer says, a sort of adverb. Case-distinction, which has disappeared in nouns of French and other Romance languages, made way for free use of prepositions.

. In all this Faiguet had a far better understanding of what is and what is not relevant than the inventor of Esperanto with its dead ballast of a separate object case (p. 463) and its adjectival plural. Perhaps because his . own language gave, him little guidance, Faiguet made no very radical suggestions for simplifying the verb system. It was to consist of a single regular conjugation without personal flexions. This cleansing of Augean stables was offset by the terminals -a for the present, -u for the future, -e for the imperfect, -i for the perfect, and -0 for the pluperfect. In addition there were three different infinitive forms (present, past, future), and a subjunctive which was indicated by an -r added to. the indicative. Still, it was not a bad attempt for its time. Perhaps Faiguet would have used the axe more energetically if he had been inspired by the needs of humanity at large. Like his predecessors he was chiefly at pains to provide “the learned academies of Europe” with a new means of communication.

Faiguet did not compile a vocabulary, and none of his contemporaries took up the task. Alertness to the waste and inconvenience of language confusion was still confined to the scholarly few. It did not become acute and widespread till steam-power revolutionized transport, and the ocean cable annihilated distance. Language-planning received a new impulse in a contracting planet. Where the single aim had been to cater

454 The Loom of Language

for the needsof international scholarship, the needs of international trade and internationally organized labour became tenfold more clamorous

, Humanitarian sentiment reinforced more material considerations. Ihe inventor of Volapiik, and many of its ardent advocates, regarded linguistic differences as fuel for warmongers and hoped that an inter¬ lingua would help to seal the bonds of brotherhood between nations. In fifty odd ephemeral auxiliaries which cropped up during the second half of the nineteenth century, several common features emerge. With few exceptions each was a one-man show, and few of the showmen were sufficiently equipped for the task. With one exception they were continental Europeans bemused by the idiosyncrasies of highly inflected languages such as German, Russian, or one of the offshoots of Latin. Each of them created a language in his own image. They did not look beyond the boundaries of Europe. If the inventor was a Frenchman the product must needs have a subjunctive; and when the Parisian votaries of Volapiik objected to Schleyer’s d, 6, and u , their Teutonic brothers m arms took up the defence with a zeal befitting the custody of the Holy Grail of the Nordic Soul.

The. nineteenth-century pioneers of language-planning did not appreciate the fact that China’s four hundred millions contrive to live and die without the consolation of case, tense, and mood distinction, indeed without any derivative apparatus at all. Why they ignored Chinese and new hybrid vernaculars such as Beach-la-Mar , Creole French, and Chinook, etc., is easy to understand. What still amazes us is that they could not profit by the extreme flexional simplicity of English, with its luxuriant literature, outstanding contributions to science, and world-wide imperial status. They had little or no know¬ ledge of the past, and were therefore unable to derive any benefit from research into the evolution of speech. Almost alone, Grimm saw what lessons history has to teach. A few years before his death, Grimm recanted his traditional loyalty to the flexional vagaries of the older European languages, and laid down the essential prerequisites of intelligent language-planning. The creation of a world-auxiliary is not a task for peremptory decisions :

MloJedTXZ' StUdy thB Path which the human mind has fhef devel°PmmJ of languages. But in the evolution of all civilized

haSZZZ u™ ™terfermce frorn °uteide and unwarranted arbitrariness- have played such a large part that the utmost such a study can achieve is to show up the danger-rocks which have to be avoided.

Wise words !

Pioneers of Language Planning

4 55

VOLAPUK

The first constructed language which human beings actually spoke, read, wrote, and printed was Volapuk (1880). Its inventor was Johann Martin Schleyer, a German catholic priest, zealous alike in the cause of world-trade and universal brotherhood. Hence his motto: Menade bal puki bal (For one humanity one language). According to his disciples, he knew an amazing number of tongues. If so, he benefited little from his learning. It was evidently a handicap. It prevented him from understanding the difficulties of Volapuk for less gifted linguists.

f he new medium spread very rapidly, first in Germany, then in France, where it found an able apostle in Auguste Kerckhoffs, pro¬ fessor, of Modem Languages at the Paris High School for Commercial Studies. There was a French Association for the propagation of Vola¬ puk, there were courses in it— and diplomas. Maybe with an eye on the mnual turnover, a famous departmental store, Les Grands Magasins du Lnntenips , also espoused the cause. Success in France encouraged others, espedaUy in the United States. By 1889, the year of its apogee, Volapuk had about 200,000 adherents, two dozen publications, sup¬ ported by 300 societies and clubs. Enthusiastic amateurs were not the only people who embraced the new faith. Academically trained linguists also flirted with it.

Volapuk petered out much faster than it spread. When its partisans had flocked together in Paris for the third Congress in 1889, the com¬ mittee had decided to conduct the proceedings exclusively in the new language. This light-hearted decision, which exposed the inherent difficulties of learning it or using it, was its death-knell. A year later the movement was in full disintegration. What precipitated collapse was a family quarrel. Father Schleyer had constructed the grammar of his proprietary product with the redundant embellishments of his own highly inflected language. Professor Kerckhoffs, supported by most of the active Volapukists, spoke up for the plain man and called for reduction of the frills. In the dispute which ensued, Schleyer took the fine that Volapuk was his private property. As such, no one could amend it without his consent.

It is impossible to explain the amazing though short-lived success of Volapuk in terms of its intrinsic merits. There was a monstrous naivete in the design of it. A short analysis of its sounds, grammar, and vocabu¬ lary suffices to expose its retreat in the natural line of linguistic pro¬ gress. Part of the comedy is that Schleyer had the nerve to Haim that

45^ The Loom of Language

he had taken spoken English as his model, with due regard to anv merits of German, French, Spanish, and Italian. The vowel battery of Schleyer’s phonetic apparatus was made up of a, a, i, 0, u, together with the German a, o, u, of which the last is notoriously difficult for English-speaking people to pronounce. In conformity with his German bias, the consonants included the guttural ch sound. Out of chivalrous consideration for children, elderly people, and China’s four hundred million, Schleyer discarded the r sound in favour of / (absent in Japanese') and other substitutes. This happened before anyone drew Schleyer’s attention to the fact that the Chinese have an r. By then he had

changed our English red or German rot to led. Similarly rose becomes lol.

In the grammar of Volapiik the noun, like the noun of German and unhke that of Anglo-American or of any Romance language, trailed behind it case-marks with or without the uniform plural -S. In this

way father becomes :

	SINGULAR	PLURAL
Nomin.	fat	fats
Acc.	fati	fatis
Gen.	fata	fatas
Dat.	fate	fates

There was no grammatical gender. Where sex raised its ugly head the simple noun form represented the male, which could assimilate the lady-like prefix;!-, as in blod-jiblod (brother-sister) and dog-jidog (dog- bitch). The adjective was recognizable as such by the suffix -ik, e.g. gudik (good), supplemented by -el when used as a noun, e.g. gudikel (the good man), jigudikel (the good woman). Gain on the roundabouts by levelling the personal pronoun (oh = I, 0l = thou, obs = we, oh — you, etc.) was lost on the swings, because each person had four cases (e.g. ob, obi, oba, obe ). From the possessive adjective derived from the pronoun by adding the suffix - ik, e.g. obik (my), you got the pos¬ sessive pronoun by an additional -el, e.g. obikel (mine). Conjugation was a bad joke. In what he had to learn about the vagaries of the Vola- puk verb, the Chinese paid a heavy price for the liquidation of r. Whether there was or was not an independent subject, the personal pronoun stuck to the verb stem. So fat lofom literally meant the father love he. There were.six tenses, as in Latin, each of them with its own characteristic vowel prefixed to the stem, presumably in imitation of tiie Greek augment: !

457

Pioneers of Language Planning

lofob Hove. ildfob I had loved.

aldfob I loved. old fob I shall love.

eldfob I have loved. ulofob I shall have loved.

Strange to say, the prefix a- of the imperfect and the o- of the future also appeared on adverbs formed from del (day), adela (yesterday), ctdelo (to-day). There were characteristic suffixes for a subjunctive and a potential mood, and each with all six tense forms, e.g. elofomla (that he has loved). By prefixing p - you could change the active to the passive, and interpolate an f immediately after the tense-mark to signify habitual action. So it was possible to make one word to say of a woman that she had been loved all the time. The Schley er imperative, like the Schleyer deity, was threefold, with a gentle will-you-please form in -os, a normal one in -od, and a categorical of the worft-you-shut-up sort in -dsr. The mark of interrogation was a hyphenated li, prefixed or suffixed, and the negative particle was no placed before the verb, e.g. no-li elofons-la? (will you not have loved?). If admittedly more regular than either, Volapuk had almost as many grammatical impedimenta as Sanskrit or Lithuanian.

The Volapukists rightly claimed that the root-material of their language was taken from English, German, Latin, and its modem descendants. Unluckily, the roots suffered drastic castigation from Father Schleyer’s hands before they became unrecognizable in the Volapuk lexicon. The memory of the beginner had nothing to bite on. All roots had to conform with a set of arbitrary conditions. To take on several prefixes and suffixes, they had to be monosyllabic, and even so the enormous length to which such a word could grow forced Schleyer to italicize the root itself. He had to alter all words which ended in a sibilant (c, 5, z, etc.) to accommodate the plural s\ and every root had to begin and end with a consonant. From this German sausage-machine, knowledge emerged as nol, difficulty as fikul , and compliment as plim, the German word Feld as fel, Licht as lit, and Wunde as vun . The name of the language itself illustrates the difficulties of detection. Even geo¬ graphical names did not escape punishment. Italy, England, and Portugal became Tdl, Nelij, and Bodugan. Europe changes to Yulop, and the other four continents to Melop, Silop, Fikop , and Talop. Who would guess that Vol in Volapuk comes from world, and puk from speech?

The method of word-derivation was as fanciful, as illogical, and as silly as the maltreatment of roots. In the manner of the catalanguages, there was a huge series of pigeon-holes each labelled with some affix.

P*

The Loom of Language

458

For instance, the suffix -el denotes inhabitants of a country or person-

ti!” S’ ffi° Par!sf <^>arisian) wore same costume as mitel (butcher) The suffix -a/ denoted some animals, e.g. suplaf (spider), tiaf (tiger), but (hon) andyeoa/ (horse) were left out in the cold. The names of ds had the label it, e.g. galit (nightingale), the names of diseases -ip e g. (hydropsy), and the names of elements •*, e.g. vatin (hydro¬ gen) The prefix lu- produced something ambiguously nasty. Thus hwat (more literally dirty water ) stood for urine. Lulien (a nasty bee) was a Volapiik wasp. Schleyer’s technique of building compounds of Teutomc length turned the stomachs of his most devoted French

-saples. As a sample, the foEowing is the opening of Schleyer’s translation of the Lord’s Prayer: Beyers

rc- °-jat °baS’ keI bino1 “ sia^ paisaludomoz nem ola1 Komomod monargan ola! Jenomoz vil olik, as in siil, i su tal!”

^understand the success of Volapiik only if we assume that it satisfied a deep, though still uncritical, longing equally acute in humani¬ tarian and commercial circles. So it was a catastrophe that a German parish pnest provided this longing with ephemeral satisfaction at such a low techniral level For a long time to come the naivetes of Volapiik and its weE-deserved coEapse discredited the artificial language move- ment GuncmsJy enough it found many disciples in academic circles including language departments of universities, always the last refuge ost causes. The American Philosophical Society > founded by Ben-

T°Ugh Sympathetic t0 Proposals for a world-aiifiary, was not taken in. It appomted a committee in 1887 to assess the merits of Schleyer s mterlanguage. In a very enfightened report the committee formulated principles of which some should be embodied in any future instructed world-auxiEary. It rejected Volapiik because 7

modern ?raCtUre T™ ^ 0Q Ae analytical of all the more modem European anguages, and because its vocabulary is not suffi-

ciently mtemational.

The committee suggested the issue of an invitation to aE learned

f«LteaWGlId 3 T t0 ^ 3n -n^ee

tor promotmg a universal auxiliary based on an Aryan vocabulary con¬ onant with the “needs of commerce, correspondence, conversation,

Sn o?r\r th°USand learned bodies accepted this invita- ^nrfErankhn^S0^ to a Congress to be held in London or Pari The Philological Society of London declined the invitation with i-hanW for reasons equaEy fatuous. One was that there was no comrl A^’

Pioneers of Language Planning 459

vocabulary. The other was that Volapiik was used all over the world. It was therefore too late in the day to offer a substitute.

After die third Congress of 1889, votaries of Volapiik washed their hands of the whole business, or ratted. Many of those who ratted followed the rising star of Esperanto. Some regained confidence and continued to tinker with Schleyer’s system. Before the final collapse St de Max had preferred Bopal (1887), and Bauer Spelin (1888). Thereaiter came Fieweger’s DU (1893), Dormoy’s Balia (1893), W. von Arnim s Veltparl (1896), and Bollack’s Langne Bleue (1899). There were several other amendments to Volapiik with the same basic defects. The stock-in-trade of all was a battery of monosyllabic roots, cut to measure from natural languages, and that past human recognition, or cast in an even less familiar mould from an arbitrary mixture of vowels and consonants/ The root was a solitary monolith surrounded by con¬ centric stone-drcles of superfiuous, if exquisitely regular flexions, lhere was declension and conjugation of the traditional type, and a luxuriant overgrowth of derivative affixes. The essential problem of word-economy was not in the picture. Indeed, the inventor of La Langue Bleue (so-called because the celestial azure has no frontiers) boasted that 144,139 different words were theoretically possible within the framework of his phonetics.

Before Volapiik, far better artificial languages had appeared on the market without attracting enthusiastic followers. One was Pirro’s Universal-Sprache, a purely a posteriori system of a very advanced type. The noun, Iffie the adjective, is invariant. Prepositions take over any function which case-distinction may retain in natural languages. The outward and visible sign of number is left to the article or other deter¬ minants. The personal pronoun with a nominative and an accusative form has no sex-differentiation in the third person. A verb without person or number flexions has a simple past with the suffix -ed, a future with -rat, and compound tenses built with the auxiliary haben. Unlike so many before and after him, Pirro did not shirk the task of designing a vocabulary. His lexicon consisted of 7,000 words, largely Latin, hence international, but partly Teutonic. The number of affixes for deriva¬ tives was small, but since he took them over from natural languages they were not particularly precise. The merits of the following specimen of the Universal-Sprache speak for themselves:

Men senior, I sende evos un gramatik e un varb-bibel de un nuov gjot nomed universal glot. In futur I scriptrai evos semper in did glot I pregate evos responden ad me in dit self glot. .

460 The Loom of Language

Though it discouraged some, Volapuk also stimulated others to set out along new paths. More than one disillusioned Volapukist recovered to undertake the task which Schleyer had executed with maladroit results. One ex-Volapuk enthusiast, Julius Lott, invented Mundolingue (1890). It was a neo-Latin language. A moderately well-educated person can quite easily read it, as the following specimen shows :

Amabil amico,

Con grand satisfaction mi ha lect tei letter de le mundolingue. Le possibility de un universal lingue pro le civilisat nations ne esse dubitabil, nam noi ha tot elements pro un tal lingue in nostri lingues, sciences, etc5.

Another language which owed its existence to Volapuk renegades was Idiom Neutral (1903). It was designed by members of the Akademi Intemasional de lingu universal. This body came into being at the Second Volapuk Congress. When it developed heretic doctrines the great Datuval (inventor) unsuccessfully excommunicated the rebels. The claim of Idiom Neutral in its own time was that it had a vocabulary based on the principle of greatest international currency. The reader who compares Schleyer’s version of the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer (p. 458) with the following can see how completely it had grown apart from Volapuk:

Nostr patr kel es in sieli! Ke votr nom es sanktifiked; ke votr regnia venij ke votr volu es fasied, kuale in siel, tale et su ter.

ESPERANTO

The collapse of Volapuk left the field clear for Esperanto. Esperanto was the child of Dr. Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof, a Russian-Polish Jew (1859-1917). He put forward his first proposals when Father Schleyer’s invention was at the height of its popularity. Zamenhof had spent his early youth at Bielostock, where Russians, Poles, Germans, and Jews hated and ill-treated one another. Reinforced by a humanitarian out¬ look, this distasteful experience stimulated the young pioneer to recon¬ cile racial antagonisms by getting people to adopt a neutral medium of common understanding. Incubation was long and painful. He was still at grammar-school when inspiration dawned. So it was natural to seek a solution in revival of one or other of the two classical languages. Slowly Zamenhof learned to recognize the chaotic superfluity of forms in, natural speech. It was English which opened young Zamenhof ’s eyes: t

I learnt French and German as a child, and could not then make comparisons or draw conclusions; but when, in the fifth class at the

Pioneers of Language Planning 461

academy, I began to study English* I was struck by the simplicity of its grammar, the more so owing to the sudden change from that of Latin and Greek. I came to see that richness of grammatical forms is only a historical chance occurrence, and is not necessary for a language. Under the influence of this idea I began to look through my language and to cast out unnecessary forms, and I perceived that the grammar melted away in my hands, till it became so small as to occupy, without any harm to the language itself, not more than a few pages.

The design of a simplified grammar did not detain him long; but he was held up when he began to construct a vocabulary. Then it dawned on him that we can make an unlimited number of new words by means of derivative affixes added to a single root. The manufacture of suitable affixes led him back to Wilkins’s theme, analysis of notional relations. His first idea was to make up his own stock-in-trade of roots. He soon realized the difficulty of learning the arbitrary root-forms of Volapiik and began to see that living languages work with a high proportion of common or international words. A preliminary Romano-T eutonic lexicon was born of this recognition. In its final form the project appeared in 1887 under the pseudonym Linguo Intemacia de la Doktoro Esperanto (International Language by Dr. Hopeful).

Unlike Schleyer, Zamenhof sustained a sensible humility towards his own creation. He did not look upon it as final. He invited criticism. His intention was to collect, discuss, and publish the objections raised, then to amend its shortcomings in the light of the findings. The public ignored Zamenhof ’s request for sympathetic and enlightened criticism. Esperanto remained unchanged till 1894, when its author himself initiated a drastic reform. It found its first adherents in Czarist Russia where the authorities suppressed its organ. La Esperantisto, because it published an article by Tolstoi. From Russia it spread to the Scandi¬ navian countries, to Central Europe, thence to France, where it had strong support in university circles. In 1905 the Government of the French Republic made Zamenhof an Officer of the Legion d’Honneur . In 1909 H.M. King Alfonso conferred upon him the honour of Com¬ mander in the Order of Isabella the Catholic. After a brief eclipse during the Great War of 1914-1918, the wave of pacifist sentiment which subsequently swept over the world gave it new momentum.

We should accept figures about its spread and popularity, when given by Esperantists themselves, with the caution we should adopt towards data about the vitality of Erse or Gaelic when those who supply them are Celtic enthusiasts. According to a report published by the General Secretariat of the League of Nations (but based upon data

4^2 The Loom of Language

provided by Esperantists), Esperanto could boast of about 4,000 publications, consisting of original works, translations, text-books, propaganda items, etc. In Albania it became a compulsory subject in secondary and higher education. In China the University of Peking offered courses. Madrid, Lisbon, and several German towns placed it on the curriculum of Police Schools. In Great Britain it was popular in Labour Colleges, and got some encouragement from such publicists as Lord Bryce, H. G. Wells, Lord Robert Cecil, and Arthur Henderson. In the U.S.S.R., the People’s Commissariat for Public Education appointed a Commission to examine its claims in January 1919, and to report on the advisability of teaching an international language in Soviet schools. The Commission decided for Esperanto, though Zinoviev favoured Ido. Five German towns made Esperanto a com¬ pulsory subject in primary schools under the Weimar Republic, and the National Esperanto Institute for the training of teachers at Leipzig received official recognition from the Ministry of the Interior. During the winter 1921-22 there were 1,592 courses in Germany for about 40,000 adults, half of them working-class people. On June 8, 1935, the National-Socialist Minister of Education, Bernhard Rust, decreed that to teach Esperanto in the Third Reich was henceforth illegal. The reason he gave was that the use of artificial languages such as Esperanto weakens the essential value of national peculiarities.

Esperanto just failed to gain support which might have mad** history. In spite of wire-pulling and high-grade publicity management, its promoters were not able to persuade the League of Nations to come out unequivocally in favour of its use as the international language. Whether this was a calamity the reader may judge from what follows. Let us first look at its phonetic build-up.

Though Esperanto uses all the letters of the Roman alphabet except three (Q, X, V), its aspect is unfamiliar on the printed page. This is due to its five accented consonants, C, <5, 8, J, a novelty open to more than one criticism, more particularly that such symbols impede recog¬ nition of international roots and slow down the speed of writing. The corresponding sounds are equally open to unfavourable comment. The H (like h in horn) and the 8 (like ch in Scots loch) are difficult sounds for people brought up to speak Romance languages. Other sounds which cause embarrassment to many nationals are represented by such combinations as SC (= sis), KC (= kts), and NKC, e.g. funhdo (function). In contradistinction to the practice of Volapijk, which had end-stress appropriate to the importance of its suffixes, the accent of

Pioneers of Language Planning 463

an Esperanto word fills invariably on the last syllable but one, e.g. virbovo (bull).

With many other artificial auxiliaries, Esperanto shares the dubiously useful grammatical trick of labelling each of the “parts of speech” with its own trade-mark. The noun singular must end in -0, the adjective in -a, the derived adverb in -0, the infinitive in ~i. The official defence is this. A reader can recognize at once which words express the main theme of an Esperanto sentence and which merely express qualifications. The ubiquitous vocalic endings of Esperanto, like those of Italian, make the spoken language sonorous and prevent accumulation of consonantal dusters which are difficult to pronounce, e.g. in English: economists expect spread of slumps throughout civilized world .

Zamenhof learned nothing from the obliteration of subject-object distinction in the English and Romance noun. Esperanto has an object case-form ending in -n both for nouns and pronouns, e.g. ni lernas Esperanton (we are learning Esperanto). Esperantists claim that people who speak or write Esperanto enjoy greater freedom of word-order, and can therefore reproduce that of the mother tongue without making a statement unintelligible in writing. If the goat eats the cabbage , we can also say that the cabbage eats the goat > because the n of the Esperanto cabbage shows that It is harmless. The Esperanto object case-form is also an accusative of direction in the Latin style. Instead of the pre¬ position al (to) you may use the accusative and say, e.g. mi iras Lon - donon (nom. Londono ) = I am going to London. Apparently the Esperanto for our verb go does not sufficiently express locomotion.

To make the plural of an Esperanto noun we add -/ to the singular, e.g. kato (cat) — katoj (cats), accus. baton — katojn . There Is no gram¬ matical gender, but for some reason difficult to fathom Zamenhof could not break away from the institution of adjectival concord. His adjective has to trail behind it the case and number terminals of the noun, e.g. nomin. beta rozo or obj. belan rozon (beautiful rose) — belaj rozoj or belajn rozojn (beautiful roses). Without regard for feminist sentiment, names of females come from names for males by inter¬ polation of -in before the trade-mark -0 of the noun, e.g. patro (father), patrino (mother), frato (brother), fratino (sister). Without deliberate deference to feminine sentiment Zamenhof reverses the process to .manufacture, the novel product fraMo (unmarried young man) by analogy with fraulino (German Fraulein = Miss).

The Esperanto verb has, like that of most of the more recent artificial languages, a single regular conjugation, without flexion of

4^4 The Loom of Language

number or person, e.g. mi skribas (I write), li skribas (he writes), ni skribas (we write). It sticks to affixation for tense and mood, and there is no shortage of them. We have to learn the -i for the infinitive, -as for the present indicative, -is for the past indicative, -os for the future, -u for the subjunctive and imperative, and -us for the con¬ ditional. There is only one auxiliary, esti (to be). By chasing it through the different tenses and moods ( estas , estis, estos, etc.) and then combining it with the three active participles ( amanta loving aminta having loved, amonta going to love), you can manufacture 1 8 different compound constructions, and then double the number by substituting passive participles for the active ones (amata loved, amita having been loved, amota going to be loved).

Zamenhof’s vocabulary consists of a collection of arbitrarily chosen roots, which grow by addition of about 50 derivative prefixes, suffixes, and infixes. The most glaring defect of the Esperantist stock of words is that it is not consistently international. To be sure, Zamenhof did choose some roots which are pan-European. In this category we find atom, aksiom , tabak, tualet. He also chose roots which are partially international, i.e. common to a large number of European languages. In this class we meet, e.g. ankr (anchor), emajl (enamel). These inter¬ national and semi-international words had to comply with Zamenhof’s sound and spelling conventions. They also had to take on Esperanto terminals. As oftefl as not they are therefore unrecognizable, or at best difficult to recognize, e.g. kafo (coffee), venko (victory), koni (know), kuri (run). What is worse, they are often misleading. Thus sesono does not mean season, as we might suppose. It means one-sixth. So alsofosilo stands for a spade, not for a fossil. Not even the starchy food called sago escaped mutilation. Its rightful name was changed to saguo pre¬ sumably because sago (Latin sagitta ) was badly needed to designate the Esperanto arrow.

Zamenhof rejected an enormous number of internationally current words. He dismissed hundreds ending in -ation, -ition, and -sion, or distorted them, e.g. nacio for nation, nada for national. A large class of words in the Esperanto dictionary are not international in any sense. To coax the susceptibilities of Germans, or Russians who do not or did not then welcome addition of international terms derived from Latin or Greek roots, Zamenhof included words which add to the difficulties of a Frenchman or a Spaniard without appreciably lightening the burden for a Dutchman or a Bulgarian. This compromise was responsible for roots such as bedaur (German bedauem = regret), jlug

Pioneers of Language Planning 465

(German Flug = flight), knob (German Knabe = boy), kugl (German

Kugel = sphere).

Striking illustrations of ZamenhoPs fear of national susceptibility, and his desire to keep an even balance, are the Esperanto words for dogy year , hair, and school. For dogy one naturally expects kano (cane in Italian, cdo in Portuguese, chien in French) corresponding to our adjective canine. In deference to German and Scandinavian sentiment, it is hundo. For year the Swedish equivalent is dr, German Jahr , French an, Italian anno, Spanish anoy Portuguese ano. There is clearly no agreement between the Romance and the Teutonic word-form; but the root ann- is common to annual (English), annuel (French), Annalen (German). Zamenhof selected the German form, jar. The word for hair illustrates the same absurdity. In Swedish it is Mr, German Haary Italian capelloy Spanish cabello, Portuguese cabeloy French cheveu. Again we have an international root in our technical words capillary or. capillarity y corresponding to the German Kapillar — ( Kapillargefdssy Kapillaritat). Zamenhof chose the purely Teutonic form har. One of the most international words in daily speech is school (Latin scholay Italian scuolay French ecoley German Schuley Swedish skola). Zamenhof chose lemejo.

From such roots as raw materials of his dictionary, the Esperantist builds new words by simple juxtaposition, as in vapor sipo (steamboat), fervojo (railway), or by adding prefixes and suffixes. Some of the affixes come from other languages with a native halo of vagueness. Others are whims of Dr. Zamenhof himself. Thus the prefix ho- signifies relation through marriage, as in hopatro (father-in-law), the suffix -et is diminu¬ tive, as in ventetoy breeze (from ventoy wind), and -eg is augmentative, as in ventego (gale). Even among the votaries the prefix mal- has never been popular. The uninitiated European would naturally assume that it means ill or bad, as in many international words. In Esperanto mal- denotes the opposite ofy hence such strange bed-fellows as malbona (bad), malamiko (enemy), malfermi (to open). The derivative affixes of Espe¬ ranto have a characteristic absent from other constructed languages. They can lead their own lives if protected by an ending to signify a part of speech deemed suitable for philosophic abstractions. This trick is encouraging to philosophers who indulge in the in-ness of a one-ship which fills the us-dom with anti-ty.

Esperanto claims to be an auxiliary which satisfies human needs on an international scale, yet is easier to learn than any natural language. One should think that such a claim involves existence of a vocabulary

466 The Loom of Language

free from redundancies and local oddities. The sad truth is that neirh^T Zamenhof nor his disciples have ever made an intelligent attempt at rationalization of word material. Unless one is a gourmet, a horti¬ culturist, or a bird-watcher, it is difficult to see why a 36-page English-Esperanto dictionary should be encumbered by entries such as artichoke = artisoko , artichoke (Jerusalem) = helianto, nightshade (deadly) = heladono, nightshade (woody) = dolcamaro. In the same opus nursing of the sick (Esperanto flegi, from German pflegen ) is differentiated from nursing of children (Esperanto varti, from German marten) when an Esperanto equivalent of to look after would have covered both. The Key to Esperanto pushes specialization further by listing kiso = kiss, and smaco = noisy kiss. If I shake a bottle Esperanto calls it skui, but if I shake my friend’s hand it is manpremi. When a chamois leaps into the Esperanto world it turns into a canto, but the stuff with which I get the dirt off my window is not a compound of chamois and leather, as you might think, it is same.

Esperanto fostered several rival projects, and their appearance gave rise to anxiety. The year 1900 was the foundation of the Delegation of the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language. This body, which had the support of leaders in the academic world, including the chemist Ostwald, the philologist Jespersen, the logician Couturat, approached a large number of scientific bodies and individual men of science with the suggestion that some competent institution, preferably the Inter¬ national Association of Academies, should take over the task of pronoun¬ cing judgment on rival claimants. The Association refused to do so, and the Delegation itself eventually appointed a committee with this object in 1907. Initially discussion focussed on two schemes, Esperanto itself and Idiom Neutral (p. 460). The delegates then received a third proposal under the pseudonym Ido. The author of this bolt from the blue was Louis de Beaufront, till then a leading French Espe¬ rantist. The Committee decided in favour of Esperanto with the proviso that reforms were necessary on the lines suggested by Ido. The Esperantists officially refused to collaborate with the delegation in the work of reform, and the delegation then adopted the reformed product which took the pseudonym of its author. In some ways Ido is better, but it has the same defective foundations as Esperanto. It has dropped adjectival concord but retains the accusative form of the noun as an op¬ tional device. The accented consonants of Esperanto have disappeared. The vocabulary of Ido contains a much higher proportion of Latin roots, and is well-nigh free of Slavonic ingredients. The roots them-

Pioneers of Language Planning 467

selves are less distorted. The system of derivative affixes has been pruned of some glaring absurdities, but inflated by a fresh battery based on quasi-logical preoccupations. In place of the six prefixes and

twenty-two suffixes of Esperanto, Ido has sixteen prefixes and forty

suffixes.

There have been other bitter feuds between orthodox Esperantists and reformist groups. After Ido came Esperantido by Rene de Saussure . The three following equivalent sentences illustrate the family likeness of Esperanto, Ido, and Esperantido:

ESPERANTO

For homo vere civilizita, filosofo au juristo, la kono de la latina lingvo estas dezirebla, sed intemacia linguo estas utila por modema inter- komunikado de lando a! aha.

IDO

For homo vere civilizita, filozofo od yuristo, la konoco di Latina esas dezirinda, nia linguo intemaciona esas utila por la komunicado modema de un lando al altra.

ESPERANTIDO

For homo vere civilizita, filozofo or yuristo, la kono de la latina linguo estas dezirebla, sed intemacia linguo estas utila por modema inter- komunicado dey un lando al aha.

INTERLINGUA

No rival successfully arrested the • spread of Esperanto., though several of its competitors were immeasurably superior. Every new project made for more mtematkraality of the basic word material. Coming from different directions pioneers of language-planning were converging to a single focus. Some searched the living European repre¬ sentatives of the Aryan family for terms common to the greatest number of them, and inevitably arrived at a vocabulary essentially Latin in its character. Others took the outcome for granted, and went straight to the neo-Latin languages for bricks and straw. A third group extracted from Classical Latin what remains alive, fie. its vocabulary, and dis¬ carded what is dead, i.e. its grammar. The most interesting, and till now the most enlightened, attempt to modernize Latin is Latino sine Flexione (Interlingua) , devised by the Italian mathematician, Giuseppe Peano. In 1908 Peano became Director of the Academia pm Interlinguas formerly the Akademi de Lingu Universal , and at a still earlier stage in its career, the Kadem bevilneiik Volapuka , founded by the second

468 The Loom of Language

and third Volapiik Congress. The Academia was a meeting-ground for people interested in applied linguistics. Any enthusiast could join and contribute to its organ in any artificial language which his fellow- travellers could easily understand. The aim was to discover what is most international among the existing welter of European languages.

Since 1903 Peano had been publishing his research in a simplified form of Latin. He did not know that Leibniz (p. 451) had proposed something similar, till one of his pupils came across the German philo¬ sopher’s observations on rational grammar and a universal language. On January 3, 19083 Peano did something quite unprofessorial. He read a paper to the Academia delle Scienze di Torino, It began in con¬ ventional Latin and ended in Peanese. Citing Leibniz, he emphasized the superfluities of Latin grammar. As he discussed and justified each innovation he advocated, he incorporated it in the idiom of his dis¬ course forthwith. Grammar-book Latin underwent a metamorphosis on the spot. What emerged from the chrysalis was a language which any well-educated European can read at first sight.

Interlingua aims at a vocabulary of Latin elements which enjoy widest currency in the living European languages of to-day. It there- fore includes all words with which we ourselves are already familiar, together with latinized Greek stems which have contributed to inter¬ national terminology. Of itself this does not distinguish Interlingua from some other auxiliaries. Five out of six words in the Esperanto dictionary have roots taken from Latin, directly or indirectly. The Latin bias of Ido , Occidental^ or Romanal is even stronger. What distinguishes Interlingua from Esperanto and its relatives is the garb which the international root word wears. In Zamenhof’s scheme the borrowed word had to conform with the author’s ideas about spelling, pronun¬ ciation, and flexional appendices. After clipping and adding, the end- product often defies recognition on an international scale. Peano followed a different plan. He did not mutilate his pickings. The Latin word has the stem-form, that is, roughly the form in which we meet it in modern languages.

What Peano regards as the stem of a noun, adjective, or pronoun is the ablative (p. 315) form, e.g. argento, campo, arte, came, moMe, parte, plcbe, principe, celebre, audace, novo. Every one of these words occurs in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. We ourselves are familiar with them in. argentine, camp, artist, carnivorous, mountain, part, plebeian, principal, celebrity, audacious, novelty. In this way Latin words preserve their final vowels. The stem-form of the Peano verb is the Latin im-

Pioneers of Language Planning 469

perative, or the infinitive without -re, So we get ama (amare), habe (habere), scribe ( scribere ), andi (audire), i (ire). Interlingua has no mobile derivative affixes to juggle with. It is wholly analytical, like Chinese or, we might almost add, Anglo-American. What prefixes and suffixes remain stick firmly to the Latin or Greek loan-word with all their diversity of meaning, contradictions and obscurities in English, French, or Spanish usage.

The grammar of Interlingua will not delay us long. Its supreme virtue is its modesty. In Peano’s own words, the minimum grammar is no grammar at all. No pioneer of language-planning has been more icono¬ clastic towards the irrelevancies of number, gender, tense, and mood. It is Chinese with Latin roots, but because the roots are Latin (or Greek) there is no surfeit of ambiguous homophones. What Latin labels by several different genitive case-marks. Interlingua binds together with the “empty35 word de, equivalent to our word of. Thus Latin vox populi, vox dei , becomes voce de populo, voce de Deo, Number indication is optional, an innovation which no future planner my ignore. What is now familiar to the reader of the Loom, Peano first grasped. He saw that number and tense intrude in situations where they are irrelevant, and we become slaves of their existence. Whether we like it or not, we have to use two irrelevant Anglo-American flexions when we sa j: there were three lies in yesterday" s broadcast. The plural s is redundant because the number three comes before the noun. The past were is irrelevant because what happened yesterday is over and done with. Interlingua reserves the optional and international plural affix -5 (Latin matres, Greek meteres, French meres , Spanish madres, Dutch moeders) for situations in which there is no qualifier equivalent to many, several, etc., or nothing in the context to specify plurality, e.g. the father has sons = patre habe filios, but three sons — tresjilio. It is almost an insult to Peano 3s genius to add that Interlingua has no gender apparatus or that the adjective is invariant. If sex is relevant to the situation, we add mas for the male, an dfemina for the female, e.g. cane femina = a bitch. There is no article, definite or indefinite. The distinction I — me, he — him, etc., which almost all Peano’s predecessors preserved, dies an overdue death. Me stands for I and me, illo for he and him.

Demolition of the verb-edifice is equally thorough. There are no flexions of person or number. Thus me habe = I have, te habe = you have, nos habe = we have. There is also no obligatory tense-distinction. This is in line with the analytical drift of modem European languages

47° The Loom of Language

(cf. especially Afrikaans, p. 285) which rely on helpers or particles to express time or aspect. The -ed like the -s in two rabbits escaped yester¬ day is redundant. We have no need for either of them when we say: two sheep hurt themselves yesterday. The Interlinguist says heri me es in London (yesterday I BE in London), hodie illos es in Paris (to-day they BE in Paris), eras te es in New York (to-morrow you BE in New York). Peano’s attitude to tense is on all fours with his attitude to number. Where explicit particles, or context do not already specify past rim* the helper e before the verb does so. Similarly i (from ire) indiraf**} the future as in the French construction je vais me coucher (I am going to bed). Thus the Interlinguist says me i bile — I am going to drinl^ or me e bibe = I drank.

Though one of the most attractive projects yet designed, Peano’s Interlingua has several weak points. Some of them spring from the fact that its author had his eyes glued on the European mise-en-scene, and more particularly, on the cultural hierarchy. So he never asked himself whether Interlingua was free from sounds likely to cause HiffimWs to linguistic communities outside Europe. There is another grave but easily remediable omission. A completely flexionless language such as Interlingua calls for rigid rules of word-order. Peano bothered little about the necessary traffic regulations. The capital weakness of Inter¬ lingua is that its vocabulary is too large. Its author ignored the interests of the peoples of Africa and Asia, as he also ignored the plain man in Europe. Had he had more sympathy with their needs he would have worked out a minimum vocabulary sufficient for everyday purposes. He did not. The 1915 edition of Peano’s Vocabulario Commune contains 14,000 words which have currency in leading European languages. Here is a sample of Interlingua :

Televisione, aut transmissione de imagines ad distantia, es ultimo applicatione de undas electrico. In die 8 februario 1928, imagines de tres homine in Long Acre apud London es transmisso ad Hartsdale apud New York, et es recepto super uno piano, de 5 per 8 centimetre, ubi assistentes vide facies in London ad move, aperi ore, etc.

NOVIA1

Bacon has said that the true and lawful goal of science is to endow human life with new powers and inventions. Throughout his long and distinguished career, the great Danish linguist Jespersen has had the courage and originality to emphasize that philology has the same “true and lawful goal” as any other science. As a young man he espoused

Pioneers of Language Planning 471

In turn Volapiik and Esperanto. Later he helped to shape Ido. In 1928 he put forward a project of his own making, but like many other Esperanto renegades did not succeed in shedding the larval skin of his highly inflected past. He called it Novial.

_ Novial is the latest arrival. It is not the last word in language-plan- ning. Naturally, it is better than Esperanto or Ido. Because it had the advantage of coming later, it could scarcely be otherwise. Besides, Jespersen is the greatest living authority on English grammar it would be surprising if a constructive linguist failed to recognize the cardinal virtues of a language so dear to him. What Jespersen calls the best type of international language is one: which in every point offers the greatest facility to the greatest number. When he speaks of the greatest number he refers only to Europeans and those inhabitants of the other continents who are either of European extraction or whose culture is based on European civilization. This sufficiently explains why Novial retains so many luxuries common to Western European languages.

For instance, the Novial adjective has a conceptual neuter form, ending in -mot. From what is otherwise the invariant ver we get verum , which means true thing. In defiance of decent thrift, Novial has two ways of expressing possessive relations, an analytical one by means of the particle de, and a synthetic by means of the ending -n. Thus Men patron kontore is Novial for: my {mine) father’s office. Jespersen’s treat¬ ment of the verb conforms to the analytical technique of Anglo-Ameri¬ can. This at least is an enormous advance upon Esperanto, Russian, Lithuanian, and other difficult languages; but is not particularly impressive if we apply the yardstick of Pekingese or Peanese. Future and conditional are expressed by the auxiliaries sal and vud , perfect and pluperfect by the auxiliaries ha and had. Novial departs from English usage in one particular. The dictionary form does the work of our past participle in compound past tenses, e.g. me protekte, I protect, me ha protekte, I have protected. This recalls the class of English verbs to which cut , put, or hurt belong. What simplification results from this is nullified by the superfluous existence of two ways of expressing past time, a synthetic one which ends in the Teutonic weak -d, e.g. me protekted (I protected), and an analytical one involving an equivalent non-emphatic Chaucerian helper did, e.g. me did protekte. There are no flexions of mood; but the student of Novial has to learn how to shunt tense forms appropriate to indirect speech.

Like Esperanto, Novial has a bulky apparatus of derivative affivpR for coining new words. They recall forms which exist in contemporary

472 The Loom of Language

European languages; but Jespersen is at pains to give each a clear-cut meaning. There are many whimsicalities in the choice of them. A special suffix denotes action, another indicates the result of an action, and a third is for use when the product of the action is specially meant , as distinct from the way in which it is done. (Got it?) In the list of prefixes we meet an old acquaintance, “the Esperanto bo-. This indicates relation by marriage, e.g. bopatro (father-in-law), bomatra (mother-in-law), bofilia (daughter-in-law). How long the mother-in-law will continue to be a menace to monogamy, or how long monogamy will continue to be the prevailing mores of civilized communities we cannot say. Mean¬ while it is just as easy to make a joke about the analytical English 0r Chinese equivalent of Jespersen’s bomatra.

In building up his vocabulary Jespersen aimed at choosing the most international words. Since there are many things and notions for which there are no fully fledged international (i.e. European) terms Jespersen embraces the eclecticism of his predecessors. The result is a mongrel pup. The following story illustrates its hybrid character:

Da G. Bernard Shaw.

Un amiko de me kel had studia spesialim okulali kirurgia, examinad in un vespre men vidpovo e informad me ke lum esed totim non-interessant a lo, pro ke lum esed “normal.” Me naturim kredad ke turn signifikad ke lum esed simil a omni altren; ma lo refusad ti interpretatione kom paradoxal, e hastosim explicad a me ke me esed optikalim exeptional e tre foruinosi persone, pro ke “normali” vido donad li povo tu vida koses akuratim e ke nor dek pro sent del popule posesed to povo, konter ke li restanti ninanti pro sent esed non-normal. Me instantim deskovrad li explikatione de men non-sukseso kom roman-autore. Men mental okule kom men korporal okule esed “normal”; lum vidad koses altriman kam li okules de altri homes, e vidad les plu bonim.

(Traduktet kun permisione de autore.)

THE ANGLO-AMERICAN REACTION

With one exception, G. J. Henderson, who published two proposals. Lingua in 1888 and Latinesce a few years later, none of the promoters of constructed languages during the nineteenth century were American or British. With few exceptions, no continental linguists of the nineteenth century, and none of the. leaders of the world-auxiliary movement, recognized the fact that one existing language, that of the largest civilized speech community, is free from several defects common to all outstanding projects for an artificial medium, before the publication of Peano’s Interlingua,

Pioneers of Language Planning 473

This is not altogether surprising. Because English spelling teems with irregularities, and still more because of the vast resources of its hybrid vocabulary, learning English is not an easy task for anyone who aims to get a wide reading knowledge . So academic linguists trained in sedentary pursuits overlooked the astonishing ease with which a beginner can get a good working knowledge of the Anglo-American interlanguage as a vehicle of unpretentious self-expression. C. K. Ogden and his colleague, I. A. Richards, are largely responsible for the growing recognition of the merits which won high tribute from Grimm. Ogden and Richards chose Anglo-American usage as the case material of The Meaning of Meanings a handbook of modem logic. What began as an academic examination of how we define things, led one of the authors into a more spacious domain. Hitherto we had thought of English as the language with the large dictionary. Ogden’s work has taught us to recognize its extreme word economy.

To resolve this paradox the reader needs to know the problem which Ogden and Richards discuss in their book. Latent in the theme of the The Meaning of Meaning is the following question: what is the absolute minimum number of words we need to retain, if we are to give an intelligible definition of all other words in Webster’s or the Oxford Dictionary? The answer is, about 800, or between two and three months’ work for anyone willing to memorize twelve new words a day. This great potential word-economy of Anglo-American is due to the withering away of word-forms dictated by context without regard to meaning. We have had many examples of this process, especially in Chapters III, IV, and VII. Our natural interlanguage has shed redundant contextual dis¬ tinctions between particles and between transitive and intransitive verbs. We can now do without a battery of about 400 special verb- forms which are almost essential to ordinary self-expression in French or German. This is not disputed by critics who carp at the absence of names for everyday objects in Ogden’s 850 Basic Word List, and it is not necessary to remind readers of the Loom that Anglo-American has another supreme merit which pioneers of language-planning, other than the great linguist Henry Sweet, were slow to realize.

Academic British grammarians, with few notable exceptions such as Bradley, have always been apologetic about the flexional “poverty” of English, and disposed to fondle any surviving flexions they could fish up. In fact, there are only three surviving obligatory flexions which we need to add to our items for a serviceable vocabulary of new words : (a) -s (for the third person singular of the present tense, or for the

474 Lhe Loom of Language

plural form of the noun, ( b ) -d or -ed for the past tense or participle of verbs, (c) -mg, which can be tacked on to almost any word which signifies an action or process. The genitive -s is optional, as are the -er and -est of essential comparatives or superlatives. The seven forms of the verb be, four or five forms of a few— not more than a dozen- common strong verbs, and half a dozen irregular noun plurals, round up the essentials of Anglo-American grammar other than rales of word-order.

Thus the essential grammar of Anglo-American is much simpler than that of the only two artificial languages which have hitherto attracted a considerable popular Mowing. The language itself is the most cosmopolitan medium of civilized intercourse, and it can boast of a copious literature produced at low cost. It is the exclusive Western vehicle of commercial transactions in the Far East, and the common tongue of business enterprise on the American continent. It is also a lingua franca for the publication of a large bulk of scientific research camtd on m Scandinavia, Japan, China, and in countries other than France, Germany, or Italy. For all these and for other reasons, the movement to promote Anglo-American as a world-auxiliary has eclipsed the enthusiasms with which former generations espoused proposals for constructed languages.

Whatever fate, has in store for Ogden’s system of Basic English everyone who is interested in the interlanguage problem must acknow¬ ledge a debt to its author for clarifying the problem of word-economy and specifying the principles for making the dictionary of a satisfactory world-auxiliary. What is not beyond dispute is whether his particular solution of the problem is the best one. To avoid the inflation of a basic vocabulary with separate verbs, Ogden takes advantage of the enormous number of distinctive elements which can be replaced by one of about sixteen common English verbs in combination with other essentialwords.

i hus we can make the following combinations with go followed bv a

directive: J

go around (circumscribe, encircle, surround); go across itraver^V <m away (&zpait)igo after (follow, pursue); go again (return); go against (attack); go before (precede); go by (pass); go doom (descend)! go for (fetch), go m (enter); go on (continue); go out (leave); go through (pene- rate), go to (visit); go up (ascend); go with (fit, suit, accompany).

We can also manufacture many verb equivalents by combining some common English verbs with nouns or adjectives, in accordance with the precedent of Bible English: make clean , make wet, make whole, make

Pioneers of Language Planning 475

wells make a fire ofs make a fuss about) make trouble* Reliance on such combinations is the method of verb-economy peculiar to Basic English . The Basic Word List contains only the verbs : come5 go9 get * give * keep) let) make) put) seem 9 take * be9 doy have * say, see9 send) may9 will . It is possible to say anything in effective English which does not offend accepted conventions of grammar without introducing any verbs not included in this list.

We could make any language more easy to learn by lopping off its useless flexions and regularizing those which are useful* and if we deprived French of its preposterous encumbrance of personal flexions (fifty per cent unpr onounced) and the still more preposterous burden of gender or number concord* Frenchmen might still decipher the product* as we can decipher pidgin English. It is doubtful whether 'this would help a foreigner to read French books* and the great prac¬ tical advantage of a living* in contradistinction to a constructed* lan¬ guage is the amenity of cheap books already available. Besides* no Frenchman would agree to leam a mutilated form of his own language as an auxiliary for peaceful communication.

This is not the result at which Ogden aims. Spelling reform or simplification of Anglo-American grammar* beyond the elimination of optional survivals for which accepted isolating constructions already exist* would lead to something different from the Anglo-American in which millions of cheaply produced books come out yearly. So Ogden accepts all the few obligatory flexions and irregularities inherent in correct usage and rejects only those (e.g. the optional genitive) which we need not use. He has proved Ms claims for Basic as a means of self- expression by translating technical works and narratives for educational use into a terse idiom wMch is not unpleasing to most of us. The prose style of J.B. S. Haldane is often almost pure Basic. Basic is not essentially a different sort of English from Anglo-American as we usually under¬ stand the term. It would be better to describe it as a system by wMch a beginner can leam to express himself clearly and correctly according to accepted standards with no more effort than learning a constructed language entails.

The recently published New Testament in Basic is a sufficient

refutation of the criticism that Basic is a pidgin English. The word list of the Basic New Testament contains some special Bible words wMch make the total up to a round 1*000. The following is a fair sample for comparison with the King James (Authorized) Bible {Mark x. 21-24 and Acts iv. 32):

476 The Loom of Language

KING JAMES BIBLE.

t Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven : and come, take up the cross, and follow me. And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved : for he had great possessions. And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his disciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God! And the dis¬ ciples were astonished at his words. But Jesus answereth again, and saith unjo them. Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God!

And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and one soul : neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they

had all things common _ Neither

was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were pos¬ sessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles5 feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.

BASIC NEW TESTAMENT.

And Jesus, looking on him, and loving him, said. There is one thing needed: go, get money for your goods, and give it to the poor, and you will have wealth in heaven : and come with me. But his face became sad at the saying, and he went away sorrowing: for he was one who had much pro¬ perty. And Jesus, looking round about, said to his disciples. How hard it is for those who have wealth to come into the kingdom of God! And the disciples - were full of wonder at his words. But Jesus said to them again, Children, how hard it is for those who put faith in wealth to come into the kingdom of God !

And all those who were of the faith were one in heart and soul: and not one of them said that any of the things which he had was his property only; but they had all things in common. . . . And no one among them was in need; for everyone who had land or houses, exchanging them for money, took the price of them, and put it at the feet of the Apostles for distribution to everyone as he had need.

Some critics of Basic will say that it is tainted with the philosophical preoccupations of Wilkins, Leibniz, and Bentham — the armchair view that the main business of language is to “transmit ideas.’5 To be sure, transmission of ideas is an unnecessarily charitable description of the everyday speech of people who have to eat, dress, buy cigarettes, pay rent, mate, or excrete. Admittedly a large part of the daily intercourse of intellectuals themselves deals with situations in which it is not con¬ venient to define a beefsteak as a cut from the back end of a male cow

Pioneers of Language Planning 477

kept on the fire long enough with the right things— and so forth. Advocates of Basic may reasonably reply that this concern for our common humanity is spurious, that early training by the method of definition would do much to raise the general intellectual level of mankind, and that the main thing for the beginner is to get self-confi¬ dence as soon as possible, at the risk of a little long-windedness .

The focus of intelligent criticism is the form of verb-economy which Ogden has chosen. His critics point out that those who have used Basic idiom as a substitute for the more usual type of Anglo-American in examples such as those cited above already know English and have no doubt about the meaning of such combinations as get for or go with. Is the correct idiomatic construction for the verb of another language equally obvious, if we do not already know English ? Is it certain that a foreigner will deduce from its literal meaning the idiomatic verb in the sentence Martha had her hands full of the work of the house? This diffi¬ culty comes out in three ways of translating into Basic idiom each of the highly indefinite native verbs (a) try , (h) ask:

(a) attempt test judge

(h) question request invite

make an attempt at. put to the test, be the judge of. put a question about, make a request, give an invitation.

Though it is quite correct English to put a question and make a request^ it is difficult to see why a Chinese should prefer these forms to making a question or putting a request Indeed the Chinanum WOuld be at home in his native idiom if he took advantage of the fact that attempt) test) judge) request) question) can all be used as verbs or nouns, and that we request the presence of a person when we invite him. By exploiting this most remarkable feature of English word-economy it would be easy to devise a word-list no longer than that of the official Basic 850 without recourse to this bewildering multiplicity of idioms. We could also include a few words such as purchase) which can be verb {to purchase)) noun (the purchase of ), or adjective (purchase price)) with¬ out such periphrases as give money for when we have to refer to an activity of daily occurrence. This way of solving the problem of verb- economy has another advantage. The Basic construction is long- winded. The Chinese trick is snappy.

It goes without saying that any attempt to simplify Anglo-American within the framework of generally accepted conventions has a ready

478 The Loom of Language

welcome where there is continuous contact between British adminis¬ trators and Oriental or African populations with a multitude of local vernaculars. Owing to the influence of American trade and medicine, and to that of American Universities and philanthropic foundations in the Far East, the influence of their common language extends far beyond the bounds of the British Empire or the United States. As a lingua franca in China and Japan, it has no formidable European competitor. Esperanto or any form of rehabilitated Aryan would have no prospect of outstripping Anglo-American unless it first established itself by general agreement as the official medium of a United Europe. In more than one respect Esperanto is inferior, and in none superior^ to English. With its wealth of flexions it limps far behind several European languages; and it would be a bold boast to say that its vocabu¬ lary is more international than that of English.

There is already a large educational publishing clientele for pro¬ posals which aim at promoting the use of Anglo-American as the lingua franca of technology and trade in backward and subject com¬ munities. Basic is not the only proposal of this sort. From Toronto comes West’s method. This is based on word-counts, and presumably therefore aims to cater for the needs of those whose immediate goal is rapid progress in reading facility. Miss Elaine Swensen of the Language Research Institute at New York University has devised another system, H. E. Palmer of the Institute for Research in English Teaching in Tokyo a third {Iret). In American Speech (1934), Dr. Jane Rankin Aiken has put forward Little English, with an essential vocabu¬ lary of 800 words, i.e. 50 less than Basic, Others exist and will come.

THE PROSPECTS FOR LANGUAGE-PLANNING

The first desideratum of an interlanguage is the ease with which people can learn it. If we apply this test to rival claimants, two conclu¬ sions emerge from our narrative. One may well doubt whether any constructed lanpiage with the support of a mass movement is superior to Anglo-American, especially if we consider the needs of the Far East or of the awakening millions of Africa. At the same time, it would be easy to devise an artificial language vastly superior to Anglo-American by taking full advantage of neglected lessons from comparative lin¬ guistics and of the short-comings of our predecessors in the same endeavour. If historical circumstances favour the adoption of a living one as a world language, Anglo-American has no dangerous rival; and practical reasons which make people prefer Anglo-American to any

Pioneers oj Language Planning 479

artificial interlanguage, however wisely conceived, wifi inevitably check ^iy bid to supersede the Anglo-American dictionary. Simplified English, whether Basic or Iret, Swensen or Aiken-not to mention more to come— can scarcely aspire to be other than a passport to the more amp e territory of the great English-speaking community, and a safe-conduct to its rich treasury of technical literature.

. T° tbese “elusions it is reasonable to add another. No artificial mterlanguage movement sponsored by voluntary effort can hope to swamp the claims of Anglo-American in the East. Thus our hopes for a neutral constructed language stand or fall with the prospects for a Europe muted by a democratic constitution based on intelligent pre¬ vision of linguistic problems which democratic co-operation must surmount. The choice before us may be settled for many decades to come by historical circumstances over which we have no control. If historical circumstances do allow us to cast our vote, it will be supremely important to recognize the implications of a decision in favour of Anglo-American or of a new start in language -planning.

If advocates of constructed languages have been peculiarly blind to the intrinsic merits of Anglo-American, those who champion its claims as a world-auxiliary have been equally deaf to its extrinsic disabilities.

hough Anglo-American is not a national language, it is not a politi- cally neutral language. If a victorious alliance of the English-speaking people attempts to make it the official medium of a united Europe, its use will make the British nation a Herrmvolk. It will perpetuate all the discords which arise when one speech-community enjoys a privileged position m the cultural and social life of a larger group. There is only one basis of equality on which nations can co-operate in a peaceful world order without the frictions which arise from linguistic differences.

A new European order, or a new world order in which no nation enjoys favoured treatment will be one in which every citizen is bilingual, as Welsh or South African children are brought up to be bilimmai The common language of European or world citizenship must be the birth¬ right of everyone, because the birthright of no one.

History has not yet given its verdict. It may not be too late to fore¬ stall disasters of a maladroit decision. For that reason the last chapter of The Loom of Language will deal with principles which must dictate a wholly satisafactory solution of the world-language problem. Whatever final decision blind fate or intelligent prescience imposes on the future of the most widely distributed and the only talking animal 0n this planet, this much is clear. The efforts of the pioneers of language-

480 The Loom of Language

planning and the work of men like Ogden will not have been for nothing. Ogden’s principle of word-economy- must influence the design of any satisfactory artificial language of the future. Some features of the later interlanguages5 such as Jespersen’s and Peano’s* will inevitably influence the teaching of Anglo- American^ if it is destined to be the auxiliary language of the whole world.

FURTHER READING

COUTURAT

GUERAKD

JESPERSEN

LOCKHART

OGDEN

PANKHURST

Histoire de la langue universelle.

A Short History of the International Language Movement .

An International Language,

Word Economy.

Basic English versus the Artificial Languages. Delphos or the Future of Language.

CHAPTER XII

LANGUAGE PLANNING FOR A NEW ORDER*

As far as we pan see into the future, there will always be a multiplicity of regional languages for everyday use. Those who advocate the intro¬ duction of an international medium do not dispute this. What they do assert is the need for a second language as a common medium for people who speak mutually unintelligible tongues. They envisage a world, or at least federations of what were once sovereign States, where people of different speech communities would be bilingual Everyone would still grow up to speak one or other of existing national languages, but everyone would also acquire a single auxiliary for supra-national communication. This prospect is not incompatible with the mental capacities of ordinary human beings; nor does it involve a total break with existing, practice. Bilingualism exists already in Wales, Belgium, South Africa and many other parts. Throughout the English-speaking world all secondary-school children study at least one foreign language, that is, French, Spanish, or German; and in some countries pupils who leave school with a smattering of a foreign language are in the majority.

In Britain they are not. Most of the children enter the labour market with a knowledge of no language other than their own.' Consequently mhhons of adult workers are excluded from direct communication with their continental comrades. Postponement of the school-leaving age will provide an opportunity for bringing the curriculum for ele¬ mentary instruction in Britain into line with that of many other coun¬ tries. Thus the adoption of an international auxiliary implies no more than regularization of existing educational practice, i.e. universal instruction in a second language and agreement to use one and the same second language everywhere. Creation of conditions for uniformity of educational practice by international agreement, as a prelude to universal bi-lingualism, as defined above, is not a language problem. It is a political problem.

* The views expressed in this chapter are the outcome of joint discussion between the author and the editor. The latter has attempted to give them shape in a project, Interglossa, which has been published by Penguin Books Ltd.

Q

482 The Loom of Language

Many well-informed people still doubt whether the social need for a single universal second language will prove strong enough to over¬ ride human laziness. At first sight the plight of modem language teaching in Great Britain and elsewhere lends some support to pessi¬ mism. Hitherto our schools have produced poor results. After years of travail the British public school product may have mastered enough French to get in Paris what Paris is only too willing to sell without French. This need not make us hopeless. Any society ripe for adopt¬ ing an Interlanguage will be faced with a new set of problems. Pupils who now take French or German as school subjects , rarely have a clear-cut idea of the purpose for which they are learning them, and more rarely still, the chance of using what knowledge they acquire. The future is likely to provide incentives and opportunities hitherto unknown. Fantastic delays, misunderstandings and waste due to the absence of a single common language for international co-operation will impress even those who are not knowingly affected by it at present.

A hundred years ago, Europe witnessed perhaps less than a dozen international congresses in the course of a whole decade. Delegates were invariably drawn from the upper class. So communication was easy enough. Deliberations were in French. When international con¬ gresses became more numerous, they assumed a more gaudy linguistic character. Consequently procedure had often to be conducted in two or more Official” languages. One could choose delegates who were able to compete with the polyglot attendant of an international sleeping-car, but the delegate with the best linguistic equipment would rarely be one with the best understanding of relevant issues. This obstacle to international communication becomes more formidable as time goes on. People of new strata and more diverse speech habits discover community of interest, and no single language enjoys the prestige of French during the eighteenth century.

In short, the prospects for language planning depend on the extent to which the impulse to international co-operation keeps in step with the new potential of prosperity for all.. Socialist planning, that is planning for the common needs of peoples belonging to different nations or cultural units, will bring about incessant contact between medical officers of health, town-planning experts, electrical engineers, social statisticians, trade-union representatives. Increased leisure combined with improved travelling facilities will give to a large floating section of the population opportunities to establish new social contacts through the medium of an Interlanguage; and its adoption '

Language Planning for a New Order 483

would find a ready ally in the radio. Even those who stay at home perpetually, would be tempted to avail themselves of opportunities to learn more of large-scale social enterprise in neighbouring communities

of the supra-national State.

The choice for those of us who cherish this hope lies between a constructed language and an already established medium, either in its existing shape or in some simplified form, such as Basic English The second involves nothing more than agreement between educational authorities expressing the will of the people. On account of its gram¬ matical simplicity, its hybrid vocabulary, its vast literature, and, above all, its wide distribution over the planet, the claims of Anglo-American would undoubtedly exclude those of any other current language which could conceivably have a large body of promoters in the near future; but political objections to such a choice are formidable. It is most unlikely that a socialist Continent would decide for Anglo-American as its interlanguage if Britain remained hostile to the new order The chances might improve if a Britain free of its imperial incubus entered into close co-operation with its neighbours next door to build up a world without class, war and want. Even so there is much to say for the adoption of a neutral medium cleansed from the all too evident defects of existing natural language

Some linguists meet the plea for a constructed auxiliary with the assertion that language is a product of growth. It is less easy to detea the relevance than to recognize the truth of this assertion. Admittedly it is beyond human ingenuity to construa a Jive sky-lark, but the aeroplane has advantages which no flying animal possesses. Apple trees and gooseberry bushes are also produas of growth, and no reasonable man or woman advances this trite reflection as sufficient reason for preventing geneticists from producing new varieties of fruit by com¬ bining inherited merits of different strains or allied species. The work accomplished by pioneers of the science of synthetic linguistics shows that it is also possible to produce new language varieties combining the inherent merits of different forms of natural speech. In the light of their achievements and shortcomings we can now prescribe the essential features of a constructed language which would be free from the con¬ spicuous defeas of any natural, or of any previously ' construaed language. ’

Professional linguists, who do not dispute the possibility of construc¬ ting a language to meet the requirements of international communica¬ tion, sometimes raise another objection. They say that the adventure

484 The Loom of Language

would be short-lived, if ever attempted; that no auxiliary could remain intact for long. Even if confined to the territory of Europe itself, it would split into dialects. Each speech community would locally impose its own phonetic habits and its own system of stress; and the Tower of Babel would come crashing down on the builders. Only a perpetual succession of international congresses could thus prevent a new disaster. Such is the gloomy view which Professor Wyld of Oxford takes. There are three sufficient reasons why it need not intimidate us.

To begin with there is nothing inherently absurd in a suggestion for setting up a permanent interlinguistic commission to check the process of disintegration. For three centuries the forty immortals of the Academe Frangaise have tried, not without success, to keep literary French in a straight-jacket; and Norway has changed its spelling and grammar by three Acts of Parliament in less than forty years. If national governments can control the growth of national languages, an inter¬ national authority could also maintain, an accepted standard for its own medium of communication. Though international committees to supervise scientific terminology, e.g. the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, are already in existence, our universities cling to the conviction that intelligent language planning on a world wide scale is out of the question.

By the nature of their training academic linguists are unduly pre¬ occupied with times when few people could travel beyond a day’s journey on horseback or by cart, when reading and writing, like steno¬ graphy to-day, were .crafts confined to a few, when there were no mechanical means for distributing news or information. It is true that languages' have broken up' time and again in the past, because of dis¬ persion over a wide area, geographical isolation, absence -of a written standard and other disintegrating agencies. Those who entertain the hope of international communication by an auxiliary envisage a future in which these agencies will no longer operate. Indeed, we have experi¬ ence to sustain a more hopeful view than is customary in aradpmir quar¬ ters. During the centuries which have followed the introduction of printing, the gradual dissolution of illiteracy, and revolutionary changes in our means of communication, English has established itself as the language of North America and of Australasia. It is not true to say that the three main continental varieties of the common Anglo-American language are drifting further apart. It is probably more true to say that universal schooling, the film, and the radio are bringing them closer together. In any case, experience shows that geographical isola-

Language Planning for a New Order 485

tion during several centuries has not made the speech of New England unintelligible to people in Old England, or vice versa. Experience should therefore encourage, rather than discourage, us in pressing for an international auxiliary.

The primary desiderata of an international auxiliary are two. First, it must be an efficient instrument of communication, embracing both the simple needs of everyday life and the more exacting ones of techni- cal discussion. Secondly, it must be easy to learn, whatever the home language of the beginner may be. To be an efficient instrument of communication it must be free from ambiguities and uncertainties arising from grammatical usage or verbal definition. The vocabulary must be free from duplication and unnecessary over-lapping. It must shun all that is of purely regional importance. The design of it can turn for guidance to two diverse sources, the pioneer-work of Ogden, and recognition of defects which vocabularies of hitherto con¬ structed languages share with natural speech. We can best see what characteristics make it easy to learn a constructed language if we first ask what features of natural languages create difficulties for the be¬ ginner. Difficulties may arise from a variety of causes: structural irregularities, grammatical complexities of small or no functional value, an abundance of separate words not essential for communication, un- familiarity with word-forms, difficulty of pronunciation or auditory recognition of certain sounds or sound-groups, and finally conventions of script.

Progress of comparative linguistics and criticism provoked by suc¬ cessive projects for a constructed auxiliary have considerably clarified these difficulties during the past fifty years. Consequently there is a wide field of general agreement concerning the essential features of satisfactory design. Though several interlanguages still claim a handful of enthusiastic supporters, it is probably true to say that most people who now advocate an artificial language approach the prospect with a ready ear for new proposals. The plethora of projects touched on in the preceding chapter should not make us despair of unanimity. On the contrary, failure brings us nearer to accord. As Jespersen remarks in the beginning of his book on his own constructed auxiliary (. Novial ):

All recent attempts show an unmistakable family likeness, and may be termed dialects of one and the same type of international language. This shows that just as bicycles and typewriters are now nearly all of the same type, which was not the case with the earlier makes, we are now in the matter of interlanguage approaching the time when one standard

486

The Loom of Language

type can be feed authoritatively in such a way that the general structure

SfssiSySf ”w woris ^ °f

This family likeness will become increasingly apparent in what follows. We shall now examine principles of design with due regard to the measure of agreement to which Jespersen draws attention and to later issues which have emerged, more especially from discussion of riie merits and defects of simple English. One of the conspicuous defects of Anglo-American in its present form is the difficulty men¬ tioned at the end of the last paragraph but one. Its script, particularly the spelling of its inherited stock of monosyllables, has become well- mgh ideographic; and this is the most striking difference between any orm of authentic English and any modem constructed language. All advocates of a constructed international auxiliary agree that it must have consistent, simple, straightforward spelling rules, based on the use of the Roman alphabet. Since existing languages such as Italian, Spanish, and Norwegian furnish models of orderly behaviour, there has never been any practical difficulty about prescribing a system of phonetic spelling. A representative international committee of experts entrusted with the task of -laying the foundations of a constructed wor d-auxiliary would waste few days in reaching agreement about its spelling conventions.

Spelling raises only one outstanding issue for discussion. Consistent spelling may mean either or both of two proposals: (a) that every sound has one symbol and one only; ( b ) that every symbol stands for a single sound. To insist too rigorously on the first has a disadvantage touched on m Chapter II. Different languages have different conven¬ tions of alphabetic script, and the imposition of a rule one

sound to one symbol alone would therefore mutilate otherwise family roots beyond easy recognition. For example, we should not recognize the root chrom- in panchromatic or polychrome as easily if we spelt it with an initial k, and the retention of two symbols for some sounds,

e.g. CH or K for k, would not appreciably add to the diffimlnVc 0f learning.

essential grammar

It is also safe to say that grammar no longer provides much fuel for controversy among interlinguists. We have moved far since the days of Volapuk; and the main outlines of an international grammar are now ear enough. The reader of The Loom of Language no longer needs to

Language Planning for a New Order 487

be told that the multiplication of word forms by flexions is foremost among obstacles to learning a language. In Chapters III, V* X, XI* we have seen that the difficulties are of two sorts ,*

(i) Some flexions (e.g. gender* number accord between noun and

adjective) have no semantic value at all and their existence is an arbitrary imposition on the memory;

(it) Even when meaningful* flexions which do the same type of work

may show widely different forms.

Thus language-planners meet on common ground in recognizing that a satisfactory auxiliary must have: (a) no useless flexions; (b) regw* lanty of what flexions it retains.,. About what constitutes regularity advocates of a constructed language do not differ. To say that flexion must be regular means that if we retain a plural* we must form the plural of all nouns in the same way; if we retain a past tense every verb must take the same past tense affix. In short: a single pattern of conjugation a single pattern of declension . To the extent that this measure of agreement exists* any constructed language offers fewer grammatical obstacles to a beginner than do such languages as French* Russian* or German.

Unanimity with reference to what flexions are useful has come about slowly; and is not yet complete. At the time when Volapiik. and Espe¬ ranto took shape* and long after* planners were enthusiastic amateurs blinded by peculiarities of European languages they knew best. Nine-^ teenth-century linguists made the same assumptions as nineteenth- century biologists. They took for granted that what exists necessarily has a use. Awareness of the -universal drift from fiexional luxuriance towards analytical simplicity in the history of Aryan languages was not yet part of their intellectual equipment. None of them recognized the many similarities between English* which has travelled furthest on the road* and Chinese* which consists wholly of unchangeable in¬ dependently mobile root words. Professional philologists* who could have enlightened tliem* were not interested in constructive linguistics.

In this setting it was a bold step to sacrifice gender or mood; and the accepted grammatical goal seemed to be a language of the aggluti¬ native type illustrated (Chapter V) by Turkish* Hungarian* or Japanese.

# ^e^ectual impediments to a more iconoclastic attitude were con¬ siderable* and we need not be surprised by the tenacity with which earlier pioneers clung to grammatical devices discarded by their

The Loom of Language

488

successors. The history of case illustrates their difficulties. Since the Reformation, generations of schoolboys have been drilled to submit to mstruction which assumes a universal subject-order distinction faith¬ fully reflecting something in the real world. Since the grammatical sub¬ ject is often the actor or agent which initiates the process specified bv the verb, and the grammatical object is often the victim or goal, a judi¬ cious choice of illustrations (e.g. the teacher punishes the boy), presented at an impressionable age makes it easy to implant the suggestion that this is always so. If the teacher acts in accordance with the last example dns bestows the reassuring conviction that there is a simple rule tor choice of the nominative or accusative case-form of a T.atjn 0r Greek noun. The pupil in whom. the teacher has firmly implanted this suggestion wifi overlook the fact that the grammatical subject is not the agent which initiates the seeing process in I see Mm ; and is not likely to worry about the fact that the grammatical object is what really does so. In such situations the pupil still applies the rule correctly, because the nominative-accusative forms of the T-atin noun t y with our own useof /— me and he— him. In this way we come to accept local likeness of speech habits as a universal necessity of discourse.

nterlmguists started, like the comparative philologists, with the handicap of a load of misconceptions inherent in traditional methods o teaching Greek or Latin. It has taken us long to recognize that case can be as useless as gender, and we are only beginning to see that -no flexional device is an* essential vehicle of ludd expression. While everyone concedes that a roundabout turn is preferable to passive flexion, most mterlinguists still cling to the flexional plural and the flexional past. Thus it is common ground that a world-auxiliary must be at least as isolating as English. Indeed, there is a close family like¬ ness between Novial and English, each with a hybrid vocabulary of Koman£e and Teutonic roots.

In short, what has happened to the flexional systems of the Aryan family during the past 2500 years of its known history has happened to the accepted pattern of an artificial inter-language during the past half-century. There has been a drift towards isolation. Jespersen recognizes the parallel. He bans the noun accusative terminal 0f Esperanto or Ido, as Zamenhof vetoed the dative of Volapiik, on the pound that it is out of step with linguistic evolution; and cites the fact that Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, English, Dutch, and Scandi¬ navia! anguages have scrapped it. By the same token we may be sceptical about the possessive case terminal which turns up in Novial.

Language Planning for a New Order 489

Absent in modem Romance languages, it is already vestigial in English,

and still more so in Dutch and in many German dialects. Number and tense are the only flexions which no Aryan language has completely discarded.

Unlike gender or the object-case category, flexion of number has a clear-cut meaning. Still it is not an indispensable device. We can always use a separate word to forestall doubt about whether the topic is one sheep or more than one sheep. Indeed it is wasteful to tack on a plural mark when the statement as a whole, or the presence of a qualifier such as all, many, several, five, make it clear that the word stands for more than one of a kind. To some extent, Turkish recognizes such uneconomical behaviour. The Turkish noun drops the plural affix {-lar or -ler) when accompanied by a numeral, e.g. ev = house, evler = houses, dort ev = four houses. The same usage occurs in German, but remains in a very rudimentary stage, e.g. drei Mann.

Similar remarks apply to tense . We express plurality once and com¬ pleted action once, and both explicitly, when we say: two deer cut through the thicket yesterday. We express plurality twice and completed action twice when we say two rabbits escaped yesterday. The flexion does nothing which the numeral two has not already done. The flexion " ed does only what the particle yesterday does more explicitly. We can use the singular form of the noun in a collective or generic sense with¬ out the slightest danger of misunderstanding for instance, when we say in French le lapin esf bon marche {rabbit is cheap). Context is often sufficient to safeguard the distinction between singular and plural, past or present. When it is not, we can fall back on an appropriate numeral, pointer-word, or particle of time.

One serious objection to flexion as a functional device is that fami¬ liarity breeds contempt. By too often using a fiexional form in a context which makes it redundant we become careless about its meaning. This process of semantic erosion has not gone far enough to make the plural flexion a positive nuisance, but clear functional outlines of tense dis¬ tinction* have been blurred in many languages, including Kngtfch (P-*° 3)*

Thus there is no formidable argument for retaining any flexional frills in a constructed language, designed with due regard to the needs of the Chinese, Japanese, and other non-Aryan speech communities to which our own flexional system is alien and confusing. In any case, a plural form of the noun and a past form of the verb are the only two likely to find any large body of supporters among interlinguists other

Q*

490

The Loom of Language

than fanatical adherents of Esperanto. A constructed auxiliary now desigied in the light of defects and merits of previous proposals wodd therefore be almost, if not quite, as free of flexions as Chinese or Peano s Interlingua. This leaves us with the following question. Would it be also free from other types of word-modification? An international language would not be practicable if it fisted as many words as the Concise Oxford Dictionary or Webster. Our limited learning capacities demand something more economical. So there is another need for which the planner has to cater. Apart from being economical, the vocabulary must allow for expansion made necessary by the incessant emergence of new articles, inventions, and

Many pioneers of language planning have tried to lull two birds with one stone by composing a restricted set of basic or root words from winch other words can be derived by a rich battery of prefixes and suffixes. They do what we do when we derive bookish from book, or systematize from system. Till now the prevailing attitude towards such envative affixes has been on all fours with the attitude of Schleyer Zamenhof, and Jespersen towards flexions. They have been less critical of their functional importance than of their erratic behaviour. For mstance, the Esperanto suffix -EC for the abstract idea is an incitement to people the world with new fictions comparable to the definition of ove as the ideality of the relativity of the reality of an infinitesimal portion of the absolute totality of the Infinite Being.

Irregularities, formal and functional, of English derivative affixes are ypical of other Aryan languages. The prefix, re- may, and often does, connote repetition when attached to a new word; but it is quite lifeless m receive, regard, respect. The negative prefixes un-, in-, im-, irr- attach themselves to a root without regard to phonetic or philological e queue, as m unable-impossible, inert— unconscious, insensitive— irresponsible The Teutonic suffixes -dom, -ship and -head ox -hood turn up in abstract nouns of the same general class (wisdom— friendship, or sip fatherhood). If we tack on -er to some verb roots we get a member of the agent class represented by fisher, writer, reader, teacher, manufacturer. We may also get a means of transport (steamer) or a com¬ partment in one ( smoker , sleeper). To all these irregularities we have to add those inherent in borrowed Latin roots which contain such uncer- in pre es as e~ or ex-y and zVz-3 the last of which may signify either enclosure (insert) or negation (innocuous). Clearly a language with a regular system of derivative affixes for such clear-cut categories as

Language Planning far a New Order 491

repetition , occupation, negation. , etc., would be free from one obstacle which confronts anyone who sets out to leatn one of the existing Aryan

languages.

This advantage does not meet the objection: are such derivative affixes really necessary? To do justice to it we must distinguish between

different classes of derivative affixes. One class may be called semantic or meaningful. The affix either modifies the meaning of the root to which it is attached or does the work of a compound formation. Clear- ■ cut qualifying affixes such as those which express repetition, negation, precedence, etc., merely usurp the function of necessary mobile items already on the word list. Thus to re-state is to state again, porf-natal means after birth, to traa-judge, means to judge wrongly, and the man in bake-man could do as much work as the accretion -er in baker. Compotmds such as textile workers, steel workers, wood workers, etc., are admittedly longer than words of the fisher, writer, baker class, but postman, milkman, iceman, dustman, dairyman show that compounds made from independent words need not be more long-winded than derivatives. By using derivative affixes of the Esperanto or Novial type we add a new burden to learning without much gain of space or any additional clarity.

Afiffies of the other dps merely label the grammatical behaviour of a word. Thus the -dam in wisdom or the -ment in arrangement respec¬ tively endow an attribute which would otherwise behave as an adjective, or a process which would otherwise behave as a verb, with the gram¬ matical prerogatives of a thing. For instance, we can speak of wisdom m contradistinction to wise, as it, and we can put the article a or the, which never stand immediately in front of arrange, before arrangement This shunting disguises the fact that wisdom remains within the adjec¬ tival world and means nothing more than wise behaviour. Some inter¬ languages carry this much further, having a spetial affix for each of the parts of speech.

At first sight there seems to be little in favour of this device A plausible excuse is that there is a rough and ready, if far from perfect, correspondence between parts of speech in an Aryan language and the three pigeon-holes into which we squeeze the physical world. Although we meet many exceptions to any functional definite 0f ^ parts of speech, it is approximately true to say that a noun-labd usually points to what is thing or person, an adjective-label to what is a pro¬ perty, a verb label to what is action in a statement. Such affixes there¬ fore give the beginner a due to the lay-out of a sentence which contains

492 The Loom of Language

unfamiliar words. They are sign-posts of sentence landscape. To that extent they lighten the task of spotting the meaning. ■

One reply to this is that isolating languages or near-isolating lan¬ guages which have no (or few) labels to mark what are the parts of speech in a flexional language can use other devices for guiding us through the sentence landscape. Four examples from our own language illustrate them: (a) the articles label an object with or without accom¬ panying attributes; ( b ) the pronoun usually labels the succeeding word as a verb in the absence of any flexional marks on the latter; (c) the copula is, are, was, were separates the thing or person from what the' statement predicates; (d) without recourse to the adverb terminal -ly the insertion of and in fast and sinking ship makes it dear that fast does not qualify sinking. All these examples imply the existence of dcfinim word-order. Rules of word-order, with whatever safeguards such particles as of, the, and other literally empty words provide, constitute all the grammar of a language, if its vocabulary consists exclusively of unchangeable independently mobile elements.

Since interlinguists now lean far towards the isolating pattern we might expect satisfactory rules of word-order to be a threadbare theme. This is far from true. In the Key to, and Primer of. Interlingua for instance, the subject is dealt with and dismissed in a few sentences’ the first of which contrives to state the truth upside down •

The order of words in Interlingua presents no great difficulties grammar and inflection having been reduced to a minimum it js so’ nearly similar to the English order of words that one may safely follow Sj "“fr* fear <**** misunderstood or beffig too^Sj

In fact, no author of a project for a constructed auxiliary has paid much attention to this problem, and those who advocate simple methods of teaching Anglo-American with a view to its use as an international imguage are singularly silent about the pitfalls into which the vagaries of Enghsh word-order can lure the beginner. These vagaries illustrate some of the issues involved in designing satisfactory rules.

While it is true that Anglo-American usage favours the method of grouping together what is thought of together, there is no uniformity about placing the qualifying expression immediately before or imme¬ diately after what it qualifies. Thus we place the qualifier enough in front of the word it qualifies in enough fat sheep and behind in fat enough sheep. Neither is consistent with more common procedure, the first because enough is not immediately in front of the sheep it

Language Planning for a New Order 493

qualifies, the second because it follows and qualifies the word fat. Unless we have some fiexional mark such as the much-abused English -ly to label the adverb as qualifier of the succeeding adjective, a rigid rule concerning the position of two qualifiers is the only way of showing if one qualifies the other or both may qualify a third. English has rigid rules of word-order, but the rules are not simple. For every combina- tion of a particular adverb of place with a particular adverb of time usage is fixed, but no straight-forward regulation of precedence in favour of one or the other covers all cases.

A constructive conclusion which emerges from the preceding dis¬ cussion is the need for a comparative study of word-order both as a safeguard of meaning and asjan aid to ready recognition. At present we have little material evidence to guide a decision about: (a) the advan- tages of pre- and post- position of directives or qualifiers; (h) the most satisfactory way of distinguishing which word is qualified by each of a sequence of qualifiers; (c) how best to express interrogation, iq speech and in script; (d) what latitude of word-order for purpose of emphasis is consistent with clarity and ease of recognition; (e) what empty words are necessary sign-posts of sentence landscape. These are themes to clarify before the grammar of an interlanguage pruned of fiexional irrelevance and redundancy assumes a firm outline.

In this and other ways, a more sympathetic attitude toward the need for a constructed auxiliary would open fields of enquiry which have been neglected by linguists in the past. Because they accept languages as products of growth our scholars have for too long sacrificed the study of functional efficiency to the task of recording what is irregular, irrational, and uneconomical in speech. A more lively interest in lan- page planning would direct their efforts towards new tasks. One which is of special importance has been formulated by Edward Sapir in International Communication:

It is highly desirable that along with the practical labour of getting wider recognition of the international language idea, there go hand in hand comparative researches which aim to lay bare the logical structures that are inadequately symbolized in our present-day languages, in order that we may see more clearly than we have yet been able to see how much of psychological insight and logical rigour have been and can be expressed in linguistic form. One of the most ambitious and important tasks that can be undertaken is the attempt to work out the relation between logic and usage in a number of national and constructed languages, in order that the eventual problem of adequately symbolizing thought may be seen as the problem it still is.

(Edward Sapir, in International Communication.)

494

The boom of Language

AN INTERDICTIONARY

Among the many pioneers who have put forward proposals for a constructed interlanguage, few have undertaken the task of giving to a skeleton of grammar the flesh and bones of a full-fledged vocabulary. Its execution brings us face to face with the two major HiffimltiVc 0f memorizing a vocabulary, i.e. unfamiliarity with the auditory or visual shape of words, and superfluity of separate forms. Elimination of unnecessary items came to the fore in the classificatory projects of Dalgamo and of Wilkins; and it has once more become a live issue owing to the popularity of Ogden’s method for teaching and using a simplified yet acceptable form of Anglo-American. Between the publi¬ cation of the Real Character of Wilkins an<! the Meaning of Meaning by Ogden and Richards* no author of a constructed language has come to pips with the problem of word wastage. Those who have not shirked the labopr of constructing a lexicon have invariably concentrated on the more immediate and inescapable problem of word-form. Thus Peano’s Interlingua accepts the entire bulk of English words derived from Latin.

To reduce the mnemonic burden of language-learning to a minimum^ it is essential to work with familiar materials, i.e. with roots takpn from existing languages. Most of the languages hitherto constructed pay lip-service to this principle, so stated; but there is less unanimity about the best way of choosing familiar material, i.e. a stock of roots with wide international currency. Indeed, there has been much confusion between two issues— -proportional representation of different speech- communities in the total stock-in-trade of roots, and widest possible mtemanonal currency of each individual root.

Up to date no one has consistently followed either plan. Out-and-out application of an eclectic solution, on an international scale, would suffice to demonstrate its inherent absurdity. A vocabulary drawn from Teutonic, Romance, Slavonic, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Indian vernaculars, Mongolian, Polynesian, and Bantu dialects, with due regard to the size of each contributory speech community would be largely foreign to the eye and ear of individuals belonging to any major one ; and tt would contain scarcely a trace of roots familiar to individuals using dialects of a small one. The add test of basing choice on a count of heads has never been carried out. The pioneers of language plan- mug have been Europeans primarily concerned with the needs of travel, commerce, and technics. Their outlook has been limited by

Language Planning for a New Order 495

requirements and difficulties of nations within the pale of Western civilization. So their first concern has been to accommodate the Haim. of countries where official speech is a language of the Teutonic and Romance groups. Within this framework compromise leads to a hybrid vocabulary very much like that of English. This shows up in comparison of a random sample of English words and their equivalents in Jespersen’s Novial:

NOVI AL

danka (Teutonic) demands (Romance) dentiste (Romance) dilti (Teutonic) dishe (Teutonic) , distribu (Romance) dome (Teutonic)

Ihere is a further objection 'to the edectic principle. A few5 yet by no means isolated., examples suffice to illustrate what 'it is. A Frenchman

or an Italian . win link up the root alt - with altitude (French) and altura (Italian)* suggesting height. The German will recall Ms own alt (old) and go wrong. The Italian or Spaniard will at once recognize the root calid- in the Italian word caldo and Spanish caliente , both meaning hot,

A German is more likely to associate it with halt (cold). Even if he is a student of Latin or familiar with such words as Kalorie or Kalorimeter, a language based on a mixture of Romance and Teutonic materials will supply no clue to the correct meaning. Clearly, there is only one way of getting over the difficulties arising from unfamiliar material and of making a vocabulary with roots which readily suggest their mwnW to men and women of different nationalities. Our first concern should be to choose roots present in words which people of different nations use.

Is this plan practicable? It is possible to answer this question without going to the trouble of making statistical word-counts in difiprww languages. The impact of scientific discovery on human society has affected our speech, as it has affected other social habits. Though a few speech communities in Europe, notably Iceland and to a lesser Germany and Holland, have shut their ears to the growing stock of internationally current terms for machinery, instruments, electrical appliances and manufactured products, the vocabulary of modem technics is equally the word material of the U.S.A. and of the U.S.S.R., of modem Iran and of Italy. It is already invading the Far

ENGLISH

to thank to demand

dentist

thick

dish

distribute

thorn

v

49*> The Loom of Language

East and must do so more and more, if China and Tndia emerge from their present miseries as free and modernized societies.

The world-wide and expanding lexicon of modem technics follows the dictates of international scientific practice. It grows by combination of roots drawn almost exclusively from two languages — Greek and Latin. To the extent that the lexicon of many projects, e.g. Esperanto Ido, Occidental, Novial, is largely or, like Romanal and Peano’s Interlingua, almost exclusively based on material of recognizably Latin origin, all recent interlanguages display the family likeness to which Jespersen refers in the passage quoted above. In fact they do include a considerable proportion of words based on roots which individually enjoy a high measure of international currency.

The international vocabulary of technics contains a large proportion of Latin roots; but Greek has furnished for a long time the. basis of the majority of new scientific words. For instance, the new terminology which Faraday and his successors designed for the description of electro-chemical phenomena is exclusively derived from Greek roots, as in: electrolyte, electrode, cathode, anode, cation, anion, and ion. Yet the Greek contribution to the . vocabulary of languages hitherto constructed has been small. Indeed the Concise Oxford Dictionary has a far higher proportion (p. 1 6) of Greek roots than any hitherto constructed language. If interlinguists utilize them at all, they confine themselves to those assimilated by Latin. In short, none of the pioneers of language¬ planning has paid due regard to the profound revolution in scientific nomenclature which took place in the closing years of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Nor did they see the implications of a fact which disturbed the English philologist Bradley. The language of invention now becomes the idiom of the street comer before the lapse of a generation. Bradley gave expression to his alarm at this process of internationalization in words which the partisans of passed projects might well have heeded :

At present our English dictionaries are burdened with an enormous and daily increasing mass of scientific terms that are not Fngiicti at a u except in the form of their terminations and in the pronunciations in¬ ferred from their spelling. The adoption of an international language for science would bring about the disappearance of these monstrosities of un-English English _

' i ■ f

Partly because of the tempo of invention, partly because of more widespread schooling, partly because of the expanding volume of books and articles popularizing new scientific discoveries, this infil-

Language Planning for a New Order 497

nation of what Bradley was pleased to call abstruse words has increased enormously of recent years. Nineteenth-century interlinguists with a conventional literary training and outlook could scarcely foresee a time when schoolboys would chatter about heterodyne outfits* periscopic sights* or stratosphere flying as light-heartedly as they had discussed kites* marbles* or tuck. Wherever there are petrol pumps and women’s journals with articles on modem standards of nutrition* anyone with a good school education — American or Russian* French or German — will recall and understand words compounded with thermo -* June hydro-, phon-, phot-, geo-, or ckromo-. The table on p. 498 illustrates neglect of this Greek building material in favour of the Latin one. The first column lists some 40 Greek bricks which frequently appear in international words; the second and third exhibit Esperanto and Novial words which have basically the same meaning as the Greek element in the first column. With the exception of a few marked by an asterisk* all of them are of Romance origin. The exceptions (other than tmkri = small) are neither Latin nor Greek.

Thus no existing project can claim to provide for maYtrrmm ease of recognition or memorization of vocabulary; but if no existing project is wholly satisfactory* it is not difficult to point to the basis of a better solution. What remains to be done is not an insurmountable task. The discovery of a common international denominator does not call for the elaborate and tedious word-counts which have occupied the efforts — and wasted the time — of some enthusiasts. We can start with the fact that a growing vocabulary of international terms is a by-product of the impact of scientific invention on modem society. Hence our first need is a classified synopsis of technical words which have filtered into the everyday speech of different language communities. These we can resolve into their constituent parts. We can then form a picture of which roots enjoy wide international circulation. The overwhelming majority will be Greek or Latin. For constructing an economical* yet adequate vocabulary there will be no lack of suitable building material.

What constitutes an adequate vocabulary in this sense enters into the problem of word-economy. For the present it suffices to say that an international vocabulary need cater only for communication within the confines of our common international culture. Commerce and travel have equipped us with such words as sugar, bazaar , samovar, sultanas, fjord, cafe, skis, and there is no reason why an international language should not take from each nation or speech community those words which describe their own specific .amenities and institutions.

49^ The Loom of Language

GREEK ELEMENT	ESPERANTO	novial
hetero	different	heterosexual	difera	diferenci
homo	same	homosexual	same*	sami*
iso	equal	isosceles	egala	egali
micro	small	microscope	malgranda	mikri*
mono	alone* single monoplane	sola	soli
neo	new	neolithic	nova	novi
palaeo	old	palaeology	malnova	oldi*
pan	all	• panchromatic	tuta	toti
poly	many	polygamous	multa	multi
pseudo	false	pseudonym	malvera	falsi
therm	heat	thermometer	varma*	varmi*
derma	skin	dermatitis	hauto*	pele
hypno	sleep	hypnosis	dormo	dormio
chron	time	chronometer	tempo	tempo
chrom	colour	chromosome	koloro	kolore
tele	distance	television	malproksima	distanti
erg	work	allergic	laboro	labore
demo	people	democracy	popolo	popule
bio	life	biology	vivo	vivo
physi	nature	physiology	nature	nature
krati	government	autocracy	rego	regiro
kosmo	world	cosmopolitan	mondo	monde
helio	sun	heliotropic	suno*	sune*
morph	form	morphology	formo	forme
astr	star	astronomy	stelo	stele
phon	sound	phonetics	sono	suone
geo	earth	geology	tero	tere
hydr	water	hydrodynamics	akvo	hidra
anthrop	man	anthropology	viro	viro
gyne	woman	gynaecology	virino	fema
akoust	hearing	acoustics	audi	audi
graph	writing	telegraph	skribi	skripte
skop	seeing	telescope	vidi	vide
kine	moving	kinetic	movi	mova
ball	throwing	ballistics	. jeti	lansa
phob	fearing	xenophobia	timi	tima
phil	loving	philately	ami	ama
game	marrying	polygamy	edzigo*	mariteso
phag	eating	phagocyte	mangi	manja
mnemo	remembering mnemonic	memori	memora

An analysis of the geographical distribution of roots derived from scientific and technical terms, such as telegraph , megaphone, micro-

Language Planning for a New Order 499

meter, microscope, cyclostyle , thermoplastics , will certainly reveal wide international currency of some Latin and Greek roots of the same meaning. This prompts the question: which should we prefer? If one enjoys much wider distribution than the other, we should generally decide in its favour; but if the difference is not great we might take into consideration other criteria of merit For instance, the existence of a Latin and a Greek root with the same meaning would enable us to avoid homophones. Thus the Latin syllable sol is common to solar, solitary, solitude, and solstice. While there is no equally common Greek root to suggest the meaning of alone, there is the suggestive helio of heliograph, helium, perihelion, heliotropism, and other technical words for the sun. We can therefore keep sol for alone and take helio for the sun. Many Latin words which are international, at least in the European and American sense, have widely divergent meanings in different countries. By substituting Greek for Latin we could avoid possible misunderstanding. For instance, the French word conscience is often equivalent to our word consciousness, and the German praises somebody for being consistent by applying the epithet konsequent. Another criterion which might well influence our decision will come up for discussion later on. We can also take into account the relative ease with which it is possible for people of different tongues to pronounce a Latin root or its Greek equivalent.

The raw materials of our lexicon will be: (a) a dual battery of cos¬ mopolitan Latin and Greek roots ; (b) a list of the necessary items which make up an adequate vocabulary for ordinary communication. We then have all the data from which a representative body could prescribe the details of a satisfactory interlanguage. If free from gram¬ matical irrelevandes, people of moderate intelligence and a secondary school education should be able to read it with little previous instruc¬ tion and learn to write and speak it in far less time than any ethnic lan¬ guage requires. Admittedly, the intervocabulary outlined above would be almost exclusively Western in origin. But we need not fear that our Eastern neighbours will reject it for that reason. The word-invasion of medicine and engineering need not be a corollary of political oppres¬ sion and economic exploitation. Besides, Europe can say to China: I take your syntax, and you take my word,

WORD-ECONOMY

The next question which arises is: what words are essential? This is what C. K. Ogden and Miss L. W. Lockhart call the problem of word-

5°o The Loom of Language

economy. The expression word-economy may suggest two, if not three quite different notions to a person who meets it for the first time. One is ability to frame different statements, questions, or requests with the least number of different vocables. Another is ability to frame the same utterance in the most compact form, i.e. with the least number of vocables, different or otherwise. Economy of the first sort implies a minimum vocabulary of essential words. Economy of the second calls for a large vocabulary of available words. Since it is not difficult to multiply words, the fundamental problem of word economy from our viewpoint is how to cut down those which are not essential for self- expression. There remains a third and more primitive way in which economy may be achieved. We can save breath or space by contracting the volume of a word or word sequence, as in U.S.S.R. for Union of Socialist Soviet Republics , or Gestapo for Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police).

At first sight it may seem a hopeless task to construct a vocabulary that would cover all the essential needs of intercommunication, yet contain not more than, say, a thousand basic words. A modem news¬ paper assumes acquaintance with perhaps 20,000, and in the EngiicT, section of a very humble English-French pocket dictionary some 10,000 are listed. It requires no lengthy scrutiny to discover that a large portion of the material is not essential. A rationally constructed word list would discard many synonyms or near-synonyms, of which Anglo-American is chock-full, e.g. little— small, big— large, begin— commence. It need not tolerate such functional overlapping as band- ribbon— strip. It would also steer clear of over-specialization by making one Word do what in natural languages is often done by three or more. Thus the outer cover of the human body is called la peau in French, that of the onion lapelure, and that of the sausage la cotte. Though less fastidious than the French, we ourselves overburden the dictionary TOth the corresponding series skin-rind— jacket— peel. When we distinguish between thread — twine — cord — string — rope — tow we are

merely heaping name upon name for what is ultimately a difference in size.

Since our interlanguage pursues strictly utilitarian ends and seeks perfection in precision, it can do without some of the verbal gewgaws and falderals of poetic and “cultured” speech. There is no need to incorporate a large number of words to express subtleties of attitude. We could safely replace the existing plethora of vocables denoting approval or disapproval by a bare handful of names. But rejection

Language Planning for a New Order 501

of such would not keep us within the 1,000 word limit. We have to look elsewhere for help; and here we can apply with profit, if we apply it with temperance, the basic principle of Dalgamo’s Art of Symbols and Wilkins’ Real Character. All European languages have words which embrace the meaning of a group. Thus the general term clothes (with the bedfellows vesture, garment, apparel, dress) includes two main classes: under clothes including vest, shirt, knickers, petticoat,. and outer clothes including frock, skirt, trousers, coat. In the same way building covers school, theatre, prison, villa, hospital, museum, and drink or beverage includes non-alcoholic and alcoholic, to the latter of which we assign wine3 cider 5 heery whisky 3 gin.

A careful comparative investigation would probably reveal that modem English is far better equipped with words of the food, drink, container, instrument class than French or Spanish for instance. It is almost self-evident that classifying words of this sort must play an important part in the build-up of an economical vocabulary, because they enable us to refer to a maximum number of different things, operations, and properties with a minimum of separate names. In a given context or situation drink will usually deputize well ™n;1i for the more specific wine. It is also self-evident that there are limits to the use of master-key words, if we aim at excluding vagueness and ambi- guity. It is not enough to have a general word animal distinguishable as wild or domestic. In real life we need words for cat, cow, dog, horse, pig. So one important problem which confronts us is this: which animals, drinks, garments, etc., have claim to a place on a list of essential words? The answer is not quite simple. We would not Wmm to provide a special niche for wine, cow, shoe-, but can we ignore cider, bull, or brassiere ? Let us see how we can extricate ourselves from the diffi¬ culty of having no such words. One way is to choose a more general term and leave the rest to the situation. Another is to extract a defini¬ tion or use a substitution by juggling with material already to hand Thus we can define cider as a drink made from apples, a bull as the male of the cow, and a brassiere as support for the breasts.

At bottom word economy depends on judicious selection of general terms and descriptive periphrase for specific uses. With reference to what constitutes judicious selection we have to remember two things. Definition is often cumbersome, and the aptitude for pirtw 0ut features which make for identification in a given situation is the product of training. In short, the difficulty of fishing out an appropriate defini¬ tion may be much greater than the effort of memorizing an extra word.

502 The Loom of Language

Therefore it is a doubtful advantage to cut out single mines for things or processes to which we constantly refer. On the other han^ we can dearly dispense with separate names for an immense number of things and processes to which we do not continually refer; and the process of definition, when context calls , for closer definition, need not be as wordy as the idiom of English or other Aryan languages often pre- . scribes. Even within the framework of acceptable Anglo-American we can substitute apple-drink for cider and breast-support for brassiere without committing an offence against usage. Making compounds of this sort is not the same as exact definition, but definition need never be more fastidious than context requires. From a purely pedantic point of view lime water might stand for the water we sprinkle on the soil for the benefit of lime trees, but it is predse enough in any real context in which it might occur.

In general the combination of a generic name with another word as in lime water suffices to specify a particular object or process in a way which is easy to recall because suffiriently suggestive. Here Engli^ usage provides some instructive models. Ordinarily a house is a private residence, the sort of building to which we refer most often, but it is also thegeneric basis of alehouse, playhouse, greenhouse, poorhouse, bake¬ house. While it may be as difficult to construct a definition of a theatre as to learn a separate word for it, it is not easier to learn a new word than to recall a compound as explidt as playhouse, in which both elements are items of an essential vocabulary. Another model for the use of such generic words is the series handwear, footwear, neckwear , headwear. Clearly, we could reduce the size of our essential vocabulary by adopting the prindple of using such generic terms as -house, -wear -man, -land, for other dasses such as vessels, fabrics, filaments. With each generic term we could then learn suffidently suggestive couplets such as postman, highland, or handwear for use when context calls for additional information. Economical compounding of this sort involves two pnndples. First, the components must be elements of the basic minimum of essential words. Second, the juxtaposition of parts must sufficiently indicate the meaning. We cannot let metaphor have a free hand to prescribe such combinations as monkey nut, rubber neck, or waffle bottom. ’

How much licence we allow to metaphor in other directions is a matter of particular interest in relation to the merits and of

Basic English. There is no hard-and-fast line between metaphorical usage as in elastic demand and generic names such as elastic for rubberi

Language Planning for a New Order 503

and we cannot eliminate the use of suggestive metaphors which may point the way to unsuspected similarities. None the less,, we have to set some limit, and one is not hard to see. Our essential list should contain separate names for physical and personal or social attributes with as litde obvious connexion as the drought in dry goods and dry ku/nour . If we prescribe the same word sharp for a tooth, for a twinge, for a temper, and for a telling reply, we might as well replace all names of qualities by two vocables respectively signifying general approval and disapproval. this field of word choice the apparent economics of Basic English, as of Chinese, may raise our hopes unduly.

The dictionary of our ideal interlanguage would naturally list internationally current words such as cigarette, coffee, tram, bus, hotel, taxi, post, international, tobacco, soya, valuta. Fixation in print would have two advantages. It might discourage local differences of pronuncia¬ tion which lead to confusion between the French word coco, variously used as a term of endearment, for coconut or for cocaine, and the English wold cocoa. It might also promote international acceptance of a single word for such world-wide commodities as petrol (Engl.), gas (Amer.), essence (French), Benzin (Germ, and Swed.).

One important contribution of Ogden’s Basic to the problem of word economy in a constructed language is his treatment of the verb. The Basic equivalent of a verb is a general term {operator) and some qualifying word or expression. By combining the general notion of space change in go with another word or group of words we dispense with all the various names now restricted to particular types of trans¬ port, e.g. walk ~ go on foot, ride — go on a horse, or go on a bicycle, etc. By the same method we avoid the use of different names for par¬ ticular manners of moving, e.g. run = go very fast, wander = go from place to place without aim. We can also do without all causative- intransitive couplets which signify producing or acquiring a condition, by combining equivalents of make or get with one of the basic adjectives, e.g. increase = make or get bigger, clarify = make or get clear, accelerate = make or get faster. By combining 16 fundamental verb substitutes {come, get, give, go, keep, let, make, put, seem, take, he, do, have, say, see, send) with other essential items of the word list Basic English thus provides an adequate Ersatz for 4,000 verbs in common use.

Before Ogden devised the basic method of teaching English, pioneers of language-planning had paid scant attention to the minimum vocabu¬ lary required for effective communication. Consequently, the English pattern has stimulated as well as circumscribed subsequent discussion.

5°4 The Loom of Language

Though it is desirable to keep down the necessary minimum number of verbs by the same device, a constructed language could not advan¬ tageously incorporate equivalents of Ogden’s sixteen operators and use them in the same way. The word-economy of Basic is a word-economy that has to conform with a standard acceptable to educated English- speaking people. Otherwise we should be at a loss to justify the inclu¬ sion of come in a sixteen-verb catalogue already equipped with go. With due regard to the economies which are possible if we combine go, make, get, or equivalent “operators” with other basic elements, it is difficult to recognize some Basic combinations such as go on, make up get on as subspecies of single classes. In fact, they are idioms of standard Anglo-American usage. The beginner has to learn them as if they were separate items in a list of verbs.

This raises the possibility of including in our word list operators which have a wide range like make and get or give and take, but do not coincide with current Anglo-American usage. Some verb couplets are redundant because they express different general relations to the same state or process. Thus to give life is to bear, to take life is to kill, to get life is to be bom. So also to give instruction is to teach and to take (or get) instruction is to learn. To give credit is to lend and to get credit is to borrow. It is easy to see how we might make similar economies, if we had an everyday equivalent for the biological stimulus— response con¬ trast analogous to the acquisitive give— get. The word give sufficiently covers the operation of stimulating, but Basic offers nothing which expresses to make the response appropriate to implicit in the somewhat archaic heed. The addition of an operator with this functional value would explicitly dispense with the need for one member of such pairs as question— answer, information — interest, command — obedience, defeat

surrender, writing reading, buy — sell. Thus to answer is to make the response appropriate to a question and to obey is to heed a command.

Other possibilities of word economy in a constructed auxiliary ’are illustrated by the large number of grammatically inflated abstractions m our language. Since we do not need separate link-word fbrmc for the directives after and before, we do not need a separate link-word while corresponding to the directive during. Since we can speak of the above remarks for the remarks printed or written higher on the page, we should also be able to speak of the previous letter as the before letter without misgiving. Since some people discuss the Beyond, we might just as well call the sequel the after and th&past the before. In fact, every directive is the focus of a cluster of different word-forms with the same

Language Planning for a New Order 505

basic function. In a language with rigid word order and empty words as sign-posts of the sentence lay-out, we could generalize without loss of clarity a process which has already gone far in Anglo-American and much farther in Chinese.

Broadly speaking, for every one of our directives we ran find an adverbial qualifier, an adjective, a noun, and often even a conjunction, with the same fundamental meaning. Each of these may itself be one of a cluster of synonyms. It is merely their different grammatical behaviour which prevents us from recognizing that semantically they are comrades in arms. Why cannot a single word do all the work of after 9 sincey afterwards , subsequent(ly\ succeeding)} seguel} aftermath} or of before} previously)} preceding)} past , history} We could then make about forty temporal, spatial, motor, instrumental and associative directives do the job of about two hundred words and three or four times as many synonyms or near synonyms sufficiently distinguishable by context and situation alone. Partly for this reason, and partly be¬ cause this class of words covers all the territory of auxiliaries which express time and aspect (pp. 103-4), it might be an advantage to extend the range corresponding to the Basic English battery of .directives by making more refined distinctions. Such distinctions may occur in one language, but be absent in another. For instance, a special word sym¬ bolizing physical contact is non-existent in Anglo-American, but exists in German and would deserve inclusion in an improved set of directives. For geiierations we have had chairs of comparative philology, but investigations dictated by an instrumental outlook are as rare to-day as in Grimm’s time. If it were not so we should now be able to specify what relations and concepts tentatively or fully expressed in this or that existing medium can justify their claim to a place on the essential word list of a properly constructed language.

Basic English gives us another clue to word-economy. As formal distinction between noun and verb, when both stand for processes or states, is an unnecessary complication, formal distinction between noun and adjective is superfluous when both symbolize a property. If we can go out in the dark or the cold , we have no need of such distinctions as warm — warmth} hot — heat} dry — dryness . If we can discuss the good , the beautiful} and the true} goodness} beauty , and truth are too much of a good thing. At the same time, we need a consistent rule about fusion of such word-forms. We cannot endorse such inconsistencies as exist in Anglo-American. It may or may not be important to distinguish be¬ tween good actions and good people when we speak of the good} but if we

The Loom of Language

do so we should be entitled to use the unclean for uncleanliness as well as for the unclean individuals. The misery of all existing speech is that useful devices remain half-exploited. Grammarians say that analogical extension has not gone far enough. English has now a simple and highly regularized flexional system, but in its linguistic expression of concepts and relations it is as chaotic as any other language, including Esperanto. This is what foreigners mean when they say: TWlic^ js simple at the start, but, etc.

While we can design a language to achieve a high level of word- economy in Ogden’s sense, and therefore to lighten the load which the beginner has to carry, there is no reason for restricting the vocabulary of an Interlanguage constructed with this end in view to the bare minimum of words essential for lucid communication; and we have no need to exclude the possibility of ringing the changes on synonyms which safeguard style against monotony. We might well add to our interdictionary an appendix containing a reserve vocabulary of compact alternatives. Even so, a maximum vocabulary of roots excluding all strictly technical terms and local names for local things or local institutions,

need scarcely exceed a total of three thousand. interphonetics

It would be easy to formulate the outstanding desiderata of an ideal language on the naive assumption that phonetic considerations are of prior importance; and it would not be difficult to give them 'practical expression. To begin with, we have to take stock of the fact that the consonant clusters (p. 214) so characteristic of the Aryan family are almost or completely absent in other languages, e.g. in Chinese, Japan¬ ese, Bantu, and in Polynesian dialects. So clusters of two or three consonants such as in blinds, and, more serious, quadruple combina¬ tions as in mustn't, are foreign to the ear and tongue of most peoples outside Europe, America, and India. Then again, few people have a range of either simple consonants or simple vowels as great as our own.

A five-fold battery of vowels with values roughly like those of the Italian and Spanish a, e, i, 0, u, suffices for many speech communities. Several of our own consonants are phonetic rarities, and many varieties of human speech reject the voiceless series in favour of the voiced, or vice versa. A battery of consonants with very wide currency would not include more than nine items—/, m, n, r, together with a choice between the series p, t,f ,k,s, and the series b, d, v,g, z. Even this would be a liberal allowance. The Japanese have no L

Language Planning for a New Order 507

A universal alphabet of five vowels and of eight or nine consonants would allow for between 1,500 and 2,000 pronounceable roots made up of open syllables like the syllables of Japanese, Bantu, and Poly¬ nesian words. Supplemented with forty-five monosyllables and a limited number of trisyllables, this would supply enough variety for a maximum vocabulary of sufficient size. The word material of a lang¬ uage constructed in accordance with this principle would be univer¬ sally, or well-nigh universally, pronounceable and recognizable without special training of ear or tongue. It would offer none of the difficulties with which the French nasal vowels, the English th and j sounds, or the German and Scots ch confront the beginner. Against these ad¬ mitted merits we have to weigh the fact that a language so designed from whole cloth would perpetuate one of the greatest of all obstacles to learning a new language. The beginner would have to wrestle with the total unfamiliarity of its word material. Each item of the vocabulary would be a fresh load with no mnemonic associations to give it buoyancy.

Grammar and memorization of the word-list are the two main difficulties of learning a new language, and the only way of reducing the second to negligible dimensions is to make each word the focus of a cluster of familiar associations like the root tel common to telegraphy telescopey telepathy . We have seen that scientific discovery is solving this problem for mankind by distributing an international vocabulary of roots derived from Latin and Greek. Anything we can do to simplify the phonetic structure of a satisfactory Interlanguage has to get done within that framework. The framework itself is exacting because Aryan languages in general are rich in variety of simple consonants and of consonantal combinations — Greek more than most. Thus the greatest concession we can make to the phonetic ideal is to weigh the claims of equivalent Latin and Greek roots, with due regard to ease of pro¬ nunciation and recognition, when both enjoy international currency.

While it would be foolish to deny the difficulties of achieving a universal standard of pronunciation for an Interlanguage based on Latin-Greek word material, and therefore on sounds and combinations of sounds alien to the speech habits of Africa and the Far East, it is > possible to exaggerate this disability. People who indulge in the witless luxury of laughing at the foreigner who says sleep instead of slip con¬ done equally striking differences between the vowel values of London and Lancashire, Aberdeen (Scotland) and Aberdeen (South Dakota). Although obliteration of the distinction between the pyty kyfy and the by dygy v series makes homophones of such couplets as pup — puby write—

5°8 The Loom of Language

ride, pluck— plug, proof— prove, the fact that very many Americans discard the voiceless in favour of the voiced consonants does not prevent British audiences from flocking to gangster sound-films.

Most of us are not trained phoneticians, and most people without some phonetic training are insensitive to comparatively crude distinc¬ tions, if interested in what the speaker is saying. Fastidious folk who foresee fearful misunderstandings because people of different nations wifl inevitably give slightly, or even sometimes crudely, different values to the same sound symbols may well reflect on the following remarks of an English phonetician :

A recent experiment proved that the sounds s,f, th are often indistin¬ guishable to listeners when broadcast in isolation by wireless trans¬ mission. Nevertheless, despite this fact, listeners understand perfectlv what is said. It follows, then, that up to a certain point, it is quite un¬ necessary to hear each and every sound that the speaker utters. We know tnat is so from our experience in listening to speakers in large halls, or theatres. If we are at some distance from the speaker, we miss many of his sounds, but provided we get a certain number, or a certain per¬ centage of the whole, then we understand what he is saying. The point to remember is that there is, or there would appear to be, in language an acoustic mimmum necessary for intelligibility, and provided the listener gets this, it is all that he requires. The rest is superfluous. The speaker may utter it, but as far as the listener is concerned, it is quite immaterial ,° ™n w^ft^ler ^ears & 0r not. The more familiar we are with a anguage, the smaller is the fraction of its sounds, etc., that we require to catch in order to understand what is said. Much of the acoustic matter that is graphically represented in the written language is unnecessary for in e hgibuity, while, on the contrary, intelligibility requires that certain acoustic features of the language must be present in speech which have no representation whatever in the written language. Educated speech

differs from uneducated speech mainly in providing a greater acoustic minimum.

(Lloyd James: Historical Introduction to French Phonetics.)

Although the Greek range of consonants, and more especially its consonantal combinations, offers difficulties for most non-Aryan- speaking peoples and for some people who speak Aryan languages, the TOwd range of a Latin-Greek vocabulary is not a serious drawback, we need only five simple vowels and their derivative diphthongs As Jespersen rightly remarks: “it is one of the beauties of an international language that it needs only five vowels, and therefore can allow a certain amount of liberty in pronouncing these sounds without mis- understanding arising,” Whether different citizens of a socialist world-

Language Planning for a New Order 509

order pronounce a as in the English word father, as in the French la, German Voter, or Danish far, is immaterial to easy communication. In fact, the differences are not greater than between glass as people respectively pronounce it in Dundee and Dorchester, or between girl in Mayfair and Old Kent Road, and far less than between tomato as people severally pronounce it in Boston and Birmingham

We may take it for granted that the difficulty which the Greek 9 sound presents to people m many nations, the preference of Germans for voiceless and of Danes for voiced consonants, the partiality of the Scot and the Spaniard for a trilled r, and the reluctance of an Englishman to pronounce r at all, will not prevent people of different speech com¬ munities from using as an efficient and satisfactory medium of com¬ munication an Interlanguage liable to get colour from local sound. Indeed, we need not despair of the possibility of reaching a standard in ihe course of time. More and more the infant discipline of phonetics, which has lately received a new impulse from the needs of radio trans¬ mission and long-distance telephone conversation, will influence the practice of school instruction. In an international community with a single official medium of intercommunication the radio and the tallnV will daily time the ear to a single speech pattern. We have no reason to fear that discourse through a constructed Interlanguage will involve greater difficulties than English conversation between a French Cana¬ dian and a South African Boer, a Maori and a New Zealander of Scots parentage, a Hindu Congress member and a Bantu trade union leader from Johannesburg, or Winston Spencer Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

INTERLANGUAGE LEARNING WITHOUT TEARS

We may now sum up the outstanding features of a constructed language designed with due regard to criticisms provoked by a suc¬ cession of earlier projects and to the efforts of those who aim at adapting English to international use.

(i) It would be essentially an isolating language. The beginner would not have to plod through a maze of useless and irregular flexions common to Aryan languages such as French or Spanish, German or Russian. With the possible exception of a plural terminal, it would have no flexional modifications of word-form. Apart from a few simple rules for the use of operators like our words make and get, formation of compounds like tooth brush, and insertion of empty words like of to show up the lay-out of the sentence, its rules of grammar would be

PART IV

R

LANGUAGE MUSEUM

USE. OF ROMANCE AND TEUTONIC WORD LISTS

. The number of items in the ensuing word lists exceeds the minimum requirements of the beginner in search of 4 battery adequate for self- expression. They contain assortments of common nouns to meet individual requirements, such as those of the traveller or of the motorist, together with many useful English words which share recognizable roots with their foreign equivalents. The items in the English column of the Romance and Teutonic word lists do not tally throughout. One reason for discrepancies is the advisability of learning Teutonic words together with English words of Teutonic origin and Romance words together with English words of Latin origin.

. The verb lists do not follow this plan consistently. The reason for this is that .the meaning of an English verb of Latin origin is usually more sharply defined than that of its Teutonic twin. For many common English verbs less usual but more explicit (see p. 39) synonyms appear in the column at the extreme left. English verb forms printed in italics correspond to Romance or Teutonic verbs of the intransitive or reflexive type. In the Teutonic word list German verbs printed in italics take the dative case. For a reason explained on p. 31, the verb lists contain few items which signify acquiring or conferring a quality listed as an adjective. For instance, we do not need a transitive or in¬ transitive equivalent for widen . To widen means to make wide (trans.) or to become wide (intrans.). We can use French or Spanish, German or Swedish equivalents of make and become with an adjective in the same way.

The reader who turns to these lists for case material illustrating family likeness or laws of sound shift: should remember that the words listed are nearly always the ones in common use. By choosing highbrow, pedantic, and somewhat archaic synonyms or near synonyms, it would be easy to construct lists giving a much more impressive picture of genetic relationship.

516

The Loom of Language I. TEUTONIC WORD LIST x. NOUNS

(a) CLIMATE AND SCENERY

ENGLISH	SWEDISH	DANISH'	DUTCH
air	luft	Luft	lucht
bank (river)	strand	Bred	oever
bay	vik *	Bugt	baai
beach	strand	Strand	strand (n)
bush	buske	Busk	struik
cloud	moln (n)	Sky	wolk
coast	kust	Kyst	kust
country (not	land (n)	Land (n)	platteland (n)
town)
current	strom	Strom	stroom
darkness	mdrker (n)	Morke (n)	duisternis
dew	dagg	Dug	dauw
dust	damm (n)	Stov (n)	stof (n)
earth	jord	Jord	aarde
east	5ster	0st	oosten (n)
field	fait	Mark	veld (n)
foam	skum (n)	Skum (n)	schuim (n)
fog	dimma	Taage	mist
forest	skog	Skov	bosch (n)
frost	frost	Frost	vorst
grass	gr2s (n)	* Graes (n)	gras (n)
hail	hagel (n)	Hagl	hagel
hay	hb (n)	Ho(n)	hooi (n)
heath	hed	Hede	heide
high tide	flod	Flod	vloed
hill	kulle	Bakke	heuvel
ice	is	Is	ijs(n)
island	6	0	eiland (n)
lake	sjo	So	meer (n)
light	ljus (n)	Lys (n)	licht (n)
lightning	blixt	Lyn (n)	bliksem
low tide	ebb	Ebbe	eb
meadow	ang	Eng	weide
moon	m£ne	Maane	maan
mountain	berg (n)	Bjerg (n)	berg
mud	mudder (n)	Dynd (n)	slijk (n)
nature	natur	Natur	natuur
north	norr	Nord	noorden (n)
peninsula	halvb	Halve	schiereiland(n)
plain	slat	Slette	vlakte
pond	damm	Dam	vijver
rain	regn (n)	Regn	regen
rainbow	regnb&ge	Regnbue	regenboog
river	flod	Flod	rivier
	* Danish a is	represented throughout by ae .

GERMAN

die Luft das Ufer die Bucht der Strand das Gebtisch die Wolke die Kiiste das Land

die Stromung die Dunkelheit der Tan der Staub die Erde der Osten das Feld der Schaum der Nebel der Wald der Frost das Gras der Hagel das Hen die Heide die Flut der Hiigel das Eis die Insel der See das Licht der Blitz die Ebbe die Wiese der Mond der Berg der Schlamm die Natur der Norden die Halbinsel die Ebene der Teich der Regen der Regen- bogen der Fluss

Language Museum

ENGLISH	SWEDISH
rock	klippa
sand	sand
sea	hav (n)
shadow, shade	skugga
sky	himmei
snow	sn5
south	soder
spring (water)	kalla
star	stjarna
storm	storm
stream	back
sun	sol
thaw	tovader (n)
thunder	&ska
valley	dal
view	utsikt
water	vatten (n)
fresh water	sotvatten (n)
salt water	saltvatten (n)
waterfall	vattenfall (n)
wave	bolja
weather	vader (n)
west	vaster
wind	vind
world	varld
	CM
arm	arm
back	rygg
beard	skagg (n)
belly	buk
bladder	bl£sa
blood	blod (n)
body	kropp
bone	ben (n)
brain	hjarna
breath	ande
calf	vad
cheek	kind
chest	brdst (n)
chin	haka
cold	forkylning
cough	hosta
ear	ora (n)
elbow	armb&ge
eye	oga (n)
eyebrow	bgonbryn (n)
eyelid	ogonlock (n)
face	ansikte (n)

DANISH	DUTCH
Klippe	rots
Sand (n)	zand (n)
Hav (n)	zee
Skygge	schaduw
Himmei	lucht
Sne	sneeuw
Syd	zuiden (n)
Kilde	bron
Stjerne	ster
Storm	storm
Baek	beek
Sol	zon
Tovejr (n)	dooi
Torden	donder
Bal	dal (n)
Udsigt	uitzicht (n)
Vand (n)	water (n)
Ferskvand (n)	zoet water (n)
Saltvand (n)	zout water (n)
Vandfald (n)	waterval
Beige	golf
Vejr (n)	weer (n)
Vest	westen (n)
Vind	wind
Verden	wereld
HUMAN BODY
Arm	arm
Ryg	rug
Skaeg (n)	baard
Bug	bulk
Blaere	blaas
Blod (n)	bloed (n)
Legeme (n)	lichaam (n)
Knokkel	been (n)
Hjeme	hersenen (pi.)
Aande	adem
Laeg	kuit
Kind	wang
Bryst (n)	borst
Hage	kin
Forkelelse	verkoudheid
Hoste	hoest
0re (n)	oor (n)
Albue	elleboog
0je (n)	oog (n)
0jenbryn (n)	wenkbrauw
0jenlaag (n)	ooglid (n)
Ansigt (n)	gezicht (n)

517

GERMAN

der Felsen der Sand die See das Meer der Schatten der Himmei der Schnee der Stiden die Quelle der Stem der Sturm der Bach die Sonne das Tauwetter der Bonner das Tal die Aussicht das Wasser das Susswasser das Salzwasser der Wasserfall die Welle das Wetter der Wes ten der Wind die Welt

der Ann der Rtlcken der Bart der Bauch die Blase das Blut der Korper der Raochen das Gehim der Atem die Wade die Wange die Brust das Kina die Erkaltung der Hasten das Ohr der Ellbogen das Auge die Augen- braue

das Augenlid das Gesicht

5*8 The Loom of Language

ENGLISH	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN
fever	feber	Feber	koorts	das Fieber
finger	finger (n)	Finger	vinger	der Finger
flesh	kott (n)	Kod (n)	vleesch (n)	das Fleisch
foot	fot	Fod	voet	der Fuss
forehead	panna	Pande	voorhoofd (n)	die Slim
gums	tandkott (n)	Tandkod (n)	tandvleesch (n) das Zahnfleisch
hair	bar (n)	Haar (n)	haar (n)	das Haar
hand	hand	Haand	hand	die Hand
head	huvud (n)	Hoved (n)	hoofd (n)	der Kopf
headache	huvudvark	Hovedpine	hoofdpijn	die Kopf- schmerzen (pi)
heart	hjarta (n)	Hjerte (n)	. hart (n)	das Herz
heel	hal	Ha el	hie!	die Ferse
hip .	hoft	Hofte	heup	die Hiifte
intestines	inelvor (pL)	Involde (pi.)	ingewanden (piO	die Einge- weide (pi.)
jaw	kfift	Kaebe	kaak	der Kiefer
kidney	njure	Nyre	nier	die Niere
knee	knl (n)	Knae (n)	knie	das Knie
leg	ben (a)	Ben (n)	been (n)	das Bein
lip	lapp	Laebe	lip	die Lippe
liver	lever	Lever	lever	die Leber
lung	lunga	Lunge	long	die Lunge
moustache	mustasch	Overskaeg (n)	> snor ■	der Schnurr- bart
mouth	mun	Mund	mond	der Mund
muscle	muskel	iVluskel	spier	der Muskel
nail	nagel	Negl	nagel	der Nagel
neck	hals	Hals	nek	der Hals
nerve	nerv	Nerve	zenuw	der Nerv
nose	nasa	Naese	neus	die Nase
pain	smarta	Smerte	pijn	der Schmerz
rib	revben (n)	Ribben (n)	rib	die Rippe
shoulder	skuldra	Skulder	schouder	die Schulter
skin	skinn (n)	Skind (n)	huid	die Haut
sole	fotsula	Fodsaal	voetzool	die FussohJe
spine	ryggrad	Rygrad	ruggegraat	das Rtlckgrat
stomach	mage	Mave	maag	der Magen
tear	t&r	Taare	traan	die Trane
thigh	Hr (n)	Laar (n)	dij	der Schenkel
throat (internal)	strupe	Strube	keel	der Hals die Kehle
thumb	tumme	Tommelfinger duhn	der Daumen
toe	tfi	Taa	teen	die Zehe
tongue	tunga	Tunge	tong	die Zunge
tooth	tand	Tand	tand	der Zahn
toothache	tandv&rk	Tandpine	kiespijn	die Zahn- schmerzen
wound	(n)	Saar (n)	wond	(pi.) die Wunde

Language Museum

ENGLISH	SWEDISH
wrist	handled
animal	djur (n)
ant	myra
badger	grayling .
bat	fl&dermus
beak	n&bb
bear	bjdm
bee	bi(n)
beetle	skalbagge
bird	f&gel
blackbird	koltrast
bull	tjur
butterfly	fjaril
calf	kaly
carp	karp
cat	katt
caterpillar	larv
claw	klo
cock	tupp
cod	torsk
cow	ko
crab	krabba
crayfish	krafta
crow	krika
cuckoo	gok
dog	hund
donkey	&sna
duck	anka
eagle	6m
eel	a
feather	fjader
fin.	fena
fish	fisk
flea	loppa
fly	fluga
fox	rav
frog	groda
fur	pals
gill	gtl
gnat	mygga
goat	get
goose	g£s
grasshopper	grashoppa
hare	hare
hen	hdna

DANISH DUTCH

Haandied (n) pols

(c) ANIMALS

Dyr (n)	dier (n)
Myre	mier
Graevling	das
Flagermus	vleermuis
Naeb (n)	snavel
Bjorn	beer
Bi	bij
Bille	tor *
Fugl	vogel
Solsort	merel
Tyr	stier
Sommerfugl	vlinder
Kalv	kalf (n)
Karpe	karper
Kat	kat
Kaalorm	raps
Klo	klauw
Hane	haan
Torsk	kabeljauy/
Ko	koe
Krabbe	krab
Krebs	kreeft
Krage	kraai
Gog	koekoek
Hund	hond
Aesel (n)	ezel
And	eend
0m	arend
Aal	aal
Fjer	veer
Finne	vin
Fisk	visch
Loppe	vloo
Flue	vlieg
Raev	vos
Fro	kikvorsch
Pels	pels '
Gaelle	kieuw
Myg	' mug
Ged	geit
Gaas	gans
Graeshoppe	sprinkhaan
Hare	haas
Hone	kip hen

GERMAN

das Hand-

gelenk

das Tier die Ameise der Dachs die Fledermaus der Schnabel der Bar die Biene der Kafer der Vogel die Amsel der Stier der Bulle der Schmetter-

Hng

das Kalb der Karpfen die Katze die Raupe die Klane der Hahn der Kabeljau die Kuh die Krabbe der Krebs * die Krahe der Kuckuck der Hund der Esel die Ente der Adler der Aal die Feder die Flosse der Fisch der Fioh , die Fliege der Fuchs der Frosch der Pelz die Kieme die MU eke die Ziege die Gans der

Grashtipfer der Hase das Huhn die Henne

520 The Loom of Language

ENGLISH

heron

herring

hoof

horn

horse

lamb

lion

lobster

louse

mackerel

mole

monkey

moth

mouse

owl

ox

oyster

parrot

partridge

paw

Pig

pigeon

pike

plaice

rabbit

rat

salmon

scale

seagull

seal

shark

sheep

snail

snake

sole

sparrow

spider

starling

stork

swallow

ail

:oad

:rout

urkey

vasp

veasel

shale

rag

eolf

Form

SWEDISH	DANISH	' DUTCH	GERMAN
hager	Hejre	reiger	der Reiher
sill	Sild	haring	der Hering
hov	Hov	hoef	der Huf
horn (n)	Horn (n)	hoorn	das Horn
hist	Hest	paard (n)	das Pferd
lamm (n)	Lam (n)	lam (n)	das Lamm
lejon (n)	Love	leeuw	der L6we
hummer	Hummer	kreeft	der Hummer
lus	Lus	luis	die Laus
makrill	Makrel	makreel	die Makrele
mullvad	Muldvarp	mol	der'Maulwurf
apa	Abe	aap	der Affe
nattfj&ril	Mol (n)	mot	die Motte
rStta	Mus	muis	die Maus
uggla	Hgle	uil	die Eule
oxe	Okse	os	der Ochs
ostron (n)	0sters	oester	die Auster
papegoja	Papegoje	papegaai	der Papagei
rapphona	Agerhone	patrijs	das Rebhuhn
tass	Pote	pool	die Pfote
svin (n)	Svin (n)	varken (n)	das Schwein
duva	Due	duif	die Taube
g^dda	Gedde	snoek	der Hecht
flundra	Rodspaette	schol	die S cholic
kanin	Kanin	konijn (n)	das Kanin chen
r£tta	Rotte	rat	die Ratte
lax	Laks	zalm	der Lachs
fjall (n)	Skael (n)	schub	die Schuppe
m&s	Maage	meeuw	die Mbwe
sM	Sael	zeehond	der Seehund
ha}	Haj	haai	der Hai
f&r (n)	Faar (n)	schaap (n)	das Schaf
snigel	Snegl	slak	die Schnecke
orm	Slange	slang	die Schlange
sjfttunga	Tunge	tong	die Seezunge
sparv	Spurv	musch	der Sperling
spindel	Edderkop	spin	die Spinne
stare	Staer	spreeuw	der Star
stork	Stork	ooievaar	der Storch
svala	Svale	zwaluw	die Schwalbe
svans	Hale	staart	der Schwanz
padda	Tudse	pad	die Krbte
forell	Forel	forel	die Forelle
kalkon	Kalkun	kalkoen	der Truthahn
geting	Hveps	wesp	die Wespe
vessla	Vaesel	wezel	das Wiesel
valfisk	*Hval	walvisch	der Walfisch
vinge	Vinge	vleugel	der Fitlgel
vaxg	Ulv	, wolf	der Wolf
mask	Orm	worm	der Wurm

ENGLISH

apple

apple-tree

apricot

ash

bark

beech

berry

birch

blackberry

branch

cherry

chestnut

currant

elm

fig

fir

fruit

gooseberry

grapes

hazelnut

kernel

larch

leaf

lemon

lime-tree

oak

orange

peach

pear

pine

pine-apple

plum

poplar

raspberry

root

strawberry

tree

tree-trunk

vine

walnut

willow

asparagus

barley

Language Museum

SWEDISH DANISH DUTCH (d) FRUIT AND TREES apple (n) Aeble (n) appletrad (a) Aebletrae (n) aprikos Abrikos

ask Ask

bark Bark

bok Beg

bar (n) Baer (n)

bjork Birk

bjarnbar (n) Brombaer (n) gren Gren

korsbar (n) Kirsebaer (n) kastanje Kastanie

vinbar (n) Ribs (n)

appel

appelboom

abrikoos

esch

schors

beuk

bes

berk

braam

aim

fikon (n)

gran

frukt

krusb&r (n)

vindruva

hasselnot

kama

larktrad (n) blad (n) citron lind ek

apelsin

persika paron (n) taH ananas plommon (n) poppel haUon (n) rot

jordgubbe

trad (n)

stam

vinstock

valnot

pil

Elm

Figen

Gran

Frugt

Stikkelsbaer

(n)

Vindrue

Hasselnod

Kaerne

Laerk

Blad (n)

Citron

Lind

Eg

Appelsin

Fersken

Paere

Fyr

Ananas

Blomme

Poppel

Hindbaer (n)

Rod

Jordbaer (n)

Trae (n)

Stamme

Vinstok

Valnod

Pil

(e) CEREALS AND VEGETABLES

521

GERMAN

der Apfel der Apfelbaum die Aprikose die Esche die Rinde die Buche die Beere die Birke die Brombeere

tak	der Ast
1 kers	die Kirsche
kastanje	die Kastanie
aalbes	die Johannis-
	beere
olm	die Dime
vijg	die Feige
den	die Tanne
vrucht	die Frucht
kruisbes	die Stachel- beere
druif	die Traube
hazelnoot	die Haselnuss
pit	der Kern
lariks	die Larche
blad (n)	das Blatt
Citroen	die Zitrone
linde	die Linde
eik	die Eiche
sinaasappel	die Orange die Apfelsine
perzik	der Pfirsich
peer	die Birne
pijnboom	die Kiefer
ananas	die Ananas
pruim	die Pflaume
populier	die Pappel
framboos	die Himbeere
wortel	die Wurzel
aardbei	die Erdbeere
boom	der Baum
stam	der Stamm
wijnstok	der Weinstock
walnoot	die Walnuss
wilg	die Weide

sparns kom (n)

Asparges

Eyg

R*

asperge

gerst

der Spargel die Gerste

522 The Loom of Language

ENGLISH	SWEDISH DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN
bean	bona	Bonne	boon	die Bohne
brussels sprouts brysselk&l	Rosenkaal	Brussels eh spruitje	der Rosenkobl
cabbage	hi	Kaal	kool	der Kohl
carrot	morot	Gulerod	peen *	die Karotte
cauliflower	blomkdl	Blomkaal	bloemkool	der Blumen- kohl
cucumber	gurka	Agurk	komkommer	die Gurke
garlic	vitldk	Hvidlog (n)	knoflook (n)	der Knoblauch
horse-radish	pepparrot	Peberrod	mierikswortel	der Meerret- tich
lentil	lins	Linse	linze	die Linse
lettuce	sallad	Salat	sla	der Kopfsalat
mint	mynta	Mynte	kruizemunt	die Minze
mushroom	svamp	Svamp	paddestoel	der Pilz
oats	havre	Havre	haver	der Hafer
onion	lok	Log (n)	ui	die Zwiebel
parsley	persilja	Persille	peterselie	die Petersilie
pea	arta	Aert	erwt	die Erbse
potato	potatis	Kartoffel	aardappel	die Kartoffel
radish	radisa	Radise	radijs	das Radies chen
rice	ris (n)	Ris	rijst	der Reis
rye	r&g	Rug	rogge	der Roggen
spinach	spenat	Spinat	spinazie	der Spinat
stalk	stjSlk	Stilk	stengel steel	der Stengel der Stiel
turnip	rova	Roe	knol	die Rube
wheat	vete (n)	Hvede tarwe (f) MATERIALS	der Weizen
alloy	legering	Legering	allooi (n)	die Legierung
brass	massing	Messing (n)	geelkoper (n)	das Messing
brick	mursten	Mursten	baksteen	der Ziegelstein
cement	cement (n)	Cement	cement (n)	der Zement
chalk	krita	Kridt (n)	krijt (n)	die Kreide
clay	lera	Ler (n)	klei	der Lehm der Ton
coal	kol (n)	Kul (n)	kool	die Kohle
concrete	betong	Beton	beton	der Beton
copper	koppar	Kobber (n)	koper (n)	das Kupfer
glass	glas (n)	Glas (n)	glas (n)	das Glas
gold	guld (n)	Guld (n)	goud (n)	das Gold
iron	jam (n)	Jern (n)	ijzer (n)	das Eisen
lead	bly (n)	Bly (n)	lood (n)	das Blei
leather	lader (n)	Laeder (n)	leer (n)	das Leder
lime	kalk	Kalk	kalk	der Kalk
marble	marmor	Marmor- (n)	manner (n)	der Marmor
mercury	kvicksilver	(n) Kviksolv (n)	kwikzilver (n)	das Queck- silber
metal	metall	Metal (n)	metaal (n)	das Metall
rubber	gummi (n)	Gummi	rubber (n)	der Gummi

Language Museum 523

ENGLISH	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN
silver	silver (n)	Salv (n)	zilver (n)	das Silber
steel	st&l (n)	Staal (n)	staal (n)	der Stahl
stone	sten	Sten	steen	der Stein
tar ‘	tjara	Tjaere	teer (n)	der Teer
tin	tenn (n)	Tin (n)	tin (n)	das Zmn
wood	tra (n)	Trae (a) hout (a) (g) BUILDINGS	das Holz
bam	lada	Lade	schuur	die Scheune
barracks	kasem	Kaseme	kazeme	die Kaseme
bridge	bro	Bro	brug	die Brticke
building	byggnad	Bygning	gebouw (n)	das Gebaude
castle	slott (n)	Slot (n)	slot (n) kasteel (n)	das Schloss
cathedral	katedral	Katedral	kathedraal	der Dom
cemetery	kyrkog&rd	Kirkegaard	kerkhof (n)	der Friedhof
church	kyrka	Kirke	kerk	die Kirche
cinema	biograf	Biograf	bioscoop	das Kino
consulate s	konsulat (n)	Konsulat (n)	consulaat (n)	das Konsulat
factory	fabrik	Fabrik	fabriek	die Fabrik
farm	bondg&rd	Bondegaard	boerderij	der Bauemhof
fountain	brunn	Brand	fontein	der Brunnen
hospital	sjukhus (n)	Hospital (n)	ziekenhuis (n)	das Kranken- haus
hut	hydda	Hytte	hut	die Htitte
inn	vardshus (n)	Kro	herberg	das Wirtshaus
lane (town)	grand	Straede (n)	steeg	die Gasse
legation	legation	Legation	legatie	die Gesandt- schaft die Bibliothek
library	bibliotek (n)	Bibliotek	bibliotheek
market	marknad	Torv (n)	markt	der Markt
monument	minnesv&rd	Monument (n) gedenkteeken	das Denkmal
path (country)	stig	Sti	pad (n)	der Pfad
pavement (side¬ walk)	trottoar	Fortov (n)	trottoir (n)	derBiirgersteig das Trottoir
police-station	polisstation	Politistation	politiebureau (n)	die Polizei- wache
port	hflmn	Havn	haven	der Hafen
prison	fangelse (n)	Faengsel (n)	gevangenis	das Gefangnis
public conve¬ nience	toilet	Toilet (n)	toilet (n)	der Abort
road (highway)	landsvag	Landevej	landweg	dieLandstrasse
school	skola	Skole	school	die Schule
square	torg (n)	Plads	plein (n)	der Platz
street	gata	Gade	straat	die Strasse
suburb	forstad	Forstad	voorstad	die Vorstadt
theatre	teater	Teater (n)	schouwburg	das Theater
tower	tom (n)	Taam (n)	toren	der Turm
town	stad	By	stad	die Stadt

524 The Loom of Language

ENGLISH,	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN
town-hall	r&dhus (n)	Raadhus (n)	stadhuis (n)	das Rathaus
university	universitet (n) Universitet (n) universiteit	die Universi-
village	by	Landsby	dorp	tSt das Dorf
	(h) THE FAMILY
birth	fodelse	Fodsel	geboorte	die Geburt
boy	gosse	Dreng	jongen	der Junge
brother	broder	Broder	broeder	der Bruder
brothers and	syskon (pi.)	Soskende (pi.) broers en	die Geschwis-
sisters			zusters	ter (pi.)
child	barn (n)	Barn (n)	kind (n)	das Kind
Christian name	forhamn (n)	Fornavn (n)	voornaam	der Vorname
cousin	kusin (m & f .) Faetter (male) neef (male)	der Vetter
		Kusine (fe¬	nicht (female)	(male)
		male)		* die Kusine
daughter	dotter	Darter	dochter	(female) die Tochter
death	dod	Dad	dood	der Tod
divorce	skilsmassa	Skilsmisse	echtscheiding	die Scheidung
family	familj	Familie	familie	die Familie
father	fader	Fader	vader	der Vater
gentleman	herre	Herre	heer	der Herr
girl	flicka	Pige	meisje (n)	das M&dchen
grandfather	farfar	Bedstefader	grootvader	der Gross-
	(patent.			vater
	morfar
	(matem.)
grandmother	mormor (mat.) Bedstemoder	grootmoeder	die Gross-
	farmor (pat.)			mutter
husband	man	Mand	man	der Mann
				der Gatte
lady	dam	Dame	dame	die Dame
man	man	Mand	man	der Mann
marriage	&ktenskap (n)	Aegteskab (n;	huwelijk (n)	die Ehe
mother	moder	Moder	moeder	die Mutter
parents	foraldrar	Foraeldre	ouders	die Eltern
relative	slakting	Slaegtning	bloedverwant	der Verwandte
sister	syster	Soster	zuster	die Schwester
son	son	Sen	zoon	der Sohn
surname	tillnamn (n)	Efternavn	achtemaam	der Familien-
		(n)		name
twin	tvilling	Tvilling	tweeling	der Zwilling
wife	hustru	Hustru	vrouw	die Frau
				die Gattin
woman	kvinna	Kvinde	vrouw	die Frau
	(i) DRESS AND TOILET
belt	balte (n)	Baelte (n)	ceintuur	der Gtirtel
boot	kSnga	Stovle	laaxs	der Stiefel
braces	hangslen (pi.)	Seler (pi.)	bretels (pi.)	die Hosen-

tr&ger (pi.)

Language Museum 525

ENGLISH	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH '	GERMAN
brash	borste	Borste	borstel	die Bhrste
button	knapp	Knap	knoop	der Knopf
cap	m5ssa	Kasket	pet	die Mutze
cigar	cigarr	Cigar	sigaar	die Zigarre
cigarette	cigarrett	Cigaret	sigaret	die Zigarette
clothes	klader	Klaeder	kleeren	die Kleider
coat	jacka	Jakke	jas	der Rock
collar	krage	Flip	boord	der Kragen
comb	kam	Kam	kam	der Kamm
cotton	bomull	Bomuld (n)	katoen (n)	die Baumwolle
cotton wool	bomull	Vat (n)	watten '	die Watte
dress	kladning	Kjole	jurk	das Kleid
fashion	mod (n)	Mode	mode	die Mode
glove	handske	Handske	hands choen	der Hands chuh
handkerchief	n&sduk	Lommetor- klaede (n)	zakdoek	das Taschen- tuch
hat	hatt	Hat	hoed	der Hut
knickers	damkalsonger Dameben- klaeder	directoire	die Schlupf- hose
match	tandsticka	Taendstik	lucifer	das Streich- holz
needle	nil	Naal	naald	die Nadel
overcoat	Overrock	Frakke	overjas	der Uber- zieher
pants	kalsonger (Pi.)	Underbukser (Pk)	onderbroek	die Unterhose
petticoat	underkjol	Underkjole	onderjurk	der Unterrock
pin	knappnal	Knappenaal	speld	die Stecknadel
pipe	pipa	Pibe	pijp	die Pfeife
pocket	ficka	Lomme	zak	die Tasche
safety-pin	s&kerhetsn&l	Sikkerheds-	veiligheids-	die Sicher-
shirt	skjorta	naal	speld	heitsnadel
Skjorte	overhemd (n)	das Hemd
shoe	sko	Sko	s choen	der Schuh
shoe-lace	skoband (n)	Skobaand (n)	schoenveter	das Schuhband
silk	silke (n)	Silke	zijde	die Seide
skirt	kjol	Nederdel	rok	der Rock
sleeve	arm	Aerme (n)	mouw	der Armel
slipper	toffel	Toffel	pantoffel	der Pantoffel
soap	tvai	Saebe	zeep	die Seife
sock	strumpa	Sok	sok	die So eke
spectacles	glasSgonen (PL)	Briller (pi.)	bril (sg.)	die Brille (sg.)
sponge	svamp	Svamp	spons	der Schwamm
stick	kapp	Stok	stok	der Stock
stocking	strumpa	Strompe	kous	der Strumpf
thread	tr&d	Traad	garen (n)	der Faden
tie	halsduk	Slips	das	der Schlips
tooth-brush	tandborste	Tandborste	tandenborstel	die Zahnbtirste
tooth-paste	tandpasta	Tandpasta	tandpasta	die Zahnpasta
trousers	byxor (pi.)	Bukser (pi.)	broek	die Hosen (pi.)

The Loom of Language

ENGLISH

umbrella

vest

waistcoat

watch

wool

alarm clock

arm-chair

ash

ash-tray

balcony

basket

bath

bed

bedroom

bell (door;

blanket

blind (roller)

box (chest)

broom

bucket

candle

carpet

ceiling

cellar

chair %

chamber-pot

chimney

comer

cupboard

curtain

cushion

door

drawer

fire

flame

flat

floor

flower

furniture

garden

ground-floor

hearth

SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH
paraply (n)	Paraply	paraplu
undertroja	Undertroje	hemd (n)
vast	Vest .	vest (n)
klocka	Ur (n)	horloge (n)
ull	UId	wol '

O') THE HOME

vackarklocka Vaekkeur (n) wekker lanstol Laenestol leunstoel

aska Aske asch

askkopp Askebaeger (n) aschbakje (n;

baikong	Balkon	balkon (n)
korg	Kurv	mand
bad (n)	Bad (n)	bad (n)
sang	Seng	bed (n)
sovrum (n)	Sovekammer (n) Klokke	slaapkamer
ringklocka	bel
flit	Taeppe (n)	deken
rullgardin	Rullegardin(n) rolgordijn (n)
kista	Kiste	kist
kvast	Kost	bezem
ambar (n)	Spand	emmer
ljus (n)	Lys (n)	kaars
matta	Taeppe (n)	tapiit (n)
tak (n)	Loft (n)	plafond (n)
kallare	Kaelder	kelder
stol	Stol	stoel
nattk&rl (n)	Natpotte	kamerpot
skorsten	Skorsten	schoor steen
horn (n)	Hjorne (n)	hoek
sk&p (n)	Skab (n)	kast
gardin	Gardin (n)	gordijn (n)
kudde	Pude	kussen (n)
dorr	Dor	deur
l&da	Skuffe	lade
eld	lid	vuur (n)
flamma	Flamme	vlam
vaning	Lejlighed	etage-woning
golv (n)	Gulv (n)	vloer
blomma	Blomst	bloem
mobler (pi.)	Mobler (pi.)	meubelen (pi.)
tradg&rd	Have	tuin
nedersta vaning	Stueetage	gelijkvloers (n)
eldstad	Arnested (n)	haard

GERMAN

der Regen- s chirm

dasUnterhemd die Wests die Uhr die Wolle

der Wecker der Lehnstuhl die Asche der Aschen- becher der Balkon der Korb das Bad das Bett das Schlaf zim- mer

die Klingel die Decide dieRollgardine die Kiste der Besen der Eimer die Kerze der Teppich die Decke der Keller der Stuhi der Nachttopf der Schorn- stein die Ecke der Schrank der Vorhang die Gardine das Kissen die Tiir die Schublade das Feuer die Flamme die Wohnung der Fussboden die Blume die Mobel (pL) der Garten das Erdge- schoss der Herd

Language Museum 527

ENGLISH	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN
house	hus (n)	Hus (n)	huis (n)	das Haus
iron (flat)	strykj&m (nj	Strygejem (n)	strijkijzer (n)	das Biigel- eisen
key	nyckel	Nogle	sleutel	der Schlhssel
kitchen	k6k (n)	Kokken (n)	keuken	die Kiiche
. lamp	lampa	Lampe	lamp	die Lampe
lavatory	W.C. (pron. v ay •say)	Toilet (n)	W.C, (pron. vay-say)	das Klosett die Toilette
lock	Its (n)	Laas	slot (n)	das Schloss
mattress	madrass	Madras	matras	die Matraze
methylated spirit denaturerade sprit	Sprit	brand-spiritus	der Brenn- spiritus
mirror	spegel	Spejl (n)	Spiegel	der Spiegel
oven	ugn	Ovn	oven	der Ofen
pantry	skafferi (n)	Spisekammer (n)	provisiekamer	die Speise- kammer
paper-basket	papperskorg	Papirkurv	prullemand	der Papierkorb
paraffin	fotogen (n)	Petroleum	petroleum	das Petroleum
picture	tavla	Billede (n)	schilderij (n)	das Bild
pillow	huvudkudde	Pude	oorkussen (n)	das Kopf- kissen
pipe (water etc.;	> ror (n)	Rer (n)	PUP	die Rohre
roof	tak (n)	Tag (n)	dak (n)	das Dach
room	rum (n)	Vaerelse (n)	kamer	das Zimmer
scales	v&g	Vaegt	weegschaal	die Wage
sheet	lakan (n)	Lagen (n)	laken (n)	das Bettuch das Bettlaken
shovel	skyffel	Skovl	schop	die Schaufel
smoke	rdk	Rog	rook	der Rauch
stairs	trappa	Trappe	trap	die Treppe
steam	inga	Damp	stoom	der Dampf
storey	vaning	Etage	verdieping	der Stock
table	bord (n)	Bord (n)	tafel	der Tisch
tap	kran	Hane	kraan	der Hahn
towel	handduk	Haandklaede (a) Mur	handdoek	das Handtuch
wall (structure)	mur	muur	die Mauer
wall (inner)	vagg	Vaeg	wand	die Wand
window	fonster (n)	Vindue (n)	raam (n)	das Fenster
yard	gSrd Gaard binnenplaats (k) FOOD AND DRINK	der Hof
bacon	flask (n)	Bacon	rookspek (n)	der Speck
beef	oxkStt (n)	Okseked (n)	rundvleesch (n)	das Rind- fleisch
beer	51 (n)	01 (n)	bier (n)	das Bier
beverage	dryck	Drik	drank	das Getrank
brandy	konjak	Cognac	cognac	der Kognak
bread	brdd (n)	Bred (n)	brood (n)	das Brot
breakfast	frukost	Morgenmad	ontbijt (n)	das Frtihstiick
butter	sm6r (n)	Smor (n)	boter	die Butter

528 The Loom of Language

ENGLISH	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN
cake	kaka	Kage	koek	der Kuchen
cheese	ost	Ost	kaas	der KSse
chicken	kyckling	Kylling	kip	das Huhn
cider	appelvin (n)	Aeblevin (n) appelwijn	der Apfelwein
coffee	kaffe(n)	Kaffe	koffie	der Kaffee
cream	gridde	Flode	room	der Rahm
whipped cream vispadgradde Flodeskum (n) siagroom	die Schlag- sahne
egg	£gg (n)	Aeg (n)	ei (n)	das Ei
boiled egg	kokt agg	kogt Aeg	gekookt ei	gekochtes Ei
fried egg	stekt agg	Spejlaeg	spiegelei	Spiegelei
evening meal	aftonm&I	Aftensmad	avondeten (n)	das Abend- essen
fat	fett (n).	Fedt (n)	vet (n)	das Fett.
flour	mjol (n)	Mel (n)	meel (n)	das Mehl
ham	skinka	Skinke	ham	der Schinken
honey	honing	Honning	honing	der Honig
ice-cream	glace	Is	ijs (n)	das Eis
jam	sylt (n)	Syltetoj (n)	jam	die Konfittire
meat	kott (n)	Kod (n)	vleesch (n)	das Fleisch
midday-meal	middag	Middag	middagmaal (n) das Mittagessen
milk	mjolk	Maelk	melk	die Milch
mustard	senap	Sennop	mosterd	der Senf der Mostrich
mutton	fSrkott (n)	Faarekod	schapenvleesch das Hammel-
oil	olja	(n)	(n)	fleisch
Olie	olie	das 01
pepper	peppar	Peber (n)	peper	der Pfeffer
pork	fl^sk (n)	Svinekod (n)	varkensvleesch (n) •	das Schweine- fleisch
roll	bulle	Rundstykke (n)	kadetje (n)	das Brotchen die Semmel
salad	sallad	Salat	salade	der Salat
salt	salt (n)	Salt (n)	zout (n)	das Salz
sandwich	smbrg&s	Smorrebrod (n)	boterham	das belegte Brotchen
sauce	sis	Sauce	saus	die Sosse
sausage	korv	Poise	worst	die Wurst
soup	soppa	Suppe	soep .	die Suppe
sugar	socker (n)	Sukker (n)	suiker	der Zucker
tea	te (n)	Te	thee	der Tee
veal	kalvkbtt (n)	Kalvekod (n)	kalfsvleesch (n) das Kalb-
vegetables	gronsaker (pi.) Gronsager (pi.)	groente	fleisch das Gemxise
vinegar	Sttika	Edikke	azijn	der Essig
wine	vin (n)	Vin (n)	wijn	der Wein
. (1) EATING AND COOKING	UTENSILS
basin	skSl	Kumme	kom (n)	das Becken
bottle	flaska	Flaske	flesch	die Flasche

Language Museum

ENGLISH

coffee-pot

corkscrew

cup

dish

fork

frying-pan

glass

jug

kettle

knife

lid

napkin

plate

saucepan

saucer

spoon

table-cloth

teapot

tin-opener

axe

board

cartridge

chisel

file

gimlet

gun

hammer

hoe

hook (fishing) ladder

line (fishing)

nail

net

nut

pincers

plane

plough

rod (fishing)

saw

scissors

screw

screw-driver

scythe

SWEDISH

kaffekanna

korkskruv

kopp

fat (n)

gaffel

stekpanna

glas (n)

kruka

kittel

kniv

lock (n)

servet

tallrik

kastrull

tefat (n)

sked

bordduk

tekanna

burkoppnare

yxa

bride (n) patron mejsel fil

borr . gevar (n) hammare hacka metkrok

stege

metrev

spik

nit (n)

mutter

ting

hyvel

plog

rnetspo (n) sig sax skruv

skruvmejsel

lie

DANISH

Kaffekande

Proptraek- ker Kop Fad (n)

Gaffel

Stegepande

Gias (n)

Kande

Kedel

Kniv

Laag (n'>

Serviet

Tallerken

Kasserolle

Underkop

Ske

Borddug

Tepotte

Daaseopluk-

ker

(m) TOOLS

DUTCH

koffiepot

kurkentrekker

kopje (n)

schotel

vork

braadpan glas (n) kan ketel mes (n) deksel servet (n) bord (n) stoofpan schoteltje (n) lepel

tafeliaken (n)

theepot

blikopener

529

GERMAN

die Kaffee- kanne der Kork- zieher die Tasse die SchUssel die Gabel die Bratpfanne das Glas der Krug der Kessel das Messer der Deckel die Serviette der Teller der Kochtopf die Untertasse der LOffel das Tischtuch die Teekanne ' der Biichsen- offner

0kse	bijl	die Axt
Braet (n)	plank	das Brett
Patron	patroon	die Patrone
Mejsel	beitel	der Meissel
Fil	vijl	die Feile
Bor (n)	boor	der Bohrer
Gevaer (n)	geweer (n)	das Gewehr
Hammer	hamer	der Hammer
Hakke	schoffel	die Hacke
Medekrog	vischhaak	der Angel- haken
Stige	ladder	die Leiter
Medesnore (n)	vischlijn	die Angelleine
Som (n)	spijker	der Nagel
Net (n)	net (n)	das Netz
Motrik	moer	die Mutter
Tang	nijptang	die Zange
Hovl	schaaf	der Hobel
Plov	ploeg	der Pflug
Medestang	hengel	die Angelrute
Sav .	zaag	die Sige
Saks	schaar	die Schere
Skrue	schroef	die Schraube
Skruetraekker	schroevedraaier der Schrau- benzieher
Le	zeis	die Sense

530 The Loom of Language

ENGLISH	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN ..
spade	spade	Spade	spade	der Spaten
spanner	skruvnycke!	Skruenogle	schroefsieutel	der Schrauben- schliissel
spring	fjader	Fjeder	veer	die Feder
string	snore (n)	Snor	touw (n)	die Schnur
tools	verktyg (n)	Vaerktoj (n)	werktuig (n)	das Werkzeug
wire	trSd Trasd draad (n) VOCATIONS AND SHOPS	der Draht
actor	sk&despelare	Skuespiller	tooneelspeler	der Schau- spieler
author	skriftstallare	Forfatter	schrijver	der Schrift- steller
baker	bagare	Bager	bakker	der Backer
bank	bank	Bank	bank	die Bank
bookseller	bokhandlare	Boghandler	boekhandelaar	der Buch- handler
bookshop	bokl&da	Boghandel	boekwinkel	die Buch- handlung
butcher	slaktare	Slagter	slager	der Fleischer der Metzger
cafe	cafe (n)	Kafe	cafe (n)	das Cafe das Kaffeehaus
chemist (phar¬ macist)	apotekare	Apoteker	apotheker	der Apotheker
chemist’s shop	apotek (n)	Apotek	apotheek	die Apotheke
clergyman	pr&st	Praest	geestelijke	der Pfarrer der Geistliche
clerk	kontorist	Kontorist	klerk	der Angestellte
confectionery	konditori (n)	Konditori (n)	banketbakkerij	die Konditorei
cook (female)	kokerska	Kokkepige	keukenmeid	die Kochin
customer	kund	Kunde	klant	der Kunde
dairy	mjolkbod	Mejeri (n)	melkinrichting	das Milchge- scMft
dentist	tandlakare	Tandlaege	tandarts	der Zahnarzt
doctor	l§kare	Laege	dokter	der Arzt der Doktor
engineer	ingenior	Ingenior	ingenieur	der Ingenieur
gardener	tradg&rdsmas- tare	Gartner	tuinman	der Gartner
hairdresser	h&rfris6r	Frisor	kapper	der Frisor der Haar- schneider
jeweller	juvelerare	Juveler	juwelier	der Juwelier
journalist	journalist	Journalist	journalist	der Journalist
judge	domare	Dommer	rechter	der Richter
laundry	tvittinrattning Vaskeri (n)	wasscherij	die Waschan- stalt
lawyer	advokat	Sagforer	advocaat	der Rechtsan- w&lt

Language Museum

ENGLISH	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH
mechanic	montor	Mekaniker	mecanicien
merchant	kopman	Kobmand	koopman
milliner	modist	Modehandler- inde	modiste
musician	musiker	Musiker	muzikant
notary	notarie	Notar	notar is
nurse (hospital)	sjukskoterska	Sygeplejerske verpleegster

officer

official

painter

peasant

photographer

policeman

postman

publisher

servant

shoemaker

shop

singer

smith

soldier

stationer’s shop

surgeon tailor teacher traveller typist (female)

watchmaker

workman

Africa

America

an American

Argentine

an Argentine

Asia

Austria

Belgium

a Belgian

Brazil

a Brazilian

officer	Officer	officier
ambetsman	Embedsmand ambtenaar
m&lare	Maler	schilder
bonde	Bonde	boer
fotograf	Fotograf	fotograaf
poliskonstapel Politibetjent	politieagent
brevbarare	Postbud	postbode
forlaggare	Forlaegger	uitgever ■
tjanare	Tjener	dienstbode
skomakare	Skomager	schoenmaker
butik *	Butik	winkel
sangare	Sanger	zanger
smed	Smed	smid
soldat	Soldat	soldaat
pappershandel Papirhandel	kantoorboek- handel
kirurg	Kirurg	chirurg
skraddare	Skraedder	kleermaker
larare	Laerer	onderwijzer
resande	Rejsende	reiziger
maskinskri-	Maskinskri-	typiste
verska	verske
urmakare	Urmager	horlogemaker
arbetare	Arbejder	werkman
(0) COUNTRIES AND PEOPLES
Afrika	Afrika	Afrika
Amerika	Amerika	Amerika
en amerikan	en Amerikaner een Amerikaan
Argentina	Argentina	Argentinig
en Argentinare enArgentiner	een Argentijn
Asien	Asien	Azie
Osterrike	0strig	Oostenrijk
Belgien	Belgien	Belgie
en belgier	en Belgier	een Belg
Brasilien	Brasilien	Brazilie
en Brasiliaaare en Brasilianer	een Braziliaan

53i

GERMAN

der Me cham¬ ber

der Kaufmann die Modistin die Putz-

macherin der Musiker der Notar die Kranken- schwester der Offizier der Beamte der Maler der Bauer der Photograph der Schutz- mann

der Polizist der Brieftrager der Verleger der Dienstbote der Schuh- macher der Laden der Sanger der Schmied der Soldat die Schreib- warenhandlung der Chirurg der Schneider der Lehrer der Reisende die Stenotypistin

der Uhrmacher der Arbeiter

Afrika

Amerlka

ein Amerikaner

Argentinien

ein Argentinier

Asien

Osterreich

Belgien

ein Belgier

Brasilien

ein Brasilian

532 The Loom of Language

ENGLISH	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN
China	Kina	Kina	China	China
a Chinese	en kines	en Kineser	een Chinees	ein Chinese
Denmark	Danmark	Danmark	Denemarken	DSnemark
a Dane	en dansk	en Dansker	een Deen	ein Dane
England	England	England	Engeland	England
an Englishman	en engelsman	. en Englaender een Engels ch-	ein Englander
Europe	Europa	Europa	Europa	Europa
a European	en europS	en Europaeer	een Europeaan	■ ein EuropSer
France	Frankrike	Frankrig	Frankrijk	Frankreich
a Frenchman	en fransman	en Fransk-	een Frans ch-	ein Franzose
		mand	man
Germany	Tyskland	Tyskland	Duitschland	Deutschland
a German	en tysk	en Tysker	een Duitscher	ein Deutscher
Great Britain	Storbritannien Storbritannien Groot-	v Grossbritan-
			BrittaniS	nien
Greece	Grekland	Graekenland	Griekenland	Griechenland
a Greek	en grek	en Graeker	een Griek	ein Grieche
Holland	Holland	Holland	Holland	Holland
a Dutchman	en holl&ndare	en Hollaendei	• een Hollander	ein Hollander
			een Nederlander
Hungary	Ungern	Ungam	Hongariie	Ungam
India	Indien	Indien	Britsch Indie	Indien
Ireland	Irland	Irland	Ierland	Irland
an Irishman	en irlandare	en Irlaender	een Ier	ein Ire
an Italian	en italienare	en Italiener	een Italiaan	ein Italiener
Italy	Italien	Italien	Italic	Italien
Japan	Japan	Japan	Japan	Japan
a Japanese	en japanes	en Japaner	een Japanees	ein Japaner
Norway	Norge	Norge	Noorwegen	Norwegen
a Norwegian	en norrman	en Nordmand	een Noor	einNorweger
Poland	Polen	Polen	Polen	Polen
a Pole	en polak *	en Polak	een Pool	ein Pole
Portugal	Portugal	Portugal	Portugal	Portugal
a Portuguese	en portugis	en Portugiser	een Portugees	ein Portugiese
Russia	Ryssland	Rusland	Rusland ,	Russland
a Russian	en ryss	en Russer	een Rus	ein Russe
Scotland	Skottland	SkotJand	Schotland	Schottland
a Scotsman	en skotte	en Skotte	een Schot	ein Schotte
Spain	Spanien	Spanien	Spanje	Spanien
a Spaniard	en spanior	en Spanier	een Spanjaard	ein Spanier
Sweden	Sverige	Sverrig	Zweden	Schweden
a Swede	en svensk	en Svensker	een Zweed	ein Schwede
Switzerland	Schweiz	Svejts	Zwitserland	die Schweiz
a Swiss	en schweizare	en Svejtser	eenZwitser	ein Schweizer
Turkey	Turkiet	Tyrkiet	Turkije	die Tiirkei
United States	Forenta Sta-	de forenede	de Vereenigde	die Vereinig-
	tema	Stater	Staten	ten Staaten

ENGLISH

address

blotting-paper

book

copy (of book* etc.)

copy (of letter,, etc.) date

dictionary

edition

envelope

fountain-pen

india-rubber

ink

letter

letter-box

map

newspaper

novel

page

paper

parcel

pen

pencil

periodical

postage

postcard

post-office

shorthand

signature

stamp

type-writer

bath

bill'

Language Museum

SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN
(p) READING AND ]	WRITING
adress	Adresse	adres (n)	die Adresse
			die Anschrift
laskpapper (n) Traekpapir (n) vloeipapier (n)	das Losch-
bok	Bog	boek (n)	papier das Buch
exemplar (n)	Eksemplar (n) exemplaar (n)	das Exemplar
kopia	Kopi	copie	die Kopie
datum (n)	Datum	datum	das Datum
ordbok	Ordbog	woordenboek	das Worter-
		(a)	buch
uppiaga	Oplag (n)	uitgave	die Aufiage
kuvert (n)	IConvolut	enveloppe	das Kuvert
			der Briefum-
			schlag
reservoir-	Fyldepen	vulpenhouder	die Ftillfeder
penna
gummi (n)	: Viskelaeder (n) vlakgom	der Radier-
blick (n)	Blaek (n)	inkt	gummi die Tinte
brev (n)	Brev (n)	brief	der Brief
brevMda	Brevkasse	brievenbus	der Briefkasten
karta	Landkort (n)	landkaart	die Karte
tidning	Avis	krant	die Zeitung
roman	Roman	roman	der Roman
sida	Side	bladzijde	die Seite
papper (n)	Papir* (n)	papier (n)	das Papier
paket (n)	Pakke	pakje (n)	das Paket
penna	Pen	pen	die Feder
blyertspenna	Blyant	potlood (n)	der Bleistift
tidskrift	Tidsskrifc (n)	tijdschrift (n)	die Zeit-
			schrift
porto (n)	Porto (n)	porto (n)	das Porto
			die Postgebiihr
brevkort (n)	Brevkort (n)	briefkaart	die Postkarte
postkontor (n) Posthus (n)	postkantoor fy\\	das Postamt
stenografi	Stenografi	w snelschrift (n)	die Kurzschrift
xmderskrift	Underskrift	handteekening	die Unter-
			schrift
frimarke (n)	Frimaerke (n)	postzegel	die Briefinarke
skrivmaskin	Skrivemaskine schrijf-	die Schreib-
		machine	maschine

(q) HOTEL AND RESTAURANT

bad (n) Bad (n) bad (n)

r &kning Regning rekening

das Bad die^Rechnung

534 The Loom of Language

ENGLISH	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH
chambermaid	staderska	Stuepige	kamermeisje
change	sm&pengar (pi.) Smaapenge (pi.) kleingeld (n
cloak-room	garderob	Toilet	garderobe
dining-room	matsal	Spisesal	eetzaal
hotel	hotel (n)	Hotel (n)	hotel (n)
lift	hiss	Elevator	lift
manager	direktor	Bestyrer	directeur
menu	matsedel	Spiseseddel	menu (n)
office	kontor (n)	Kontor (n)	kantoor (n)
porter	portier	Portier	portier
receipt	kvitto (n)	Kvjttering	kwitantie
restaurant	restaurant	Restaurant	restaurant (n)
tip	drickspengar	Drikkepenge	fooi
	(pi.)	(Pi.)
waiter	kypare	Tjener .	kellner

arrival

booking-office

ankomst

biljettkontor

(r) TRAIN

Ankomst

Billetkontor

	(n)	(n)
cloak-room	garderob	Garderobe
coach	vagn	Waggon
compartment	kupe	Kupe
communication cord	nddbroms	Nodbremse
connexion	forbindelse	Forbindelse
customs	tull	Told
departure	avresa	Afgang
engine	lokomotiv (n)	Lokomotiv (i
entrance	inging	Indgang
exit	urging	Udgang
frontier	grans	Graense
guard	konduktor	Konduktor
inquiry office	upplysnings-	Oplysnings-
	kontor (n)	kontor (n)
luggage	bagage (n)	Bagage
luggage-van	bagagevagn	Bagagevogn
passenger	passagerare	Passager
passport	pass (n)	Pas (n)
platform	perrong	Perron
porter	barare	Drager
railway	jamvag	Jembane

aankomst loket (n)

bagage-depot

(n)

wagon

coupd

noodrem

aansluiting douane vertrek (n)

ingang

nitgang

grens

conducteur informatie- bnreau (n)

bagagewagen

passagier paspoort (n) perron (n) kruier

spoorw eg

GERMAN das Zimmer- mad chen das Kleingeld die Garderobe der Speisesaal das Hotel der Lift der Fahrstuhl der Direktor die Speise- karte das Btiro der Portier die Quittnng das Restaurant das Trinkgeld

der Kellner

die Ankunft der Fahrkar- tenschalter die Gepackab- gabe

der Wagen dasKupee das Abteil die Notbremse

der Anschluss das Zollamt die Abfahrt die Lokomo¬ tive

der Eingang der Ausgang die Grenze der SchafEner die Auskunfts- stelle

das Gepack der Gepack- wagen

der Passagier der Pass der Bahnsteig der GepSck- trSger

die Eisenbahn

ENGLISH

seat

sleeping-car

smokers

station

station-master

stop

suit- case ticket return timetable train fast train

slow train

trunk

visa

waiting-room

Language Museum

SWEDISH DANISH DUTCH

plats Plads plaats

sowagn Sovevogn slaapwagon

rokare Rygere rookcoupe

535

GERMAN

der Platz der Schlaf-

wagen '

dasRaucherab-

station

stationsin-

spektor

halt

kappsack

biljett

rerar

tidtabell

tag (n)

snalMg

persontag

Station Stationsfor- stander Holdeplads Haandkuffert Billet retur Ksreplan Tog (n)

Iltog

Eksprestog

Persontog

station (n) stations chef

halte

valies (n) kaartje (n)

retour

spoorboekje (n) trein

sneltrein

boemeltrein

der Bahnhof der Bahnhof- vorsteher die Haltestelle ‘der Handkoffer die Fahrkarte retour

der Fahrplan der Zug der Eilzug der D-zug der Personen-

koffert

..visa

vantsal

RuSert

Visum (n) Ventesal

koffer

visum (n) wachtkamer

zug

der Koffer das Visum der Wartesaal

(s) SHIP

anchor	ankare (n)	Anker (n)	anker (n)	der Anker
boat	bat	Baad	boot	das Boot
bow	bog	Bov	boeg	der Bug
bridge	brygga	Bro	brug	die Brucke
cabin	kajuta	Kahyt	kajuit	die Kabine
captain	kapten	Kaptajn	kapitein	der Kapitan
compass	kompass	Kompas (n)	kompas (n)	der Kompass
crew	besattning	Mandskab (n)	bemanning	die Mannschaft
deck	dack (n)	Daek (n)	dek (n)	das Deck
dock	docka	Dok	dok (n)	das Dock
ffag	flagg	Flag (n)	vlag	die Flagge
gangway	landgang	Landgang	loopplank	die Laufplanke
hold	lastrum (n)	Lastrum (n)	scheepsniim (n) der Laderaum
keel	kbl	Ksl	kiel	der Kiel.
life-belt	raddnings- balte (n)	Rednings- baelte (n)	reddingsgordel der Rettungs- stlrtel
life-boat	raddningsbat	Redningsbaad	reddingsboot	das Retttmgs- boot
lighthouse	fyrtom (n)	Fyrtaam (n)	vuurtoren	der Leucht- turm
mast	mast	Mast	mast	der Mast
oar	ara	Aare	roeiriem	das Ruder
propeller	skruv	Skrue	schroef	die Schraube
purser	iatendent	Hovmester	hofineester	der Zahl- meister
rope	rep (n)	Reb (h)	touw (n)	das Tau

536	The Loom of Language
ENGLISH	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH
rudder	roder (n)	Ror (n)	roer (n)
sail	segel (n;	Sejl (n)	zeil (n)
sailor	sjoman	Somand	zeeman
seasickness	sjdsjuka	Sesyge	zeeziekte
ship	skepp (n)	Skib (n)	schip (n)
stern	akter	Agterende	achtersteven
tug	bogserbSt	Bugserbaad	sleepboot
wharf	kaj	Kaj	kaai
	(t) MOTOR AND BICYCLE
axle	axel	Aksel	as
bearing	lager (n)	Leje (n)	drager
bend (road;	kurva	Sving (n)	hoek
bicycle	cykel	. Cykle	fiets
bonnet	motorhuv	Motorhjselm	motorkap
brake	broms	Bremse	rem
bulb	lampa	Paere	lamp
bumper	kofangare	Kofanger	schokbreker
car	bil	Bil	auto
carburettor	forgasare	Karburator	carburator
chain	kedja	Kaede	ketting
clutch	koppling	Kobling	koppeling
cross-road	korsvSg	Korsvej	kruispunt (n)
distributor	fordelare	Fordeler	verdeeler
driving-licence	korkort (n)	Koretilladelse rijbewijs (n)
fine .	bo ter (pi.)	Bode	boete
gear	vaxel •	Gear	versnelling
head-lamp .	strllkastare	Forlygte	koplicht (n)
hood	sufRett	Kaleche	kap
hooter	signalhom (n) Signalhorn (n) claxon
horse-power	hastkraft	Hestekraft	paardekracht
ignition	tandning	Taendirig	ontsteking
insurance	forsSkring	Forsikring	verzekering
jade	domkraft	Donkraft	krik
level-crossing	jarnvagsover-	Togoverskaer-	overweg
	ging	ing
lorry	lastbil	Lastvogn	vrachtauto
motor-cyde	motorcykel	Motorcykle	motorfiets
mudguard	stankskarm	Staenkskaerm spatbord (n)
number-plate	nummerpHt	Nummerplade nunamerbord

(a)

german

das Ruder das Segel der Seemann die Seekrank- heit

das SchifF der Hinter- ’■ steven der Schlepper der Kai

die Achse das Lager die Kurve das Fahrrad die Haube die Bremse die Birne der Stossfanger das Auto der Wagen der Vergaser die Kette die Kupplung die Strassen- kreuzung der Verteiler der Fiihrer- * schein

die Geldstrafe der Gang der Schein- werfer das Verdeck die Hupe die Pferde- starke

die Zlindung die Ver- sicherung der Heber der Bahntiber- gang

das Lastauto das Motorrad der Kotfltigel das Nummern- s child

Language Museum

ENGLISH SWEDISH DANISH DUTCH

pedal	pedal
petrol	bensin
piston	pistong
plug	t&ndstift (n)
pressure	tryck (n)
pump	pump
radiator	kylare
saddle	sadel
spark	gnista
speed	fart
speed-limit	hastighets- grans
starter	sjalvstartare
s tarting-bau die	startvSv
steering-wheel	ratt
tank	tank
tube	luftslang
tyre	ring
valve	ventil
wheel	hjul (n)

accident (mis-	olyekshan-
hap)	delse
accident (chance handelse
event)
account (report) beriittelse
action	handling
advantage	fbrdel
advertisement	annons
advice	rad (n)
age (length of	alder
life)
allusion	hansyftning
amount	belopp (n)
anger	vrede
angle	vinkel
answer	svar (n)
apology	urs&kt
approval	bifall (n)
army	arme
art	konst

Pedal	pedaal (n)
Benzin	benzine
Stempel (n)	piston
Taendror (n)	bougie
Tryk (n)	druk
Pumpe	pomp
Koler	radiator
Sadel	zadel (n;
Gnist	yonk
Fart	snelheid
Hastigheds- graense	snelheidsgrens
Selvstarter	starter
Startsving (n) slinger
Rat (n)	stuurrad (n)
Tank	reservoir (n)
Slange	binnenband
Daek (n)	band
Ventil	ventiel
Hjul (n)	wiel (n)

(u) GENERAL

Ulykkestil-	ongeval (n)
faelde (n) Tilfaelde (n)	toeval (n)
Beretning .	bericht (n)
Handling	handeling
Fordel	voordeel (n)
Annonce	annonce
Raad (n)	advertentie raad
Alder	leeftijd
Hentydning	zinspeling
Belob (n)	bedrag (n)
Vrede	toom
Vinkel	hoek
Svar (n)	antwoord (n)
Uhdskyld-	verontschuldig-
ning	ing
Bifald (n)	bijval
Haer	leger (n)
Kunst	kunst

537

GERMAN

das Pedal

das Benzin der Kolben die Kerze cfer Druck die Piimpe der Kohler der Sattel der Fnnke die Geschwin- digkeit die Hdchstge- schwindig- keit

der Anlasser die Hand- kurbel

das Steuerrad der Behalter der Schlauch der Reiien das Ventil das Rad

der Unfall

der Zufall

der Bericht die Handlung der Vorteil die Annonce das Inserat der Rat das Alter

die Anspielung der Betrag der Arger der Zorn der Winkel die Antwort die Entschuldi- gung

der Beifall

die Armee das Hear die Kunst

538	The l
ENGLISH	SWEDISH
attack	anfall (n)
attempt	fSrsok (n)
attraction	dragnings- kraft
average	genomsnitt (0)
ball (round	boll
tbing)
battle	slag (n)
beauty	skdnhet
beginning	begynnelse
behaviour	uppfbrande (n)
belief	tro
birth	fodelse
blindness	biindhet
blot	flack
blow	slag (n)
bottom	botten
boundary, limit	grans
bow (arc)	b&ge
breed, race	ras
cause (grounds)	orsak
caution (care)	omsorg
centre	mitt
change (altera-	forandring
tion)
chapter	kapitel (n)
choice	val (n)
circle	cirkel
circumference	omkrets
collection	samling
colour	farg
combustion	forbranning
command (order) befallmng
committee	kommitt6
comparison	jamfbrelse
competition	konkurrens
(business)

The Loom of Language

DANISH Angreb (n)

DUTCH

aanval

Forsog (n) poging

Tiltraeknings- aantrekkings- kraft kracht

Gennemsnit gemiddelde (n)

(n)

Kugle kogel

GERMAN

der Anfall der Angriff der Versuch die Anzieh- ungskraft der Durch- , schnitt die Kugel

Slag (n) Skonhed Begyndelse

Opforsel

Tro

Fodsel

Blindhed

Piet

Slag (n)

Grund

Graense

Bue

Race

Aarsag

Forsigtighed

Midte

Forandring

Kapitel (n)

Valg (n)

Cirkel

Omfang (n)

Samling

Farve

Kulor

Forbraendinjg

Befaling Komi t6

veldslag schoonheid begin (n)

aanvang gedrag (n)

geloof (n)

geboorte

blindheid

vlek

slag

bodem

grens boog ras (n) oorzaak

voorzichtigheid

midden (n) verandering

hoofdstuk (n)

keus

cirkel

omtrek

verzameling

kleur

die Schlacht die Schbnheit der Beginn der Anfang das Benehmen das Betragen der Glaube die Geburt die Blindheit der Fleck der Schlag der Grand der Boden die Grenze der Bogen die Rasse die Ursache die Vorsicht die Sorgfalt die Mitte die Veran- derang das Kapitel die Wahl der ICreis der Umfang die Sammlung die Farbe

bevel (n) comit<§ (n)

Sammenligning vergelijking Konkurrence concurrentic

verbrtnding die Verbren- nung

der Befehl das Komitee der Ausschuss der Vergleich die Konlcur- renz

der Wettbe- werb

Language Museum

ENGLISH SWEDISH DANISH DUTCH COSonT(StiP'J‘Vilk0r(n) Betiagelse voorwaarde

condition (state) tillstind (n) Tilstand toestand

confidence

(trust)

connexion

ffcrtroende (n) Tillid vertrouwen (n)

fSroindelse Forbindelse verbinding

539

GERMAN die Bedingung

der Zustand die Lage das Vertrauen

die Verb in-

consequence	fdljd
consolation	trost
contempt	forakt (n)
contents	inneMll (n)
continuation	fortsattning
country (nation) land (n)
courage	mod (n)
cowardice	feghet
crime	brott (n)
criticism	kritik
cross	kors (n)
crowd	mangd
cry (call)	rop (n)
cube	taming
custom	sedvana
cut (incision)	snitt (n)
damage	skada
danger	fara
death	dod
debt	skuld
decay	fidrfall (a)
decision	beslut
defeat	nederlag a)
defence	forsvar (n)
degree (scale)	grad
depth	djup (n)
description	beskrlvnirtg
desire	bnskan
despair	fbrtvivlan
destruction	fbrddelse

detail detalj

development utveckling

Folge		dung
gevolg (n)	die Folge
Trost	troost .	der Trost
Foragt	verachting	die Verachtung
Indhold (n)	inhoud	der Inhalt
Fortsaettelse	voortzetting	die Fortset-
Land (n)	land (n)	zung das Land
Mod (n)	moed	der Mut
Fejghed	lafheid	die Feigheit
Forbrydelse	misdaad	das Ver-
Kritik		brechen
kritiek	die Kritik
Kors (n)	kruis (n)	das Kreuz
Maengde	menigte	die Menge
Raab (n)	roep	der Ruf
Teming	kubus	der Wfirfel
Saedvane	gewoonte	. die Sitte die Gewohn-
		heit
Snit (n)	snede	der Schnitt
Skade	schade	der Schaden
Fare	gevaar (n)	die Gefahr
Dod	dood	der Tod
Gaeld	schuld	die Schuld
Forfald (n)	verval (a)	der Verfall
Beslutning	besluit (n)	der Beschluss
Nederlag (n)	nederlaag	die Niederlage
Forsvar (a)	verdediging	die Verteidi-
Grad		gung
graad	der Grad
Dybde	diepte	die Tiefe
Beskrivelse	beschrijving	die Beschrei-
0nske (n)		bung
wensch	der Wunsch
Fortvivlelse	wanhoop	die Verzweif-
0delaeggelse		lung
vemieling	die Zerstbrang die Vemich-
Enkelthed		tung
detail (n)	die Einzelheit das Detail
Udvikling	ontwikkeling	die Entwick-

long

540

ENGLISH

diameter

digestion

direction

(course)

discovery

discussion

disease disgust disk (slice) distance

distribution

doubt

dozen

dryness

duty

edge (border) education effect effort

encounter (meet-

. ing)

end

.enemy

enmity

entertainment

(amusement)

environment

envy

equilibrium

event

example

exception

exhibition

existence

expansion *

experience

explanation

The Loom of Language

SWEDISH DANISH

diameter Diameter

matsmaltning Fordojelse

riktning	Retning
upptackt	Opdagelse
diskussion	Droftelse
sjukdom ackel (n) skiva avst&nd (n)	Sygdom Vaemmelse Skive Afstand
fordelning tvivel (n) dussin (n) torrhet	Fordeling Tvivl Dus in (n) Tor bed
plikt rand uppfostran verkning anstrangning	Pligt Rand Opdragelse Virkning Anstrengelse

mbte (n) Mode (n)

DUTCH	GERMAN
middellijn	der Durch- messer
spijsvertering	die Verdauung
richting	die Richtung
ontdekking	die Ent- deckung
bespreking	die ■ Erorterung die Diskussion
ziekte	die Krankheit
walging	der Ekel
schijf	die Scheibe
afstand	die Entfemung der Abstand
verdeeling	die Verteilung
twijfel	der Zweifel
dozijn (n)	das Dutzend
droogte	die Trocken- keit
plicht	die Pflicht
rand	der Rand
opvoeding	die Erziehung
uitwerking	die Wirkung
inspanning	die Anstren- gung die Anspan- nung
ontmoeting	die Begegnung

Unde	Ende	einde (n)
fiend e	Fjende	vijand
fiendskap (n)	Fjendskab (n) vijandschap
underMlling	Under- holdning	vermaak (n)
omgivning	Omgivelse	omgeving
avund (n)	Misundelse	afgunst
jamvikt	Ligevaegt	evenwicht (n)
handelse	Tildragelse	gebeurtenis
exempel (n)	Eksempel (n)	voorbeeld (n)
undantag (n)	Undtagelse	uitzondering
utstallning	Udstilling	tentoonstelling
tillvaro	Eksistens	bestaan (n)
utvidgning	Udvidelse	uitzetting
erfarenhet	Erfaring	ondervinding
fbrklaring	Forklaring	verklaring

das Ende der Feind die Feindsckaft die Unter- haltung die Umgebung der Neid das Gleich- gewicht das Ereignis das Beispiel die Ausnahme die Ausstellung dasVorhan- densein das Bestehen die Ausdeh- nung

die Erfahrung die Erkl&rung

Language Museum

ENGLISH	SWEDISH
fact (what is	faktum (n)
true)
fall (drop)	fall (n)
fear	fruktan
feeling	k&nsla
flight (air)	flykt
flight (escape)	flykt
fleet	flotta
fold (thing	fill
folded)
food	naring
force	kraft
fracture	brott (n)
freedom	frihet
friend	van
friendship	v&nskap
fuel	bransle (n)
future	framtid
game (play)	lek
gathering	forsamling
gift (present)	g&va
government	regering
gratitude	tacksamhet
greeting	halsning
growth	vSxt
guilt	skuld
half	halft
hardness	Mrdhet
haste	hast
hate	hat (n)
health	sundhet
hearing(senseof) hQrsel
heat (physics)	varme
height	hdjd
help	hjip
history	historia
hole	Ml (n)
honour	heder
hope	h°pp(n)
hunger	hunger
idea	id<§

DANISH	dutch
. Kendsgeming feit (n)
Faktum (n)
Fald (c)	val
Frygt	vrees
Folelse	gevoel (n)
Flugt	vlucht
Flugt	vlucht
Fiaade	vloot
Fold	vouw
Naering	voedsel (n)
Kraft	kracht
Brud (n)	breuk
Frihed	vrijheid
Ven	vriend
Venskab (n)	vriendschap
Braendsel (n)	brandstof
Fremtid	toekomst
Spil (n)	spel (n)
Forsamling	vergadering
Gave	geschenk (n)
Regering	regeering
Taknemme-	dankbaarheid
lighed
Hilsen	groet
Vaekst	groei
Skyld	schuld
Halvdel	helft
Haardhed	hardheid
Hast	haast
Had (n)	haat
Sundhed	gezondheid
Horelse (n)	gehoor (n)
Varme	warmte
Hojde	hoogte
Hjaelp	hulp
Historic	geschiedenis
Hul (n)	gat (n)
Acre	eer
Haab (n)	hoop
Suit	honger
Ide	idee (n)

541

GERMAN die Tatsache

der Fall der Srarz die Furcht die Angst das Gefhhl der Flug die Fludit die Flotte die Falte

die Nanning die Kraft der Bruch die Freiheit der Freund die Freund- schaft das Brenn- material die Zukunft das Spiel die Versamm- Iung

das Geschenk die Gabe die Regierung die Dankbar- keit

der Gruss das Wachstum die Schuld die Halite die Hirte die Hast die Eile der Hass die Gesundheit das Gehdr die Wanne die HQhe die Hilfe die Unter- sttitzung die Geschichte das Loch die Ehre die Hoffhung der Hunger die Idee

542

ENGLISH

imitation

income f

increase

industry (appli¬ cation) innocence instruction (teaching) intention interest (atten¬ tion) invention investigation

invitation

jealousy

journey

joy

judgment

juice

jump

justice

kick

kind (sort) knot

knowledge

language

laughter

law

lawsuit

laziness

lecture

leisure

length

lesson

level

lie

life

line

liquid

The Loom of Language

SWEDISH	DANISH .	DUTCH	GERMAN
efterhar-	Efterligning	imitatie	die Nachah-
mande (n) inkomst	Indkomst	inkomen (n)	mung das Einkom-
tilltagande (n) Tiltagen (n)	toename	men die Zunahme
flit	Flid	vlijt	dieVermehrung der Fleiss
oskuld	Uskyld	onschuld	die Unschuld
undervisning	' Undervisninj	g onderwijs (n)	der Unterricht
avsikt	Hensigt	voornemen (n)	die Absicht
intresse (n)	Interesse .	belangstelling	das Interesse
uppfinning	Opfindelse	uitvinding	die Erfindung
undersokning Undersogelse	onderzoek (n)	die Unter-
bjudning	Indbydelse	uitnoodiging	suchung die Einladung
svartsjuka	Skinsyge	jaloezie	die Eifersucht
resa	Rejse	reis	die Reise
gladje	Glaede	vreugde	die Freude
dom	Dom	oordeel (n)	das Urteil
saft	Saft	sap (n)	der Saft
spring (n)	Spring (n)	sprong	der Sprung
rattfardighet	Retfaerdighed gerechtigheid	die Gerechtig-
spark	Spark (n)	schop	keit ' de!r Fusstritt
art	Art	trap soort	die Art
knut	Knude	slag (n) knoop	die Sorte der Rnoten
kunskap	Kundskab	kennis	die Kenntnis
sprlk (n)	Sprog (n)	taal	das Wissen die Sprache
skratt (n)	Latter	lach	das Lachen
lag	Lov	gelach (n) wet	das Gelachter das Gesetz
process	Proces	proces (n)	der Prozess
lattja	Dovenskab	luiheid	die Trlgheit
foredrag (n)	Foredrag (n)	voordracht	die Faulheit der Vortrag
ledighet	Fritid	vrije tijd	die freie Zeit
langd	Laengde	lengte	die Musse die L&nge
laxa	Lektie	les	die Lektion
nivl	Niveau (n)	niveau (n)	das Niveau
logn	Logn	leugen	die Ltige
liv (n)	Liv (n)	leven (n)	das Leben
linje	Linie	lijn	die Linie
vatska	Vaedske	vloeistof	die Flilssigkeit

Language Museum

ENGLISH

list

load

look

loss

love

luck (chance)

luxury man (human being) manager mark, sign mass measure member memory mistake mixture money

mood (temper)

movement

name

necessity

SWEDISH

lista

last

blick

fdrlust

karlek

lycka

lyx

manniska

ledare tecken (n) massa matt (n) medlem minne (n) misstag blandning pengar (pi.) lynne (n)

rdrelse namn (n) nodv^ndighet

543

BANISH

Liste

Laes (n) Blik (n) Tab (n) Kaerlighed Held (n)

Luksus

Leder ■

Tegn (n) Masse Maal (n) Medlem (n) Hukommelse Fejl

Blanding Penge (pi.) Stemning Lune (n) Bevaegelse Navn (n)

DUTCH	GERMAN
lijst	das Verzeichnis die Liste
last	die Last
blik	der Blick
verlies (n)	der Verlust
liefde	die Liebe
geluk (n)	das Gltick
kans	die Chance
luxe	der Luxus
mensch	der Mensch
leider	der Leiter
teeken (n)	das Zeichen
massa	die Masse
maat	das Mass
lid (n)	das Mitglied
geheugen (n)	das Gedachtnis
fout	der Fehler
mengsel (n)	die Mischung
geld (n)	das Geld
stemming	die Stimmung die Laune
beweging	die Bewegung
naam	der Name
noodzakelijk-	die Notwen-

heid

news	nyhet	Nyhed	tijding	die Nachricht
noise (sound)	ljud (n)	Stoj	nieuws (n) geluid (n)	die Neuigkeit das GerSusch
noise (din)	buller (n)	Larm	geraas (n)	der Larm
number (No.)	nummer (n)	Nummer (n)	nummer (n)	die Nummer
number (nu-	tal(n)	Tal (n)	getal (n)	die Zahl
meral)
number	antal (n)	Antal (n)	aantal (n)	die Anzahl
(amount)
observation	iakttagelse	lagttagelse	opmerking	die Beobach-
occasion	tillfaile (n)	Lejlighed	gelegenheid	tung die Gelegen-
occupation (pro- yrke (n)	Stilling	beroep (n)	heit der Beruf
fession)
opening	bppning	Aabning	opening	die Offnung
opinion	mening	Mening	meening	die Meinung
order (arrange-	ordning	Ordning	orde	die Ansicht die Ordnung
ment)
origin	ursprung (n)	Oprindelse	oor§prong	der Ursprung
owner	agare	Ejer	eigenaar	der Eigentii-
pain	smarts	Smerte	pijn ’	mer der Schmerz
part (of whole)	del	Del	deel (n)	der Teil

544 The Loom of Language

ENGLISH	' SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN ’
part (in play,	roll	■ Rolle	rol	die Rolle
etc.) party (faction)	parti (n)	‘ Parti (n)	partij	die Parte i
past	det forflutna	Fortid	verleden (n)	die Vergangen-
				heit
payment	betalning	Betaling	betaling	die Bezahlung
peace	fred	Fred	vrede	der Friede
people (com¬	folk (n)	Folk (n)	volk (n)	das Volk
munity)
permission	tillatelse	Tilladelse	vergunning	die Erlaubnis
picture	bild	Billede (n)	beeld (n)	das Bild
piece (fragment) sty cite (n)	Stykke (n)	stuk (n)	das Sttick
place (spot)	stalle	Sted (n)	oord (n)	der Ort
plan (project)		Plads	plaats	die Stelle der Platz
plan	Plan	plan (n)	der Plan
pleasure	noje (n)	Fornojelse	vermaak (n)	das Vergntigen
point (sharp end) spets	Spids	punt	die Spitze
point (in space	punkt	Punkt (n)	punt (n)	der Punkt
or time)
poison	gift (n)	Gift	vergif (n)	das Gift
politeness	hovlighet	Hoflighed	beleefdheid	die Hoflich-
				keit
politics	politik	Politik	politiek	die Politik
practice	ovning	0velse	oefening	die Ubune
prejudice	fordom	Fordom	vooroordeel (n) das Vorurteil
press	press	Presse	pers	die Presse
pressure	tryck (n)	Tryk (n)	druk	der Druck
pretext	fdrevandning	Paaskud (n)	voorwendsel	der Vorwand
	pris (n)		(n)
price, prize	Pris	prijs	der Preis
product	produkt	Produkt (n)	product (n)	das Erzeugnis das Produkt
progress	framsteg (n)	Fremskridt (n) vordering	der Fortschritt
promise	loffce (n)	Lofte (n)	belofte	das Ver-
proof (evidence) bevis (n)	Bevis (n)	bewijs (n)	sprechen der Beweis
property (qual¬	egenskap	Egenskab	eigenschap	die Eigen-
ity				schaft
property (things egendom owned)	Ejendom	eigendom (n)	das Eigentum
protection	beskyld (n)	Beskyttelse	bescherming	der Schutz
publicity (ad¬ vertising)	reklam	Reklame	reclame	die Reklame
pull	drag (n;	Traek (n)	trek	der Zug
punishment	straff (n)	Straf	straf	die Strafe
purchase	kop (n)	Kob (n)	koop	der Kauf
purpose (aim)	mil (n)	Hensigt	doel (n)	der Zweck

das Ziel der Stoss die Frage

push

question

stot

Mga

Stod (n) stoot SporgsmaalCn) vraag

Language Museum

ENGLISH SWEDISH DANISH

ra^ str&le Straale

reason (power of fornuft Fornuft

thought)

re^Uection erinring Erindring

relation forhMande (n) Forhold (n)

DUTCH

straal vemuft (n)

herinnering

verhouding

remainder

remark

rent (of house, etc.)

repetition

rest _ . Rest rest

anmirkning Bemaerkning opmerking

hyra Leje hmir

upprepning Gentagelse herhaling

reproach

resistance

forebr&else Bebrejdelse verwijt (n) motst&nd (n) Motstand tegenstand

respect aktning

rest (repose) vila

revenge hamnd

reward beldning

right (just claim) ratt risk risk

rule (regulation) regel rumour rykte (n)

safety sakerhet

salc forsaljning

sample monster (n)

science vetenskap

scratch skr&ma

Agtelse	achting
Ro	rust
Haevn	wraak
Belonning	belooning
Ret	recht (n)
Risiko	risico (n)
Regel	regel
Rygte (n)	gerucht (n)
Sikkerhed	veiligheid
Salg (n)	verkoop
Monster (n)	monster (n)
Videnskab	wetenschap
Ridse	schram

screen

seat

skarm Skaerm scherm (n)

sate (n) Saede (n) zitting

secret

sensation (stir)

hemlighet Hemmelighed geheim (n) uPpseende (n) R0re (n) sensatie

sense (meaning) betydelse sense (smell, sinne touch, etc.) sentence (group sats of words)

sex	kon (n)
shape	form
share	andel
side	sida
size	storlek
sleep	somn
smell	lukt
smile	sm^loje (n)

Betydning	beteekenis
Sans	zintuig
Saetning	volzin
Kon (n)	geslacht (n)
Form	vorm
Andel	aandeel (n)
Side	zijde
Storrelse	grootte
Sovn	slaap
Lugt	reuk
Smil (n)	glimlach

545

GERMAN

der Strah! die Vemunft

die Erinnerung die Beziehung das Verhaitnis der Rest

die Bemerkung die Miete

die Wieder- holung der Vorwurf der Wider- stand

die Achtung 5 die Ruhe die Rache die Belohnxmg das Recht das Risiko die Regel das Geriicht die Sicherheit der Verkauf das Muster die Wissen- schaft die Ritze die Schramme der Schirm der Sitz der Platz das Geheimnis das Aufsehen die Sensation die Bedeutung der Sinn

der Satz

das Geschlecht die Form die Gestalt der Anted die Seite die Grbsse der Schlaf der Geruch das Lachein

546 The Loom of Language

ENGLISH	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN '
society	sallskap (n)	Selskab (n)	maatschappij	die Gesell- schaft
song	sing	Sang	lied (n)	das Lied
sound	ljud	Lyd	geluid (n)	der Laut
space	ram (n)	Rum (n)	ruimte	der Raum
speech (address) tal	Tale	redevoering	die Rede
speed	hastighet	Fart	snelheid	die Geschwin- digkeit
square	fyrkant	Firkant	vierkant (n)	das Quadrat
state	stat	Stat	staat	der Staat
stay (sojourn)	uppehill (n)	Ophold (n)	verblijf (n)	der Aufenthalt
step (pace)	steg	Skridt (n)	stap	der Schritt
story	berattelse	Fortaelling	verhaal (n)	die Erzahlung die Geschichte
strike	strejk	Strejke	staking	der Streik
struggle	kamp	Kamp	strijd	der Kampf
study	studium (n)	Studium (n)	studie	das Studium
substance	stoff (n)	Stof (n)	stof	der Stoff die Substanz
success	framg&ng	Success	succes	der Erfolg
suggestion (pro¬ posal)	fbrslag (n)	Forslag (n)	voorstel (n)	der Vorschlag
sum	summa	Sum	som	die Summe
surface	yta	Overflade	oppervlakte	die Oberfiiche
surprise	bverraskning	Overraskelse	verrassing	die Uber- raschung der Verdacht
suspicion	misstanke	Mistanke	achterdocht
swindle (fraud)	bedrageri	Bedrag (n)	bedrog (n)	der Betrug der Schwindel
sympathy (com¬ passion)	medlidande (n)	Medlidenhed	medelijden (n)	das Mitleid
task	syssla	Opgave	taak	die Aufgabe
taste	smak	Smag	smaak	der Geschmack
tax	skatt	Skat	belasting	die Steuer
tendency	tendens	Tendens	neiging	die Neigung die Tendenz
tension	spinning	Spaending	spanning	die Spannung
test	prov (n)	Prove	beproeving	die Priifung die Probe
thanks	tack	Tak	dank	der Dank
(heft	stbld	Tyveri (n)	diefstal	der Diebstahl
thing	ting	Ting	ding (n)	das Ding
	sak	Sag	zaak	die Sache
thirst	tbrst	Torst	dorst	der Durst
thought	tanks	Tanke	gedachte	der Gedanke
tie (bond)	band (n)	Baand (n)	band	das Band
time	tid	Tid	tijd	die Zeit
top (summit)	topp	Top	top	die Spitze der Gipfel
touch (contact)	berSring	Beroring	aanraking	die Berilhrung
trade	liandel	Handel	handel	der Handel

ENGLISH

trade-union

translation

Language Museum 547

SWEDISH DANISH DUTCH GERMAN fackffireaing Fagforemng vakvereeniging die Gcwerk-

Oversattning Oversaettelse yertaling dietibLet-

treatment

triangle

trick

trouble (worry)

truth

turn

behandlande Behandling trekant Trekant

knep (n) Kneb (n)

sorg Sorg

sanning Sandhed

vandning Vending

unemployment arbetsloshet Arbcjdslos-

hed

111111 enhet Enhed

use (application) bruk Brag

vacation, boll- ferier (pi) days

value varde (n)

vanity £&fanga

vehicle Skdon

vermin ohyra

vessel (container) beh&Hare

Ferie

Vaerd (n) Tomhed Koretoj (n) Utoj (n) Beholder

victory

visit

voice, vote wages

walk (stroll)

want (lack) war

warning

waste

seger

besok

visit

stamma

l6n

spatserg&ng

brist krig varning slOseri (n)

Sejr

Besog (n)

Visit

Stemme

Lon

Spadseretur

Mangel

Krig

Advarsel

0delaeggelse

way vag Vej

wealth rikedom Rigdom

weapon vapen (n) Vaaben (n)

weight vikt Vaegt

width bredd Bredde

will vilja Vilje

wish dnskan 0nske (n)

word ord (n) Ord (n)

work (labour) arbete (n) Arbejde (n)

youth ungdom Ungdom

zeal iver , Iver

behandeling

driehoek

true

zorg

waarheid

wending

werkeloosheid

eenheid gebraik (n)

vacantie

. zung

die Behandlung

das Dreieck der KnifF die Sorge die Wahrheit die Wendung die Brehung die Arbeits- losigkeit die Einheit der Gebrauch dieAnwendung die Ferien (pi)

waarde ijdelheid voertuig (n) ongedierte (nj vat (n)

overwinning bezoek (n) visite stem loon (n) wandeling

gebrek (n) oorlog

waarschuwing

verkwisting

weg rijkdom wapen (n) gewicht (n) breedte v?il

wensch woord (n) werk (n) jeugd ijver

der Wert dieEitelkeit das Fahrzeug das Ungeziefer das Gef&ss der Beh&lter der Sieg der Besuch die Visite die Sttmme der Lohn der Spazier- gang

der Mangel der Kxieg die Warming die Verschwen- dung der Weg der Reichtum die Waffe das Gewicht die Breite der Wille der Wunsch das Wort die Arbeit die Jugend der Eifer

54^ The Loom of Language

2. DIVISION OF TIME

(a)' GENERAL TERMS

ENGLISH	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN
afternoon	eftennlddag	Efrermiddag	namiddag	derNachmit-
century	Srhundrade	Aarhundrede eeuw	tag das Jahrhun-
Christmas	(n) Jul	On) Jul	Kerstmis	dert Weihnachten
day	dag	Dag	dag	der Tag
dawn	daggryning	Daggty (n)	dageraad	der Tagesan-
dusk	skymning	Tusmorke (n) schemering	bruch die Dimmer-
Easter	pSsk	Paaske	Paschen	ting Ostem
evening	afton	Aften	avond	der Abend
fortnight	fjorton dagar	fjorten Dage	veertien dagen vierzehn Tage
holiday (public) helgdag	Festdag	feestdag	der Festtag
hour	timme	Time	uur (n)	die Stunde
half-an-hour	en halvtimme	: en halv Time	een half uur	eine halbe
a quarter of an	en kvart	et Kvarter(n)	een kwartier	Stunde eine Viertel-
hour an hour and a	en och en	halvanden	anderhaifuur	stunde anderthalb
half	halv timnie	Time		Stunden
leap year	skott£r (n)	Skudaar (n)	schrikkeljaar (n) das Schaltjahr
midnight	midhatt	Midnat	middemacht	dieMittemacht
minute	minut	Minut (n)	minuut	die Minute
month	m&nad	Maaned	maand	der Monat
morning	morgon	Morgen	morgen	der Morgen
night	natt	Nat	nacht	die Nacht
noon	middag	Middag	middag	der Mittag
season	Irstid	Aarstid	jaargetijde (n)	die Jahreszeit
second	sekund	Sekund (n)	seconde	die Sekunde
sunrise	soluppging	Solopgang	zonsopgang	der Sonnen-
sunset	soloedg&ng	Solnedgang	aiugaug zonsondergang der Sonnen-
time	tid	Tid	tijd	untergang die Zeit
week	vecka	Uge	week	die Woche
year '	ii (n)	Aar (n)	jaar (n)	das Jahr
spring	(b) SEASONS , MONTHS AND DAYS vir Foraar (n) lente	der Fruhling
summer	sommar	Sommer	zomer	der Sommer
autumn	h6st	Efteraar (c)	herfst	der Herbst
winter	vinter	Vinter	winter	der Winter
January	januari	Januar	Januari	Januar
February	februari	Februar	Februari	Februar
March	mars	Marts	Maart	M to .
April	april	April	April	April

ENGLISH	Language Museum SWEDISH DANISH DUTCH	549 GERMAN
May	maj	Maj	Mei	Mai
June	juni	Juni	Juni	Juni
July	juli	Juli	Juli	Juli
August	august!	August	Augustus	August
September	September	September	September	September
October	oktober	Oktober	Oaober	Oktober
November	november	November	November	November
December	december	December	December	Dezember
Monday	mindag	Mandag	Maandag	Montag
Tuesday	tisdag	Tirsdag	Dinsdag	Dienstag
Wednesday	onsdag	. Onsdag	Woensdag	Mittwoch
Thursday	torsdag	Torsdag	Donderdag	Donnerstag
Friday	fredag	Fredag	Vrijdag	Freitag
Saturday	l6rdag	Lordag	Zaterdag	Samstag
Sunday	sondag	Sondag	Zondag	Sonnabend Sonntag
one	en* ett (n)	3. NUMERALS en, et (n) eea	cin3 eine (f )
two	tvi	to	twee	zwei
three	tre	tre	drie	drei
four	fyra	fire	vier	vier
five	fem	fem	vijf	fiinf
six	sex	seks	ze8	sechs
seven	sju	syv	zeven	sieben
eight	Itta	otte	acht	acht
nine	nio	ni	negen	neun
ten	tio	ti	tien	zehn
eleven	elva	elleve	elf	elf
twelve	tolv	tolv	twaalf	zwSlf
thirteen	tretton	tretten	dertien	dreizehn
fourteen	fjorton	fjorten	veertien	vierzehn
fifteen	femton	femten	vijftien	fiinfzehn
sixteen	sexton	sejsten	zestien	sechzehn
seventeen	sjutton	sytten	zeventien	siebzehn
eighteen	aderton	atten	achttien	achtzehn
nineteen	nitton	nitten	negentien	neunzehn'
twenty	tjugo	tyve	twintig	zwanzig
twenty-one	tjugoen	en og tyve	een en twintig	einund-
twenty-two	tjugotvS	to og tyve	twee en twintig	zwanzig ; zweiund-
thirty	trettio	tredive	dertig	zwanzig dreissig
forty	fyrtio	fyrre	veertig	vierzig
fifty	femtio	halvtreds	vijftig	ftmfzig
sixty	sextio	tres	zestig	sechszig
seventy	sjuttio	halvfjers	zeventig	siebzig
eighty	Sttio	firs	tachtig	achtzig
ninety	nittio	halvfems	negentig	neunzig

55° The Loom of Language

ENGLISH	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN
hundred	hundra	hundrede	honderd	hundert
thousand	tusen	tusinde	duizend	tausend
million	en million	en million	een millioen	eine Million
first	den forsta	den forste	de eerste	der erste
second	andra	anden	tweede	zweite
third	tredje	tredje	derde	dritte
fourth	fjarde	fjerde	vierde	vierte
fifth	femte	femte	vijfde	fiinfte
sixth	sjatte	sjette	zesde	sechste
seventh	sjunde	syvende	zevende	siebente
eighth	iittonde	ottende	achtste	achte
half	en halv	en halv	een half	ein Halb
one-third	en tredjedel	en Tredjedel	een derde	ein Drittel
one-fourth	en fjardedel	en Fjerdedel	een vierde	ein Viertel
one-fifth	en femtedel	en Femtedel	een vijfde	ein Fiinftel
once	en gfing	een Gang	eenmaal	einmal
twice	tv& ganger	to Gauge	tweemaal	zweimal
three times	tre ganger	tre Gauge	driemaal	dreimal
	4	, ADJECTIVES
able (capable)	duglig	dygtig	bekwaam	fahig
absent	fr&nvarande	fravaerende	afwezig	abwesend
accidental	tillfaUig	tilfaeldig	toevallig	zufallig
agreeable	behaglig	behagelig	aangenaam	angenehm
alive	levande	levende	levend	lebend
ambiguous	tvetydig	tvetydig	dubbelzinnig	doppelsinnig
amusing	rolig	morsom	vermakelijk	amtisant
				unterhaltend
angry	vred	vred	toomig	bose
			boos	aufgebracht
artificial	konstlad	kunstig	kunstmatig	kiinstlich
attentive	uppmarksam	opmaerksom	aandachtig	aufinerksam
avaricious	girig	gerrig	gierig	geizig
awake	vaken	vaagen	wakker	wach
bad	d&lig	daarlig	slecht	schlecht
beautiful	skon	smuk	mooi	schSn
bent	b5jd	bojet	gebogen	gebogen
bitter	bitter	bitter	bitter	bitter
black	svart	sort	zwart	schwarz ,
blind	blind	blind	blind	blind
blue	bid	blaa	blauw	blau
blunt (not sharp) slo	slov	stomp	stumpf
brave	tapper	tapper	dapper	tapfer
	modig	modig	moedig	mutig
bright (full of \\oht	ljus	lys	helder	hell
broad (wide)	bred	bred	breed	breit
brown	brun	brim	bruin	braun
careful (cautious) fftrsiktig	forsigtig	voorzichtig	vorsichtig

Language Museum 551

ENGLISH	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN
charming	fdrtjusande	fortryllende	bekoorlijk	relzend
cheap clean	billig	billig	goedkoop	bezaubernd billig
ren	ren	schoon	rein
clear (not	klar	klar	klaar	sauber klar
clouded) cold	kail	kold	koud	kalt
comfortable	bekv&m	bekvem	comfortabel	bequem
continual	stSndig	bestandig	gestadig	fortwahrend
continuous	oavbruten	uafbrudt	onafgebroken	bestSndig ununterbroch*
contrary	motsatt	modsat	tegengesteld	en gegenteilig
cool	kylig	koiig	koel	ktihl
cruel	grym	grusom	wreed	grausam
daily	daglig	daglig	dagelijksch	tUglich
dangerous	farlig	farlig	gevasrlijk	gef&hrlicb
dark	mork	mark	donker	dunkel
dead	d6d	dod	dood	tot
deaf	d5v	dov	doof	taub
deaf and dumb	dovstum	dovstum	doofstom	taubstumm
dear (beloved)	k&r	kaer	lief	lieb
dear (expensive) dyr	dyr	duur	teuer
deep	djup	dyb	diep	tief
different (differ¬ ing) difficult	• olik	forskellig	verschillend	verschieden
sv&r	vanskelig	moeilijk	schwer
dirty	smutsig	snavset	vuil	schwierig schmutzig
disagreeable	obehaglig	ubehagelig	onaangenaam	unangenehm
distinct (dear)	tydlig	tydelig	duidelijk	deutlich
domestic	huslig	huslig	huiselijk	hauslich
double	dubbel	dobbelt	dubbel	doppelt
drunk	drucken	drukken	dronken	betrunken
dry	torr	tor	droog	trocken
dumb	stum	stum	stom	stumm
dusty	dammig	stovet	stoffig	staubig
early	tidig	tidlig	vroeg	friih
eastern	ostlig	ostlig	oostersch	dstlich
easy	latt	nem	gemakkelijk	leicht
edible	atbar	spisel ig	eetbaar	essbar
empty	tom	tom	leeg	leer
equal	lika	lige	gelijk	gleich
extreme	ytterst	yderst	uiterste	Susserst
faithful	trogen	tro	trouw	treu
false	falsk	falsk	valsch	falsch
famous	berdmd	beromt	beroemd	berfihmt
fast (firm)	fast	fast	vast	fest
fast (speedy)	snabb	hurtig	spoedig	schnell
fat (of meat)	fet	fed	vet	fett

552

ENGLISH

favourable

female

fertile

flat

foreign

fragile

free

fresh

friendly

full

furious

future

generous

genuine

good

greats large

green

grey

guilty

happy

hard

harmful

healthy

heavy

high

hollow

honest

hot

human

hungry

ill

important

impossible

industrious

inner

innocent

inquisitive

insane

intelligent

interesting just (fair) kind

last

late

lazy

lean

left

The Loom of Language

SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN
gynnsam	gunstig	gunstig	ghnstig
kvinnlig	kvindelig	vrouwelijk	weiblich
fruktbar	frugtbar	vruchtbaar	fruchtbar
flat	flad	vlak	flach
utlandsk'	udenlandsk	buitenlandsch	auslandisch
skor	skor	broos	zerbrechlich
£fi	fri	vrij	frei
frisk	frisk	versch	frisch
vanlig	venlig	vriendelijk	freundlich
full	fuld	vol	voll
rasande	rasende	woedend	wtitend
framtida	fremtidig	toekomstig	zukfinftig
frikostig	gavmild	vrijgevig	freigebig
Skta	aegte	echt	echt
god	god	goed	gut
stor	stor	groot	gross
gron	gron	groen	griin
gr&	graa	grijs	grau
skyldig	skyldig	schuldig	schuldig
lycklig	lykkelig	gelukkig	glticklicb
h&rd	baard	hard	hart
skadlig	skadelig	schadelijk	schadlich
sund	sund	gezond	gesund
rung	tung	zwaar	schwer
h6g	hoj	hoog	hoch
iMlig	hul	hoi	hohl
arlig	aerlig	eerlijk	ehrlich
het	hed	heet	heiss
mSnsklig	menneskelig	menschelijk	menschlich
hungrig	sulten	hongerig	hungrig
sjuk	syg	ziek	krank
viktig	vigtig	belangrijk	wichtig
omojlig	rnnulig	onmogelijk	unmQglich
flitig	flittig	vlijtig	fleissig
inre	indre	binnenst	inner
oskyldig	uskyldig	onschuldig	unschuldig
nyfiken	nysgerrig	nieuwsgierig	neugierig
vansinnig	sindssyg	krankzinnig	geistesgestort
klok	klog	knap	irr klug
intelligent	intelligent	intelligent	intelligent
intressant	interessant	interessant	interessant
rSttfardig	retfaerdig	rechtvaardig	gerecht
godhjSrtad	godhjertet	goedig	gtltig freundlich
sist	sidst	laatst	letzt
sen	sen	laat	spat
lat	doven	lui	trage faul *
mager	mager	mager	mager
vSnster	venstre	linker	link

Language Museum

ENGLISH	SWEDISH
light (in weight) latt
liquid	hytande
long	ling
loose (slack)	los
loud	hogljudd
low	lig
lukewarm	ljum
male	man! ig
married	gift
mean (average)	medel-
medical	medicinsk
military	militarisk
mobile	rorlig
modest	blygsam
moist	fuktig
mutual	omsesidig
naked	naken
narrow	smal
natural	naturlig
necessary	nodvandig
new	ny
next	nast
northern	nordlig
obedient	lydig
occupied (of	upptagen
seat, etc.)
old	gamma]
only	enda
open	oppen
ordinary	vanlig
(current)
original (first)	ursprunglig
outer	yttre
own (one’s;	egen
painful	smartful
pale	blek
past	forgingen
patient	tilig
personal	personlig
pointed	spetsig
poisonous	giftig
polite	hovlig
poor	fattig
popular	popular
possible	mojlig
practical	praktisk
pregnant	havande
present	narvarande

DANISH	DUTCH
let	liebt
flydende	vloeibaar
lang	lang
los	los
hoj	luid
lav	3aag
lunlten	lauw
mandlig	mannelijk
gift	gehuwd
gennemsnitlig	; gemiddeld
medicinsk	geneeskundig
militaer	militair
bevaegelig	beweegbaar
beskeden	bescheiden
fogtig	vochtig
gensidig	wederzijdsch
nogen	naakt
smal	nauw
naturlig	natuurlijk
nodvendig	noodig
ny	nieuw
naest	naast
nordlig	noordelijk
lydig	gehoorzaam
optagen	bezel
gammel	oud
eneste	eenig
aaben	open
saedvanlig	gewoon
oprindelig	oorspronkelijk
ydre	buitenst
egen	eigen
smertelig	pijnlijk
bleg	bleek
forbigangen	verleden
taalmodig	gednldig
personlig	persoonlijk
spids	puntig
giftig	giftig
hofiig	beleefd
fattig	arm
populaer	populair
mulig	mogelijk
praktisk	practisch
svanger	zwanger
naervaerende S*	tegenwoordig

553

GERMAN

leichr

fiusslg

lang

lose

laut

niedrig

lauwarm

mannlich

verheiratet

mittler

durchschnitt-

licit

medizinisch

militarisch

beweglich

bescheiden

feucht

gegenseidg

nackt

schmal

nattirlich

notig

notwendig

neu

nachst

nordlich

gehorsam

besetzt

alt

einzig

offen

gewohnlich

urspriinglich

ausser

eigen

schmerzhaft

bleich

vergangen

geduldig

personlich

spitz

giftig

Hoflich

arm

popular

moglich

praktisch

schwanger

gegenwartig

554	The Loom of Language
ENGLISH	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN
pretty	vacker	kon	aardig	hiibsch
principal	huvudsaklig	hovedsagelig	hoofdzakelijk	wichtigst
probable	sannolik	sandsynlig	waarschijnlijk	hauptsachlichst wahrscheinlich
proud	stolt	stolt	trotsch	stolz
public	oficentlig	offendig	openbaar	offentlich
quiet (calm)	lugn	rolig	rustig	rahig
rare	s&Usynt	sjaelden	zeldzaam	selten
raw (not cooked) r&	raa	rauw	roh
ready	f£rdig	faerdig	klaar	bereit '
real	verklig	virkelig	werkelijk	fertig wirklich
reasonable (rational)	fomuftig	fomuftig	verstandig	vemilnftig
red	rod	rod	rood	rot
regular	regelbunden	regelmaessig	regelmatig	regelmassig
responsible	ansvarig	ansvarlig	verantwoor-	verantwordich
rich	rik	rig	delijk rijk	reich
ridiculous	lojlig	latterlig	belachelijk	lacherlich
right (correct)	riktig	rigtig	juist	richtig
right (hand)	hoger	hojre	rechter	recht
rigid	styv	stiv	stijf	steif
ripe	mogen	moden	rijp	reif
rough (not	skrovlig	ru	raw	rauh
smooth) round	rund	rund	rond	rund
rude	ohovlig	uhoflig	onbeleefd	unhoflich
rusty	rostig	rusten	roestig	rostig
sad	bedrovad	bedrovet	treurig	traurig
satisfied	n5jd	tilfreds	tevreden	betrubt zufrieden
scientific	vetenskaplig	videnskabelig wetenschappe-	wissenschaft-
secret	hemlig	hemmelig	lijk geheim	lich geheim
sensitive	kanslig	folsom	gevoelig	empfindlich
separate	skiljd	saerskilt	afzonderlijk	getrennt
serious	allvarsam	alvorlig	ernstig	emst
shallow	grand	lav	ondiep	untief
sharp	skarp	skarp	scherp	seicht scharf
short	kort	kort	kort	kurz
shut	stangt	lukket	dicht	geschlossen
shy	skygg	sky	verlegen	scheu
similar	likartad	lignende	soortgelijk	ahnlich
simple	enkel	enkelt	eenvoudig	einfach
sleepy	somnig	sovnig	slaperig	schlafrig
slim	smart	slank	slank	schlank
slow	l&ngsam	langsom	langzaam	langsam
small, little	liten	lille	klein	klein
smooth	slat	glat	glad	glatt

Language Museum

ENGLISH	SWEDISH
sober	nykter
soft	miuk
solid (not liquid) fast
sour	sur
southern	sydlig
special	s&rskild
square	fyrkantig
steep	brant
sticky	klibbig
straight	rak
strange (pecu-	egendomlig
liar)
strong	stark
stupid	dum
sudden	plotslig
sufficient	tillr&cklig
suitable (appro-	■ passande
priate
sure (certain)	saker
sweet	sot
talkative	pratsam '
tame	tarn
thankful	tacksam
thick (not thin)	tjock
thick (dense)	tat
thin	tunn
thirsty	torstig
tight (close-	tr&ng
fitting)
tired	trott
topmost	overst
tough	seg
transparent	genomskinlig
true	sann
ugly	ful
unconscious	medvetslbs
unemployed	arbetslos
urgent	br&dskande
useful	nyttig
vain	ffifang
valid	giltig
valuable	vSrdefull
visible	synlig
vulgar	gemen
warm	varm
weak	svag
western	vesterlig
wet	v&t
white	vit
whole	hel
wild	vild

DANISH	DUTCH
aedru	nuchter
blod	zacht
fast	vast
sur	zuur
sydlig	zuidelijk
saeregen	bijzonder
firkantet	vierkant
stejl	steil
klaebrig	kleverig
lige _	recht
ejendommelig eigenaardig vreemd
staerk	sterk
dum	dom
pludselig	plotseling
tilstraekkelig	voldoende
passende	geschikt
sikker	zeker
sod	zoet
snaksom	spraakzaam
tarn	tarn
taknemmelig	dankbaar
tyk	dik
taet	dicht
tynd	dun
torstig	dorstig
taet	nauw
traet	moe
overst	bovenste
sejg	taai
gennemsigtig	doorzichtig
sand	waar
grim	leelijk
bevidstlos	bewusteloos
arbejdslos	werkeloos
indtraengende	dringend
nyttig	nuttig
forfaengelig	ijdel
gyldig	geldig
vaerdifuld	kostbaar
synlig	zichtbaar
gemen	ordinair
varm	warm
svag	zwak
vestlig	westelijk
vaad	nat
hvid	wit
hel	geheel
vild	wild

555

GERMAN

niichtern

weich

fest

sauer

stidlich

besonder

viereckig

steil

Mebrig

gerade

eigenffimlich

sonderbar

stark

dumm

plotzlich

gentigend

passend

geeigner

sicher

shss

gesprachig

zahm

dankbar

dick

dicht

dtinn

durstig

eng

mtide

oberst

zah

durchsichtig ’

wahr

hasslich

bewusstlos

arbeitslos

dringend ■

ntitzlich

eltel

gflltig

wertvoll

sichtbar

gemein

warm

schwach

westlich

nass

weiss

ganz

wild

556

ENGLISH SWEDISH wrong ( incorrect) oriktig

The Loom of Language

yearly

yellow

young

be able to absorb accept accompany accuse act upon add to add up

admire advertise advise be afraid of

£rlig

guJ

ung

kunna

insuga

mottaga

fblja

anklaga

verka pi

tillfoga

adders

beundra

annonsera

rlda

vara r add fdr

be in agreement Mila med with

take aim at sikta pi

alight from stiga ur

allow till&ta

amuse (oneself) roa (sig)

annoy pMga

answer (reply) svara

apologize ursSkta sig

arrange arrest (take in custody) arrive

be ashamed of

ask (put a question) ask (beg)

ordna

arrestera

ankomma sklmmas for

frlga'

bedja

associate with umgls med

DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN
urigtig	verkeerd	unrichtig
aarlig	iaarlijksch	falsch jahrlich
gui	geel	gelb
ung	long	jung
VERBS
kunne	kunnen	kdnnen
indsuge	absorbeeren	absorbieren
modtage	aannemen	annehmen
ledsage	begeleiden	begleiten
anklage	aanklagen	anklagen
virke paa	werken op	wirken auf
tilfoje	bijvoegen	hinzufQgen
addere	optellen	addieren
beundre	bewonderen	zusammen- zahlen bewundern
avertere	adverteeren	annoncieren
raade	raden	raten
vaere bange for bang zijn	sich ftirchten
	voor	vor
stemme over-	overeen-	ubereinstim-
eens med	stemmen met men mit
sigte paa	mikken op	zielen auf
stige ud	uitstoppen	aussteigen
tiliade	veroorloven	erlauben
more (sig)	(zich) ver~	(sich) unter-
plage	maken	halten
ergeren	argern
svare	antwoorden	antworten
undskylde sig	zich veront-	sich entschul-
ordne	schuldigen	digen
regelen	regeln
arrestere	arresteeren	festnehmen
ankomme	aankomen	ankommen
skamme sig	zich schamen	sich schamen
over	over	(gen.)
sporge	vragen	fragen
bede	vragen	bitten
	verzoeken	ersuchen

assure

astonish

attack

attempt

attract

fdrsakra

fdrvlna

angripa

forsoka

tildraga

omgaas med

forsikre

forbause

angribe

forsoge

tiltraekke

omgaan met

verzekeren

verbazen

aanvallen

beproeven

aantrekken

umgehen mit

versichern

tiberraschen

angreifen

versuchen

anziehen

Language Museum

ENGLISH

avoid

bathe* take a

SWEDISH

tmdvika

bada

DANISH

undgaa

bade

slaa biive begynde opfare sig

DUTCH

vermijden

baden

slaan worden beginnen zicb gedragen

bath

beat (give blows) sH become bliva

begin borja

behave uppfdra sig

557

GERMAN

vermeiden

baden

schlagen werden beginnen sich betragen

believe	tro
belong to	tillhora
bend	boia
bend down (stoop) b6ja sig
bet	sM vad
bite	bita
blame (reproach) tadla
blow	biasa
blow one’s nose snyta sig
boast	sknta
boil 1
boil J	koka
bore (drill)	borra
bore (tire)	uttr&ka
be bom	vara fodd
borrow	lana (av)
bother oneself	bry sig om
about
break 1
break J	bryta
breathe	andas
breed (rear)	avia
	uppfoda
breed	avia
bring	hamta
broadcast	utsanda
brush	borsta
build	bygga
burn 1
burn j	branna
burst	brista
bury (inter)	begrava
be busy with	sysselsatta s;
	med
buy	kdpa
calculate	berakna
call (name)	kalla
call (shout for)	ropa
be called	heta

tro	gelooven	sich benehmen glauben
tilhore	behooren	gehdren
boje	buigen	biegen
boje sig	zich bukken	sich bucken
vaedde	wedden	wetten
bide	bijten	beissen
dadle	laken	tadeln
blaese	blazen	blasen
pudse sin	zijn neus	sich die Nase
Naese	snuiten	putzen
prale	pochen	sich schneuzen sich ruhmen
koge	■koken	kochen
bore	boren	bohren
kede	vervelen	langweilen
vaere odt	geboren zijn	geboren
laane (af)	leenen (van)	werden borgen (von)
bryde sig om	zich bekom-	sich kiimmem
	meren om	urn
braekke	breken	zerbrechen
aande	ademen	atmen
avle	fokken	ziichten
opdrage	opvoeden	aufziehen
yngle	voortbrengen	sich vermeh-
bringe	brengen	ren bringen
udsende	uitzenden	rundfunken
borste	borstelen	biirsten
bjrgge	bouwen	bauen
braende	branden	brennen
briste	barsten	platzen
begrave	begraven	begraben
beskaeftige	zich bezig	sich beschaft-
sig med	houden met	igen mil
kobe	koopen	kaufen
beregne	berekenen	berechnen
kalde	noemen	nennen
raabe	roepen	rufen
hedde	heeten	heissen

558 The Loom of Language

ENGLISH SWEDISH .DANISH DUTCH

carry	b&ra
catch (capture)	f&nga
cease (stop)	upphSra
• celebrate	fra
change (alter)	fSrandra
change (money; v§xla
change	forandras
chew	tugga
choke	kvava
choke	kvavas
choose, elect	valja
clean	gora ren
climb	klattra
collect	samla
comb	kamma
come	komma
compare	j^mfora
compel	tvinga
compete	konkurrera
complain (about) klaga (over)
concern (imper¬	ang&
sonal)

condemn	dorna
confess	erkanna
confuse	forvirra
congratulate	gratulera
connect	forbinda
conquer (terri-	erovra
tory)
consent	samtycka
console (com-	trbsfa *
fort)
contain	innehSlia
continue	fortsatta
contradict	mots§ga
contribute	bidraga
control	kontrolera
converge	lQpa samman
convince	Svertyga
cook	koka
copy	kopiera
correct	ratta

baere	dragen
fange	vangen
ophore	ophouden
fejre	'vieren
forandre	veranderen
veksle	wisselen
forandre sig	veranderen
tygge	kauwen
kvaele	worgen
kvaeles	stikken
vaelge	kiezen
gore ren	schoonmaken
kJatre	klimmen
samle	verzamelen
kaemme	kammen
komme	komen
sammenligne	vergelijken
tvinge	dwingen
konkurrere	mededingen
klage (over)	klagen (over)
angaa	betreffen
domme	veroordeelen
bekende	bekennen
forvirre	verwarren
gratulere	gelukwenschei feliciteeren
forbinde	verbinden
erobre	veroveren
samtykke	toestemmen inwilligen
troste	troosten
indeholde	bevatten
fortsaette	voortzetten
modsige	tegenspreken
bidrage	bijdragen
kontrolere	controleeren
lobe sammen	samenloopen
overtyde	overtuigen
koge	koken
kopiere	copieeren
rette	verbeteren

GERMAN

tragen fangen aufhbren feiern andern wechseln sich verandern kanen wiirgen ersticken wahlen reinigen putzen klettem sammeln k&mmen kommen vergleichen zwingen konkurrieren klagen (liber) betreffen angehen vernrteilen gestehen verwirren i gratulieren begllickwiin- schen verbinden eroberrs

zustimmen

einwilligen

trosten

enthalten fortsetzen fortfahren mit widersprechen beitragen kontrollieren zusammen- laufen

konvergieren

tiberzeugen

kochen

kopieren

verbessern

korrigieren

Language Museum

ENGLISH SWEDISH

correspond to motsvara

cost	kosta
cough	hosts
count (find	rakna
number)
cover	tacka
creep	krypa
criticise	kritisera
crush	krossa
cure	bota
cut	skara
cycle	cykla
damage	skada
dance	dansa
dare	v&ga
dazzle	blanda
deceive	bedraga
decide	besluta
decorate	pryda
deduce (infer)	sluta
defeat	besegra
defend	forsvara
defy	utfordra
demand	fordra
deny (say that	forneka
thing is untrue)
depart	avresa
depend upon	bero pi
describe	beskriva
deserve	fortjana
design (plan)	planlagga
despair	fortvivla
despise	fbrakta
destroy	forstora
detain (delay)	uppeMila
develop	utveckla
develop	utveckla sig
die	d6
dig	grava
digest	smalta
disappear	forsvinna
disappoint	svika
discharge (dis¬	avskeda
miss)
discover	upptScka
disinfect	desinficiera

DANISH	DUTCH
svare til	beantwoorde: aan
koste	kosten '
hoste	hoes ten
taelle	tellen
daekke	bedekken
krybe	kruipen
kritisere	critiseeren
knuse	verpletteren
helbrede	genezen
skaere	snijden
cvkle	fietsen
beskadige	beschadigen
danse	dansen
vove	durven
blaende	verblinden
bedrage	bedriegen
beslutte	beslissen
smykke	tooien
slutte	afleiden
besejre	verslaan
forsvare	verdedigen
udfordre	uitdagen
fordre	verlangen
benaegte	ontkennen
afrejse	vertrekken
afhaenge af	afhangen van
beskrive	beschrijven
fortjene	verdienen
planlaegge	ontwerpen
fortvivle	wanhopen
foragte	verachten
odelaegge	vernielen
opholde	ophouden
udvikle	ontwikkelen
udvikle sig	zich ontwikkel¬ en
do	sterven
grave	graven
fordoje	verteeren
forsvinde	verdwijnen
skuffe	teleurstellen
afskedige	ontslaan
opdage	ontdekken
desinficere	desinfecteeren

559

GERMAN

entsprechen

kosten

husten

zahlen

bedecken

kriechen

kritisieren

zerdriicken

beilen

scbneiden

radeln

beschadigen

tanzen

wagen

blenden

betiiigen

beschliessen

schmilcken

schliessen

folgem

besiegen

schlagen

verteidigen

herausfordem

fordem

verlangen

leugnen

abreisen abhangen von beschreiben verdienen entwerfen verzeifeln verachten zerstSren aufhalten entwickeln sich ent¬ wickeln sterben graben verdauen verschwinden enttauschen entlassen

entdecken

desinfizieren

56o

The Loom of Language

ENGLISH

dissolve distinguish between distribute disturb dive divide divorce (get divorced from) do gora

doubt (of) trivia (p£ )

SWEDISH

upplosa

Itskiljamellan

fbrdela oroa dyka

dela

skilja sig

draw (sketch) dream

dress oneself drink

drive (vehicle)

drown

dry

dye •

earn

eat (of animals) eat (of man) educate (train) embrace emphasize

empty

encourage

endeavour

to

enjoy

envy

escape

estimate evaporate exaggerate examine (in¬ vestigate) excite exclude excuse

exhibit

exist

rita

dromma klada sig dricka kora drunkna

DANISH

oplose

skelne mellem

fordele

forstyrre

dykke

dele

skille fra gore

tvivle (paa)

tegne

dromme

klaede sig

drikke

kore

drakne

DUTCH

oplossen

onderscheiden

tusschen

verdeelen

storen

duiken

deelen

scheiden

doen

twijfelen (aan)

teekenen droomen zich aankleeden drinken rijden verdrinken

torka	torre	drogen
fcga	farve	verven
fbrtjana	fortjene	verdienen
ata	aede	vreten
ata	spise	eten
uppfostra	opdrage	opvoeden
onrfamna	omfavne	omarmen
betona	laegge Vaegt	nadruk leggen
	paa	op
tomma	tomme	ledigen
uppmuntra	opmuntre	aanmoedigen
bemdda sig	bestraebe sig	streven
l fbrlova sig	forlove sig	zich verloven
med	med	met
njuta	nyde	genieten
misunna	misunde	benijden
tmdvika	undvige	ontvluchten
uppskatta	vurdere	schatten
avdunsta	fordampe	verdampen
dverdriva	overdrive	overdrijven
undersoka	undersoge	onderzoeken
uppegga	pirre	opwinden
utestanga	udelukke	uitsluiten
uxsakta	undskylde	verontschul- digen
utstalla	udstille	tentoonstellen
existera	eksistere	bestaan

expect

vtnta

forvente

verwachten

german

aufibsen

unterscheiden

zwischen

verteilen

storen

tauchen

teilen

sich scheiden lassen tun

zweifeln (an) bezweifeln zeichnen traumen sich ankleiden trinken fahren ertrinken trocknen farben verdienen fressen essen erziehen umarmen betonen Nachdruck legen auf leeren ermutigen sich bemtihen sich bestreben sich verloben mit

geniessen

beneiden

entkommen

entweichen

schatzen

verdunsten

iibertreiben

untersuchen

aufregen

ausschliessen

entschuldigen

ausstellen

bestehen

existieren

erwarten

Language Museum

ENGLISH	SWEDISH
explain	forklara
exploit	utnyta
express oneself	uttrycka sig
extinguish	utslacka
faint (swoon)	svimma
fall	falla
fall in love with	foralska sig
fasten (fix)	fasta
feed (animals)	fodra
feed (people)	nara
feel	kanna sig
fetch	hamta
fight	kampa
fill	fylla
find	finna
finish (conclude)	sluta
finish (complete) fullanda
fish	fiska
fit (make to fit)	passa
flatter	smickra
flee (run away	fly.
from)
flow	flyta
fly	flyga
fold	f&ila
follow	fblja
forbid	forbjuda
forecast (predict) forutsaga
foresee	forutse
forget	glomma
forgive	forl&ta
freeze	frysa

DANISH	DUTCH
forklare	uitleggen
ndbytte	uitbuiten
ndtrykkesig	zich uitdruk- ken
udslukke	uitdooven
besvime	flauw vallen
falde	vallen
forelske sig	verliefd wor- den op
gore fast	vastmaken
fodre	voeden
(er) naere	voeden
foie	zich voelen
hente	halen
kaempe	vechten
fylde	vullen
finde	vinden
siutte	besluiten
fuldende	voltooien
fiske	visschen
tilpasse	aanpassen
smigre	vleien
flygte	vluchten
flyde	vloeien
flyve	vliegen
folde	vouwen
folge	volgen
forbyde	verbieden
forudsige	voorspellen
forudse	voorzien
glemme	vergeten
tilgive	vergeven
fryse	bevriezen

freeze	frysa
frighten	skramma
gather (pick)	plocka
gather (come together)	forsamla sig
get up (rise)	stiga upp
give	giva
go (on foot)	ga
go (in vehicle)	fara
govern	regera
greet	Mlsa
grind (crush)	mala

fryse	vriezen
forskraekke	verschrikken
plukke	plukken
forsamles	samenkomen
staa op	opstaan
give	geven
gaa	gaan
k0re	rijden
regere	regeeren
hilse	groeten
male	malen

561

GERMAN erklaren ausbeuten Rich ausdrii- cken

ausloschen in Ohnmacht fallen fallen

sich verlieben in

befestigen

futtem

(er) nahren

sich fuhlen

holen

kaxxipfen

fullen

finden

schliessen

vollenden

fertigmachen

fischen

anpassen

schmeicheln

fliehen

fliessen fiiegen falten folgen verbieten voraussagen voraussehen vergessen verzeihen zum Gefrieren bringen gefrieren erschrecken pflticken sich versam- meln aufstehen geben gehen fahren regieren griissen mahlen

562

The Loom of Language

ENGLISH	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH
groan	stona	stonne	steunen
grow.	vaxa	vokse	groeien
grumble	brumma	brumme	mopperen
	loiorra	knurre	knorren
guess hang 1 hang J	gissa	gaette	raden
hanga	haenge	hangen
happen (imper¬ sonal) harvest (reap)	handa	ske	gebeuren
skorda	hoste	oogsten
hate	hata	hade	haten
have	hava	have	hebben
hear	hora	hore	hooren
help	hjalpa	hjaelpe	helpen
hesitate	tveka	tove	aarzelen
hide	dblja	skjule	verbergen
hide (from)	gomma sig (for)	skjule sig (for) zich verberi (voor)
hinder	hindra	hindre	hinderen

hire hit (strike) hold hope hunt hurry

hurt (injure) illuminate (light up)

imagine (form picture) imitate import incline include infect

inflate

inherit

inquire (about) insult insure interest Interfere (with)

introduce (per¬ son) invent invite join (unite)

hyra

trafxa

halla

hoppas

jaga

skynda sig

skada

upplysa

hyre

traeffe

holde

haabe

jage

skynde sig

saare

oplyse

huren

treffen

houden

hopen

jagen

zich haasten

pijn doen

verlichten

GERMAN stohnen wachsen murren brummen erraten fhangen [hangen geschehen sich ereignen emten hassen haben h6ren helfen zogern verbergen sich verbergen (vor) hindern mieten treffen halten

hoffen 1

jagen

sich beeilen eilen verletzen Licht machen

forestalla sig forestille zich voorstellen sich vorstellen

efterharma

infora

boja

inneslutta

smitta

inficiera

uppbMsa

arva

Mga (efter) fbrolampa fors&kra intressera blanda sig(in)

efterligne

indfore

boje

indeslutte

smitte

inficere

opblaese

arve

sporge (efter) fomaerme forsikre interessere blande sig (i)

forestille

forestalla presentera

uppfinna , opfinde inbjuda indbyde

ft5rena forene

nabootsen

invoeren

neigen

insluiten

besmetten

infecteeren

opblazen

erven

vragen (naar) beleedigen verzekeren interesseeren zich bemoeien (met)

voorstellen

uitvinden uitnoodigen vereenigen

nachahmen

einftihren

neigen

einschliessen

anstecken

infizieren

aufblasen

erben

fragen (nach) beschimpfen versichem interessieren sich einmi- schen (in) vorstellen

erfinden

einladen

vereinigen

ENGLISH

joke (jest)

judge

jump

keep (preserve) keep (retain) kick

kill

kiss

kneel

knock (at door) know

land

last

laugh laugh at lead lean on learn

leave behind lend

let (house* etc.) lie (teH lie) lie (position) lie down

lift

light (cigarette* etc.) like

'imp listen to live (be alive) Ive (dwell) look after (take care of) ook (have ap¬ pearance of) ook at

ose

ove (person)

ubricate

nake

nake a mistake

Language Museum

SWEDISH

skamta

doma

hoppa

bevara

behiUa

sparka

ddda

kyssa

kniboja

knacka

kinna

veta

landa

vara

skratta

utskratta

fora

luta pi

lara sig

lamna efter

lina

uthyra

ljuga

ligga

lagga sig

lyfta

tanda

tycka om

halta lyssna till leva bo

se efter

se ut

se pi beskida

tappa alska smorja gora taga fel

banish

spoge

domme

springe

bevare

beholde

sparke

draebe

kysse

knaele

banke

kende

vide

iande

vare

le

udle

fore

laene sig til

laere

efteriade

laane

udleje

lyve

ligge

laegge sig

lofte

taende

synes om

halte lytte til leve bo

se efter

se ud

se paa

betragte

tabe

elske

smore

gore

tage Fejl

BUTCH

schertsen

beoordeelen

springen

bewaren

behouden

schoppen

dooden

kussen

knielen

kloppen

kennen

weten

landen

duren

lachen

uitlachen

voeren

leunen op

Ieeren

achterlaten

leenen

verhuren

liegen

liggen

gaan liggen

tinen

aansteken

houden van

hinken

toehooren

leven

wonen

oppassen

uitzien

aanzien

aanldjken

verliezen

houden van

smeren

maken

een fout maken

563

GERMAN

scherzen

spassen

beurteilen

springen

hupfen

(au£)bewahren behalten mit dem Fusse stossen tdten kussen knien klopfen kennen wissen landen dauem wahren lachen auslachen fuhren

sichlehnenan lernen zurticklassen leihen vermieten liigen liegen sich nieder- legen heben anziinden anstecken gem haben mogen hinken zuhoren leben wohnen achten auf

aussehen

ansehen betrachten verlieren lieben schmieren machen einen Fehler machen

564 The Loom of Language

ENGLISH	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH
manage (direct) skota	lede	besturen
manufacture	fabricera	fabrikere	fabriceeren
march	marschera	marchere	marcheeren
marry (get married)	gifts sig med	gifte sig med	huwen trouwen met
mate measure 1	para	parre sig	paren
measure J	mata	maale	meten
meet (encoun¬ ter) melt 1	mota traffa	mode traeffe	ontmoeten
melt J	smalta	smelte	smelten
mend	reparera	reparere	repareeren
milk	mjolka	malke	melken
mix	blanda	blande	mengen
mourn	beklaga	beklage	betreuren
move (shift)	rora	rykke	verschuiven
move (change residence)	flytta	flytte	verhuizen
move (budge)	rora sig	rore sig	zich bewegen
multiply	multiplicera	multiplicere	vermenigvul-

need	behova	behove	noodig hebben
neglect	forsumma	forsomme	veronachtza-
nurse (sick)	skota	pieje	men verplegen
obey	lyda	adlyde	gehoorzamen
offend	forolampa	fornaerme	beleedigen
offer	erbjuda	tilbyde	aanbieden
omit (leave out)	utelamna	udelade	weglaten
open	oppna	aabne	opendoen
oppose (with¬ stand)	motst&	modsaette sig	weerstaan
oppress	fortrycka	undertrykke	onderdrukken
order (goods)	bestalla	bestille	bestellen
organise	organisera	organisere	organiseeren
owe	vara skyldig	skylde	schuldig zijn
pack	packa	pakke	pakken
paint	mala	male	schilderen
pay	betala	betale	betalen
	skala	skraelle	schillen
perform (carry out)	utfbra	udfore	uitvoeren ‘
persecute	forfolja	forfolge	vervolgen
persuade	overtala	overtale	overreden
pick up	plocka upp	tage op	oprapen

german

leiten fabrizieren marschieren heiraten sich verheira- ten mit paaren

xnessen

begegnen

treffen

schmelzen

reparieren

melken

mischen

beklagen

rilcken

verschieben

umziehen

sich bewegen multiplizieren

brauchen notig haben vernachlassi- gen

pflegen

gehorchen

beleidigen

anbieten

auslassen

bffhen

aufmachen

sich widerseizen

unterdrucken

bestellen

organisieren

schulden

packen

malen

bezahlen

schalen

ausfuhren

verfolgen

iiberreden

auflesen

Language Museum

ENGLISH

pity

plan

plant

play (game)

SWEDISH DANISH

6mka

planera plantera leka

play (instrument) spela please behaga

plough ploja

plunder plundra

poison forgifca

possess besitta

postpone uppskjuta

Pour. gjuta

practice (exer- praktisera cise oneself)

praise berdmma

Pray bedja

precede g& forat

prefer foredraga

prepare forbereda

press . trycka

pretend (feign) foregiva prevent print

profit (from)

promise pronounce

hindra

trycka

ynke

planere

plante

lege

spille

behage

ploje

plyndre

forgifte

besidde

udsaette

ose

ove

rose

bede gaa foran foretraekke forberede trykke foregive forhindre trykke

565

DUTCH GERMAN

medelijden bemitleiden

hebben met Mitleid haben mit

plannen planen

planten pflanzen

spelen spielen

spelen spielen

behagen gefallen

ploegen pfltigen

plunderen • phindern vergiftigen vergiften

bezitten besitzen

uitstellen verschieben

gieten giessen

oefenen tiben

sich tiben

roemen loben

ruhmen

bidden beten

voorafgaan vorangehen

verkiezen vorziehen

voorbereiden vorbereiten

drukken drtacken

voorgeven verhinderen drukken

draga fordel profitere (af) profiteeren

(av) lova uttala

propose (suggest) fdresM protect beskydda

protest protestera

prove bevisa

publish (of pub- forlagga lisher)

pull draga

pump (water) pumpa pump (inflate) pumpa upp punish straffa

Push stdta

put (see p.257) satta

love

udtale

foreslaa

beskytte

protestere

bevise

udgive

traekke

pumpe

oppumpe

straffe

stode

saette

quarrel	stalla lagga	stille laegge
gr§la	skaendes
be quiet (silent)	vara tyst	tie
quote	citera	citere
rain	regna	regne
react	reagera	reagere
read	ISsa	laese

(van) beloven uitspreken voorstellen beschermen protesteeren bewijzen 9 uitgeven

trekken

pompen

oppompen

straffen

stooten

zetten

stellen

leggen

twisten

zwijgen

citeeren

regenen

reageeren

lezen

vorgeben

verhindem

drucken

profitieren

(von)

versprechen

aussprechen

vorschlagen

beschtitzen

protestieren

beweisen

herausgeben

verlegen

ziehen

pumpen

aufpumpen

(be)strafen

stossen

setzen

stellen

legen

zanken

schweigen

zitieren

regnen

reagieren

lesen

566	The Loom of Language
ENGLISH	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH
receive	_ mottaga	modtage	ontvangen
recite	recitera	reciters	reciteeren
recognize	kanna igen	genkende	erkennen
recommend	rekommen- dera	anbefale	aanbevelen
recover (get better)	tillfriskna	komme sig	kerstellen
reflect (light)	refiektera	kaste tilbage	weerkaatsen
refuse to	v£gra att	naegte at	weigeren te
regret	beklaga	beklage	spijten

GERMAN

empfangen

erhalten

rezitieren

vorlesen

erkennen

empfehlen

sick erholen

zuriickwerfen reflektieren sick weigern zu

bedauem

reject	forkasta	afvise
rejoice (be glad) gladja sig frdjdas	glaede sig
release (let go)	slSppa	loslade
rely on	lita p&	stole paa
remain	fbrbliva	forblive
remember	komma ikag	mindes
remind	erinra sig	kuske
paminna	erindre
renew	fornya	foray
repeat	upprepa	gentage
report (news)	meddela	meddele
represent (stand forestall	forestille
resemble	likna	ligne
reserve (seat)	reservera	reservere
respect	akta	agte
restrict	inskrUnka	indskraenke
rest (take rest)	Vila	hvile
reveal	uppenbara	aabenbare
revenge oneself	kamnas	haevne sig
review (books)	recensera	anmelde
revise	revidera	revidere
revolt (rise)	uppresa sig	rejse sig
reward	beldna	belonne
ride	rida	ride
be right	kavaratt	have Ret
ring	ringa	ringe
ring	ringa	klinge
risk (incur risk) riskera	ri^ikere

verwerpen zurtickweisen zick verheugen sick freuen

loslaten vertrouwen op

blijven zick kerin- neren herinneren vernieuwen kerkalen berickten

voorstellen

loslassen sick verlassen a uf

bleiben sick erinnem

erinnem

erneuern

wiederholen

berickten

melden

vorstellen

gelijken

reserveeren

ackten

beperken

rusten

openbaren

zick wreken

bespreken

recenseeren

herzien

opstaan

beloonen

rijden

gelijkhebben

bellen

luiden

luiden

gevaar loopen riskeeren

gldchm

reservieren

ackten

einschranken

ruken

sick ansrnken

entktillen

sick rachen

besprecken

rezensieren

revidieren

sick erheben

belohnen

reiten

Reckt kaben klingeln l&uten lauten

Gefakr lanfeaa riskieren

Language Museum

ENGLISH	SWEDISH
roast roll )	steka
roll }	rulla
rot (decay)	ruttna
row	ro
rub	gnida
ruin	ruinera
run	lopa
sail	segla
save (from)	radda (Mn)
save (money)	spara
saw	s&ga
say, tell	saga
scatter (sprinkle) strQ
scrape	skrapa
scratch	riva
scream	skrika
screw	skruva
search	ransaka
secrete	avsondra
see	se
seek (look for)	soka
seem	tyckas
seize (grasp)	gripa
sell	salja
send	sanda
separate	skilja separera
serve	tjana
serve (meals)	servera
sew	sy
shake	skaka
share with	dela med
shave	raka sig
shine	skina
shoot	skjuta
shoot dead	skjnta ihjal
show	visa
shut (dose)	stanga
shut in	instanga
side with	Mila med
sigh	sucka
sign	underteckna
signify (mean)	betyda

DANISH	DUTCH
stege	braden
mile	rollen
raadne	rotten
ro	roeien
guide’	wrijven
ruinere	ruineeren
lobe	rennen loopen
sejle	zeilen
redde (fra)	redden (van)
spare	sparen
save	zagen
sige	zeggen
StT0	strooien
skrabe	schrapen
kradse	krabben
skrige	gillen
skrue	schroeven
ransage	doorzoeken
afsondre	afscheiden
se	zien
soge	zoeken
synes	schijnen
gribe	grijpen
saelge	verkoopen
sende	zenden
skille	scheiden
separere
tjene	dienen
servere	serveeren
sy	naaien
ryste	schudden
dele med	deelen met
barbere sig	zich scheren
skinne	schijnen
skyde	schieten
ihjelskyde	doodschieten
vise	toonen
lukke	sluiten dichtdoen
indelukke	insluiten
holde med	partij kiezen voor
sukke	zuchten
underskrive	onderteekenen
betyde	beduiden

567

GERMAN

braten

rollen

faulen

rndem

reiben

ruinieren

verderben

rennen

laufen

segeln

retten (von)

sparen

sagen

sagen

streuen

schabea

kratzen

schreien

schrauben

durchsuchen

ausscheiden

sehen

suchen

scheinen

ergrelfen

packen

verkaufen

senden

schicken

trennen

dienen servieren nahen schtitteln teilen mit sich rasieren scheinen schiessen erschiessen zeigen schliessen zumachen einschliessen Parteinehmen fur

seufzen

unterschreiben

unterzeichnen

bedeuten

568 The Loom of Language

ENGLISH SWEDISH

sin	synda
sing	sjunga
sink	sanka
sink	sjunka
sit	sitta
sit down	satta sig
skate	aka skridsk(
slander	baktala
sleep	sova
slip	halka *
smear	smorja
smell	lukta
smell of	lukta av
smile	smale
smoke 1
moke J	roka
sneeze	nysa
snore	snarka
now '	snoa
s* k	biota
sob	snyfta
soil	smutsa
solve	upplosa
sow	sa
speak	tala
spell	stava
spend (money)	kasta ut
spend (time)	tillbringa
spit	spotta
split	klyva
spread out	utbreda
squeeze out	pressa
. stand	sta
stay (reside	bo hos
with)
steal	stjala
stick (glue)	klibba
stimulate	stimulera
sting	sticka
stink	stinka
stop (cause to	stoppa
stop)
slop (make a halt) stanna
strike (be on	stryka
strike)
stroke (caress)	strejka

DANISH	DUTCH
synde	zondigen
synge	zingen
saenke	doen zinken
synke	zinken
sidde	zitten
saette sig	gaan zitten
lobe paa	schaatsen
Skojter	rijden
bagtale	lasteren
sove	slapen
glide ud	uitglijden
smore	smeren
lugte	ruiken
lugte af	rieken naar
smile	glimlachen
ryge	rooken
nyse	niezen
snorke	snorken
sne	sneeuwen
blode	weeken
hulke	snikken
tilsole	. bezoedelen
lose	oplossen
saa	zaaien
tale	spreken
stave	spellen
give ud	uitgeven
tilbringe	besteden doorbrengen
spytte	spuwen
spalte	splijten
sprede	uitspreiden
trykke ud	uitpersen
staa	staan
bo	logeeren
stjaele	stelen
klaebe	kleven
stimulere	aansporen
stikke	steken
stinke	stinken
stoppe	aanhouden
standse	stoppen
strejke	staken
stryge	streelen

GERMAN

siindigen s ingen versenken sinken sitzen sich setzen Schlittschuh laufen verleumden schlafen ausgleiten schmieren riechen riechen nach l&cheln

rauchen

niesen

schnarchen

schneien

einweichen

schluchzen

beschmutzen

losen

s&en

sprechen

buchstabieren

ausgeben

verbringen

zubringen

spucken

speien

spalten

ausbreiten

auspressen

stehen

wohnen bei

stehlen

kleben

anregen

stimulieren

stedien

stinken

auhalten

anhalten

streiken

stxeicheln

Language Museum

ENGLISH	SWEDISH
struggle	streta
study	studera
subtract	avdraga
succeed (be sue	subtrahera lyckas
cessfulin doing)
suck	suga
suffer (from)	lida (av)
suit (be fitting)	passa
support (back up) support (prop	understSdja
stbtta
up)
suppose (assume) antaga
surprise (take	overraska
by surprise)
surpass	bvertr&ffa
surround	omgiva
swear (take oath) sv&rja
swear (curse)	svtra
sweat	svettas
sweep	sopa
swell	svullna
swim	simma
swing	svanga
sympathize	sympatisera
take	taga
take away (re-	taga bort
move)
talk (chat)	prata
taste	smaka
taste of	smaka pi
teach	lSra
tear	riva sbnder
tell (narrate)	ber&tta
test	prova
thank	tacka
think (believe)	tanka
think (ponder)	t§nka efter
threaten	hota
throw	kasta
thunder	&ska
tickle	kittla
tie (bind)	binda
tolerate (endure) t£la

DANISH	DUTCH
kaempe	vechten
studere	studeeren
fradrage subtrahere	aftrekken
lykkes	gelukken
suge	zuigen
lide (af)	lijden (aan)
passe	passen *
understotte	ondersteunen
stette	steunen
antage	aannemen
overraske	verrassen
overgaa	overtreffen
omgive	omringen
svaerge	zweren
bande	vloeken
svede	zweeten
feje	vegen
svulme	opzwellen
svomme	‘zwemmen
svlnge	schommelen
sympatisere	medevoelen
tage	nemen
tage bort	wegnemen
snakke	praten babbelen
smage	proeven
smage af	smaken naar
undervise	onderwijzen
rive itu	scheuren
fortaelle	vertellen
prove	beproeven
takke	danken
taenke	denken
taenke efter	nadenken
true	bedreigen
kaste	gooien
tordne	donderen
kilde	kietelen
binde	binden
taale	dulden

569

GERMAN

ringen

studieren

abziehen

subtrahieren

gelingen

gliicken

saugen leiden (an) passea unterstfltzen

stQtzen

annehmen

tiberraschen

Gbertreffen

umgeben

schwSren

fluchen

schwitzen

fegen

kehren

anscbwellen

schwimmen

schwingen

mitfQhlen

nehmen

wegnehmen

plaudem

schwatzen

kosten

schmecken

schmecken

nach

lehren

zerreissen

erzahlen

priifen

dariken

glauben

nachdenken

bedrohen

werfen

donnem

kitzeln

binden

dulden

leiden

57° The Loom of Language

ENGLISH	SWEDISH
touch	vidrSra
trade	faandla
translate	Sversitta
travel	resa
tread on	trida pi
treat	traktera
tremble	darra
turn over	vanda
type	maskinskriva
underline	understryka
understand f	fdrs ti
(comprehend) undertake	fbretaga
undress	klidaavsig
unpack	packa upp
upset	stbta omkull
urinate	kasta vatten
use (employ)	bruka
vaccinate	vaccinera
visit	bes5ka
vomit	krakas
vote	rdsta
wait (for)	vanta (pi)
wake	vicka
wake	vakna
go for a walk	promenera
wander about	fara omkring

DANISH	DUTCH	german
berore	(aan)raken	bertihren
handle	handelen	handeln
oversaette	vertalen	tibersetzen
rejse	reizen	reisen
traede paa	treden op	treten auf
behandle	behandelen	behandeln
ryste	beven	zittem
vende	omkeeren	wenden
maskinskrive	tikken	tippen
tmderstrege	onderstreepen	unterstreichen
forstaa	verstaan	verstehen
foretage	begrijpen ondernemen	begreifen untemehmen
klaede sig af	ontkleeden	sich ausziehen
pakke ud	uitpakken	auspacken
stode om	omvergooien	umstossen
lade Vandet	urineeren	urinieren
bruge	gebruiken	das Wasser abschlagen gebrauchen
vaccinere	inenten	impfen
pode besoge	vaccineeren bezoeken	besuchen
kaste op	braken	sich erbrechen
stemme	stemmen	stimmen
vente (paa)	wachten (op)	i I
vaekke	wekken	wecken
vaagne op	ontwaken	erwachen
spadsere	wandelen	spazieren ge~
strejfe om	rond dwaien	hen bummeln umherschwei-

want to	vilja	ville
warn	varna	advare
wash	tvatta	vaske
wash	tvatta sig	vaske sig
waste (food.	sl5sa	spilde
money, etc.)
wave (hand)	vinka	vinke
wear (clothes)	bira	have paa
weave	vava	vaeve
weep	grita	graede
weigh
weigh j	vaga	veje
whisper	viska	hviske
whistle	vissla	flojte
win	vinna	vinde
wind around	vinda	vinde
wind up (spring) draga upp	traekke op
wish	6nska	onske

willen	fen wollen
waarschuwen	wamen
wasschen	waschen
zich wasschen	sich waschen
verkwisten	vergeuden
wuiven	verschwenden winken
dragen	tragen
weven	weben
huilen	weinen
wegen	wiegen
fluisteren	fltistem
fluiten	pfeifen
winnen	gewinnen
winden	winden
opwinden	aufziehen
wenschen	wtinschen

ENGLISH

wonder

work

worship be worth wrap up write be wrong

yawn

yield (give way)

Language Museum

SWEDISH DANISH

undra

arbeta

dyrka vara v&rd inpacka skriva hava oratt

undre sig

arbejde

dyrke

vaere vaerd pakke ind skrive have Uret

DUTCH

zich verwon- deren werken arbeiden vereeren waard zijn inpakken schrijven ongelijk hebben gapen toegeven

gaspa gabe

giva efter for give efter

6. ADVERBS

(a) PLACE AND MOTION

above, upstairs	ovanfor
away	bort
back	tillbaka
behind	bakom
below., down¬	nedanfor
stairs
down (wards)	ned
elsewhere	annorstades
everywhere	Gverallt
far	Mngt
forward	fram&t
hence	hariff&n
here	har
hither	hit
home (wards)	hem
at home	hemma
inside	innanfor
near	nara
nowhere	ingenstades
out	ut
outside	utanfor
past	forbi
somewhere	n&gonstades
thence	d&rifr&n
there	dSr
thither	dit
through	igenom
to the left	till vSnster
to the right	till h6ger
underneath	inunder
ards	upp&t

ovenpaa	boven
bort	weg
tilbage	terug
bagefter	achter
nedenunder	beneden
nedad	naar beneden
andetstets	elders
overalt	overal
langt	ver
fremad	voorwaarts
herffa	van hier
her	hier
hid	hierheen
hjem	naar huis
hjemme	thuis
indenfor	hitmen
naer	dichtbij
intetsteds	nergens
ud	uit
udenfor	buiten
forbi	voorbij
nogensteds	ergens
derfra	vandaar
der	daar
derhen	daarheen
igennem	door
til venstre	links
til hojre	rechts
derunder	daaronder
opad	op naar boven

571

german.

sich wundem

arbeiten

verehren wert sein einpacken schreiben Unrecht haben

g&hnen

nachgeben

oben

weg

fort

zurhck

hinten

unten

hinab

nach unten

anderswo

iiberall

weit

vorw&rts

von hier

hier

hierher

nach Hause

zu Hause

drinnen

nah

nirgends

aus

draussen

vorbei

irgendwo

von dort

dort

dorthin

hindurch

links

rechts

darunter

hinauf

nach oben

572

ENGLISH

afterwards

again

ago

already

always

as soon as at first at last at once

at present constantly

early

ever

formerly from time to time in future in the evening

in the morning

in time

last night last week late

meanwhile

monthly never next week

not yet now

nowadays often ' once

recently

repeatedly

seldom

The Loom of Language

SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN
efter&t	(b) TIME derefter	naderhand	nachher
igen	igen	weder	wieder
for . . . sedan for . . . siden	geleden	vor
redan	allerede	reeds	schon
alltid	altid	altijd	bereits immer
s& snart som	saa snart som	i zoodra als	stets so bald als
fdrst	forst	vooreerst	zuerst
antligen	endelig	eindelijk	endlich
genast	straks	terstond	sofort
narvarande	nu for Tiden	opeens tegenwoordig	sogleich zur Zeit
bestandig	bestandig	voortdurend	bestandig
tidigt	tidligt	vroeg	fortwahrend frtih
ndgonsin	nogens inde	ooit	zeitig je
fordom	forhen	vroeger	frliher
tid eften	fra Tid til	nu en dan	von Zeit zu
annan framdeles	anden i Fremtiden	toekomstig	Zeit ktinftig
i afton	om Aftenen	9s avonds	abends
pa morgonen	om Morgenen	. ’s morgens	am Abend morgens
i tid	i Tide	op tijd	am Morgen rechtzeitig
i g&r kvall	sidste Nat	gisteravond	beizeiten gestern abend
forra veckan	sidste Uge	verleden week	letzte Woche
sent	sent	laat	spat
under tiden	imitlertid	intusschen	inzwischen
mSnatligen	maanedlig	maandelijks	unterdessen monatlich
aldrig	aldrig	nooit	nie
nasta vecka	naeste Uge	aanstaande	nachste Woche
Snnu icke	endnu ikke ‘	week nog niet	noch nicht
nu	nu	nu	nun
nu f5r tiden	nu til dags	tegenwoordig	heutzutage
ofta	ofte	dikwijls	oft
enging	en Gang	eens	einst
nyligen	nylig	onlangs	einmal neulicb
g&ng pa g£ng	gentagne 3 Gange sjaelden	tierhaaldelijk	kttrzlich wiederholt
sailan	zelden	selten

ENGLISH

sometimes

soon still, yet the day before yesterday the day after to-morrow then (at that time) thereafter this afternoon

this evening

this morning to-day

to-morrow

to-morrow

evening

to-morrow

morning

to-night

weekly

yearly yesterday what is the time?

it is five o’clock it is half past five

it is a quarter to five

it is a quarter past five

it is twenty minutes to five

it is twenty minutes past , five

Language Museum 573

SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN
ibland	untertiden	soms	manchmal zuweilen
snart	snart	spoedig	bald
&nnu	endnu	nog	noch
i fdrg&r	iforgaars	eergisteren	vorgestern
i bvermorgon	iovermorgen	overmorgen	iibermorgen
d!	da	toen	dann
d&rp£	derpaa	daarop	darauf
i eftermiddag	i Eftermiddag	vanmiddag	heute nach- mittag
i afton i kvall	iaften	vanavond	heute abend
i morse	imorges	vanochtend	heute morgen
idag	idag	heden vandaag	heute
i morgon	imorgen 51	morgen	morgen
1 morgon afton 1 Morgen Afivaini	morgen avond	morgen abend
i morgon	i Morgon	morgen	morgen friih
bitti	tidlig	ochtend
i natt	inat	vannacht	heute nacht
eng&ng i verlran	ugentlig ,	wekelijks	wochentlich
▼ vwxvom &rligen	aarlig	jaarlijks	jahrlich
ig&r	igaar	gisteren	gestem
vad ar	hvad er	hoe laat is	wie spat ist es?
klockan?	Klokken?	het?	wieviel Uhr ist es? es ist fiinf Uhr
klockan §r fern Klokkenerfem het is vijf uur
klockan ar	Klokken er	het is half zes	es ist halb
halv sex	halv seks		sechs Uhr
klockan ar en	Klokken er et	het is kwart	es ist ein Vier-
kvart i fem	kvarter i fem	voor vijven	tel vor fiinf Uhr (or: drei Viertel auf fiinf)
klockan ar en	Klokken er et	het is kwart	es ist ein Vier¬
kvart Over	kvarter over	over vijven	tel nach fiinf
fem	fem	Uhr (or: ein Viertel auf sechs)
klockan §r	Klokken er	het is twintig	es ist zwanzig
tjugo minu¬	tyve minuter minuten voor	Minuten vor
ter i fem	ifem	vijven	fiinf Uhr
klockan ar	Klokken er	het is twintig	es ist zwanzig
tjugo minu¬	tyve minu¬	minuten over	Minuten
ter over fem	ter over fem	vijven	nach fiinf Uhr

574 The Loom of Language

ENGLISH SWEDISH DANISH DUTCH GERMAN

(cl MANNER , QUANTITY, AFFIRMATION AND NEGATION

about	omkring	omtrent	ongeveer
a little	en smuia	lidt	een beetje
almost	nastan	naesten	bijna
also, too	ocksi	ogsaa	ook
apparently	synbarligen	tilsyneladende schijnbaar
as a matter of fact	faktiskt	i Virkelighe- den	feitelijk
as much	si mycket	ligesaa meget	zooveel
at least	itminstone	i det mindste	ten mxnste
at most	pi det hogsta	i i det hojeste	hoogstens
badly	diligt	daarligt	slecht
besides	dessutom	desuden	bovendien
by chance	tillfalligtvis	tilfaeldigvis	toevallig
by heart	utantill	udenad	van buiten
by no means	ingalunda	ingenlunde	geenszins
by the way	i forbigaende	apropos for Resten	a propos
chiefly	huvudsakligen hovedsagelig	voornaamelijk
completely	fulls t&ndigt	fulstaendig	volkomen
deliberately	avsiktligt	forsaetligt	opzettelijk
directly	direkt	direkte	direct
easily	lit t	let	gemakkeiijk
enough	nog	nok	genoeg
even	aven	selv	zeifs
exactly	precis	akkurat	precies
exclusively	uteslutande .	udelukkende	uitsluitend
extraordinarily	utomordentlig overordentlig	buitengewoon
extremely	ytterst	yderst	uiterst
fortunately	lyckligtvis	lykkeligvis	gelukkig
gradually	sminingom	gradvis	geleidelijk
gratis	gratis	gratis	gratis
hardly	knappast	naeppe	nauwelijks
indeed	faktiskt	faktiskt	inderdaad
in vain	forgives	forgaeves	tevergeefs
less and less	mindre och	mindre og	steeds
	mindre	mindre	minder

ungefahr

etwa

ein wenig ein bisschen fast beinah auch

scheinbar

anscheinend

inWirklichkeit

so viel wenigstens mindestens hdchstens schlecht tiberdies zudem zufillig auswendig keineswegs beilaufig ge- sagt

hauptsachlich

vollkommen

vollstandig

absichtlicb

bewusst

direkt

leicht

genug

selbst

genau

ausschliesslich

ungewohnlich

hochst

ausserst

glticklicber-

weise

zum Gllick allm&hlich nach und nach gratis umsonst kaum tatsichlich in der Tat vergebens immer wenige£

Language Museum 575

ENGLISH	SWEDISH	DANISH	DUTCH	GERMAN
loud	hogt	hojt	hard	laut
more and more	mer och mer	mer og mer	meer en meer	immer mehr
no	nej	nej	neen	nein
not	inte	ikke	niet	nicht
not at all	inte alls	slet ikke	in’t geheel niet	durchaus nicht
not even	inte ens	ikke engang	niet eens	nicht einmal
obviously	pitagligen	ojensyniig	blijkbaar	offensichtlich augenschein- lich
of course	naturligtvis	naturligvis	natuurlijk	nattirlich
only	bara	kun	slechts	nur
on the contrary	tvartom	tvaertimod	integendeel	im Gegenteil
partly	delvis	delvis	deels	teilweise teils
perhaps	kanske	maaske	misschien	vielleicht
preferably	hellre	hellere	liever	lieber
probably	sannolikt	sandsynligvis waarschijnlijk	wahrscheinlich
quickly	raskt fort	hurtigt	gauw spoedig	schnell rasch
quietly	lugnt	rolig	rustig	ruhig
really	verkligen	virkelig	werkelijk	wirklich
slowly	lingsamt	langsomt	langzaam	langsam
so* thus	si	saa	zoo	so
so much the better	si mycket bittre	saa meget des bedre	des te beter	um so besser
so to speak	si at saga	saa at sige	om zoo te zeggen	so zu sagen
specially	sarskilt	saerskilt	bijzonder	besonders
suddenly	plbtsligt	pludseligt	plotseling	plotzlich
together	tillsammans	tilsammen	samen tegelijk	zusammen
too3 too much	for	for	te	zu
undoubtedly	utan tvivel	uden Tvivl	ongetwijfeld	ohne Zweifel
unfortunately	olyckligen	ulykkeligvis	ongelukkiger- wijs	zum Ungliick unglucklicher- weise
usually-	vanligtvis	saedvanligvis	gewoonlijk	gewohnlich
very	mycket	meget	zeer	sehr
viz.	namligen	nemlig	namelijk te weten	namlich das heisst
voluntarily	frivilligt	frivillig	vrijwillig	ffeiwillig
well	bra	godt	goed	gut
willingly	garna	geme	gaame	gern
yes	ja jo 7.	ja ja jo SOCIAL USAGE	ja
Good morning!	Godmorgon!	God Morgen!	Goeden mor¬ gen!	Guten Mor¬ gen!
Good evening !	God afton !	God Aften!	Goeden avond ! Guten Abend l

57^ The Loom of Language

ENGLISH SWEDISH DANISH DUTCH GERMAN

Good night ! God natt !

Good day! God dag!

Good-bye! Ad jo !

Good health ! Sk&l !

Thank you! (ac- Ja, Tack! cepting offer)

No, thank you 1 Nej, Tack !

(refusing offer)

Thanks I (for Tack !

favour done)

Don’t mention Ingen orsakl it!

Excuse me ! Ursakta !

I beg your Forl&t!

pardon!

Please, show Var s& god

me . * .■ och visa

mig . . .!

How are you? Hur star det till?

Very well, thank Tack, ut- you m&rkt

Come in! Stigin!

God Nat! God Dag!

Farvel !

Skaal!

Ja, Tak!

Nej, Tak ! Tak!

Goeden nacht! Goeden dag ! Tot ziens !

Proost! Alstublieff ! Graag!

Dank U! ■ Nee, dank U! Dank U!

Gute Nacht! Guten Tag! Leben Sie wohl! Prosit!

Bitte !

Bitte schon! Danke! Danke schon! Danke!

Aa jeg beder! Niettedanken ! Bitte!

Bitte schon!

Undskyld mig ! Pardon I Entschuldigen

Sie!

Omforladelse ! Pardon ! Verzeihung !

Vaersaagod Wijsmij... Bitte, zeigen at vise alstublieft! Sie mir . . .!

mig . . J

Hvordan har Hoe gaat het? Wie geht’s De det? (Ihnen)?

Tak, ud- Goed, dank U Gut, danke maerket

Kom ind ! Binnen !

Herein!

II. ROMANCE WORD LIST

i. NOUNS

(a) CLIMATE AND SCENERY

PORTU¬ GUESE o ar

.ENGLISH ■	FRENCH
air	Pair (m)
bank (of river}	la rive
bay	la baie
beach	la plage
cape	le cap
cave	la caverne
climate	le climat
cloud	le nuage
coast	la c6te
country (not town) la campagne
current	le courant
darkness	Fobscurite (f)
desert	le desert
dew	la rosee
dust	la poussiere
earth	la terre
east	Test (m)
field	le champ
foam	Fecume (f)
forest	la fordt
frost	la gelee Fherbe (f)
grass
hail	la grele
hay	le foin
hill	la colline
horizon	Fhorizon (m)
ice	la glace
island	File (f)
lake	le lac
light	la Jumiere
lightning	Feclair (m)
meadow	le pre
mist	le brouillard
moon	la lime
full moon	la pleine lune
mountain	la montagne
mouth (river)	Fembouchure (0
mud (river, etc.)	la vase
north	le nord
peninsula	la peninsule
plain	la plaine
pond	retang (m)
rain	la pluie
rainbow	Farc-en-ciel (n

SPANISH el aire la orilla la bahia la playa el cabo la cueva el clima lanube la costa el campo la corriente la obscuridad el desierto el rocio el polvo la tierra el este el campo la espuma el bosque la helada la hierba el granizo el heno la colina el horizonte el hielo la isia el lago la luz

el relampago el prado la niebla la luna la luna llena la montana la desemb oca- dura el barro el norte la peninsula el llano el estanque la lluvia

a margem a baia a praia o cabo a caverna o clima a nuvem a costa o campo a corrente a escuridao o deserto o orvalho o po a terra o leste o campo a espuma a floresta a geada a erva o granizo o feno a colina o horizonte o gelo a ilha o lago a luz

o rel&mpago o prado a neblina a lua

a lua cheia a montanha a foz

o lodo o norte a peninsula a planide a lagoa a chuva o arco iris

ITALIAN

Faria la riva la baia la spiaggia il capo la caverna il clima la nube la costa la campagna la corrente Fosoirita (f) il deserto la rugiada la polvere la terra 1’est (m) il campo la schiuma il bosco il gelo Ferba la grandine il fieno la collina Forizzonte (m) il ghiaccio Fisola illago la luce il baleno il prato la nebbia la luna il plenilunio la montagna rimboccatura

il fango il nord la penisola il piano lo stagno la pioggia Farcobaleno

578

ENGLISH river (large) rock sand sea

shadow

sky

snow

south

spring (water)

star

storm

straits

stream

sun

thunder

tide

high tide

low tide

town

valley

view

village

vineyard

water

waterfall

wave

weather

west

ankle

arm

artery

back

beard

belly

bladder

blood

body

bone

brain

breast

calf

cheek

chest

chin

cold

complexion

The Loom of Language

		PORTU¬
FRENCH	SPANISH	GUESE	ITALIAN
le fleuve	el no	o rio	il flume
le rocher	la roca	a rocha	lo scoglio
le sable	la arena	a areia	la sabbia
la mer	el mar	o mar	il mare
Fombre (f)	la sombra	a sombra	Fombra
le del	el cielo	o ceu	il cielo
la neige	la nieve	a neve	la neve
le sud	el sur	o sul ■	il sud
la source	la fuente	a nascente	la sorgente
Fetoile (f)	la estrella	a estrela	la Stella
la tempete le detroit	la tormenta el estrecho	a tempestade o estrelto	il temporale lo stretto
le ruisseau	el arroyo	o riacho	il ruscello
le soleil	el sol	o sol	il sole
le tonnerre	el trueno	o trovao	il mono
la maree	la marea	a mare	la marea
la maree haute	: la pleamar	a preamar	Falta marea
la maree basse 3a hajaraar	a baixamar	la bassa marea
la vule	la ciudad	a cidade	la citta
la vallee	el valle	o vale	la valle
la vue	la vista	a vista	la vista
le village	la aldea	a aldeia	il villaggio
le vignoble	la viha	a vinha	la vigna
l’eau (f)	el agua (f)	a agua	Facqua
la cascade	la cascada	a cascata	la cascata
la vague	la ola	a onda	Fonda
le temps	el tiempo	o tempo	il tempo
Fouest (m)	el oeste	o oeste	Fovest (m)

la cheville	(b) HUMAN BODY . el tobillo o tornozelo	la caviglia
le bras	eJ brazo	o bra$o	il braccio
Fartere (f)	la arteria	a arteria	le braccia (pi) Farteria
le dos	la espalda	o dorso	il dorso
la barbe	la barba	a barba	la barba
le ventre	el vientre	o ventre	il ventre
la vessie	la vejiga	a bexiga	la vescica
le sang	la sangre	o sangue	il sangue
le corps	el cuerpo	o corpo	il corpo
Fos (m)	el hueso	o ossa	Fosso
la cervelle	el cerebro	o cerebro	le ossa (pi) il cervello
le sein	el seno	o seio	il seno
le mallet	la pantorrilla	a barriga	il polpaccio
la joue	la me j ilia	a face	la guancia
la poitrine	el pecho ,	o peito	il petto
le menton	la barba	a barba	il mento
le rhume	el resfriado	a constipapao	il rafireddore
le teint	la tez	a tez	la carnagione

579

ENGLISH

cough

disease

ear

elbow

eye

eyebrow

eyelid

face

fever

finger

fist

flesh

foot

forehead

gum

hair (of head) hand head health

heart

heel

hip

jaw

kidney

knee

leg

Hp

liver

lung

moustache

mouth

muscle

nail

neck

nerve

nose

palm

pulse

rib

shoulder

skeleton

skin

skull

sole

spine

Language Museum

FRENCH	SPANISH
la toux	la tos
la maladie	ia enfermedad
Poreille (f)	la oreja
le coude	el codo
l’oeil (m)	el ojo
les yeux (pi) le sourcil	la ceja
la paupiere	el parpado
le visage	la cara
la fibvxe	la fiebre
le doigt	el dedo “
le poing	el puno
la chair	la came
le pied	el pie
le front	la ffente
la gencive	la encaa
les cheveux	el cabello
la main .	la mano
la tete	la cabeza
la sante	la salud
le cceur	el corazon
le talon	el talon
la hanche	la cadera
la m&choire	la quijada
le rein	el rindn
le genou	la rodilla
la jambe	la pierna
la levre	el labio
le foie	el higado
le poumon	el pulmon
la moustache	el bigote
la bouche	la boca
le muscle	el musculo
Fongle (m)	la una
le cou	el cuelio
le nerf	el nervio
le nez	la nariz
la paume	la palma
le pouls	el pulso
la cote	la costilla
fepaule (f)	el hombro
le squelette	el esqueleto
la peau	la piel
le crane	el craneo
la plante	la planta
lupine dorsale la espina
co	dorsal
Festomac (m)	el estomago

PORTU-
GUESS	ITALIAN
a tosse	la tosse
a enfermidade	la malattia
a orelha	Forecchio
o cotov6Io	il gomito
1 o	Focchio
a sobrancelha	gli occhi (pi) il sopracciglio
a palpebra	la palpebra
a cara	la faccia
a febre	la febbre
o dedo	il dito
o punho	le dita (pi) il pugno
a carne	la carne
o pe	il piede
a testa	la fronte
a gengiva	la gengiva
o cabelo	i capelli
a mao	la mano
a cabeza	la testa
a safide	la salute
o calcanhar	il cuore
o talao	il tallone
o quadril	Fanca
a queixada	la mascella
o rim	il rene
o joelho	il ginocchio
a pema	le ginocchia(pl) la gamba
o labio	il labbro
o fjgado	le iabbra (pi) il fegato
o pulmao	il polmone
o bigode	i baffi.
a boca	la bocca
o mfisculo	il muscolo
a unha	Funghla
o pesco^o	il collo
o nervo	il nervo
o nariz	il naso
a palma	la palma
o pulso	il polso
a costeila	la costola
o hombro	la spalla
o esqueleto	lo scheletro
a pele	la pelle
o cr&nio	il cranio
a planta	la pianta
a espinha	la spina dorsale
dorsal
o estomago	lo stomaco

stomach

580

The Loom of Language

ENGLISH

tear

temple

thigh

throat (internal)

thumb

toe

tongue

tooth

vein

wound

wrist

FRENCH la larme la tempe la cuisse la gorge le pouce

SPANISH '

la lagrima la sien el muslo la garganta el puigar

ledoigtdupied el dedo del pie

la langue la dent la veine la blessure le poignet

la lengua el diente la vena la herida la niuneca

PORTU¬
GUESE	. ITALIAN
a lagrima	la lagrima
a fonte	la tempia
a coxa	la coscia
a garganta	la gola
0 polegar	il pollice
0 dedo do pe	il dito delpiede
a lingua	la lingua
0 dente	il dente
a veia	la vena
a ferida	la ferita
0 pulso	il polso

(c) ANIMALS

animal

ant

beak

bear

bee

bird

blackbird

bull

butterfly

calf

cat

caterpillar claw (catj etc.) cock

cockroach

cod

cow

crayfish

crow

dog

donkey

duck

eagle

eel

elephant

feather

fin

fish

flea

fly

fox

frog

gm

goat

goose

grasshopper

hare

Fanimal (m) la fourmi le bee Fours (m Fabeille (f) Foiseau (m) le merle le taureau le papillon le veau le chat la chenille la griffe le coq le cafard la morue la vache Fecrevisse (f) le corbeau le chien Fane (m) le canard Faigle (m) Fanguille (f) Felephant (m) la plume la nageoire le poisson la puce la mouche le renard la grenouille la branchie la chevre Foie (f) la sauterelle le lievre

el animal la hormiga el pico el oso la abeja el pajaro el mirlo el toro la mariposa el ternero el gato la oruga la garra el gallo la cucaracha el bacalao la vaca el cangrejo el cuervo el perro el burro el pato el aguila (f) la anguila el elefante la pluma la aleta el pez la pulga la mosca el zorro la rana la branquia la cabra el ganso el saltamontes la liebre

o animal a formiga o bico o urso a abelha o passaro o faelro o touro a borboleta a vitela o gato a lagarta a garra o galo la barata o bacalhau a vaca

o caranguejo o corvo o cao o burro o pato a aguia a enguia o elefante a pena a barbatana o peixe a pulga a mosca a raposa a ra

o barranco a cabra o ganso o gafanhoto a lebre

Fanimale (m) la formica il becco Forso Fape (f) Fuccello il merlo il toro la farfalla il vitello il gatto il bruco Fartiglio il gallo

10 scarafaggio

11 merluzzo la vacca

il gambero il corvo il cane il ciuco Fanitra Faquila Fanguilla Felefante (m) la penna la pinna il pesce la pulce la mosca la volpe ilranocchio la branchia la capra Foca

la cavaletta la lepre

■ENGLISH

hen

herring

hoof

horn

horse

insect

lamb

lark

lion

lobster (spiny)

louse

mackerel

monkey

mosquito

mouse

mule

mussel

nightingale

octopus

owl

ox

oyster

parrot

partridge

Pig

pigeon

pike

rabbit

rat

salmon

scale

seagull

seal

shark

sheep

skin (fur)

slug

snail

snake

sole

sparrow

spider

squirrel

swallow

tail

tiger

toad

trout

tunny ,

wasp

Language Museum

FRENCH

la poule le hareng le sabot la corne le cheval Pinsecte (m) Pagneau (m) Palouette (f) le lion la langouste le pou

le maquereau le singe le moustique la souris le mulet la moule le rossignol la pieuvre le hibou le bceuf l’huitre (f) le perroquet la perdrix le cochon le pigeon le brochet le lapin le rat le saumon l’ecaille (f) la mouette le phoque le requin le mouton la peau la limace le limagon le serpent la couleuvre la sole le moineau 1’araignee Pecureuil (m) Phirondelle (f) la queue le tigre le crapaud la truite le thon la guepe

SPANISH

la gallina el arenque la pezuha el cuerno el cab alio el insecto el cordero la alondra el leon la langosta el piojo el escombro el mono el mosquito el raton el mulo la almeja el ruisehor ■ el pulpo el buho el buey la ostra el loro la perdiz ei cerdo el pichon el sollo el conejo la rata el salmon la escama la gaviota la foca el tiburon la oveja la piel la babosa el caracol la serpiente la culebra el lenguado el gorribn la araha la ardilla la golondrina la cola el tigre el sapo la trucha el atun la avispa

PORTU¬ GUESE a galhina o arenque o casco o corno o cavalo o insecto o cordeiro a cotovia o leao a lagosta o piolho a cavala o macaco o mosquito o rato a mula o mexilhao o rouxinol o polvo o mocho o boi a ostra o papagaio a perdiz o porco o pombo o lhcio o coelho o rato o salmao a escama a gaivota a foca o tubarao a ovelha a pele a lesma o caracol a serpente a cobra o linguado o pardal a aranha o esquilo a andorinha a cauda o tigre o sapo a truta o atum a vespa

581

ITALIAN la gallina

Paringa

10 zoccolo

11 corno 11 cavallo Pinsetto * Pagnello l’allodola il leone Paragosta

il pidocchio

10 sgombro la scimmia la zanzara

11 sorcio il mulo

la gongola Pusignuolo il polpo il gufo il bue Postrica il pappagallo la pernice il porco il piccione il luccio il coniglio il topo il salmone la squama il gabbiano la foca il pescecane la pecora ia pelle la lumaca la chiocciola il serpente la biscia la sogliola il passero il ragno

10 scoiattoio la r'ondine la coda

la tigre

11 rospo la trota il tonno la vespa

582	The Loom of Language PORTU-
ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	GUESE
whale	la baleine	la bailena	a baleia
wing	Faile (f)	el ala (f) ,	a asa
wolf	le loup	el lobo	0 lobo
worm	le ver	el gusano	0 bicho
almond	(d) FRUIT AND	TREES
Famande (f)	la almendra	a amendoa
apple	la pom me	la manzana	a ma5a
apple-tree	le poromier	el manzana	a macieira
apricot	Fabricot (m)	el albaricoque 0 damasco
ash	le frfcne	el fresno	0 freixo
bark	Fecorce (f)	la corteza	a cases
beech	le hetre	el haya (f)	a faia
berry	la bale	la baya	a baga
birch	le bouleau	el abedul ■	0 vidoeiro
branch	la branche	la rama	0 ramo
cherry	la cerise	la cereza	a cere;' a
cherry-tree	le cerisier	el cerezo	a cerejeira
chestnut	la chataigne le marron	la castana	a castanha
chestnut-tree	le chataignier	el castano	0 castanbsiro
currant	la groseille	la grosella	a groselha
cypress	le cyprfcs	el cipres	0 cipreste
date	la datte	el datil	a tamara
elm	Forme (m)	el olmo	0 olmo
%	la figue	el higo	0 figo
fig-tree	• le figuier	la higuera	a figueira
fir	le sapin	el abeto	0 abeto
fruit	le fruit	la fruta	a fruta
grapes	le raisin	la uva	a uva
hazelnut	la noisette	la avellana	a avela
laurel	le laurier	el laurel	0 loureiro
leaf	la feuille	la hoja	a fdlha
lemon	le citron	ellimbn	0 limao
lime-tree	le tilleul	el tilo	a tfiia
■ melon	le melon	el melon	0 melao
mulberry-tree	le murier	la morera	a amoreira
oak	le chene	el roble	0 ca.rvalho
olive	Folive (f)	la aceituna	a azeitona
olive-tree	Folivier (m)	el olivo	a olivexra
orange	Forange (f)	la naranja	a laranja
orange-tree	Forangier (m)	el naranjo	a laranjeira
peach	la peche	el melocotdn	0 pessego
pear	la poire	la pera	a pera
pear-tree	le poirier	el peral	a pereira
pine	le pin	el pino	0 pinhexro
pine-apple	Fananas (m)	la pina	0 ananas
plum	la prune	la ciruela	a ameixa
poplar	le peuplier	el alamo	0 alamo
raspberry	la framboise	la frambuesa	a framboesa
root	la racine	la raiz	a raiz
strawberry	la fraise	la fresa	0 morango

ITALIAN

la balena Tala il lupo il verme

la mandorla la mela il melo Falbicocca il frassino la corteccia il faggio la bacca la betulla il ramo la ciliegia il ciliegio la castagna

il castagno il ribes il cipresso il dattero Folmo il fico il fico Fabete (m) la frutta Fuva

la nocciuola Falloro la foglia il limone il tiglio il melons il gelso la quercia Foliva Folivo Farancia Farancio la pesca la pera il pero il pino Fananasso lasusina il pioppo il lampone la radice la fragola

ENGLISH

tree

tree-trunk

vine

walnut

walnut-tree

willow

artichoke

asparagus

barley

bean (broad)

bean (kidney)

cabbage

carrot

cauliflower

celery

chives

cucumber

egg-plant

garlic

herb

horse-radish

lentil

lettuce

maize

mint

mushroom

oats

onion

parsley

pea

potato

pumpkin

radish

rice

rye

sage

seed

spinach

tomato

turnip

wheat

brass

brick

Language Museum

FRENCH Parbre (m) le tronc

la vigne la noix le noyer le saule

SPANISH el arbol

el tronco la parra la nuez el nogai el sauce

PORTU¬ GUESE a arvore o tronco a videira a noz a noguesra o salgueiro

(e) CEREALS AND VEGETABLES

Partichaut (m) la alcachofa	a alcachofa
1 asperge (f)	el esparrago	0 aspargo
Porge (f)	la cebada	a cevada
la feve	el haba (f)	a fava
le haricot	la judfa	0 feijao
le choux	la col	a couve
la carotte	la zanahoria	a cenoura
le chou-fleur	la coiiflor	a couve fior
le celeri	elapio	0 aipo
la ciboulette	la cebollana	0 ceboiinho
le concombre	el pepino	0 pepino
Paubergine (f)	la berenjena	a beringela
Pail(m)	el ajo	0 alho
Pherbe (f)	la hierba	a herva
le raifort	el rabano	0 rabo de cavalo
la lentille	picante la lenteja	a lentilha
la laitue	la lechuga	a alface
le mais	el maiz	0 milho
la menthe	la menta	a hortela
le champignon la seta	0 cogumelo
1 avoine (f)	la avena	a aveia
Poignon (m)	la cebolla	a cebola
le persil	el perejil	a salsa
le pois	el guisante	a erviiha
la pomme de	la patata	a batata
terre
le potiron	la calabaza	a abobora
le radis	el rabano	0 rabano
le riz	el arroz	0 arroz
le seigle	el centeno	0 centeio
la sauge	la salvia	a salva
la graine	la semilla	a semente
les £pinards	la espinaca	0 espinafre
(m)
la tomate	el tomate	0 tomate
le navet	el nabo	0 nabo
le froment	el trigo	0 trigo
(f) MATERIALS
le laiton	el latbn	0 latao
la brique	el ladrillo	0 tijolo

583

ITALIAN

Palbero il tronco

la vite la noce

il noce il salcio

il carciofo Pasparago Porzo la fava il fagiuolo il cavoio la carota il cavolfiore il sedano la cipollina il cetriolo la melanzana Paglio Perba

la barbaforte

la lenticchia la lattuga il granturco la menta il fungo Pavena la cipolla il prezzemolo il pisello la patata

la zucca il ravaaello il riso la segale la salvia il seme gli spinacci

il pomodoro la rapa il frumento

Pottone (m) il mattone

5§4

ENGLISH

chalk

clay

concrete

copper

cork

glass

gold

iron

lead

leather

lime

marble

metal

rubber

silver

steel

stone

tar

tin (metal) tin (sheet) wood

barn

barracks

bridge

building

castle

cathedral

cemetery

church

consulate

comer (street)

courtyard

dock

embassy

factory

farm

fountain

hospital

hut

inn

lane (town)

library

market

ministry

museum

palace

, path (country)

pavement

pier

The Loom of Language

FRENCH

la craie l’argile (f) le beton le cuivre le liege le verre For (m) le fer le plomb le cuir la chaux le marbre le metal ' le caoutchouc Fargent (m) Facier (m) la pierre le goudron Fetain (m) lefer-blanc le bois

SPANISH

la greda la arcilla el hormigbn el cobre el corcho el vidrio el oro el hierro el plomo el cuero la cal el marmo! el metal el caucho la plata el acero la piedra el alquitran el estano la hojalata la madera

PORTU¬

GUESE

a greda a argila o formigao o cobre a corti^a o vidro o ouro o ferro o chumbo .o couro a cal

o marmore o metal a borracha a prata o ago a pedra o alcatrao o estanho a folha de lata a madeira

ITALIAN

la creta Fargilla il calcestruzzo il rame il sughero il vetro Foro il ferro il piombo il cuoio la calce j il marmo il metallo la gomma Fargento Facciaio la pietra il catrame

10 stagno la latta

11 legno

(g) BUILDINGS

la grange	el granero
la caserne	el cuartel
le pont	el puente
le batiment	el edificio
le chateau	el castillo
la cathedrale	la catedral
le cimetiere	el cementerio
Feglise (f)	la iglesia
le consular	el consulado
le coin	la esquina
la cour	el patio
le bassin	la darsena
Fambassade (f)la embajada
l usme (f)	la fabrica
la ferine	la granja
la fontaine	la fuente
Fhopital (m)	el hospital
la hutte	la cabana
Fauberge (f)	la posada
la ruelle	la calleia
la bibliotheque la biblioteca
le marche	el mercado
le minist£re	el ministerio
le musee	el museo
le palais	el palacio
le sender	la senda
le trottoir	la acera
la jetee	el muelle

o celeiro	il granaio
o quartel	la caserma
a ponte	il ponte
o edificio	Fedificio
o casteio	il castello
a catedral	il duomo
o cemiterio	il cimitero
a igreja	la chiesa
o consulado	il consolato
a esquina	il canto
o patio	il cortile
a doca	il bacino
a embaixada	Fambasciata
a fabrica	la fabbrica
a granja	la fattoria
a fonte	la fontana
o hospital	Fospedale (m)
a cabana	la capanna
a estalagem	Fosteria
o beco	il vicolo
a biblioteca	la biblioteca
o mercado	il mercato
o ministerio	il ministero
o museu	il museo
o palacio	il palazzo
a caminho	il sentiero
o passeio	il marciapiede
o molhe	il molo

Language Museum

585

ENGLISH

police-station

port

prison

road (highway)

school

square

stable (cattle)

street

theatre

tower

town-hall

university

FRENCH le commis¬ sariat le poste le port la prison le chemin la route Fecole (f) la place l’etable (f) la rue le theatre la tour

rhotel de ville la mairie 1’universite (f)

SPANISH la comisaria

el puerto la prisibn !a carretera la via la escuela la plaza la cuadra la calle el teatro la torre el ayunta- miento

la universidad

PORTU¬ GUESE a esquadra da poHda

0 porto a prisao a estrada a via a escola a praqa o estabulo * a rua o teatro a torre a camara municipal a universidade

ITALIAN la questura

il porto la prigione il cammino la strada la scuola la piazza la stalla la via il teatro la torre il municipio

Funiversita (f)

(h) THE FAMILY

aunt

boy

brother

child

Christian name

cousin

daughter

divorce

family

father

gentleman

girl

grandfather

grandmother

husband

lady

man

marriage

mother

parents

relation

sister

son

surname

la tante la tfa a tia

le gax$on el muchacho o rapaz

le frere el hermano o irmao

1 enfant (m.f.) el (la) nino(a) o (a) menino(a)

le prenom el nombre de o nome de

baptismo o (a) primo(a) a filha o divorcio afamilia o pai o senhor a rapariga

pila

le (la) cousin(e) el (la) primo(a) <

la fille le divorce la famille le pere le monsieur la fille* la jeune fille le grand-pere

la hija el divorcio la familia el padre el sehor la muchacha la chica el abuelo

la grand’mere la abuela

le mari Fbpoux la dame Fhomme le mariage la mere pere et mere les parents

el marido el esposo la sehora el hombre el matrimonio la madxe padre y madre los padres

le (la) parent(e) el (la) pariente la sceur la hermana

le fils el hijo

le nom el apellido

o avo a av6 o marido o esposo a senhora o homem o matrimonio a mae pai e mae os pais o (a) parente a irma o filho o apelido

la zia il ragazzo il frateHo il (la) fanci-

ullo (a) il nome di battesimo il (la) cugiao(a) la figlia il divorzio la famiglia il padre il signore la ragazza

il nonno la nonna il marito

10 sposo la signora Fuomo

11 matrimonio la madre padre e madre i genitori

il (la) parente la sorella 11 figlio il cognome

* une fille. (a girl) may only be used in contrast to un gar$on (a boy). In other situations use une jeune fille. Fille without the adjective signifies a pros¬ titute. v

5 §6	The Loom of Language
ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	PORTU- ■ GUE.SE	ITALIAN
twins	les jumeaux	los gemelos	os gemeos	i gemelli
uncle	Foncle	el tio	o tio	lo zio
wife	la femme	la mujer	a mulher	la moglie
woman	Fepouse la femme	la esposa la mujer	a esposa a mulher	la donna

(i) DRESS AND TOILET

letablier el delantal

la botte la bota

les bretelies (f) los tirantes

apron

boot

braces

brash

button

cigar

cigarette

cloth

clothes

collar

comb

cotton

drawers (men’s)

dress

fashion

glove

handbag

handkerchief

hat

jacket

match

needle

overcoat

pin

pipe

pocket

powder

rain-coat

razor-blade

shirt

shoe

shoe-lace

silk

skirt

sleeve.

soap

sock

la brosse le bouton le cigare la cigarette F&toffe (f) les vetements (m)

le faux-col le peigne le coton le cale?on

la robe la mode le gant la sacoche le mouchoir le chapeau le veston rallumette (f) Faiguille (f) le pardessus Fepingle (f) la pipe la poche la poudre Fimperme- able (m) la lame

la chemise le soulier le lacet la sole la jupe la manche le savoa la chaussette

el cepillo el boton el puro el cigarillo la tela la ropa

el cuello el peine el algodon los calzon- cillos el vestido la moda el guante el bolso el panuelo el sombrero la chaqueta la cerilla la aguja el abrigo el alfler la pipa el bolsillo los polvos el imperme¬ able

la hoja de afeitar la camisa el zapato el cordon la seda la falda la manga el jabon el calcetin

o avental a bota os suspen- sorios a escova o botao o charuto o cigarro a fazenda as roupas

o colarinho o pente o algodao as ceroulas

o vestido a moda a luva a bolsa o lengo o chapeu a jaqueta o fosforo a agulha o sobretudo o alfinete o cachimbo a algibeira o p6

o impermeavel

a lamina

a camisa o sapato o atacador a seda a saia a manga o sabao a petiga

il grembiale

10 stivale

le bretelle

la spazzola

11 bottone il sigaro

la sigaretta la stoffa gli abiti

il colletto il pettine il cotone le mutande

Fabito la moda • il guanto la borsa il fazzoletto il cappello la giacchetta il fiammifero Fago

il soprabito

10 spillo la pipa la tasca la cipria Fimpennea-

bile (m) la lama

la camicia la scarpa

11 laccio la seta la gonna la manica il sapone

il calzettino

ENGLISH

spectacles

sponge

stick

stocking

suit

tie

tooth-brush

trousers

umbrella

waistcoat

watch

wool

alarm-clock

arm-chair

ash

ash-tray

balcony

basement

basket

bath

bed

bedroom

bell (door)

blanket

blind

box

broom

bucket

candle

carpet

ceiling

chair

chamber-pot

chimney

coal

corner

cupboard

curtain

cushion

door

drawer*

flame

flat

Language Museum

587

FRENCH

les lunettes Feponge (f) la canne le bas le complet

SPANISH

(f) las gafas la esponja el baston la media el traje

la cravate la brosse a dents

le pantalon , le paraplule le gilet la montre la laine

la corbata el cepillo de dientes

los pantaloties el paraguas el chaleco

el reloj la lana

PORTU¬ GUESE os 6culos a esponja a bengala a meia o fato

a gr avata a escova dos dentes as calpas o guarda-chuva o colete o relbgio a la

ITALIAN

gli occhiali la spugna il bastone la calza Fabito com- pleto

la cravatta la spazzolina da denti i pantaloni Fombrello il pandotto Forologio la lana

0) THE HOME

le reveil	el despertadc
le fauteuil	el sillbn
la cendre	la ceniza
le cendrier	el cenicero
le balcon	el balcdn
le sous-sol	el sotano
le panier	el cesto
le bain	el bano
le lit	la cama
la chambre a	la alcoba
coucher la sonnette	la campanilla
la couverture	la manta
le store	la persiana
la boite	la caja
le balai	la escoba
le seau	el balde
la bougie	la vela
le tapis	la alfombra
le plafond	el techo
la chaise	la silla
le vase de nuit	el vaso de
la cheminee	noche la chimenea
le charbon	el carbbn
le coin	el rincon
Farmoire (f)	el armario
le rideau	la cortina
le coussin	el cojin
la porte	la puerta
le tiroir	el caj6n
la flamme	la llama
Fappartement	el piso
(m)

r 0 despertador	la Sveglia
a poltrona	la poltrona
a dnza	la cenere
0 cinzeiro	il portacenere
0 balcao	il balcone
a cave	il sottosuolo
0 Cesto	il paniere
0 banho	il bagno
a cama	il letto
0 quarto de	la camera da
dormir	letto
a campainha	il campanello
0 cobertor	la coperta
a persiana	la persiana
a caixa	la scatola
a vassoura	la scopa
0 balde	il secchio
a vela	la candela
0 tapete	il tappeto
0 teto	il soffitto
a cadeira	la sedia
a bacia de cama	il vaso da notte
a chamine	il camino
0 carvao	il carbone
0 canto	Fangolo Farmadio
0 armario
a cortina	la cortina
a almofada	il Cuscino
a porta	la porta
a gaveta	il cassette
a chtoa	la fiamma
0 aposento	Fappartamento

588	The Loom of Language
ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	PORTU¬ GUESE	ITALIAN
floor	le plancher	el suelo	0 soalho	il pavimento
flower	la fleur	la flor	a flor	il fiore
furniture	les meubles	los muebles	os mdveis	i mobili
garden	(m) le jardin	el Jardrn	0 jardim	il giardino
ground-floor	le rez-de-	la planta baja	0 res-do-chao	il pianterreno
hook	chaussee le crochet	el gancho	0 gancho	1’uncino
house	la maison	la casa	a casa	la casa
iron (flat)	le fer a	la plancha	0 ferro de	il ferro da
key	repasser la clef	la Have	engomar a chave	stirare la chiave
kitchen	la cuisine	la cocina	a cozinha	la cucina
ladder	Fdchelle (f)	la escalera	a escada	la scala
lamp	la lampe	la lampara	0 candieiro	la lampada
lock	la serrure	la cerradura	a fechadura	la serratura
mattress	le matelas	el colchdn	0 colchao	il materasso
methylated spirit l’alcool	el alcohol	0 alcooi	l’alcool
mirror	denature (m) metflico	desnaturado	denaturato
le mrroir	el espejo	0 espelho	lo specchio
pantry	3 ’office (f)	la despensa	a despensa	la dispensa
paraffin	le petrole	el petroleo	0 petroleo	il petrolio
picture	le tableau	el cuadro	0 quadro	il quadro
pillow	1’oreiller (m)	la almohada	a almofada	il guanciale
pipe (water3 etc.) le tuyau	el tubo	0 cano	il condotto
poker	le tisonnier	el atizador	0 ati?ador	1’attizzatoio
record (gramo¬ phone) * roof	le disque	el disco	0 disco	il disco
le toit	el techado	0 telhado	il tetto
room	la chambre	el cuarto	0 quarto	la camera
sheet	la piece	la habitation	a camara	la stanza
le drap	la sabana	0 len?ol	il lenzuolo
shovel	la pelle	la pala	a pi	la pala
side-board	le buffet	el aparador	0 aparador	la credenza
sitting-room	le salon	la sala	a sala	il salotto
smoke	la fumee	el humo	0 fumo	il fumo
stairs	l’escalier (m)	la escalera	a escada	la scala
storey	1’etage (m)	el piso	0 andar	il piano
stove	le poele	la estufa	a estufa	la stufa
switch (electric)	le commuta-	el conmutador 0 comutador	l’interruttore

teur

table tap toilet (W.C.) towel vacuum cleaner	la table le robinet le cabinet la serviette l’aspirateur (m) le mur la paroi la fen&re le lard	la mesa el grifo el retrete la toalla el aspirador	a mesa a tomeira 0 retrete a toalha 0 aspirador	la tavola il rubinetto il gabinetto l’asciugamano l’aspiratore (m)
wall (house) wall (room) window bacon	el muro la pared la ventana el tocino	0 muro a parede a janela 0 toucinho	il muro la parete la finestra il lardo

5§9

Language Museum

(k) FOOD AND DRINK

ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	PORTU¬ GUESE	ITALIAN
beef	le boeuf	la came de	a carne de vaca il manzo
beer	la biere	vaca la cerveza	a cerveja	la birra
beverage	la boisson	la bebida	a bebida	la bevanda
biscuit	le biscuit	el bizcocho	o biscoito	il biscotto
bread	le pain	el pan	o pao	il pane
breakfast	le petit	el desayuno	o pequeno	la prima
brandy	dejeuner le cognac	el conac	almo9o a aguardente	colazione il cognac
butter	le beurre	la mantequilla	i amanteiga	il burro
cake	le gateau	el pastel	o bolo	la torta
cheese	le fromage	el queso	o queijo	il formaggio
chicken	le poulet	el polio	o frango	il polio
chop	la cotelette	la chuleta	a costeleta	la costoletta
coffee	le cafe	el cafe	o cafe	il caffe
cream	la creme	la crema	a nata	la panna
dessert	le dessert	el postre	a sobremesa	le frutta
dinner	le diner	la comida	o jantar	il pranzo
egg	Foeuf (m)	el huevo	o ovo	Fuovo
fried eggs	des oeufs sur	huevos ffitos	ovos assados	nova al piatto
soft-boiled eggs	le plat des oeufs a la	huevos pasa-	ovos quentes	uova sode
fat	coque la graisse	dos por agua la grasa a gordura	il grasso
flour	la farine	la harina	a farinha	la farina
ham	le jambon	el jamon	o prezunto	il prosciutto il miele
honey	le miel	la miel	o mel
jam	la confiture	la jalea	a compota	la marmellata
lunch	le dejeuner	el almuerzQ	o almogo	la colazione
meal	le repas	la comida	a refeigao	il pasto
meat	la viande	la carne	a carne	la carne
milk	le lait	la leche	o leite	il latte
mustard	la moutarde	la mostaza	a mostarda	la mostarda
mutton	le mouton	la came de	a came de	la came di
oil	Fhuile (f)	camero el aceite *	carneiro o azeite	montone Folio
omelet	Fomelette (f)	la tortilla	a omeleta	la frittata
pepper	le poivre	la pimienta	a pimenta	il pepe
pork	le pore	la carne de	a carne de	il maiale
roast	le roti	cerdo el asado	porco o assado	Farrosto
roll	le petit pain	el panecillo	o paozinho	il panino
salad	la salade	la ensalada	a salada	l’insalata
salt	le sel	la sal	o sal	il sale
sauce	la sauce	la salsa	o molho	la salsa
sausage	la saucisse	la salchicha	a salchicha	la salsiccia
soda-water	Feau de Seitz	el agua de	a soda	Facqua
soup	la soupe	Seitz la sopa	a sopa	minerale la minestra
stew	le ragout	el guisado	o guisado	lo stufato

590

The Loom of Language

ENGLISH

sugar

supper

tea

veal

vegetable

vinegar

wine

FRENCH le sucre le souper le the le veau

la legume le vinaigre le vin

SPANISH el azucar la qena el te

la ternera ■

la legumbre el vinagre el vino

PORTU¬

GUESE

o agficar a ceia o cha a carne de vitela o legume o vinagre o vinho

ITALIAN

10 zucchero la cena

11 te

la carne de vitello il legume Faceto il vino

basin

bottle

coffee-pot

colander

cork-screw

cup

dish

fork

frying-pan

glass

jug

kettle

knife

lid

napkin

plate

saucer

saucepan

spoon

tablecloth

teapot

axe

board

chisel

cord

file

gimlet

gun

hammer

hoe

hook (fishing)

line (fishing)

nail

net

nut

(1) EATING AND COOKING UTENSILS

le bol la bouteiile la cafeti&re la passoire le tire- bouchon la tasse le plat

la fourchette la po£le le verre la cruche la bouilloire le couteau le couvercle la serviette Fassiette (f) la soucoupe la casserole la cuiller la nappe la theiere

la hache la planche le ciseau la corde la lime la vrille le fusil le marteau la houe le hamegon laligne le clou le filet Teqrou (m)

el tazdn la botella la cafetera el colador el sacacorchos

la taza el plato el tenedor la sarten el vaso la jarra la caldera el cuchillo la tapa

la servilleta <

el plato <

el platiilo i

la cacerola la cuchara el mantel la tetera

(m) TOOLS

el hacha (f) latabla el dncel la cuerda la lima

la barrens ;

la escopeta ;

el martiho .

la azada ;

elanzuelo <

el cordel <

el clavo (

la red *

latuerca 2

a tejela a garrafa a cafeteira o passador 5 o saca-rolhas

a chavena o prato o garfo a firigideira o copo o jarro a chaleira a faca a tampa o guardanapo o prato o pires a cagaroia a colher a toalha o bule

omachado a tabua o cinzel a corda a lima a verruma a espingarda o martelo a enxada o anzol 0 fio o prego a rede a porca

la catinella la bottiglia la caffettiera il passino il cavatappi

la tazza il piatto la forchetta la padeha il bicchiere la brocca il calderotto il coltello il coperchlo il tovagliolo il piatto il piattino la casseruola il cucchiaio la tovaglia la teiera

Fascia la tavola

10 scalpello la corda

la lima

11 succhiello il fucile

il martello la zappa Famo la lenza il chiodo la rete la madrevite

Language Museum

PORTU¬

GUESE

ENGLISH

pincers

plane

pliers

plough

rod (fishing)

saw

scissors

screw

screw-driver

scythe

spade

spanner

tool

wire

FRENCH les tenailles (f) lerabot les pinces (f) la charrae la canne la scie les ciseaux la vis le toumevis

la faux la b&che la clef l’outil (m) le fil de fer

SPANISH las tenazas el cepillo los alicates el arado la cana la sierra las tijeras el tomiilo el destorni- llador la guadana la pala la llave

as tenazes a pleina o alicate o arado a cana a serra as tesouras o parafuso a chave de parafusos a foice a pd

a chave la herramienta a ferramenta el alambre o arame

(m)

(n) VOCATIONS AND SHOPS

Facteur	el actor	0 actor
Factrice	la actriz	a actriz
Fauteur	el autor	0 autor
le boulanger	el panadero	0 padeiro
la boulangerie	la panaderia	a padarla
la banque	el banco	0 banco
la pension	la casa de huespedes la pension	a pensao
le libraire	el librero	0 livreiro
la librairie	la libreria	a livraria
le commerpant el comerciante	0 comerciante

actor

actress

author

baker

baker’s shop bank

boarding-house

bookseller bookshop business man

butcher butcher’s shop chemist (chem¬ istry)

chemist (phar¬ macy)

cook (female) dairy dentist doctor

employee

engineer

fisherman

gardener

hairdresser

jeweller

journalist

le boucher la boucherie le chimiste

le phdrmacien

la cuismiere la cremerie le dentiste le docteur le medecln Temploye Fing^niettr le pecheur le jardinier le coiffeur la coiffeuse le bijoutier le (la) jour- naliste

el camicero la camiceria el quimico

el farmacefi- tico

la cocinera la iecherfa el dentista el doctor el ihddicd el empleado el ingeniero el pescador el jardineto el peluquero la peluquera el joyero el (la) period- ista

o carniceiro o talho o quimico

o farmac£u- tico

a cozinheira a leitaria o dentista o doutor o medico o empregado o engenheiro o pescador o jardineiro o cabeleireiro a Oabeleireira o joalheiro o (a) jornalista

591

ITALIAN

le tenaglie la pialla le pinzette Faratro la canna la sega le forbici la vite il cacciavite

la falce la pala la chiave Famese (m) il file di ferro

Fattore Fattrice Fautore il fomaio la panetteria la banca la pensione

il libraio la libreria il commerci- ante

il macellaio la macelleria il chimico

il farmacista

la cuoca la latteria il dentista il dottore il medico Fimpiegato Fingegnere il pescatore il giardiniere il parmcchiere la parrucchiera il gioielliere il (la) gior- nalista

592

ENGLISH

judge

laundry

lawyer

mechanic

milliner

musician

notary

nurse (hospital) official

optician

painter

peasant

photographer

policeman

postman

priest (parish)

publisher

scientist

servant

t

shoemaker

shop

singer

stationer’s shop

student

surgeon

tailor

teacher

typist

watchmaker

workman

Africa

America

an American

Argentine

an Argentine

Asia

Austria

Belgium

a Belgian

Brazil

The Loom of Language

FRENCH	SPANISH
le juge	el juez
la blanchis-	el lavadero
serie
Pavocat	el abogado
le mecanicien	el mecanico
la modiste	la modista
le musicien	el mhsico
le notaire	el notario
Pinfirmiere	la enfermera
le fonction-	el funcionario
naire
Popticien	el dptico
le peintre	el pintor
le paysan	el labrador
le photographe el fotdgrafo
1 agent	el policfa
le facteur	el cartero
le cure	el cura
Pediteur	el editor
Phomme de	el hombre de
science	ciencia
le (la) do-	el (la) cri-
mestique	ado(a)
le cordonnier	el zapatero
le magasin	la tienda
le chanteur	el cantor
la chanteuse	la cantora
la papeterie	la papelerfa
Fetudiant	el estudiante
le chirurgien	el cirujano
le tailleur	el sastre
Pinstituteur	el maestro
(m)	la maestra
1 institutrice (f)
la (le) dac-	la (el) meca-
tylographe	nografa (o)
l’horloger	el relojero
Pouvrier	el obrero

PORTU¬

GUESE

o juiz

a lavandaria

o advogado o mecanico a modista o musico o notario a enfermeira o funcionario

o oculista o pintor o iavrador o fotdgrafo o policia o carteiro o cura o editor o scientista

o (a) criado(a)

o sapateiro a loja o cantor a cantora a papelaria o estudante o cirurgiao o alfaiate o mestre a mestra

a (o) dactild- grafa (o) o relojoeiro o obreiro

(o) COUNTRIES AND PEOPLES

PAfrique (f) el Africa (f)

PAmerique (f) la America xm Americain un americano PArgentine (f) la Argentina un Argentin

PAsie (f) PAutriche (f) la Belgique un Beige le Brdsjl

un argentine el Asia (f) el Austria (f) la Belgica un belga el Brasil

a Africa a America um americano a Argentina um argentine a Asia a Austria a Belgica um belga o Brasil

.ITALIAN

il giudice la lavanderia

Pawocato il meccanico la modista il musicista il notaio Pinfermiera Pufficiale

Pottico il pittore il contadino il fotografo la guardia il portalettere il prete Peditore

10 scienziato

11 (la) domes- tico(a)

il calzolaio il negozio il (la) cantante

la cartoleria

10 studente

11 chirurgo il sarto

il maestro la maestra

la (il) dattilo- grafa (o) Porologiaio Poperaio

PAfrica PAmerica un Americano PArgentina un Argentino PAsia PAustria il Belgio un Belga il Brasil?

ENGLISH

a Brazilian China a Chinese a Dane

Denmark Egypt empire England an Englishman Europe a European Finland a Finn a foreigner France a Frenchman a German Germany Great Britain

Greece a Greek Holland a Dutchman a Hungarian Hungary Ireland an Irishman Italy

an Italian Japan a Japanese kingdom Norway a Norwegian Poland a Pole Portugal a Portuguese republic Russia a Russian Scotland a Scotsman Spain a Spaniard Sweden a Swede a Swiss Switzerland

Language Museum

FRENCH

un Bresilien la Chine un Chinois un Danois

le Danemark PEgypte (f) l’empire (m)

SPANISH

un brasileno la China un chino un dina- marques la Dinamarca el Egipto el imperio

l’Angleterre (f) la Inglaterra

un Anglais PEurope (f) un Europeen la Finlande un Finnois un etranger la France un Franpais

un ingles la Europa un europeo la Finlandia un finlandes un extranjero la Francia un frances

un Allemand un aleman

1 AHemagne (f) la Alemania la Grande- la Gran

Bretagne Bretaha la Grece la Grecia

un Grec un griego

la Hollande la Holanda

un Hollandais un holandes un Hongrois un hiingaro

la Hongrie PIrlande (f) un Irlandais Tltalie (f) un Italien le Japon le Japonais le royaume la Norvege

la Hungria la Irlanda un irlandes la Italia un italiano el Japdn un japon& el reino la Noruega

un Norvegien un noruego la Pologne la Polonia

le Polonais un polaco

le Portugal el Portugal

le Portugais un portugues

la republique la repfiblica

la Russie la Rusia

un Russe PEcosse (f) un ficossais PEspagne (f) un Espagnol la Su&de un Su^dois un Suisse la Suisse

un ruso la Escocia un escoces Espana un espahol la Suecia un sueco un suizo la Suiza

PORTU¬ GUESE o um brasileiro a China um chin&s um dina- marques ca a Dinamarca Egipto . o imperio a a Inglaterra um inglSs a Europa um europeo a FinMndia um finlandes o o estrangeiro a Franqa um frances um alemao a Alemanha Gra-Bretanha

a Grecia umgrego a Holanda um holandes um hungaro a Hungria a Irlanda um irlandes a Italia um italiano ,o Japao um Japones o reino a Noruega um noruegues a Poldnia um polaco Portugal um portugues a repfiblica a Russia um russo a Escdcia um escoces a Espanha um espanhol a Suecia um sueco um suipo a Suiqa

593

ITALIAN

un Brasiliano la Cina un Cinese un Danese

la Danimarca PEgitto Pimpero PInghilterra un Inglese PEuropa un Europeo la Finlandia un Finlandese un forestiere la Francia un Francese il Tedesco la Germania la Gran- Bretagna 1 la Grecia il Greco POland a un Olandese un Ungherese l’Ungheria PIrlanda un Irlandese • PItalia un Italiano il Giappone un Giapponese il regno , la Norvegia un Norvegese la Polonia un Polacco il Portogallo un Portoghese la repubblica la Russia un Russo la Scozia uno Scozzese la Spagna uno Spagnuolo la Svezia uno Svedese uno Svizzerb la Svizzera

594	The Loom of Language
			PORTU¬
ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	GUESE	ITALIAN
a Turk	un Turc	un turco	um turco	un Turco
Turkey	la Turquie	la Turquia	a Turquia	la Turchia
U.S.A.	les Etats-Unis los Estados	os Estados	gli StatiUniti
		Unidos	Unidos
	(p) READING AND	WRITING
address	Fadresse (f)	las sehas	o enderego	Tindirizzo
addressee	le destinatafre el destinatario	o destinatario	il destinatario
blotting-paper	le papier	el papel	o mataborrao	la carta 'sugante
	buvard	secante
book	le Hvre	el libro	o livro	il libro
date	la date	la fecha	a data	la data
dictionary	le dictionnaire el diccionario	o dicionario	il dizionario
envelope	Fenveloppe (f) el sobre	o envelope	la busta
fountain-pen	le stylo	la pluma	a caneta de tinta la penna stilo-
	(graphe)	estilografica	permanente	grafica
ink	Pencre (£)	la tinta	a tinta	Finchiostro
letter	la lettre	la carta	a carta	la lettera
letter-box	la boite aux	el buzon	a caixa do	la buca da
	lettres		correio	lettere
mail	le courrxer	el correo	o correio	il corriere
map	la carte	el mapa	o mapa	la carta
news	les nouvelleS(£)las noticias	as noticias	le notizie
newspaper	le Journal	el periodico	o jornal	il giornale
novel	le roman	la novela	a novels	il romanzo
page	la page	la p&gina	a pagina	la pagina
paper	le papier	el papel	o papel	la carta
parcel	le paquet	el paquete	o pacote	il pacco
pen	la plume	la pluma	a pena	la penna
pencil	le crayon	el lapiz	o lapis	la matita
periodical	la revue	la revista	a revista	la rivista
postage	le port	el franqueo	o porte	Faffrancatura
post-card	la carte	la tarjeta	o bilhete postal la cartolina
	postale	postal		postale
post-office	le bureau de	la oficina de	o correio	Fufficio postale
	poste	correos
reading	la lecture	la lectura	a leitura	la lettura
rubber (eraser)	la gomme	la goma	o apagador	la gomma
sender	Fexpediteur	el remitente	o remetente	il mittente
	(m)
signature	la signature	la firma	a assinatura	la firma
stamp	le timbre-	el sello	o s&lo	il francobollo
	poste
typewriter	la machine	la maquina de	a maquina de	la macchina da
	a ecrire	escribir	escrever	scrivere
	(q) HOTEL AND RESTAURANT
bath-room	la salle de	el cuarto de	o quarto de	la sala da bagno
	bain	band	banho

595

ENGLISH

bill

chambermaid

change

chef

cloak-room

dining-room

hotel

lift

manager

menu

office

restaurant

staff

tip

waiter

arrival

booking-office

cloak-room

coach

compartment

connection

customs

delay

departure

dining-car

engine

entrance

exit

guard

inquiry office

lavatory

luggage

luggage-van

passenger

Language Museum

FRENCII SPANISH

1 addition la cuenta

(restaurant) la note (hotel) la femme de la criada

chambre

la monnaie el cambio

le chef _ el jefe

le vestiaire el vestuario la salie a el comedor manger

Fhotel (m) el hotel

Fascenseur (m) el ascensor le directeur el director le gerant el gerente la carte la lista le bureau las oficinas le restaurant el restaurant le personnel el personal le pourboire la propina le gar$on el camarero

PORTU¬ GUESE ITALIAN

a conta il conto

a crfada la cameriera

o trdcQ gll spiccioli

o ehefe il capocuoco

o guarda-roupa la guardaroba a sala de jantar la saia da pranzo

o hotel Falbergo

o ascensor Fascensore

o director il direttore

o gerente il gerente

a lista la lista

o escritorio Fufficio

o restaurante il ristorante

o pessoal il personal©

a gorgeta la mancia

o criado il cameriere

(r) TRAIN

Farrivee (1)	la llegada
le guichet	la taquilla
la consigne	la sala de
la voiture	equipajes
el coche 4
le wagon	el vagbn
le comparti-	el departa-
ment	mento
la correspon-	el empalme
dance
la douane	la aduana
le retard	el retraso
le depart	la partida
le wagon-	el coche
restaurant	comedor
la locomotive	la locomotors
la machine
Fentree (f)	la entrada
la sortie	la salida
le eonducteur	el guarda
le bureau de	la oficina de
renseigne-	informacion
ment
le cabinet	el retrete
les baggages	el equipaje
(m)
le fourgon	el furgdn
le voyageur	el pasajero

a chegada Farrivo a bilheteira lo sportello a sala de H deposit©

bagagem

a carruagem la vettura

o vagao il vagone

o compart i- lo scomparti-

mento mento

a ligagao la coincidenza

a afflndega la dogana ■

o atrazo il ritardo

a partida la partenza

o vagao-res- il vagone

taurante ristorante

a locomotive ■ la locomotiva

a entrada Fentrata

a safda Fuscita

o condutor il capotreno

o escritdrio de Fufficio in-

mforma^oes formazioni

a retrete la ritirata-

a bagagem il bagaglio

o furgao , il bagagliaio

o passageiro _ il passegiere

The Loom of Language

FRENCH le passeport le quai le porteur le chemin de fer

la place le wagon-lit fumeurs la gare

le chef de gare

Parrot (m) la valise le billet le billet d’aller et retour

SPANISH el pasaporte el anden el mozo el ferrocarril

el asiento el coche cama fmnadores la estacibn el jefe de estacibn la parada la maleta el billete el billete de ida y vuelta

PORTU¬

GUESE

o passaporte a plataforma o porteiro o caminho de ferro o lugar o vagao leito fumadores a esta9§o o chefe da estagao a paragem a mala de mao o bilhete o bilhete de ida e volta

596

ENGLISH

passport

platform

porter

railway

seat

sleeping-car

smoking

station

station-master

stop

suit-case

ticket

return ticket

ticket-collector

time-table

train fast train

slow train

trunk

waiting-room

anchor boat (small) boiler bows bridge

cabin

captain

compass

crew

deck

flag

funnel

hold

hull

keel

lighthouse

mast

oar

propeller

le contrdleur Pindicateur (m)

le train le rapide Pexpress (m) le train omnibus la malle la salle d’attente

Pancre (f) le bateau la chaudiere Pavant (m) la passerelle

la cabine le capitaine la boussole Pequipage (m) le pont le pavilion la cheminee la cale la coque la quille le phare le m&t larame la helice

el revisor el horario

el tren el rapido el expreso el mixto

el baiil la sala de

espera

(s) SHIP

el ancla (f) la barca la caldera la proa el puente

el camarote el capitan la brhjula la tripulacion la cubierta el pabellon la chimenea la cala el casco la quilla el faro el mastil el remo la helice

o revisor o horario

o combbio o rapido o expresso o mixto

o bah a sala de espera

a ancora o barco a caldeira a proa a ponte

o camarote o capitao a bhssola a equipagem a coberta a bandeira a chamine 0 porao o casco a quilha o farol o mastro 0 remo a helice

ITALIAN

il passaporto la piattaforma il facchino la ferrovia

il posto la vettura letto fumatori la stazione il capo- stazione la fermata la valigia il biglietto il biglietto d’andata e ritomo il controllore Porario

il treno il treno rapido

il treno omnibus il baule la sala d’aspetto

Pancora la barca la caldaia la prua il ponte di comando la cabina il capitano la bussola Pequipaggio il ponte la bandiera il fumaiolo la stiva

10 scafo la chiglia

11 faro Palbero il remo Pelice (f)

597

Language Museum

ENGLISH purser rudder • sail

seaman

sea-sickness

ship

stern

tug

FRENCH SPANISH le commissaire el contador ' le gouvemail el timon la voile la vela

le naarin el marine le mal de mer el mareo le bateau el barco Parriere (m) la popa le remorqueur el remolcador

PORTU¬ GUESE o comissario o leme a vela

o marinheiro o enjoo o navio a popa o rebocador

ITALIAN il commissario il timone la vela il marinaio il mal di mare il bastimento la poppa il rimorchia- tore

(t) MOTOR AND BICYCLE

aeroplane

axle

bearing

bend (road)

bicycle

brake

bulb

bumper

chain

clutch

damage

engine

fine

gears

head-lamp

hood

hooter

horse-power

ignition

jack

level-crossing

lever

lorry

motor-car

motor-cycle

mudguard one way

petrol

pump

puncture

Pavion (m) Pessieu (m) le coussinet le virage la bicyclette le frein Pampoule (f) le pare-chocs

la chaine Pembrayage (m)

le dommage le moteur Pamende (f)

el avi6n el eje el cojinete la curva la bicicleta el freno la ampolleta el tope

la cadena el embrague

el dano el motor la multa

o aviao o eixp

a chumaceira a curva a bicicleta o travao a lampada o para- choques a cadeia a embraiagem

o dano o motor a multa

Paeroplano Passe (f) il cuscinetto la svolta la bicicletta il freno Pampolla il paraurti

la catena la frizione

il danno il motore la contrawen- zione

l’ingranaggio

il faro la cappotta la tromba il cavallo vapore

l’accensione (f) il cricco il passaggio a livello la leva Pautocarro Pauto(mobile) (f)

la motocicletta

il parafango senso uni co

la benzina la pompa a bucatura

Pengrenage

(m)

le phare la capote le claxon le cheval vapeur

Pallumage (m) le cric le passage a niveau lelevier le camion Pauto(mobile) (f)

la moto- cyclette Paile (f ) sens unique

l’essence (f) la pompe la crevaison

el engranaje a engrenagem

el faro a lantema

la capota a capota la bocina a buzina el caballo de a forqa de fuerza cavalo

el encendido a ignigao el cric o macaco

el paso a nivel a passagem de rnvel

la palanca a ala van ca el camion o camiao el auto(movil) o auto(movel)

la motocicleta a motocicleta

elguardabarro direccibn finica la gasolina la bomba el pinchazo

o guarda-lama direegao obri- gatbria a gasolina a bomba o furo

59^ The Loom of Language

PORTU-

ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	_ GUESE	ITALIAN
spark	Fetincelle (f)	la chispa	' a faisca	la scintilla
sparking-plug	la bougie	la bujia	a vela	la candela
spring	le ressort	el muelle	a mola	la molla , .
starter	le demarreur	el arranque	o arranque	Fawiamento
steering-wheel	le volant	el volante	o volante	il volante -
tram	le tramway	el tranvi'a	o carro electrico il tranvai
tube	la chambre a	la camara de	a camara	la camera
	air	aire		d’aria
	le boyau
tyre	le pneu	el neumatico	o pneumatico	la gomma
valve	la soupape	la valvula	a valvula	la valvola
wheel	la roue	la rueda ■	a roda	la ruota
	%	(u) GENERAL
accident (chance Paccident (m)	el acaso	o acaso	il caso
event)
accident (mishap)raccident (m)	la desgracia	o acidente	la disgrazia
account (bill)	le compte	la cuenta	a conta	il conto
action	Faction (f)	la accion	a acgao	Fazione

The correspondence English -tion, French -tion, Spanish -cion, Portuguese -pao,' Italian -zione also occurs in the Romance equivalents to ambition, association, attention, Condition, direction , imitation, nation, relation, etc.

advantage	Favantage (m) la ventaja	a vantagem	il vantaggio
advertisement	Fannonce(f)	el anuncio	o anhncio	Fannunzio
advice (counsel) le conseil	el consejo	o conselho	il consiglxo
age (length of	Page (m)	la edad	a idade	Feta (f)
life)
amusement	Pamusement	la diversion	o divertimentc	> il divertimento
	(m)
anger	la coiere	la cdlera	o enfado	la collera
angle	Fangle (m)	el angulo	o angulo	Fangolo
answer	la reponse	la respuesta	a resposta	la risposta
apology	Pexcuse (f)	la disculpa	a satisfa?ao	la scusa
apparatus	Fappareil (m)	el aparato	o aparelho	Papparecchio
appetite	Fappetit (m)	el apetito	o apetite	Fappetito
army	Farmee (f)	el ejercito	o exercito	Fesercito
art	Fart(m)	el arte (m)	a arte	Farte (f)
assistance	Paide (f)	la ayuda	a ajuda	F aiuto
attack	l’attaque (f)	el ataque	o ataque	Fattacco
authority	Pautorite	la autoridad	a autoridade	Fautorita (f )
The correspondence English -ty, French	-U, Spanish -	dad, Portuguese
-aade, Italian -	ta, also occurs in the Romance	equivalents to difficulty* liberty*
quality, society, tranquillity, etc.
average	la moyenne	el termino	o termo m<§dio	la media
		medio
bag	le sac	el saco	o saco	il sacco
ball	la boule	la bola	a bola	la palla
battle	la bataille	la batalla	a batalha	la battaglia
beauty	la beaut6	la belleza	a beleza	la bellezza

ENGLISH

beginning

birth

blot

blow (hit)

bottom

burn

business (trade) care

case (instance) cause (grounds) change (altera¬ tion)

chemistry choice circle cleanliness colour committee company competition (commercial) competition (sport, etc.) compromise conclusion (end) conduct confidence (trust) conquest contact contempt contents country (nation) courage cowardice crack (fissure^ crime crisis criticism cross crowd

cruelty

cry

cube

curve

custom (habit) cut

damage

dance

Language Museum

french

le

ment

la naissance la tache le coup le fond la brulure

le changemefit

la chimie le choix le cercle la proprete la couleur le comite la compagnie la

SPANISH

principio

el nacimiento el borron el golpe

el cuidado el caso la causa el cambia

la qrnmica la eleccibn el cfrculo la iimpieza el color el comite

PORTU¬

GUESE

o principio.

o nascimento o borrao o golpe o fundo a queimadura os negocios o cuidado o caso a causa a mudanca

a quimica a escolha o cfrculo a limpeza a cor o comite a companhia a concorrencia

la companfa concurrence la competencia

commence- el

el fondo ia quemadura ies affaires (f) los negocios le soia le cas la cause

599

ITALIAN

il principio

la nascita

10 sgorbio

11 colpo il fondo

la bruciatura gli affari la cura il caso la causa il cambia- mento la chimica la scelta il circolo la pulizia il colore il comitato la compagnia la concorrenza

le concours	el concurs.©
le compromis	el compromise
la fin	el fin
la conduite	la conducta
la confiance	la confianza
la conqu£te	la conquista
le contact	el contact©
le mepris	el desprecio
le contenu	el contenido
le pays	el pais
le courage	el valor
la l&chete	la cobardia
la fente	la hendedura
le crime	el crimen
la crise	la crisis
la critique	la critica
la croix	la cruz
la foule	la muche-
	dumbre
la cruaute	la crueldad
le cri	el grito
le cube	el eubo
la courbe	la curva
la coutume	la costumbre
la coupure	el corte
le dommage	el dano
la danse	el baile

o concurso	il concorso
o 1 I. C/3 o	11 compromesso
o nm	la fine
a conduta	la condotta
a confianpa	la fiducia
a conquista	la conquista
Q contact©	il contatto
o desprezo	lo sprezzo
o conteiido	il contenuto
o pais	il paese
a coragem	il coraggio
a cobardia	la codardia
a fenda	la fessura
o crime	il delitto
a crise	la crisi
a critica	la critica
a cr uz	la croce
a multidlo	la folia
a crueldade	la crudelta
o grito	il grido
o cubo	il cubo
a curva	la curva
o costume	il costume
o corte	il taglio
o dano	il danno
o baile	il ballo

6oo

The Loom of Language

PORTU-

ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	GUESR	ITALIAN
danger	le danger	el peligro	o perigo	il pericolo
death	lamort	la muerte	a morte	la morte
debt	la dette	la deuda	a divida	il debito
defeat	la defaite	la derrota	a derrota	la disfatta
defect	le defaut	el defecto	o defeito	il difetto
defence	la defense	la defensa	a defesa	la difesa
degree	le degre	el grado	o grau	il grado
depth	la profondeur la profundidada profundidade la profondita
design (sketch)	le dessin	el diseno	o desenho	il disegno
desire	le desir	el deseo	o desejo	il desiderio
detail	le detail	el detalle	o detalhe	il dettaglio
development	le developpe- ment	el desarrollo	d desenvolvi- mento	lo sviluppo
disaster	le ddsastre	el desastre	o desastre	il disastro
discovery	la decouverte	el descubri- miento	o descobri- mento	la scoperta
disgust	le degout	la repugnancia o desgosto	lo schifo
distance	la distance	la distancia	a distancia	la distanza
doubt	le doute	la duda	a ddvida	il dubbio
dream	le reve	el sueno	o sonho	il sogno
drop (water, etc.) la goutte	la gota	a gota	la goccia
duration	la duree	la duracidn	a duragao	la durata
duty	le devoir	el deber	o dever	il dovere
edge (border)	le bord	el borde	a borda	Forlo
effort	Feffort (m)	el esfuerzo	o esforco	lo sforzo
electricity	Felectricite (f) la electricidad a electricidade	Felettricitk
employment	Femploi (m)	el empleo	o emprego	Fimpiego
encounter (meeting)	la rencontre	el encuentro	o encontro	l’incontro
end (extremity)	le bout	el extreme	a extremidade	Festremita
enemy	Fennemi (m)	el enemigo	o inimigo	il nemico
enterprise	l entreprise (f) la empresa	a empresa	Fimpresa
entrance	lentree (f)	la entrada	a entrada	Fentrata
environment	le milieu	el ambiente	o ambiente	Fambiente (m)
envy	l’envie (f)	la envidia	a inveja	Finvidia
equality	Fegalit£ (f)	la igualdad	a igualdade	Feguaglianza
error	Ferreur (f)	el error	o erro	Ferrore (m)
event	Fevenement . (m)	el aconteci- miento	o aconteci- mento	Fawenimento
examination	Fexamen(m)	elexamen	o exame	Fesame (m)
example	Fexemple (m)	el ejemplo	o exemplo	Fesempio
exchange	Fechange (m)	el cambio	a troca	il cambio
exhibition	Fexposition (f) la exposicidn	a exposigao	Fesposizione Fesistenza
existence	l existence (t)	la existencia	a existencia

The correspondence English -ence, French -ence, Spanish -e.nc.ia, Portuguese -encia, Italian -enza also occurs in the Romance equivalents to experience impudence , mdiffereneey patience y etc. 3

expense les frais (m) los gastos os gastos le spese

explanation Implication la explicaci6n a explicate la spiegazione

Language Museum

601

ENGLISH

fact

fall (of price, temperature, ■etc.) fear

flight (air)

fold

food

force

friend

friendship

front

frontier

fuel

future

game (play)

gesture

gland

government

gratitude

group growth half

happiness haste hate health heap

FRENCH

le fait la baisse

SPANISH

el hecho la baja

PORTU¬

GUESE

o facto a baixa

la peur el temor 0 receio

la cramte el miedo 0 medo

le vol el vuelo o v6o

lepli . el pliegue a dobra

la nourriture el alimento o alimento

la force la fiierza a fdr?a

1 Wt-m f1(la) axni8°W °(a) amigo(a)

1 amine (f) la amistad a amizade

le front el frente a frente

la frontiere la frontera a fronteira

le combustible el combustible o combustfvel 1 avenir (m) el porvenir o porvir

el juego o logo

el gesto o gesto

la glandula a glandula

el gobierno o govemo

le jeu le geste la glande le gouveme- ment

la reconnais¬ sance le groupe la croissance la moitie le bonheur la Mte la haine la sante le tas

ITALIAN

il fatto la caduta

la paura

il volo la plega il cibo

la forza Famico(a; Famlcizia il fronte la frontiera ii combustibile l’awenire (m) il giuoco il gesto la glandola il govemo

la gratitud el grupo

*a gratidao la gratitudine

o grupo

el crecimiento o crescimento la mitad a metade

hearing (sense of)Fouie (f)

heat height history hole honour hope hunger idea

improvement

impulse

inhabitant

instrument

la chaleur la hauteur Fhistoire (f) le trou

la felicidad la prisa el odio la salud el montbn el ofdo el calor la altura la historia el agujero

Fhonneur (m) el honor Fespoir (m) la esperanza la faim el hambre

Fidee (f) la idea Famelioration el mejora- (0 miento

Fimpulsion (f) el impulso Inhabitant (m) el habitante

a felicidade a pressa o 6dio a saMe o montao o ouvido o calor a altura a histbria o buraco a honra a esperan?a a fome a ideia o melhora- mento o impulso o habitante

il gruppo il crescimento la meta la felicita la fretta Fodio la salute il mucchio Fudito il calore Faltura la storia il buco Fonore (m) la speranza la fame Fidea

il migliora- mento

Fimpulso Fabitante lo strumento

^ - - - - w

1 instrument el instrument!) o instrumento

_ (m)

JJ* correspondence English -mm, French -mm, Spanish - mento , Portugues

t n ~?T° 3130 °CCUrS “ *** Romance equivalents to argument document , element, fragment, monument, etc. *

insurance Fassurance (f) el seguro o seguro Fassicura-

zione (f)

602 The Loom of Language

PORTU-

ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	GUESE	ITALIAN
interest (atten-	1’interSt (m)	el interns	o interesse	rinteresse (m)
tion)
interest (return)	1 sr i	el redito	o juro	Finteresse (m)
jealousy	la jalousie	los celos	o ciume	la gelosia
joke (jest)	la plaisanterie labroma	o gracejo	lo scherzo
journey	le voyage	el viaje	a viagem	il viaggio
joy	la joie	la alegrfa	a alegria	la gioia
judgment	le jugement	el juicio	o juizo	il giudizio
jump	le saut	el salto	o salto	il salto
kind (species)	Fespece (f)	la especie	a especie	la specie
	le genre	el genero	o genero	il genere
kiss	le baiser	el beso	o beijo	il bacio
knot	le noeud	el nudo	o n6	il nodo
knowledge	la connais-	el conoci-	o conheci-	la conoscenza
sance language (tongue la langue	miento la lengua	mento a lingua	la lingua
of a community)	el idioma	o idioma
language (style	le langage	el lenguaje	a linguagem	il linguaggio
of expression)
laughter	le rite	la risa	o riso	il riso
laziness	la paresse	la pereza	a.pregui$a	la pigrizia
law	la loi	la ley	a lei	la legge
lecture	la conference	la conferencia	a conferencia	la conferenza
length (space)	la longueur	la longitud	o comprimento la lunghezza
lesson	la le$on	la leccibn	a li$ao	la lezione
level	le niveau	el nivel	o nivel	il livello
lie	le mensonge	la mentira •	a mentira	la bugia
life	la vie	la vida	a vida	la vita
line	la ligne	la linea	a linha	la linea
liquid	le liquide	el Hquido	o liquido	il liquido
list	la liste	la lista	a lista	la lista
load	la charge	la carga	a carga	il carico
look (glance)	le regard	la mirada	a oihadela	lo sguardo
loss	la perte	la perdida	a perda	la perdita
love	ramour (m)	el amor	o amor	Famore (m)
luxury	le luxe	el lujo	o luxo	il lusso
machine	la machine	la maquina	a m&quina	la macchina
majority	la majorite	la mayoria	a maioria	la maggioranza
manager	le directeur	el director	o director	il direttore
maimer	la manfere	la manera	a maneira	la maniera
	la fa?on	el modo	o modo	il modo
mark	la marque	la marca	a marca	la marca
mass	la masse	la masa	a massa	la massa
material	le materiel	el material	o material	il materiale
matter	la matiere	la materia	a materia	la materia
means	le moyen	el medio	o meio	il mezzo
measure	la mesure	la medida	a medida	la misura
meeting (assem-	la reunion	elmitin	a reuniao	la riunione
bly)
member	le membre	el miembro	o membro	il membro
memory	la memoire	la memoria	a memdria	la memoria

603

Language Museum

ENGLISH FRENCH method la methode

middle le centre

le milieu

minority la minorite

mixture le melange

money Fargent (m)

mood (temper) l’humeur (£) movement le mouvemen

native land la patrie

nature la nature

navy la marine'

noise le bruit

notice (warning) Favis (m) number le nombre

(amount)

number (No.) le numero

object Fobjet (m)

offer Foffre (f)

order (arrange- Fordre (m ) ment)

order(command) Fordre (m)

le numero Fobjet (m) Foffre (f) Fordre (m;

SPANISH el metodo

el centro el medio la minoria la mezcla el dinero el humor

PORTU¬ GUESE o metodo o centro

o meio a menoridade a mistura o dinheiro o humor

ITALIAN il metodo il centro il mezzo la minorita la mistura il denaro Fumore (m)

order (goods) la commande origin Forigine (f)

owner le propriety

pain (suffering) la dotileur painting la peinture

part (of whole) la partie party (faction) le parti past le passe

peace la paix

people (persons) les gens people (com- le peuple munity)

person la personne

piece (fragment) le morceau

la peinture la partie le parti le passe la paix

place (spot) plant pleasure poetry point (dot)

Fendroit (m) la plante le plaisir la po6sie le point

point (sharp end) la pointe

poison

politeness

politics

population

poverty

power

practice (exer¬ cise)

prejudice present (gift)

le poison la politesse la politique la population la pauvrete le pouvoir Fexercice (£)

le prejuge le cadeau

it el movimiento o movimento	il movimento
la patria	a patria	la patria
la naturaleza	a natureza	la natura
la marina	a marmha	la marina
el raido	o ruido	ilrumore
el aviso	o aviso	Fawiso
el nhmero	o-ntatero	il numero
el nhmero	o nhmero	il numero
el objeto	o objecto	Foggetto
la oferta	a oferta	Fofferta
el orden	a ordem	Fordine un)
la orden	a ordem	Fordine (m)
i el pedido	a encomenda	Fordinaxioae(t)
el origen	a origem	Forigine (f)
e el propietario	o proprietario	il proprietario
el dolor	a dor	il dolore
la pintura	a pintura	la pittura
la parte	a parte	la parte
el partido	o partido	il partito
el pasado	o passado	il passato
la paz	a paz	la pace
la gente	a gente	la gente
el pueblo	o povo	il popolo
la persona	a pessoa	la persona
el pedazo	a ptga	il pezzo
el lugar	o lugar	il luogo
la planta	a planta	la planta
el placer	o prazer	il piacere
la poesia	a poesia	la poesia
el punto	o ponto	il punto
la punta	a ponta	la punta
el veneno	o veneno	il veleno
la cortesia	a cortesia	la cortesia
la poHtica	a poHtica	la politics
la poblacidn	a popula?aa	la popolazione
la pobreza	a pobreza	la poverta
el poder	o poder	il potere
el ejercicio	o exercfdo	l’eserdzio
el perjuicio	o prejuizo	il pregiudizio
el regalo	o presente	il regalo

The Loom of Language

ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH
present (gift)	le present	el obsequio
pressure	la pression	la presidn
price	le prix	el precio
prize	le prix	el pr&nio
problem	le probl&me	el problema
product	le produit	el producto
profit	le profit	el provecho
progress	le progrfcs	el progreso
proof	la preuve	la prueba
property	la propriety	la propiedad
protest	la protestation la protesta
punishment	la punition	el castigo
purchase	Fachat (m)	la compra
purpose	le but	el objeto
question	la question	la pregunta
race (breed)	la race	la raza
ray	le rayon	el rayo
reason	la raison	la raz6n
receipt (paper)	le regu	el recibo
recollection	le souvenir	el recuerdo
refusal	le refus	lanegativa
remainder	le reste	el resto
remedy	le remede	el remedio
report (account) le rapport	el informe
request	la demande	la peticion
respect	le respect	el respeto
rest (repose)	le repos	el descanso
result	le resultat	el resultado
revenge	la vengeance	la venganza
reward	la recompense la recompensa
right (just claim) le droit	el derecho
risk	le risque	el riesgo
rule (regulation') la rfegle	la regia
sadness	la tristesse	la tristeza
safety	la surete	la seguridad
sale	la vente	la venta
sample	Fechantilion (m) Fechelle (f)	la muestra
scale (measure)	la escala
science	la science	la ciencia
sense (meaning) le sens	el sentido
sentence (group of words)	la phrase	la frase
sex	le sexe	el sexo
shame	la honte	la vergiienza
side	le cote	el lado
sight (sense of)	la vue	la vista
sign	le signe	la senal
size	la grandeur	el tamano
sleep	le sommeil	el sueno
smell	Fodeur (f)	el olor

PORTU¬

GUESE

a d&diva a press ao o prego o premio o problems o produto o lucro o progresso a prova a propriedade o protesto o castigo a compra o propbsito a pergunta a raga o raio a razao o recibo a lembranga a recusa o resto o remedio a relagao a petigao o respeito o descanso o resultado a vinganga a recompensa o direito o risco a regra a tristeza a seguranga a venda a amostra

a escala a sci&ncia o sentido a frase

o sexo a vergonha o lado a vista o sinal o tamanho o sono o cheiro

ITALIAN

la press ione il prezzo il premio il problems il prodotto il profitto 11 progresso la prova la propriety la protesta la punizione la compera il proposito la domanda la razza il raggio la ragione la ricevuta il ricordo il rifiuto il resto il remedio il rapporto la ricchiesta il rispetto il riposo il resultato la vendetta la ricompensa il diritto il rischio la regola la tristezza la sicurezza la vendita il campione

la scala la scienza il senso la frase

il sesso la vergogna il lato la vista il segno la grandezza il sonno Fodore (m)

Language Museum,

ENGLISH

smile song sound space

FRENCH

le sourir

la chanson le son Fespace (m)

la vitesse le sport le carre

— i espace {

speech (power of) la parole speech (dis- le discours

course) speed sport

square (geo¬ metrical state (govern¬ ment) step strike struggle study success suggestion

SPANISH

la sonrisa la cancidn el sonido el espacio el habla (£) el discurso

la velocidad el deporte el cuadrado

1 etat (m) el estado

sum

summary

summit

surface

surprise

suspicion

swindle (fraud)

system

task

taste

tax :

test

thanks

theft

thing

thirst

tone

touch (sense of)

toy

trade

translation

transport

treatment

treaty

trial (law)

truth

use (employ¬ ment) value

le pas la greve la lutte Fetude (f) le succ&s la suggestion

la somme le resume le sommet la surface la surprise le soup9on Fescroquerie (f)

le systeme la tiche le gout Fimpot (m) Fepreuve (f) les remercie- ments (m) le vol la chose la soif le ton le toucher le jouet le commerce la traduction le transport le traitement le traite le proems la verity Femploi (m)

la valeur

el paso la huelga la lucha el estudio el exito la sugestidn

la suma el resumen la cumbre la superficie la sorpresa la sospecha la estafa

el sistema la tarea el gusto el impuesto la prueba las gracias

el robo la cosa la sed el tono el tacto el juguete el comercio la traduccion el transporte el tratamiento el tratado el proceso la verdad el uso

el valor

PORTU¬

GUESE

o sorriso a can^ao o som o espa^o a fala o discurso

a velocidade o despotic o quadrado

o estado

o passo a greve a luta o estudo o £xito a sugestao

a soma o sumario o cume a superficie a surpresa a suspeita a burla

o sistema a tarefa o gosto o imposto a prova as gramas

o furto a coisa a sede o tom o toque o brinquedo o comercio a tradu^ao o transporte o tratamento o tratado o processo a verdade o uso

o valor

605

ITALIAN

il sorriso : - la canzone il suono

10 spazio la parola

11 discorso

la velocita

10 sport

11 quadrate

10 stato

11 passo

lo sciopero la lotta

10 studio

11 successo il suggeri-

mento la somma il sommario la dma la superficie la sorpresa il sospetto

10 scroccone

11 sistema il compito il gusto

la tassa la prova le grazie

il furto la cosa la sete il tono il tatto il giuocattolo il commercio la traduzione il trasporto il trattamento il trattato il processo la verita Fuso

il valore

606	The	Loom of Language
ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	PORTU¬ GUESE	' ITALIAN
vessel	le vaisseau	la vasija	0 vaso	il vaso
(receptacle)
victory	la victoire	la victoria	a vitdria	la vittoria
voice	la voix	la voz	a voz	la voce
wages	le salaire	el salario	0 salario	il salario
walk (stroll)	la promenade el paseo	0 passeio	la passeggiata
want (lack)	le manque	la falta	a falta	la mancanza
war	la guerre	la guerra	a guerra	la guerra
wealth	la richesse	la riqueza	a riqueza	la ricchezza
weapon	Parme (f)	el arma (f)	a arma	Parma
weight	le poids	el peso	0 peso	il peso
width	la largeur	la anchura	a largura	la larghezza
will	la volonte	la voluntad	a vontade	la volontk
word	le mot	la palabra	a palavra	la parola
work (achieve-	Pceuvre (f)	la obra	a obra	Popera
ment)
work (exertion)	le travail	el trabajo	0 trabalho	il lavoro
world	le monde	el mundo	0 mundo	il mondo
youth (early life) la jeunesse	la juventud	a juventude	la gioventii
zeal	le zele	el celo	0 zelo	lo zelo

2. DIVISION OF TIME (a) GENERAL TERMS

afternoon	Papres-midi (m) PantlquM (f)	la tarde	a tarde	il pomeriggio
antiquity	la antighedad	a antiguidade	Pantichita (f)
century	le sifcde	el siglo	0 seculo	il secolo
Christmas	Nod (m)	Navidad (f)	Natal (m)	il Natale
day	le jour	el dia	0 dia	il giorno
daybreak	le point du jour	el amanecer	a madrugada	lo spuntar del giomo
dusk	la tombee de la nuit	el anochecer	0 anoitecer	il far della notte
Easter	Paques (m.pl) Pascua	Pascoa	la Pasqua
evening	le soir	la tarde	a tarde	la sera
fortnight	quinze jours	quince dias	quinze dias	quindici gioria
hour	la quinzaine	la quincena	a quinzena	la quindicina
Pheure (f)	la hora	a hora	Fora
half an hour	une demi- heure	media hora	meia hora	una mezz’ ora
a quarter of an	un quart	un cuarto de	um quarto de	un quarto d’ora
hour’	d’heure	hora	hora
an hour and a	une heure et	hora y	uma hora e	un’ ora e
half	demie	media	meia	mezzo
leap-year	Pannee bis¬ sextile	el ano bi- siesto	0 ano bissexto	PannO bi- sestile
Middle Ages	le moyen age	la edad media	a idade m6dia	il medio evo
midnight	le minuit	medianoche	meia noute	la mezzanotte
minute	la minute	el minuto	0 minuto	il minuto

ENGLISH

month

morning

night

noon

season

second

New Year

sunrise

sunset

time

week

year

spring

summer

autumn

winter

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

one

two

three

four

five

six

seven

Language Museum

FRENCH

le mois le matin la nuit le midi la saison la seconde le nouvel an le lever du soleil

le coucher du soleil le temps la semaine huit jours 1 ’an (m)

SPANISH

el mes la manana la noche mediodfa la estacidn el segundo el ano nuevo la salida del sol

lapuesta del sol

el tiempo la semana ocho dias el ano

PORTU¬ GUESE o mes a manha a noute o meio dia a estagao o segundo o ano novo o nascer do sol

o p5r do sol

o tempo a semana oito dias o ano

(b) SEASONS , MONTHS s AND DAYS le pr intemps la primavera a primavera l^ete (m) el verano o verao

Fautomne (m) el otono o outono

1 C®) el invierno o inverno

janvier

fevrier *

mars

avril

mai

juin

juillet

aout

septembre

octobre

novembre

decembre

enero

febrero

marzo

abril •

mayo

junio

julio

agosto

septiembre

octubre

noviembre

diciembre

Janeiro

fevereiro

margo

abril

maio

junho

julho

agosto

setembro

outubro

novembro

dezembro

lundi

mardi

mercredi

jeudi

vendredi

samedi

dimanche

u n, une

deux

trois

quatre

cinq

six

sept

el lunes el martes el miercoles el jueves el viernes sabado domingo

segunda-feira

terga-feira

quarta-feira

quinta-feira

sexta-feira

el sabado

el domingo

3. NUMERALS

uno, un3 una urn, uma dos dois* duas

tres tres

cuatro quatro

cinco cinco

seis seis

siete sete

607

ITALIAN

il mese la mattina la notte . mezzodi la stagione ii secondo ■ il capo d’anno il levar del sole

il tramonto

il tempo la settimana otto giorni l’anno

la primavera Testate (f) Tautunno

Tinvemo

Gennaio

Febbraio

Marzo

Aprile

Maggio

Giugno

Luglio

Agosto

Settembre

Ottobre

Novembre

Dicembre

Lunedl

Martedi

Mercoledi

Giovedi

Venerdi

Sabato

Domenica

uno5 imx una

due

tre

quattro

cinque

sei

sette

608 The Loom of Language

PORTU-

ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	GUESE	ITALIAN
eight	huit	ocho	oito	otto
nine	neuf	nueve	nove	nove
ten	dix	diez	dez	died
eleven	onze	once	onze	undid
twelve	douze	doce	doze	dodici
thirteen	treize	trece	treze	tredici
fourteen	quatorze	catorce	catorze	quattordici
fifteen	quinze	quince	quinze	quindici
sixteen	seize	diez y seis	dezasseis	sedici
seventeen	dix-sept	diez y siete	dezassete	diciassette
eighteen	dix-huit	diez y ocho	dezdito	diciotto
nineteen	dix-neuf	diez y nueve	dezanove	diciannove
twenty	vingt	veinte	vinte	venti
twenty-one	vingtetun	veinte y uno	vinte e um	ventuno
twenty-two	vingt-deux	veinte y dos	vinte e dois	ventidue
thirty	trente	treinta	trinta	trenta
forty	quarante	cuarenta	quarenta	quaranta
fifty	cinquante	cincuenta	cinquenta	cinquanta
sixty	soixante	sesenta	sessenta	sessanta
seventy	soixante-dix	setenta	setenta	settanta
eighty	quatre-vingts	ochenta	oitenta	ottanta
ninety	quatre-	noventa	noventa	novanta
	vingt-dix
hundred	cent	ciento3 cien	cem	cento
thousand	mille	mil	mil	mille
million	un million	un millon	um milhao	un milione
first	premier	primero	primeiro	primo
second	second	segundo	segundo	secondo
	deuxieme
third	troisieme	tercero	terceiro	terzo
fourth	quatrieme	cuarto	quarto	quarto
fifth	cinquieme	quinto	quinto	quinto
sixth	sixieme	sexto	sexto	sesto
seventh	septieme	septimo	setimo	settimo
eighth	huitieme	octavo	oitavo	ottavo
half	un demi	un medio	um meio	un mezzo
one-third	un tiers	un tercio	um ter go	un terzo
one-fourth	un quart	un cuarto	um quarto	un quarto
one-fifth	un cinquieme	un quinto	um quinto	un quinto
once	une fois	una vez	uma vez	una volta
twice	deux fois	dos veces	duas vezes	due volte
three times	trois fois	tres veces	tres vezes .	tre volte
	4-	ADJECTIVES
able (capable)	capable	capaz	capaz	capace
absent	absentee •	ausente	ausente	assente
acid	acide	acido	acido	acido

Language Museum 609

H?2'ISH "““w® Spanish S ITA1IAN

ido, also occurs in the Romance equivdems ^

admirable

aerial

agreeable

alone

ambiguous

amusing

ancient

angry

annual

admirable

aerien,ne

agreable

seul,e

ambigu,e

amusant,e

ancien, ne

f scheme

annuelje

admirable

aereo

agradable

solo

ambiguo divertido antiguo enfadado anual

admiravel	ammirabile
aereo	aereo
agradavel	gradevole
s6	solo
ambiguo	ambiguo
divertido	divertente
antigo	antico
enfadado	adirato
anual	annuale

rp, „ - — ouuai

J2S -*.<*r‘* ^ *»>*■■« -t

', n° “

astonished avaricious bad

beautiful

bent (curved) bitter (in taste) black blind

blue UACLl,C

blunt (not sharp) 6mousse,e

etonne,e avare mauvais,e beau, belle

courbe,e amer, ere noir,e aveugle bleu,e

boiling bright (shining) brown busy cautious cheap

bouillant,e

brillant,e

brun,e

occupe,e

prudence

bon-marche

atonito

avaro

malo

bello

hermoso

curvo

amargo

negro

ciego

aznl

embotado

hirviente

brillante

moreno

ocupado

cauto

barato

surpreendido

avaro

mau

belo

formoso

curvo

amargo

preto

cego

azul

desafiado

fervente

brilhante

moreno

ocupado

cauto

barato

cheerful

chemical

circular

sorpreso

avaro

cattivo

bello

curvo

amaro

nero

cieco

azzurro

smussato

bollente

brillante

marrone

occupato

cauto

a buonmercato poco caro allegro chimico circolare

gai,e ^ alegre alegre

chimique quimico qufmico

circulaire circular circular

The correspondence English -ular, French -tdaire, Spanish, Portuguese

clean clear closed cold

comfortable comic

propre	limpio	limpo
clair, e	claro	claro
ferme,e	cerrado	fechado
froid,e	frfo	frio
confortable	edmodo	edmodo
comique	cdmico	cdmico

pulito chiaro chiuso freddo comodo comico

■1C, French -ique, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian

miiTOipnto i-A -7 _ t . .

The correspondence English -ic, J?renc.h -ique, Spanish, Portuguese Italian

sdL%ac,°^S m nCS 6qUiValentS t0 domestic> elas*‘> enl^tic,

commercial commercial,e comercial comercial

common commun,e comiin comum

(general)

commerciale

comune

U

6io The Loom of Language

PORTU-

ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	GUESR	ITALIAN
complete	complet,fete	completo	completo	completo
complicated	complique,e	complicado	complicado	complicato
. content	content,e	contento	contente	contento
continuous	continu,e	continuo	continuo	continuo
cooked	cuit,e	cocido	cozinhado	cotto
cool	frais,ffaiche	fresco	fresco	fresco
correct	correct,e	correcto	correcto	corretto
covered	converts	cubierto	coberto	coperto
cruel	cruel, le	cruel	cruel	crudele
cunning	ruse, e	astuto	astuto	astuto
curious (inquisi-	curieux,se	curioso	curioso	curioso

tive)

The correspondence English -ous, French -eux, Spanish -oso, Portuguese -oso, Italian -oso, also occurs in the Romance equivalents to delicious, famous , furious, generous, industrious, etc.

daily	quotidien, ne	diario	diario	quotidiano
damp	humide	hfimedo	hdmido	umido
dangerous	dangereux,se	peligroso	perigoso	pericoloso
dark	obscur,e	obscuro	escuro	oscuro
dead	mort,e	muerto	morto	morto
deaf	sourd,e	sordo	surdo	sordo
dear (beloved)	cher,ere	querido	querido	caro
deep	profond,e	profundo	profundo	profondo
delicate (easily damaged)	delicat,e	delicado	delicado	delicato
dense (thick)	epais,se	denso	denso	denso
different	different, e	diferente	diferente	differente

The correspondence English -era, French -ent, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian -ente also occurs in the Romance equivalents to excellent 9 frequent, innocent, intelligent, patient, permanent, transparent, urgent, etc.

difficult	difficile	dificil	dificil	difficile
direct	direct, e	directo	directo	diretto
dirty	sale	sucio	sujo	sporco
disagreeable	desagreable	desagradable	desagradavel	sgradevole
discreet	discret,&te	discreto	discreto	discreto
dishonest	malhonnete	deshonesto	deshonesto	disonesto
distant	lointain,e	lejano	distante	lontano
distinct	distinct,e	distinto	distinto	distinto
double	double	doble	dobre	doppio
doubtful	douteux,se	dudoso	duvidoso	dubbioso
drunk	ivre	borracho	embriagado	ubbriaco
	soul,e	ebrio	ebrio	brillo
dry	sec, seche	seco	seco	secco
dumb	muet,te	mudo	mudo	muto
easy	facile	facil	facil	facile
edible	comestible	comestible	comestivel	commestibile
educated	instruit,e	instruido	instruido	istruito
elegant	elegant, e	elegante	elegante	elegante
employed	employee	empleado	empregado	impiegato

6ii

ENGLISH

empty

energetic

enormous

entire

equal

exact

expensive

external

extreme

fair (blond)

faithful

false

fat

feeble (weak) female (sex) fertile firm (fixed) flat

following

foolish

forbidden

foreign

frank

free

fresh (new)

fried

friendly

full

future

general

good

grateful

grave

green

grey

guilty half happy hard harmful healthy (whole¬ some) heavy high high up historical hollow

Language Museum

FRENCH

vide

inergique

enorme

entier^re

6gal,e

exacts

cher^re

exteme

extreme

blond>e

fiddle

faux3sse

gras3se

faible

femelle

fecond,e

ferme

plat,e

suivant,e

sot,te

bete

stupide

defendu,e

6tranger,&re

franc, che

libre

frais, fraiche frit,e aimable plein,e futur,e g£n£ral,e bon,ne reconnais¬ sance grave vert,e gris,e

coupable

demi3e

heureux,se

dur,e

nuisible

sain,e

SPANISH	PORTU¬ GUESE
vado	vazio
energico	energico
enorme	enorme
entero	inteiro
igual	igual
exacto	exacto
caro	caro
extemo	extemo
extreme	extreme
rubio	loiro
fiel	fiel
falso	falso
gordo	gordo
debil	debil
hembra	femea
fecundo	fecundo
firme	firme
llano	piano
siguiente	seguinte
tonto	tolo
estiipido	estiipido
prohibido	proibido
extranjero franco	estrangeiro franco
libre	livre
fresco	fresco
frito	frito
amigable	amigavel
lleno	cheio
fiituro	fiituro
general	geral
bueno	bom
agradeddo	agradecido
grave	grave
verde	verde
gris	dnzento
pardo	pardo
culpable	culpavel
medio	meio
feliz	feliz
duro	duro
nodvo	nodvo
sano	sao

lourd>e

haut>e

eleve,e

historique

creux,se

pesado

alto

elevado

histdrico

hueco

pesado

alto

elevado

historico

oco

ITALIAN

vuoto

energico

enorme

intiero

eguale

esatto

car©

estemo

estremo

biondo

fedele

falso

grasso

debole

femmina

fecondo

fermo

piano

seguente

sciocco

stupido

vietato

straniero

franco

libero

fresco

fritto

amichevole

pieno

future

general©

buono

riconoscente

grato

grave

verde

grigio

bigio

colpevole

mezzo

felice

duro

nodvo

sano

pesante

alto

elevato

storico

cavo

612

ENGLISH

honest human or humane humble ill .

important impossible inclined (dis¬ posed) inconvenient incredible inferior ingenuous intact interesting internal just (fair) kind

known

large

last

late (tardy) lazy lean left

light (in weight) light (in colour) living long

loose (slack)

lost

low

mad

male (sex) married maximum mean (average) mild

minimum

mixed

mobile

monthly

naked

narrow

national

near

necessary

neighbouring

The Loom of Language

PORTU-

FRENCH	SPANISH
honnSte	honrado
humain^e	humano
humble	humilde
malade	enfermo
importance	importante
impossible	imposible
dispose^	dispuesto
incommode	incdmodo
incroyable	increible
inferieuce	inferior
ingenue	ingenuo
intact3e	intacto
interessant,e	interesante
interne	intemo
juste	justo
bon3ne	bondadoso
aimable	amable
connu5e	conocido
grandee	grande
gros5se demier^re	tiltimo
tardif,ve	tardfo
paresseux5se	perezoso
maigre	magro
gauche	izquierdo
leger.ere	ligero
clair3e	claro
vivant3e	vivo
longjue	largo
lache	fiojo
perduae	perdido
bas,se	bajo
fou* folle	loco
mde	macho
. marine	casado
maximal^	maximo
moyen3ne	medio
doux3ce	suave
minimal,e	mfnimo
mde5e	mezclado
mobile	m6vil
mensuel3le	mensual
nu,e	desnudo
etroice	estrecho
nationals	nacional
proche	cercano
necessaire	necesario
voisin,e	predso vedno

GUESE	ITALIAN
honesto	onesto
humano	umano
humilde	umile
enfermo	ammalato
importante	importante
impossivel	impossibile
disposto	disposto
incomodo	incomodo
incrivel	incredibile
inferior	inferiore
ingenuo	ingenuo
intacto	intatto
interessante	interessante
intemo	intemo
justo	giusto
bondoso	buono
benevolo	amabile
conhecido	conosciuto
grande	grande
tiltimo	ultimo
tardio	tardo
mandriao	pigro
magro	magro
esquerdo	sinistro
ligeiro	leggero
daro	chiaro
vivo	vivo
comprido	limgo
frouxo	sciolto
perdido	perduto
baixo	basso
louco	pazzo
macho	maschio
casado	sposato
maximo	massimo
medio	medio
suave	mite
rninimo	rninimo
misturado	misto
mdvel	mobile
mensal	mensile
nu	nudo
estreito	stretto
nacional	nazionale
prdximo	prossimo
necess&rio	necessario
predso
vizinho	vidno

Language Museum

ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	PORTU¬ GUESE
new	nouveau, nou	- nuevo	novo
nice (of people)	velle gentil,le	amable	amavel
	sympathique	simpatico	simpatico
numerous	nombreux,se	numeroso	numeroso
obstinate	obstine,e	obstinato	obstinado
official	officiel, le	oficial	oficial
old	vieux, vieille	viejo	velho
only (sole)	seul,e	unico	iinico
open	unique ouvert,e	solo abierto	aberto
opposite (con¬	oppose, e	opuesto	oposto
trary)	contraire	contrario	contrario
other	autre	otro	outro
own (one’s)	propre	propio	proprio
painfhl	douloureux, se doloroso	doloroso
pale	pale	palido	palido
parallel	parallele	paralelo	paralelo
past	passe,e	pasado	passado
perfect	parfait,e	perfecto	perfeito
personal	personel,le	personal	pessoal
physical	physique	fisico	fisico
pink	rose	rosado	cor de rosa
pointed	pointu,e	puntiagudo	ponteagudo
poisonous	veneneux	venenoso	venenoso
polite	poli,e	cortes	cortes
political	politique	pohtico	politico
poor	pauvre	pobre	pobre
possible	possible	posible	possivel
pregnant	enceinte	encinta	gravida
present (oi	actuel,le	actual	actual
time) present (of place) pretty	present,e	presente	presente
joli,e	lindo	lindo
	gentil,le	bonito	bonito
previous	precedence	previo	previo
private (not	prealable	precedente	precedente
particulier,ere	particular	particular
public)	prive,e	privado	privado
probable	probable	probable	provavel
proud	fier,ere	orgulloso	orgulhoso
public	public,que	pdblico	pfiblico
pure	pur,e	puro	puro
quiet (calm)	tranquille	tranquilo	tranqixilo
rare	rare	raro	raro
raw	cru,e	crudo	cru
ready	pr£t,e	listo	pronto
real	reel,le	real	real
reasonable	raisonnable	razonable	razoavel
recent	recent,e	reciente	recente

613

ITALIAN

nuovo

gentile simpatico numeroso ostinato ufficiale vecchio solo unico aperto opposto contrario altro proprio ' doloroso pallido parallelo passato perfetto personale fisico rosa

appuntato

velenoso

cortese

politico

povero

possibile

incinta

attnale

presente

grazioso

bellino

previo

precedente

particolare

privato

probabile

orgoglioso

pubblico

puro

tranqnillo

raro

crudo

pronto

reale

ragionevole

recente

The Loom of Language

614

ENGLISH

red

regular

responsible

rich

ridiculous

rigid

right (not left)

ripe

rough (not smooth) round rude

rusty-

sad

safe (secure)

salt (salty)

same

satisfied

seated

secret

sensible

sensitive

separate

severe shallow sharp (keen edge) short

silent (mute)

similar

simple

sincere

slow

small, little smooth sober social

soft (not hard)

sour

special

square

steep

sticky

straight strange (pecu¬ liar)

FRENCH

rouge

regulier,ere

responsable

riche

ridicule

raide

droit,e

mur,e

raboteux,se

rond,e

grossier,£re

impoii,e

rouill£,e

triste

sauf,ve

sale,e

m£me

satisfait,e

assis,e

secret, ete

sense,e

tranchant,e

court,e

silendeux,se

semblable

simple

sincere

lent,e

petit,e

lisse

sobre

social,e

mou,molle

aigre

specials

carr^e

escarpe,e

collant,e

droit,e

etrange

SPANISH

rojo

regular

responsable

rico

ridiculo

rigido

derecho

maduro

aspero

redondo grosero descortes oxidado triste seguro salado mismo satisfecho sentado secreto sensato sensible separado serio severo

afilado

corto

silencioso

semejante

sencillo

sincero

lento

pequeno

liso

sobrio

social

blando

agrio

especial

cuadrado

escarpado

pegajoso

derecho

extrano

PORTU¬

GUESE

vermelho

regular

responsavel

rico

ridiculo

rigido

direito

maduro

aspero

redondo

grosseiro

descortes

ferrugento

triste

seguro

salgado

mesmo

satisfeito

sentado

secreto

sensato

sensivel

separado

serio

severo

baixo

afiado

curto

silencioso

semelhante.

simples

sincero

vagaroso

pequeno

liso

sdbrio

social

brando

azedo

especial

quadrado

escarpado

pegajoso

direito

raro

sensible separe,e

serious (earnest) serieux,se severe

peu profond,e somero

strong

sudden

fort^e

soudain,e

fuerte

repentino

forte

repentino

ITALIAN

rosso

regolare

responsabile

ricco

ridicolo

rigido

destro

maturo

ruvido

rotondo

rozzo

scortese

arrugginito

triste

sicuro

salato

stesso

soddisfatto

seduto

segreto

sensato

sensibile

separato

serio

severo

basso

affilato

corto silenzioso simile semplice sincero lento piccolo liscio sobrio sociale molle ' agro speciale quadro ripido appiccica- ticcio diritto strano

forte

subitaneo

ENGLISH

sufficient suitable (appro¬ priate) superior supreme sure (certain) sweet tender tepid terrible

thick (not thin) thin

tight (close fitting) tired true ugly uneasy unequal unfaithful unfortunate ungrateful unhappy unjust unknown useful useless usual

vain (persons) violent vulgar warm

wet (of persons and objects) white wicked wide (broad) wild (not do¬ mesticated) wise wrong yellow young

Language Museum

FRENCH	SPANISH	PORTU¬ GUESE
suffisant,e	suficiente	suficiente
convenable	apropriado	apropriado
superieur3e	superior	superior
supreme	supremo	supremo
sur5e	cierto	certo
doux3ce	dulce	doce
tendre	tiemo	tenro
tiede	tibio	tepido
terrible	terrible	terrivel
£pais,se	espeso	esp£sso
grosze	grueso	grosso
mince	delgado	delgado
serre3e	cerrado	apertado
fatigu^e	cansado	cansado
vrai3e	verdadero	verdadeiro
laid3e	feo	feio
inquiet^te	inquieto	inquieto
inegal*e	desigual	desigual
infidele	infiel	infiel
infortune^e	desgraciado	desgra$ado
ingrat3e	ingrato	ingrato
malheureux*	se infeliz	• infeliz
injuste	injusto	injusto
inconnu^e	desconocido	desconhecido
utile	titil	txtil
inutile	inutil	infitil
usuel5le	usual	usual
vaniteuxjse	vanidoso	vaidoso
violence	violento	violento
vulgaire	vulgar	vulgar
chaud^e	caliente	quente
mouille^e	mojado	molhado
blanc,che	bianco	branco
mechant3e	malo	malvado
large	ancho	largo
sauvage	salvaje	selvagem
sage	sabio	sabio
faux.>sse	falso	errado
jaune	amarillo	amarelo
jeune	joven	novo

615

ITALIAN

sufficiente

conveniente

superiore

supremo

certo

dolce

tenero

tiepido

terribile

spesso

grosso

sottile

stretto

stanco

vero

bratto

inquieto

ineguale

infedele

sfortunato

ingrato

infelice

ingiusto

sconosciuto

utile

inutile

usuale

vanitoso

violento

volgare

caldo

bagnato

bianco

cattivo

largo

selvaggio

saggio

falso

giallo

giovane

•be able to pouvoir

absorb absorber

abuse (revile) injurier

5. VERBS

poder poder

absorber absorver

injuriar injuriar

potere

assorbire

ingiuriare

6i6

ENGLISH

accept accompany accuse (of) get accustomed (to)

add (to) add up admire advance

advertise (goods) advise (counsel) be afraid (of)

The Loom of Language

be in agreement (with)

alight (from) allow (to)

. amuse amuse oneself apologize appear approach

arm

arrest (seize) arrive

ascend (go up) be ashamed (of)

ask (a question) ask for

astonish (amaze) be astonished attack

attempt (to) attract avoid bathe

bathe3 take bath beat (thrash) become begin begin (to)

FRENCH accepter accompagner accuser (de) s’accoutumer (a)

ajouter (a) additionner admirer avancer annoncer conseiller avoir peur We)

craindre &tre d’accord (avec)

SPANISH

aceptar acompahar acusar (de) acostumbrarse (a)

anadir (a) sumar admirar adelantar anunciar aconsejar tener miedo (de) temer concordar (con)

descendre (de) apearse (de) permettre (de) permitir

divertir s’amuser s’excuser apparaitre s’approcher (de) armer arrSter arriver monter avoir honte (de)

demander

demander

etonner

s’etonner

attaquer

essayer (de)

attirer

eviter

baigner

se baigner

battre

devenir

commencer

divertir divertirse disculparse aparecer acercarse (a)

armar

arrestar

llegar

subir

avergonzarse

(de)

preguntar pedir asombrar asombrarse , atacar tratar (de) atraer evitar bahar banarse golpear hacerse empezar

behave

believe

belong to

bend

bend

bet

commencer (a) ponerse (a) se mettre a

se conduire conducirse

croire creer

appartenir a pertenecer a comber curvar

se comber, encorvarse

parier apostar

PORTU¬ GUESE

aceitar acompanhar acusar (de) acostumar-se / (a) juntar (a) somar admirar adiantar anunciar aconselhar ter m£do (de) temer concordar (com)

apear-se (de) permitir divertir divertir-se desculpar-se aparecer aproximar-se (de) armar prender chegar subir

envergonhar- se (de) perguntar pedir assombrar assombrar-se atacar tentar (de) atrair evitar banhar banhar-se bater fazer-se comegar por-se (a)

conduzir-se

crer

pertenecer a curvar curvar-se apostar

ITALIAN

accettare accompagnare accusare (di) awezzarsi (a)

aggiungere (a) sommare ammirare avanzare annunziare consigliare aver pama (di) temere

essere d’accor- do (con) scendere (da) permettere (di) divertire divertirsi scusarsi apparire awicinarsi (a)

armare

arrestare

arrivare

salire

aver vergogna (di)

domandare

chiedere

sbalordire

stupirsi

attaccare

tentare

attirare

evitare

bagnare

bagnarsi

battere

divenire

cominciare

mettersi (a)

condursi

credere

appartenere a

curvare

curvarsi

scommettere

Language Museum

ENGLISH

bite

blame

blossom

blow

blow one’s nose boast (of) boil boil

bore (tire)	ennuyer
be born	naitre
borrow	emprunter
brake	ffeiner
break	briser
break	casser rompre se casser
breathe	respirer
breed or bring	elever
up breed	se multiplier
bring	apporter
broadcast	diffuser
brush	brosser
build	batir
burn	bruler
bum	bruler
burst	crever
bury (inter)	enterrer
busy oneself with s’occuper de
buy	acheter
calculate	calculer
call (give name)	appeler
be called	nommer s’appeler
call (cry to)	appeler
caress	caresser
carry	porter
catch (animal)	attraper s’enrhumer
catch cold
cause	causer
cease (to)	cesser (de)
celebrate	celebrer
change (alter)	changer
change	changer
chase away	chasser
chew	m&cher
choke (suffocate) suffoquer
choose	choisir

SPANISH	PORTU¬ GUESE
morder	morder
culpar	culpar
florecer	fiorescer
soplar	soprar
sonarse	assoar-se
> jactarse (de)	gabar-se (de)
hacer hervir	fazer ferver
hervir	ferver
aburrir	enfastiar
nacer	nascer
pedir prestado pedir empres-
enfrenar	tado travar
romper	romper
quebrar	quebrar
romperse	romper-se
respirar	respirar
criar	criar
multiplicarse	multiplicar-se
traer	trazer
difimdir	difundir
cepillar	escovar
edificar	edificar
quemar	queimar
arder	arder
reventar	rebentar
enterrar	enterrar
ocuparse de	ocupar-se de
comprar	comprar
calcular	calcular
llamar	chamar
llamarse	chamar-se
llamar	chamar
acariciar	acariciar
llevar	levar
coger	apanhar '
resfriarse	constipar-se
causar	causar
cesar (de)	cessar !
celebrar	celebrar
cambiar	alterar
mudar	mudar
echar	enxotar
masticar	mastigar
sofocar	sufocar
es coger	escolher
u*

FRENCH mordre blamer fleurir souffier se moucher se vanter (de) faire botiillir bouillir

ITALIAN mordere incolpare fiorire soffiare soffiarsi vantarsi (di) far bollire bollire axmoiare nascere prendere a prestito frenare rompere spezzare

rompersi

respirare

allevare

moltiplicarsi portare radio diffon- dere

spazzolare

costruire

bruciare

ardere

scoppiare

sotterrare

occuparsi di

comprare

calcolare

chiamare

chiamarsi

chiamare

accarezzare

portare

prendere

raffreddarsi

cans are

cessare (di)

celebrare

cambiare

cambiarsi

scacciare

masticare

soffocare

scegliere

618	The Loom of Language
ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	PORTU¬ GUESE	ITALIAN
clean	nettoyer	limpiar	limpar	pul ire
close or shut	fermer	cerrar	fechar	chiudere
collect (gather)	rassembler	recoger	colher	raccogliere
comb	peigner	peinar	pentear	pettinare
comb	se peigner	peinarse	pentear-se	pettinarsi
come	venir	venir	vir	venire
come back	revenir	volver	voltar	rivenire
compare (with)	comparer (a)	comparar (a)	comparar (com) confrontare
compel (to)	obliger (a)	obligar (a)	obrigar (a)	v_ 0) _ u II JD O
	forcer (a)	forzar (a)	forcar (a)	forzare (a\
complain (about) seplaindre(de) quejarse (de)	queixar-se (de) lasnarsi fdn
concern (be im¬ portant to)	regarder	concernir	concernar	riguardare

condemn (to) confess confuse congratulate « conquer (take by force) console contain continue (to) contradict convince cook copy correct correspond to

condamner (a) condenar (a) avouer confesar

confondre confundir

feliciter feiicitar

conquerir conquistar

cost

cough

count

cover (with) criticize cross (street* etc.) crush cure (heal) cut dance

dare (venture)

deceive

decide (to)

decorate

deduce (infer)

defend

define

demand (insist upon)

consoler

contenir

continuer (a)

contredire

convaincre

faire cuire

copier

corriger

correspondre

a

couter

tousser

compter

couvrir (de)

critiquer

traverser

ecraser

guerir

couper

danser

oser

tromper

se decider (a)

decorer

deduire

defendre

definir

exiger

consolar

contener

continuar

contradecir

convencer

cocinar

copiar

corregir

corresponder

a

costar

toser

contar

cubrir (con)

critical

atravesar

quebrantar

curar

cortar

bailar

atreverse (a)

enganar

decidirse (a)

decorar

deducir

defender

definir

exigir

condenar(a)

confessar

confundir

feiicitar

conquistar

consolar

conter

continuar (a) contradizer convencer cozinhar copiar corrigir corresponder a

custar tossir contar cobrir (de) criticar atravessar

esmagar

curar

cortar

dangar

atreyer-se (a)

enganar

decidir-se (a)

decorar

deduzir

defender

definir

exigir

condannare (a)

confessare

confondere

felicitare

conquistare

consolare contenere continuare (a) contraddire convincere cucinare copiare correggere corrispondere a

costare

tossire

contare

coprire (con)

criticare

attraversare

schiacciare

guarire

tagliare

ballare

osare

ingannare

deciders! (a)

decorare

dedurre

difendere

definire

esigere

Language Museum

en gli sh French

deny (say that nier thing is untrue)

SPANISH

negar

PORTU¬

GUESE

negar

depart (leave)

depend upon

deprive of

descend

describe

desert

deserve

desire

despair (of)

despise

destroy

determine

detest

develop (grow) die (from) digest diminish dine

dip (plunge) disappear discover discuss

disguise oneself disinfect dismiss (sack)

displease dissolve distinguish distribute (deal out) disturb dive

diverge (from) divide (into) do or make do without doubt

draw (sketch)

dream

dress

dress

drink

drive (vehicle) drop (let fall)

Partir

dependre de P**iver de descendre decrire abandonner meriter desirer

partir partir

depender de depender de privar de privar de

descender descer

describir descrever

abandonar abandonar

merecer merecer

j x desear desejar

oesesperer(de) desesperar (de) desesperar (de mepriser despreciar desprezar

aetruire destruir

determiner determinar

detester detestar

se developper desarrollarse

H^ourir (de) digerer diminuer diner plonger disparaitre decouvrir discuter sc deguiser desinfecter cong^dier f quer (fem.) deplaire dissoudre distinguer distribuer

deranger plonger diverger (de) diviser (en) faire

se passer de douter dessiner rever habiller s’habiller boire

conduire _ _

laisser tomber dejar caer

morir (de)

digerir

disminuir

comer

sumergir

desaparecer

descubrir

discutir

disffazarse

desinfectar

despedir

desagradar

disolver

distinguir

distribuix

incomodar

zambuliirse

divergir (de)

dividir (en)

hacer

pasarse sin

dudar,

dibujar

sonar

vestir

vestirse

beber

conducir

drown

dry

dye

se noyer

secher

teindre

ahogarse

secar

tehir

destruir determinar detestar desenvolver-se morrer (de) digerir diminuir jantar mergulhar desaperecer descobrir discutir disfar<;ar-se desinfetar despedir

desagradar

dissolver

distinguir

distribuir

encomodar mergulhar divergir (de) dividir (em) fazer

passar sem

duvidar

debuxar

sonhar

vestir

vestir-se

beber

guiar

deixar cair

afogar-se

secar

tingir

619

ITALIAN

negate

partire dipendere da privare di discendere descrivere abbandonare meritare desiderare ) disperare (di) disprezzare distruggere determinare detestare svilupparsi morire (di) digerire diminuire pranzare immergere sparire scoprire discutere travestirsi disinfettare licenziare

dispiacere

dissolvere

distinguere

distribuire

disturbare tuffarsi divergere (di) dividere (in) fare

fare a meno di dubitare disegnare sognare vestire vestirsi bere guidare lasciar ca- dere

annegarsi

seccare

tingere

620

The Loom of Language

ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	PORTU¬ GUESE	, ITALIAN
earn	gagner	ganar	ganhar	guadagnare
eat	manger	comer	comer	mangiare
educate (instruct) instruire	instruir	instruir	istruire
elect	elire	elegir	eleger	eleggere
embrace	embrasser	abrazar	abra9ar	abbracciare
emphasize	souligner	recalcar	acentuar	accentuare
employ (labour) employer	emplear	empregar	impiegare
empty	vider	vaciar	despejar	votare
enter	entrer dans	entrar en	entrar em	entrare in
envy	envier	envidiar	invejar	invidiare
erase (cancel)	bifier	borrar	cancelar	cancellare
evaporate	s’evaporer	evaporarse	evaporar-se	svaporarsi
exaggerate	exaggerer	exagerar	exagerar	esagerare
examine (inves¬	examiner	evaminar	examinar	esaminare
tigate) exclude	exclure	exduir	excluir	esdudere
exhibit	exposer	exhibir	exibir	esporre
exist	exister	existir	existir	esistere
expect	attendre	esperar	esperar	aspettare
explain	expliquer	explicar	explicar	spiegare
exploit	exploiter s’etendre	explotar	explorar	sfruttare
extend	extenderse	estender-se	stendersi
extinguish	eteindre	apagar	apagar	spegnere
faint	s’evanouir	desmayarse	desmaiar	svenirsi
fall	tomber	caer	cair	cadere
fall asleep	s’endormir	dormirse	adormecer	addormentars
fall ill	tomber malade caer enfermo	cair enfermo	ammalarsi
fall in love	tomber	enamorarse	enamorar-se	innamorarsi
(with)	amoureux	(de)	(de)	(di)
fasten (fix)	(de) fixer	fijar	fechar	fissare
feed	nourir	alimentar	alimentar	alimentare
feel (well* etc.)	se sentir	sentirse	sentir-se	sentirsi
fill (with)	remplir (de)	llenar (de)	encher (de)	riempire (di)
find	trouver	hallax	achar	trovare
finish	finir	acabar	acabar	finire
fish	pecher	pescar	pescar	pescare
fit (adjust)	ajuster	ajustar	ajustar	aggiustare
flatter	flatter	adular	lisonjear	lusingare
flee (run away)	s’enfuir	huir	fugir	fuggire
flow (of liquid)	couler	correr	correr	colare
fly	voler	volar	voar	volare
fold	plier	doblar	dobrar	piegare
follow	suivre	seguir	seguir	seguire
forbid	defendre	prohibir	proibir	vietare
forecast (predict) predire	predecir	predizer	proibire predire
foresee	prevoir	prever	prever	prevedere
forget	oublier	olvidar	esquecer	dimenticare
forgive	pardonner	perdonar	perdoar	perdonare
found (establish)1 fonder	fundar	fundar	fondare

621

Language Museum

ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	PORTU¬ GUESE	ITALIAN
freeze! freeze f	geler	helar	gelar	gelare
frighten	effrayer	asustar	assustar	spaventare
famish	meubler	amueblar	mobilar	ammobigliare
gather (pick)	cueillir	recoger	colher	cogliere
get rid of	se debarrasser librarse de	desembaragar-	sbarazzarsi di
give	de donner	dar	se de dar	dare
go	aller	ir	ir	andare
go away	s’en aller	andar irse	andar ir-se	andar via
go out	sortir	salir	sair	uscire
go to bed	se coucher	acostarse	deitar-se	coricarsi
govern "	gouverner	gobernar	governar	govemare
greet	saluer	saludar	saudar	salutare
grind (reduce	moudre	moler	moer	macinare
to powder)
groan	gemir	gemir	gemer	gemere
grow	cultiver	cultivar	cultivar	coltivare
grow (of plants,	croitre	crecer	crescer	crescere
etc.)
guess	deviner	adivinar	adivinhar	indovinare
guide	guider	guiar	guiar	guidare
handle (tool, etc.) manier	manejar	manejar	maneggiare
hang (person)	pendre	ahorcar	enforcar	impiccare
hang up	suspendre	colgar	pendurar	sospendere
hang dozen	pendre	colgar	colgar	penzolare
happen	arriver	acontecer	acontecer	awenire
hate	hair	odiar	odiar	odiare
have (own, hold) avoir	tener	ter	avere
hear	entendre	oir	ouvir	udire
heat	chauffer	calentar	aquecer	sentire riscaldare
help	aider	ayudar	ajudar	aiutare
hesitate	hesiter	vacilar	vacilar	esitare
hide	cacher	ocultar	esconder	nascondere
hide	se cacher	ocultarse	esconder-se	nascondersi
hinder	empecher	impedir	impedir	impedire
hire	louer	arrendar	alugar	prender a nolo
hit (strike)	frapper	acertar	acertar	colpire
hold	tenir	tener	ter	tenere
hope	esperer	esperar	esperar	sperare
hunt	chasser	cazar	cagar	cacciare
hurry	se depecher	apresurarse	apressar-se	afirettarsi
hurt (injure)	blesser	herir	ferir	ferire
hurt (ache)	faire mal	doler	doer	far male
imagine (figure) se figurer	figurarse	imaginar	figurarsi
imitate	imiter	imitar	imitar	imitare
increase	augmenter	aumentar	aumentar	aumentare
indicate	indiquer	indicar	indicar	indicare
infect	infecter	infectar	infectar	infettare

622

The Loom of Language

PORTU-

ENGLISH	■ FRENCH	SPANISH	GUESE	ITALIAN
inflate	gonfler	inflar	encher •	gonfiare
inform	informer	informar	informar	informare '
, inhabit	habiter	habitar	habitar	abitare
inherit	heriter	heredar	herdar	ereditare
inquire (ask	s’informer	informarse	informar-se	informarsi
about)
insult	insulter	insultar	insultar	insultare
insure	assurer	asegurar	assegurar	ass i curare
interest	interesser	interesar .	interessar	interessare
interfere with	se m£ler de	meterse en	meter-se em	immischiarsi
interrupt	interrompre	interrumpir	interromper	interrompere
introduce (per¬ son)	presenter	presentar	apresentar	presentare
invent	inventer	inventar	inventar	inventare
invite	inviter	invitar	convidar	invitare
irritate	irriter	irritar	irritar	irritare
join (put	joindre	juntar	juntar	giungere
together)
joke (jest)	plaisanter	bromear	gracejar	scherzare
judge	juger	juzgar	julgar	giudicare
jump	sauter	saltar	saltar	saltare
keep (retain) '	garder	guardar	guardar	guardare
keep (maintain)	maintenir	mantener	manter	mantenere
kick (of humans) donner des	dar puntapies	dar pontapes	dar dei calci
	coups de
	pied
kill	tuer	matar	matar	uccidere
kiss	embrasser	besar	beijar	baciare
kneel	s’agenouiller	arrodillarse	ajoelhar	inginocchiarsi
knock (at door)	frapper	llamar	to car	toccare
know	connaitre	conocer	conliecer	conoscere
	savoir	saber	saber	sapere
last	durer	durar	durar	durare
laugh	rire	reir	rir	ridere
laugh at	se moquer de	mofarse de	mofar-se de	burlarsi di
	se rire de	reirse de	rir-se de	rider di
lean (against)	s’appuyer	apoyarse	apoiar-se (em)	appoggiarsi
	(contre)	(contra)		(contro)
learn (to)	apprendre (a)	aprender (a)	aprender (a)	imparare (a)
leave (behind or	laisser	dejar	deixar	lasciare
m certain state.
allow)
lend	preter	prestar	emprestar	prestare
let (house)	loner	alquilar	alugar	aflittare
lie (tell untruth) mentir	mentir	mentir	mentire
light (set fire to) allumer	encender	acender	accendere
light (illuminate) eclairer	alumbrar	iluminar	illuminare
like or love	aimer	gustar*	gostar de	piacere*
limp	boiter	cojear	coxear	zoppicare

* With change of subject, e.g. Sp. me gustan los pasteles (Hike pies).

Language Museum 623

ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	PORTU¬ GUESE	ITALIAN
listen	ecouter	escuchar	escutar	ascoltare
live (be alive)	vivre	vivir	viver	vivere
live (dwell)	demeurer	morar	morar	abitare
	habiter	habitar	habitar	dimorare
load (put on	charger	cargar	carregar	caricare
vehicle, etc.)
lock	fermer a clef	cerrar con	fechar a	serrare a
look (appear)	avoir Fair	Have parecer	chave parecer	chiave parere
look after (take	s’occuper de	cuidar de	cuidar de	attendere
care of) look at	regarder	mixar	olhar para	guardare
look for	chercher	bus car	bus car	cercare
lose	perdre	perder	perder	perdere
love (person)	aimer	amar	amar	amare
lower	baisser	querer bajar	querer bem baixar	abbassare
make a mistake	se tromper	equivocarse	enganar-se	sbagliarsi
make sure (of)	s’assurer (de)	asegurarse	assegurar-se	accertarsi (di)
manage (direct)	diriger	(de) dirigir	(de) dirigir	dirigere
manufacture	fabriquer	fabricar	fabricar	fabbricare
marry (take in	epouser	casarse con	casar-se com	sposare
marriage)
get married	se marier	casarse	casar-se	ammogliarsi
measure	mesurer	medir	medir	(of man) maritarsi (of woman) misurare
meet	rencontrer	encontrar	encontrar	incontrare
meet (assemble)	se reunir	reunirse	reiinir-se	riunirsi
melt	fondre	derretir	derreter	fondere
melt	se fondre	derretirse	derreter-se	fondersi
mend	reparer	reparar	reparar	riparare
mention	mentionner	mencionar	mencionar	menzionare
mix	meler	mezclar	misturar	mescolare
move (shift)	remuer	mover	mover	movere
move (budge)	bouger	moverse	mover-se	movers i
move (into new	demenager	mudarse de	mudar de casa	cambiar di casa
place) multiply	multiplier	casa multiplicar	multiplicar	moltiplicare
need	avoir besoin	necesitar	necessitar	aver bisogno
neglect	de negliger	descuidar	descuidar	di abbisognare tras curare
nurse (sick)	soigner	cuidar	cuidar	curare
obey	obeir a	obedecer a	obedecer a	ubbidire a
object (to)	s’opposer (a)	oponerse (a)	opor-se (a)	opporsi (a)
observe (watch) observer	observer	observar	osservare
obtain	obtenir	obtener	obter	ottenere
offend	offenser	ofender	ofender	offendere

624

The Loom of Language

ENGLISH

offer

omit

open

oppose (with¬ stand) oppress order (goods) owe pain pardon pass (close to)

pawn

pay

perforate

permit

persecute

pick up

plan

plant

play (game) ‘ play(instrumeE poison possess pour out praise pray precede prefer prepare press (hold tight)

pretend (feign) prevent (from) print produce profit (from)

promise pronounce propose (suggest) protect protest prove (give proof of) publish pull pull out pump (water, etc.)

FRENCH	SPANISH	PORTU¬ GUESE	ITALIAN
offrir	ofrecer	oferecer	offerire
omettre	omitir	omitir	ommettere
ouvrir	abrir	abrir	aprire
resister (a)	resistir (a)	resistir (a)	resistere (a)
opprimer	oprimir	oprimir	opprimere
commander	pedir	ordenar	ordinare
devoir	deber	dever	dovere
peindre	pintar	pintar	dipingere
pardonner	perdonar	perdoar	perdonare
passer (a	pasar (al	passar (ao	passar (da-
c6te de)	lado de)	lado de)	vanti a)
engager	empenar	empenhar	impegnare
payer	pagar	pagar	pagare
perforer	perforar	perforar	perforare
permettre	permitir	permitir	permettere
persecuter	perseguir	perseguir	perseguitare
ramasser	recoger	apanhar	raccogliere
projeter	proyectar	projectar	progettare
planter	plantar	plantar	piantare
jouer (a)	jugar (a)	jogar (a)	giocare (a)
) jouer (de)	tocar	tocar	suonare
empoisonner	envenenar	envenenar	awelenare
posseder	poseer	possuir	possedere
verser	derramar	derramar	versare
louer	alabar	louvar	lodare
prier	rezar	rezar	pregare
preceder	preceder	preceder	precedere
preferer	preferir	preferir	preferire
preparer	preparar	preparar	preparare
serrer	apretar	apertar	serrare

feindre empecher (de) imprimer produire profiter (de)

promettre prononcer proposer

proteger protester prouver

publier tirer arracher pomper

fingir

impedir

imprimir

producir

aprovecharse

(de)

fingir

impedir (de) imprimir produzir tirar proveito

stringers fingere impedire (di) stampare produrre approfittare (di)

prometer	prometer	promettere
pronunciar	pronunciar	pronunziare
proponer	propor	proporre
proteger	proteger	proteggere
protestar	protestar	protestare
probar	provar	provare
publicar	publicar	pubblicare
tirar	puxar	tirare
arrancar	arrancar	strappare
dar a la bomba	dar a bomba	pompare

	Language Museum	625
ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	PORTU¬ GUESE	ITALIAN
punish	punir	castigar	castigar	punire
pursue push	poursuivre	perseguir	perseguir	perseguitare
pousser	empujar	empurrar	spingere
put (place)	mettre	poner	p6r	porre
quarrel	poser	colocar	colocar	mettere
se quereller	disputar	disputar	altercare
be quiet (say	se disputer	renir	renhir	bisticciarsi
se taire	callarse	calar-se	tacere
nothing)
quote	citer	citar	citar	citare
rain	pleuvoir	Hover	chover	piovere
raise (lift)	lever	levantar	levantar	alzare
react	reagir	reaccionar	reagir	reagire
read	lire	leer	ler	leggere
receive	recevoir -	recibir	receber	ricevere
recite	reciter	xecitar	recitar	recitare
recognize	reconnaitre	reconocer	reconhecer	riconoscere
recommend	recommandei	' recomendar	recomendar	raccomandare
reconcile (make	se reconcilier	reconciliarse	reconciliar-se	riconciliarsi
it up)
recover (get	se remettre	recobrar	restabelecer-se	rimettersi
better)
reduce	reduire	reducir	reduzir	ridurre
reflect (light)	reflechir	reflejar	reflectir	riflettere
refuse (to)	refuser (de)	rehusar	recusar	rifiutare
regret (be sorry)	regretter	(4- infin.) sentir	(a) sentir	rincrescersi
rely upon	compter sur	confiar en	contar com f	contare su
remain (be left	rester	restar	restar	restare
over) remember	se souvenir de acordarse de	lembrar-se de	rimanere ricordarsi di
remind	rappeler	recordar	lembrar	ricordare
repeat	repeter	repetir	repetir	ripetere
replace (substi¬ tute) reply	remplacer	reemplazar	substituir	rimpiazzare
repondre	contestar	responder	rispondere
represent (stand for) reprimand	representer	representar	representar	rappresentare
reprimander	reprobar	repreender	riprendere
repulse	repousser	repulsar	repulsar	respingere
resemble	ressembler (a) parecerse (a)	parecer-se(com) rassomigliare
reserve (seat,	reserver	reservar	reservar	(a) riservare
etc.)
respect	respecter	respetar	respeitar	rispettare
rest (repose)	se reposer	descansar	descansar	riposarsi
restrict	restreindre	restringir	restringir	restringere
retain	retenir	retener	reter	ritenere
retire (withdraw)	se retirer	retirarse	retirar-se	ritirarsi
return (give	rendre	devolver	devolver	restituire
back)

626	The Loom of Language
ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	PORTU¬ GUESE	ITALIAN
return (go back)	retoumer	volver	voltar	ritomare
revise	reviser	revisar	rev&r	rivedere
revive (restore	ressusciter	resucitar	ressuscitar ,	risuscitare
to life) revolve	toumer	girar	girar	girare
reward	recompenser	recompensar	recompensar	ricompensare
ring (bell)	sonner	tocar	tocar	suonare
rise	se lever	levantarse	levantar-se	alzarsi
risk	risquer	arriesgar	arris car	arris chiare
roll) roll]	rouler	rodar	rolar	rotolare
row	ramer	remar	remar	remare
rub	frotter	frotar	esfregar	fregare
ruin	ruiner	arruinar	arruinar	rovinare
run	courir	correr	correr	correre
save (from	sauver	salvar	salvar	salvare
danger) save up	epargner	ahorrar	poupar	risparmiare
say	dire	decir	dizer	dire
scatter	eparpiller	esparcir	espalhar	spargere
scrape	gratter	r as car	raspar	ras chiare
scratch	egratigner	aranar	arranhar	graffiare
see	voir	ver	ver	vedere
seem	sembler	parecer	parecer	parere
seize (grasp)	paraitre saisir	agarrar	agarrar	afferrare
sell	vendre	vender	vender	vendere
send	envoyer	enviar	enviar	mandare
send back	renvoyer	devolver	devolver	rinviare
separate (from)	separer (de)	separar (de)	separar (de)	separare (di)
serve (meals or	servir	servir	servir	servire
persons) sew	coudre	coser	coser	cucire
shake (agitate)	secouer	sacudir	chocalhar	scuotere
share (hand part over) sharpen	partager	compartir	repartir	spartire
aiguiser	afilar	afiar	aflilare
shave	raser	afeitar	fazer a barba	far la barba
shave	faire la barbe se raser	afeitarse	fazer a barba	farsi la barba
shine	se faire la barbe briller brillar	brilhar	brillare
shoot at	luire	lucir	luzir	risplendere
tirer sur	tirar a	atirar a	tirare a
shoot (execute)	fusilier	fusilar	fuzilar	fucilare
shout	crier	gritar	gritar	gridare •
show „	montrer	mostrar	mostrar	mostrare
shut in	enfermer	encerrar	encerrar	rinchiudere
side with	prendre le	ponerse de	tomar aparte	prender le
Sigh	parti de	parte de	de	parti di
soupirer	suspirar	suspirar	sospirare?

Language Museum, 627

PORTO-

ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	GUESE	ITALIAN
sign	signer	firmar	assinar	firmare
signify	signifier	significar	significar	significare
sing	chanter	cantar	cantar	cantare
sink in	s’enfoncer	hundirse	afundar-se	affonders
sit (be sitting)	etre assis	estar sentado	estar sentado	sedere
sit down	s’asseoir	sentarse	assentar-se	seders i
sleep	dormir	dormir	dormir	dormire
slip	glisser	resbalar	escorregar	scivolare
smell	sentir	oler	cheirar	sentire
smell (of)	sentir	oler (a)	cheirar (a)	sentire
smile	sourir	sonreir	sorrir	sorridere
smoke (tobacco) fumer	fumar	fumar	fumare
smoke	fumer	humear	deitar fumo	fumare •
snore	ronfler	roncar	ressonar	russare
snow	neiger	nevar	nevar	nevicare
sob	sangloter	sollozar	solugar	singhiozzare
soil	souilier	manchar	manchar	sporcare
solve (problem,	resoudre	resolver	resolver	risolvere
etc.)
sow	semer	sembrar	semear	seminars
speak	parler	hablar	falar	parlare
spell	epeler	deletrear	soletrar	compitare
spend (money)	depenser	gastar	gastar	spendere
spend (time)	passer	pasar	passar	passare
spit	cracher	escupir	cuspir	sputare -
split	fendre	hender	fender	fendere
stand (be on	Stre debout	estar de pie	estar de pe	stare in piedi
one’s feet)
stand on	se tenir sur	estar sobre	estar colo- cado sobre	stare su
stay (reside tern-	rester	quedarse	ficar	stare
porarily)
steal	voler	robar	roubar	rubare
stimulate	stimuler	estimular	estimular	stimolare
sting	piquer	picar	picar	pungere
stop (cause to	arr£ter	parar	parar	fermare
stop)
stop	s’arreter	pararse	parar	fermarsi
strike (go on	se mettre en	declarse en	declar-se em .	far sciopero
strike)	greve	huelga	greve
struggle (with)	lutter (avec)	luchar (con)	lutar (com)	lottare (con)
study	etudier	estudiar	estudar	studiare
succeed (be suc¬ cessful)	reussir	tener exito	ter 6xito	riuscire
suck	sucer	chupar	chupar	succhiare
suffer (from)	souffrir (de)	suffir (de)	sofrer (de)’	soffrire (di)
suffice	suffir	bastar	bastar	bastare
suit (be fitting)	aller bien	sentar bien	assentar bem	star bene
support (prop up, back up)	soutenir	sostener	suportar	sostenere
suppose	supposer	suponer	supor	supporre

628

The Loom of Language

ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	PORTU¬ GUESE	ITALIAN
surprise (take by surprendre	sorprender	surpreender	sorprendere
surprise)
surround (with)	entourer (de)	rodear (de)	rodear (com)	circondare (di
suspect	soupponner	sospechar	suspeitar	sospettare
swallow	avaler	tragar	engulir	inghiottire
swear (curse)	jurer	jurar	blasfemar	bestemmiare
swear (take oath) preter serment tomar jura-	tomar jura-	giurare
sweat	suer	mento sudar	mento suar	sudare
sweep (floor)	transpirer	transprar	transpirar	traspirare
balayer	barrer	varrer	spazzare
swim	nager	nadar	nadar	nuotare
sympathise	sympathiser	simpatizar	simpatizar	simpatizzare
(with)	(avec)	(con)	(com)	(con)
take	prendre	tomar	tomar	prendere
take away	enlever	quitar	retirar	ritirare
taste	gouter	probar	provar	gustare
teach	enseigner	ensenar	ensinar	insegnare
tear (rend)	dechirer	rasgar	rasgar	lacerare
tell (say)	dire	decir	dizer	dire
tell (relate)	raconter	contar	contar	raccontare
test	mettre a	probar	provar	provare
thank	Pepreuve remercier	agradecer	agradecer	ringraziare
think (about)	penser (a)	pensar (de)	pensar (de)	pensare (a)
threaten (with)	menacer (de)	amenazar	ameapar	minacciare (di)
throw	jeter	(con) echar	(com) deitar	gettare
thunder	lancer	lanzar	lan par	lanciare
tonner	tronar	trovejar	tuonare
tie (bind to-	lier	liar	ligar	leeare
together)
tolerate	tolerer	tolerar	tolerar	tollerare
touch	toucher	to car	tocar	toccare
translate	traduire	traducir	traduzir	tradurre
transport	transporter	transportar	transportar	trasportare
travel	voyager	viajar	viajar	viaggiare
treat	traiter	tratar	tratar	trattare
tremble	trembler	temblar	tremer	tremare
turn (twist)	tordre	torcer	torcer	torcere
type	taper (a la	escribira	dactilografar	scriver a
uncover	machine) decouvrir	maquina descubrir	descobrir	macchina scoprire
underline	souligner	subrayar	sublinhar	sottolineare
understand(com- comprendre nrehend)	comprender	compreender	comprendere
undress	se deshabiller	desnudarse	despir-se	svestirsi
unfasten	detacher	desatar	desatar	staccare
upset	renverser	trastornar	transtornar	rovesciare
urinate	uriner	orinar	urinar	orinare
	pisser	mear	mijar	pisciare

Language Museum, 629

ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	PORTU¬ GUESE	ITALIAN
use (employ)	employer	emplear	empregar	adoperare
visit	se servir de	serviirse de	servir-se de	servirsi di
visiter	visitar	visitar	visitare
vomit	vomir	vomitar	vomitar	vomitare
vote	rendre voter	votar	votar	votare
wait for	attendre	esperar	esperar	aspettare
waken	eveiller	despertar	acordar	svegliare
wake up	s’eveiller	despertarse	acordar	svegliarsi
walk	marcher	andar	andar	camminare
walk (go for a	se promener	pasearse	passear-se	far un giro
walk)
wander about	errer	errar	errar	errare
want (wish)	vaguer	vagar	vaguear	vagare
vouloir	querer	querer	volere
	desirer	desear	desejar	desiderare
warn	avertir	avisar	avisar	awertire
wash	laver	lavar	lavar	lavare
wash.	se laver .	lavarse	lavar-se	lavarsi
watch (keep an	surveiller	vigilar	vigiar	sorvegliare
eye on)
wave (hat, etc.)	agiter	agitar	agitar	agitare
wear (clothes)	porter	llevar	usar	portare
weep	pleurer	llorar	chorar	piangere
weion 1
weigh j	peser.	pesar	pesar	pesare
whisper	chuchoter	cuchichear	cochichar	sussurrare
whistle	siffler	silbar	assobiar	fischiare
win	gagner	ganar	ganhar	guadagnare
wind (coil)	enrouler	enrollar	enrolar	arrotolare
wind up (watch) remonter	dar cuerda	dar corda	carl care
be wont to	avoir coutume soler	soer	solere
work	de travailler	trabajar	trabalhar	lavorare
worship *	adorer	adorar	adorar	adorare
be worth	valoir	valer	valer	valere
wrap up	envelopper	envolver	embrulhar	awolgere
write	ecrire	escribir	escrever	scrivere
yawn	bailler	bostezar	bocejar	sbadigliare
yield (to)	ceder (a)	ceder (a)	ceder (a)	cedere (a)
above, upstairs	6. ADVERBS (a) PLACE AND MOTION en haut arriba em cima	di sopra
abroad	a l’etranger	en el extran- jero donde quiera	no estrangeiro	airestero
anywhere,	n’importe oh	onde quer	dovunque
wherever
around	autour	alrededor	a roda	intomo

630	The	Loom, of Language
			PORTU¬
ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	GUESE
backwards	en arriere	atras	para tras
before (in front) devant	delante	diante
behind	derriere	detras	atras
below, down¬	en bas	aba jo	em baixo
stairs
beyond	au-dela	mas alia	alem
downwards	en bas	hacia abajo	abaixo
elsewhere	ailleurs	en otra parte	noutra parte
	autre part
everywhere	partout	en todas	em toda a
		partes	parte
far	loin	lejos	longe
forwards	en avant	adelante	adiante
hence	d’ici	de aqui	daqui
here	ici	aquf	aqui
here and there	ga et la	aca y alia	ca e la
hither	ici	aqui	aqui
	par ici		qui
home (home¬	a la maison	a casa	a casa
wards)
at home	a la maison	en casa	em casa
inside	en dedans	dentro	dentro
near	pres	cerca	perto
nowhere	nulle part	en ninguna	em nemhuna
		parte	parte
on the left	a gauche	a la izquierda	a esquerda
on the right	a droite	a la derecha	a direita
on top	dessus	encima	em cima
over there (yon)	la-bas	alii; alia	acola
opposite (facing) vis-a-vis	enfrente	defronte
outside	dehors	fuera	fora
somewhere	quelque part	en alguna	em algum
		parte	lugar
thence	de la	desde alii	dalf
there	la	ahi	ali
	y	allf	acola
		alia	la
thither	la	allf	para aH
	y	alia	para la
through, across	a travers	a traves	atraves
underneath	dessous	debajo	debaixo
upwards	en haut	hacia arriba	para cima

after, after-v	apres	(b) TIME despues	depois
wards	ensuite	luego	em seguida
again	de nouveau	de nuevo	de novo
already	encore	otra vez	outra vez
deja	ya	ja

ITALIAN

indietro

davanti

dietro

giu

abbasso oltre in gift altrove

dappertutto

lontano avanti da qxii qui

qua e la qui qua a casa

in casa dentro vicino in nessun luogo a sinistra a destra sopra

colla; laggiu

dirimpetto

fuori

in qualche luogo dila li la

11

la

attraverso

disotto

insu

dopo

in seguito di nuovo ancora gia

Language Museum 63 1

ENGLISH	FRENCH	SPANISH	PORTU¬ GUESE	ITALIAN
always	toujours	siempre	sempre	sempre
as soon as	le plus tot	cuanto antes	quanto antes	quanto prima
possible	possible	lo mas pronto 0 mais pronto	il piu presto
ac first	d’abord	al principio	ao principio	possibile dapprima
at last	au commence ment enfin	por fin	em fim	finalmente
at once	tout de suite	al fin en seguida	porfim ja	alia fine subito
	a l’instant	al instante	no instante	immantinente
at present	a present	al presente	presentemente	; adesso
	maintenant	ahora	agora	ora
at the latest	au plus tard	a mas tardar	0 mais tardar	al piu tardi
at the same time	s en m£me	en mismo	ao mesmo	alio stesso
at times	temps	tiempo	tempo	tempo
quelquefois	a veces	as vezes	qualche volta
before	parfois avant	antes	antes	talvolta prima
daily	tous les jours	diariamente	diariamente	innanzi ogni giomo
early	joumellement tot	temprano	cedo	di buon9 ora
de bonne heure ever (at all times) tonjours siempre	sempre	sempre
ever (at any time) jamais	jamas	jamais	mai
finally	finalement	finalmente	finalmente	finalmente
formerly	autrefois	antes	antigamente	altre volte
from time to	jadis de temps en	antiguamente de cuando en	de quando em	di quando in
«*time	temps	cuando	quando	quando
de temps a antre from that time on des lors	de vez en vez desde entonces desde entao	sin d’allora
henceforth	desormais	en adelante	de hoje em	d’ora innanzi
hitherto	jusqufici	hasta ahora	diante ate agora	finora
in future	a Tavenir	enlovenidero	para 0 futuro	perl’awenire
in the evening	le soir	por la tarde	de tarde	di sera
in the morning	le matin	por la manana	de manha	di mattina
in time	a temps	a tiempo	a tempo	in tempo
last night	hier soir	anoche	a noite passada ieri sera
last week	la semaine	la semana	a semana	la settimana
	demiere	pasada	passada	passata
late	tard	tarde	tarde	tardi
lately	demierement	filtimamente	ultimamente	recentemente
meanwhile	en attendant	entretanto	entretanto	frattanto
monthly	par mois	mensualmente	mensalfnente	al mese
never	mensuellement jamais	nunca; jamas	nunca; jamais	mai
	ne . . . jamais	no . . . nunca	nao , . . nunca	non . . .mai

632

ENGLISH

no longer

next week

not yet now

nowadays now and then

often per day previously

recently

repeatedly

seldom since then soon (shortly)

soon after

still* yet

then (after that) then (at that time)

the other day this evening this morning to-day to-morrow to-morrow evening to-morrow morning three weeks ago weekly

yearly yesterday the day before yesterday the day after to-morrow

The Loom of Language

FRENCH	SPANISH	PORTU¬ GUESE	ITALIAN
ne . . . plus	yano	ja nao	non . . . piix
la semaine	no . . . mas la semana	nao . . . mais a semana pro¬	la settimana
prochaine	proxima	xima	ventura
pas encore	todavia no	ainda nao	non an cora
maintenant	ahora	agora	ora
de nos jours	hoy dia	hoje em dia	adesso oggigiorno
parfois	de vez en	de vez em	di quando in
	cuando	quando	quando
souvent	a menudo	muitas vezes	spesso
par jour	al dia	por dia	al giorno
auparavant	anterior-	antes	innanzi
recemment	mente recientemente	; recentemente	recentemente
plusieurs fois	repetida-	repetidamente	a piu volte
a plusieurs	mente
reprises
rarement	raramente	raramente	raramente
depuis lors	desde entonces desde entao	d’allora
bientot	luego	cedo	fra poco
pen de temps	pronto poco despues	logo pouco depois	poco dopo *
apres
encore	aun	ainda	anche
toujours	todavia	todavia	tuttora
ensuite	luego	logo	poi
alors	entonces	entao	allora
Pautre jour	el otro dia	0 outro dia	Paltro giorno
ce soir	esta tarde	esta tarde	stasera
ce matin	esta mahana	esta manha	stamattina
aujourd’hui	hoy	hoje	oggi
demain	mahana	amanha	domani
demain soir	mahana por	amanha de	domani sera
demain matin	la tarde mahana por	tarde amanha de	domattina
il y a trois	la mahana hace tres	manha ha tres se¬	tre settimane
semaines	semanas	manas	fa
chaque se¬	semanalmente semanalmente	settimanal-
maine hebdomadaire-	- hebdoma-		mente
ment annuellement	dariamente anualmente	anualmente	annualmente
hier	ayer	ontem	ieri
avant-hier	anteayer	ante-ontem	avantieri

apres-demain pasado depois de posdomani

mahana amanfia

633

Language Museum

ENGLISH to-day a week

What is the time?

it is one o’clock it is five o’clock

half-past five

quarter to five

quarter past five twenty to five twenty past five

FRENCH

d’aujourd’hui en huit quelle heure est-il?

ilestune heure il est cinq heures

cinq heures et demi

cinq heures • moins un quart

cinq heures un quart cinq heures moins vingt cinq heures vingt

SPANISH

de hoy en ocho dfas que hora es?

es la una son las cinco

las cinco y media las cinco menos cu- arto

las cinco y quarto

las cinco me¬ nos veinte las cinco y veinte

PORTU¬ GUESE de hoje a oito dias

que horas sao?

e rnna sao cinco

cinco e meia

cinco menos urn quarto

cinco e um quarto cinco menos vinte

cinco e vinte

ITALIAN oggi a otto

che ora e?

e la una sono le cinque

le cinque e mezzo

le cinque meno un quarto

le cinque e un quarto venti minuti alle cinque le cinque e venti

(c) MANNER , QUANTITY, AFFIRMATION AND NEGATION

about	environ a peu pres	cerca	cerca	circa verso
above all	surtout	sobre todo	sobretudo	sopratutto
actually	en fait en realite	en realidad	na realidade	infatti
a little	un peu	un poco	um pouco	im poco
almost	presque	casi	quasi	quasi
aloud	a haute voix	en alta voz	em voz alta	ad alta voce
also, too	aussi	tambien	tambem	an che
as (like)	comme	como	como	come
as it were	pour ainsi dire por decirlo asi	por assim dizer	per cosi dire
as much	autant	tanto	tanto	tanto
at least	au moins	a lo menos	pelo menos	almeno
at most	tout au plus	por lo mas	ao mais	tutt’ al pih
badly	mal	mal	mal	male
besides (more¬ over)	d’ailleurs en outre	ademas	de mais	inoltre
by all means	a toute force	sin falta	a todo o custo	ad ogni modo
by no means	en aucune	de ningun	de nenhum	in nessun
	maniere	modo	modo	modo
by chance	par hasard	por suerte	por acaso	a caso
by heart	par cosur	de memoria	de cor	a memoria
by the way	en passant a propos	de paso a propdsito	a propdsito	a volo a proposito
certainly	certainement	ciertamente	certamente	certamente
chiefly	principale-	principal-	principalmente	principal¬
	ment	mente		mente
completely	complement completa- mente	completa- mente	completa- mente
directly	directement	directamente	directamente	direttamente

634

The Loom of Language

ENGLISH

enough

even

evidently exactly (just so) extremely first (in the first place)

for instance , fortunately hardly (scarcely) hastily

indeed

FRENCH

assez

meme

evidemment justement extremement d’abord en premier lieu

par example heureusement a peine a la bite

in general in vain less and less

little

little by little more and more more or less mostly

much

no

not

not at all not even of course only

on purpose

partly

perhaps

probably quickly rather (prefer¬ ably) slowly *

vraiment

en verite en general en vain de moins en . moins peu

peu a peu

poco a poco de plus en plus mas y mas plus ou moins mas o menos pourlapluparten su mayor

	PORTU¬
SPANISH	GUESE	ITALIAN
bastante	bastante	abbastanza
aun	ainda	perfino
evidentemente evidentemente	evidentemente
justamente	justamente	giusto
extremamente	extremamente	estremamente
primeramente	primeiro	prima
en primer	em primeiro	in primo
lugar	lugar	luogo
por ejemplo	por exemplo	per esempio
por fortuna	felizmente	per fortuna
apenas precipitada-	apenas precipitada-	appena in fretta
mente	mente
verdadera-	verdadeira-	dawero
mente	mente
de veras	de-veras
generalmente	geralmente	generalmente
en vano	em vao	invano
menos y	menos e menos	di meno in
menos		meno
poco	pouco	poco

pouco a pouco mais e mais mais ou menos pela maior

beau coup bien fort	parte	parte
mucho	muito
non	no	nao
ne . . . pas	no	nao
pas du tout	de ningun	de nenhum
	modo	modo
pas mSme	ni aun	nem mesmo
naturellement	naturalmente	naturalmente
sans doute	sin duda	sem ddvida
seulement	solamente	somente
ne . , . que	no . , . mas	nao . . 4 mais
expres	que	que
de proposito	de propbsito
en partie	en parte	em parte
peut-Stre	tal vez	talvez por ventura
probablement	probablemente provavelmente
vite	de prisa	depressa
plutdt	mas bien	mais
lentement	lentamente	lentamente
tout dou ce¬ ment	despa cio	devagar

poco a poco di pit. in pih piu o meno per lo pih

molto

no

non

niente affatto

neanche neppure naturalmente si capisce soltanto non . . . che

apposta in parte forse

probabilmente

presto

piuttosto

lentamente pian piano

Language Museum

635

ENGLISH

so (so much)

so (thus)

somewhat

suddenly

together too, too much unfortunately

very

viz.

well

willingly

yes

FRENCH

tant

tellement

ainsi

quelque pen

SPANISH

tanto

asi algo

PORTU¬

GUESE

tanto

assim

soudainement de repente tout a coup de sopetdn

subitamente de repente

ensemble

trop

malheureuse-

ment

trfcs

c’est a dire bien

volontiers

oui

si

good morning 1 . .

good day } bon>our good evening good night

good-bye

good speed your health many thanks thanks merci*

don’t mention it ii n’y a pas de quoi

bonsoir bonsoir bonne nuit adieu au revoir bon voyage a votre sante merci bien

I beg your pardon

excuse me I am sorry

please

with pleasure good

how are you

so so

come m *

ce n est rien je vous de- mande par¬ don

excusez-moi je suis desol£ s’il vous plait avec plaisir

bon

comment al- lez-vous

comme ci, comme 9a entrez

juntamente demasiado desgraciada- mente muy a saber bien

voluntaria-

mente

de buena gana si

juntamente demais desgragada- mente muito a saber bem

voluntaria- mente

de boa vontade sim s]

ITALIAN

tanto

cosi

alquanto improwisa- mente d’un tratto insieme troppo per sfortuaa

molto

cioe

bene

volentieri

SOCIAL USAGE

buenos dxas bom dia

buenas tardes boa tarde buenas noches boa noite

adi6s

hasta luego buena suerte a su salud

adeus ate a vista boa viagem a sua satide

buon giorno

buona sera buona notte

addio arrivederci buon viaggio salute

muchas gracias muito obrigado tante grazie gracias obrigado

no hay de que nao ha de que

de nada

perdone usted perdoe-me

dispenseme lo siento por favor con mucho gusto bueno c6mo estd usted que tal asi asf

desculpe lament© muito se faz favor com muito gosto bom

como est&

que tal esta assim, assim

entre

grazie

non c’e di che prego

le domando scusa

permesso mi rincresce per piacere con piacere

buono , come sta

cosi cosi

avanti

adelante

When accepting an offer say sHl vous plait3 or avec plaisir, or volontiers', when refusing say merci or merci bien.

APPENDIX HI

THE GREEK LEGACY

What follows are Greek words with roots which survive in words of our own language and in scientific terms which are international. The latter include especially medical words and names of classes or genera of animals and plants, many of which will be familiar to the reader who has an interest in natural history. Greek abounded in compounds and words with derivative affixes. Loan words often come directly from a combination of elements indicated separately by the reference number of each item. The most important Greek affix which does not occur as a separate word is a- (without). Generic and class nam^ listed below have an initial capital letter, as do proper names.

Use of a Greek dictionary in order to find the origin of a technical term involves knowledge of the conventions of romanized spelling; and the order of the signs of the Greek alphabet: a, ft y, 3, e, ft v, &, t, k. A, p,, v, ft o, it, p, cr(?), t, v, <f>, x> oj. The Greek aspirate is the transposed apostrophe ' written before an initial letter. Thus a=ha, 'p — rh. Dictionaries do not separate words with aspirated from words with unaspirated initial vowel. The transcription of the peculiar Greek consonants is as follows: 4> — ps, x = ch l — z, <f> = Ph £ = x. If y comes before a guttural (y, ft y) it is equivalent to n. Thus yy = ng. The Latin transcription of k is C, but some modem words render it as K. The equivalents of the simple vowels are « = e, rj = e or a, a — a, i = i, o or co = o and v = y. The conven¬ tions for the double vowels are ov = u, ec = i, at = ae, and oc = oe or e. The final ia of many Greek substantives becomes y in English.

When the stem of other case-forms of a noun or adjective is longer than, or different from, the nominative the following rule holds good. The nominative form occurs in a final syllable, elsewhere the stem. Thus from (233) aams (aspis — nominative) and acrmSos (aspidos genitive) we get the zoological names Hemiaspis and Aspi- docotyle. From the nominative 6 pig (thrix) and genitive rptyov ( trichos ) we get the genera Ophiothrix and Trichina. Where confusion arise, the nominative and genitive forms of a noun appear below. An

asterisk (*) marks the genitive, if given alone.

The number of verbs listed is small, because the root which turns

Language Museum 637

up in technical words is more transparent in the corresponding abstract noun. Greek prepositions have widely different values depending on the case-forms which go with them. The ones given are those which they usually have in technical terms. •

Many Greek words transcribed in accordance with the foregoing conventions have come into use with little or no change. These include:

[a) Mythical persons such as Medusa, j Hydra, Gorgon, Titan, Andro¬ meda, Morpheus, Nemesis , and nectar (the drink of the gods). * The myths have furnished many technical terms for zoological or botanical genera, constellations, etc.

(b) Medical terms of which the following are samples :

apdptrtg	arthritis	KaOapmg	catharsis
cmoiTArjgca	apoplexy	Kazappoog	catarrhoos
aoBpta	asthma	Aerrpa	lepra
Siappoia	diarrhoea	ptapacrjLioe	marasmus
<5 voevrepia	dysentery	TTapaAvoiz	paralysis
epLTrXaCTpov	emplastron (plaster)	TTpOpOGKlG	proboscis
emArpfng	epilepsy	(Sevjua-ucrpiog	rhewnatismos
yayypmva	gangreina	(fiAsficTopua	phlebotomy (blood-letting)
Bcopag	thorax	ifjopa	psora (itch — psoriasis)

(c) A few non-technical words such as the following:

aiviypa	enigma (riddle)	idea	idea
CLKpLr)	acme (top, pinnacle)	Kpvtripiov	(criterion)
aopsoroG	asbestos (unquenchable) kv6o£	kudos (glory)
paoig	basis		opt£a)v	horizon
daip'Cov	daemon	iravaKEia.	panacea
diafloAoz	diabolos (slanderer)	7Tpa£t£	praxis
doyjaa	dogma		CTiypLa	stigma (branding)
dpapta	drama		cvvra&g	syntax (arrangement)
Bejua	thema (theme)	V(f)SV	hyphen
SIKCOV	ikon (image)	<j>avuacna	phantasia
8pL<f)aCflg	emphasis	%apcuczr)p	character
	echo		%aoc	chaos
		(a) GENERAL NOUNS
(1) aycov		(agon)	contest —	protagonist
(2) aycoyrj		(agoge)	training —	pedagogue (220), galacto- gogue (127)
(3) ama		(aetia)	cause —	aetiology (36)
(4) aioBrjaig	(aesthesis)	perception —	anaesthesia, aesthetic
(5) apXV		(arche)	beginning —	archaic, archetype (71),
		origin	archenteron (301), archegonium (ii).
				Archaeopteryx (348)
(6) a vrog		(autos)	self —	autolysis (37), autarchy

(202), autonomy (217)

638

(7) fhog

(8) fiohri

(9) yevecu; (10) ysvog

(11) yovrj

(12) yama

(13) yvpoc

(14) yvcoatg

(15) <5ofa

(16) dpojuog

(17) Swa/ug

(18) dcopov

(19) eAeyoc

(20) eXerj/aoovvrj

(21) emcmyAT]

(22) euros'

(23) epyov

(24) epcog

(25) Oavaxog

(26) dav/za

(27) depansia

(28) flfiOYg'

(29) Oscopia

(30) laxopta

(31) KCVTpOV

(32) Kvfiog

(33) tcvXivdpog

(34) icwcAog'

(35) Kcopiog

(36) Aoyog’

(37) Aw^

The Loom of Language

(bios)	life
(bole)	toss
(genesis)	origin
(genos)	kind, race, offspring
(gone)	generation, womb
(gonia)	angle
(gyros)	ring, circle
(gnosis)	knowledge
(doxa)	opinion
(dromos)	race, running
(dynamis)	power
(doron)	gift
(elegos)	lament
(eleemosyne) pity
(episteme)	knowledge
(epos)	speech
(ergon)	work
(eras)	love
(thanatos)	death
(thauma)	marvel
(therapia)	attendance, care
(thesis)	arrangement, order
(theoria)	reflection, contempla¬ tion
(historia)	narrative, research
(centron)	centre, sting
(cubos)	cube
(cylindros)	cylinder
(cyclos)	circle
(comos)	revel, comedy
(logos)	discourse, reasoning, word
(lysis)	release

- biology (36), symbiosis (668)

- hyperbole (669), anabolism (653), catabolism (663)

- oogenesis (387), ectogenesis (658), epigenesis (661)

- (654), nitrogen (I93)i genealogy (36)^ pho¬ togenic (119)

- gonady opisthogoneate (580)

- iJofeow (593), mefo7 (267, 629)

- gyrate, Gyrocotyle (140)

- agnostic, diagnostic (656)

- orthodoxy (582), hetero¬ doxy (545)

- anadromous (653), katadro' mous (663)

- dynamic, dynamo

- Dorothea (252)

- tf/egy, elegiac

- eleemosynary

- epistemology (36)

■ epic «

- synergic (668),

(659)

• ero&c, autoerotic (6)

* euthanasia (546)

■ thaumasite, thaumaturgy

(23)

■ therapy, therapeutic antithesis (654), parenthesis

(665) (659)

theory, theoretical

— history, story

— egocentric (eyco = /),, ^eo~ cfinmc (91)

— cubical

— cylindrical

— cyc/zc, tricycle (267), epi¬ cycle (66 1), Cyclostome(^6 3)

— comic

— logarithm (264), ew/cgy (546), analogy (653), apo- ^ (655)> prologue (667), dialogue (656)

— haemolysis (281), analysis (<553)> catalysis (663)

	Language Museum 639
(38) /LtaOrjfxa	(mathema)	learning	— mathematics
(39) pisBodo;	(methodos)	process	— method (107), (664)
(40) juepo;	(mews)	part	— metamerism (664), mero- blastic (484), pentamerous (269)
(41) fXLfxrjatg	( mimesis )	imitation	— mimetic , mimicry
(42) /ugt;	(mixis)	mixing	— amphimixis (526)
(43) [MOOS	( misos )	hatred	— misogynist (206), misan¬ thrope (201)
(44) may;	(mnesis)	memory	— amnesia , mnemonic
(45) pova;	(monos)	a unit	— monady Ochromonas (612), Trichomonas (370)
(46) f^ovaucrj	(musice)	art of the Muses	— music3 musician) etc.
(47) l*op<f>rj	0 morphe )	form	— morphology (36), amor¬ phous , metamorphosis (664), Myomorpha (425)
(48) ovopa	(pnoma or onyma)	name	— onomatopoeia (632), anony¬ mous
(49) opyia	(orgia)	secret rite	— orgy
(50) iraBo;	(pathos)	suffering, passion	— sympathy (668), apathy
(51) irpayfxa	(pragma)	deed, fact	— pragmatic , pragmatism
(52) irpop\r)fia	(problema)	proposition	— problem , problematic
(53) Trvpa/Ludo;*	(pyramidos)	pyramid	• — pyramidal
(54) qvBplo;	(rhythmos)	rhythm	— rhythmic^ eurythmics (546)
(55) aapKaapto;	(sarcasmos)	mockery	— sarcasm , sarcastic
(56) arifxa	(sema)	sign, symbol	— semantics
(57) aBevo;	(sthenos)	strength	— asthenic, neurasthenia (325)
(58) aicavdaXov	(scandalon)	offence	— scandalous
(^9) araai;	(stasis)	standing still, posture	— epistatic (661), ecstasy(6 57), apostasy (655), statolith (188), statocyst (315)
(60) ariyfxa	(stigma)	mark, puncture	— stigmata
(61) arpo<j>r)	(strophe)	twist	— apostrophe (655), Strophan- thus (483)
(62) a<j>atpa	(sphaera)	sphere, globe	— • spherical , stratosphere
(63) a%r}fxa	(schema)	plan	— scheme , schematic
(64) <fo<f>ta	(sophia)	wisdom	— philosophy (648), sophism
(65) tsXo;	(telos)	end, purpose	— entelechy (659), teleology (36), telosynapsis (668, 124)
(66) repa;	(teras)	omen	— amphoteric (52 6)
(67) rexvrj	(techne)	art	— technical) pyrotechnic (in)
(68) xovo ;	(tonos)	stretching	— tonuS) tone , rhmc
(69) totto;	(topos)	place	— topography (619), ectopic (657)3 topical
(70) TpOTTT}	(trope)	direction, turn •	— heliotropism (95), entropy (659), geotropism (91)

640

(71) TVTTOg

(72) <f>0($0£

(73) ^ pa.au;

(74) <f>pr\v

(75) <f>vai;

(76) <f>Q)V7]

(77) %pu>iia

(78) xpovo;

(79)

(80) coapiT]

The Loom of Language

(typos)	model, impression
(phobos)	fear
(phrasis)	phrase
(phren)	under¬ standing
(physis)	nature
(phone)	sound, voice
(chroma)	colour
(chronos)	time
(psyche)	mind
(osme)	thrust

— typical; typography (619), typewriter

— hydrophobia (114), xeno¬ phobia (575)

. — periphrasis (666) s para¬ phrase (665)

— oligophrenia (577), schizo¬ phrenia (641)

— physical) physiography (619)

— phonetics) phonograph (619)* gramophone (249), phony (654), cacophony (555)

— panchromatic (584)* poly¬ chrome (593), chromosome (367)

— chronometer (629), synchro¬ nize (668), chronology (36)

— psychic) psychology (36)

— osmosis

(81) aypoc

(82) a?7/>

(83) a/mg', ctKTivo;

(84) a£0?7p

(85) avepo;

(86) aazrjp

(87) arpoc

(88) avAos*

(89) fiodpo;

(90) PpOVTf)

(91) yrj

(92) dpoao;

(93) W

(94) £e<f>vpo;

(95) V^o;

C9<5) fjjuepa

(97) 0aAaorcra

(98) *pic

(i) NATURE — OUTDOOR THINGS

(agras)

(aer)

(actiS)

actinos)

(aether)

(memos)

(aster)

(atmos)

(aulos)

(bothros)

(bronte)

(ge)

(drosos)

(cos)

(zephyros)

(helios)

(hemera)

(ihalassa)

<fris)

field

air

sunbeam

sky

wind

star

vapour

pipe

pit

thunder

earth

dew

dawn

west wind sun

day

rainbow

1 — agronomy (217)

— ■ aerial) aerobic (7), aero¬ plane, aerotropism (70)

— actinic) Hexactinia (270), Actinozoa (399), actino- morphic (47)

— ether ) ethereal

— anemophilous (648), anemo¬ meter (629)

— astrology (36), astral , as¬ teroid, Aster, Asteroidea

— atmosphere (62)

— hydraulic (114)

— Stenobothrium (597), Bothriocephalus (310)

— Brontosaurus (434)

— geography ' (619), geology (36)) geometry (629)

— Drosera, Drosophila (648)

— Eohippus (401), Eoanthro- pUS'( 201)

— zephyr

— helium , perihelion (666), heliograph (619), heliocen¬ tric (31)

— ephemeral (661)

Thalassemma , Thalasso- plancta

— iridescent

Language Museum 641

(99) Koajuog	(1 cosmos )	world	— cosmogony (11), ccsmzc
(100) KpvaraXXog	(crystallos)	ice, crystal	— crystalline , crystallography
(101) Kvjua	(cyma)	wave	(619) — Cumacea, kymograph (619)
(102) Aifivr)	(limne)	lake	— limnology (36), Limnanthe-
(103) ve<f>eXrj	(nephele)	cloud	mum (483) — nephelometer (629)
(104) vrjooc;	(nesos)	island	— Polynesia (593), Microne¬
(105) vv$,	(nux, nyctos )	night	sia (569), Melanesia (610) — Nyctiphanes (646), nycft-
VVKZOg (106) ovpavog	(uranos)	heaven	wosry, nyctotropism (70) — uranium, , uranian
(107) odog	(hodos)	way, journey— pmbd (666), awode (653),
(108) TrXavrjg	(planes)	wanderer	cathode (663) — planet
(109) rrozapLog	( potamos )	river	— hippopotamus (401), Pora-
(lIO) 77T^£,	(ptyx.	cleft	mogeton — Ptychoderay Amphiptyches
TTTV%Og	ptyckos)		(526), Aptychus
(ill) 77Vp	(Pyr)	fire	— pyr ex, pyrexia, empyrean
(112) creArjvr}	(selene)	moon	(659)3 Pyronema (148) — selenium , selenodont (328)
(113) omvdrjp	(. spinther )	spark	— spinthariscope (639)
(114) vdcop	Qiydor )	water	— hydrogen (10), anhydrous ,
(115)' vdang	( "hydatis )	drop	hydrant, hydrostatics (59) — hydatid
(116) $Ao£,	( phlox ,	flame	— phlogiston
<f>Aoyog (117) ^ pay nog	phlogos ) (phragmos)	fence	— Phragmatohia (7), Phrag-
(118) (fipeap ,	( phrear ,	cistern	mites — Phreatokus
(ftpearog (119) ificazog*	phreatos) ( photos )	light	— photic, photograph (619),
(120) tpajupiog	( psammos )	sand	photon — Psammoclema, Psamma
(121) COKSaVOg	(oceanos)	ocean	— oceanic, oceanography (619)

(c) DOMESTIC THINGS (Building, Clothes, Furniture, Tools)

(122) ayyeiov	(angeion)	box, chest	— Angiosperm (511), Angiop- teris (507)
(123) acr/coc	(ascos)	bottle, bag	— Ascomycetes (504), Asddian
(124)	(apsis)	knot	— synapsis (668), parasynapsis (665)
(125) afaw	(axon)	axle, shaft	— axis, axzaZ, triaxon (267)
(126) fiovzvpov	(butywn)	butter	— butyric
(127) yaAa, yaAa/cToc	(gala, galactos )	milk	— galactic, galaxy
(128) ductvcov	(dictyon)	net	— Dictyota, Palaeodictyoptera (348, 583)

642 The Loom of Language

(129) diai co£	( discos )	dish5 quoit
(130) eKKXr}Oia	(ecclesid)	church
(131) £vyov	(zygon)	yoke
(132) Zcovrj	{zone)	belt
(133) OaXaptog	(thalamos)	bedchamber
(134) Oeaxpov	(theatron)	theatre
(135) OrjKT]	(theke)	box
(136) ferroc	(histos)	web
(137) Kavcov	{canon)	ruler, rod
(138) leaded pa	{cathedra)	chair
(139) kXlvt)	{dine)	bed
140) kotvXt]	{cotyle)	small cup (sucker)
(141) Kpaxrjp	{crater)	mixing vessel bowl
(142) Kxevwv	{demon)	comb
(143) KVXOtg	{cytos)	vessel (cell)
(144) Xvpa	Qyra)	lyre
(145) /xapcmroc	{marsipos)	bag
(146) JUTOg	{mitos)	thread
(147) jut pa	0 mitra )	girdle
(148) vrjpta,	{nema.	thread
vrjjbiaxog	nematos)
(149) oiKOg	{oecos)	house
(150) oijsov	{opson)	food
(151) opyavov	{organon)	tool, instrument
(152) nXacpLa	{ plasma )	figure, image
(153) rrXivQog	{plinthos)	tile
(154) 7 TvXf]	{pyle)	gate
(155) fa&g	{rhaphis)	needle
(156) irXag,	( plax 5	tombstone.
TiXarcog	placos)	slab
(157) craXmyg,	{salpinx.	trumpet
aaXmyyog	salpingos)
(158) <n<j)mv	{siphon)	siphon
(159) GKV<j)OC	{scyphos)	cup

— disc, Cephalodiscus (310), Discoglossa (292)

— ecclesiastical

— zygote, azygos , zygoma, zy - gomorphic (47), homozygote (579)

— zone

— thalamus, hypothalamus (670)5 thalamencephalon (297) .

— theatrical

— gonotheca (11), hlastotheca (484)5 thecophore (649)

— histology (36)5 histogenesis

(9)

— canonical

— cathedral

— clinic, clinical

— hypocotyl (670)5 Hetero- cotylea (545)5 Monocotyle¬ don (570)

— crater

— Ctenophora (649)5 cteni- dium, ctenoid

— amoebocyte , phagocyte (645)

— lyrical #

— Marsipohranchii (287)

— mitosis, mitochondria (384)

* — mitre, Haplomitrium (528)5

Gyromitra (13)

— Nematoda, nematocyst(% 15), Nemathelminthes (396)

— ecology (36)5 dioecious T(266)

— opsonin

— organ, organic

— protoplasm (265)5 cytoplasm

(143)

— plinth

— micropyle (569)5 apopyle

(655).

— raphide, Raphidae

— placoid, Placophora (649)5

— Placodontea (328)

— Salpingoeca (149)

— Siphonophora (649)5 sipho- noglyph (618), Siphono- cladus (495)

— Scyphozoa (399), Scyphis - toma (363)

	Language Museum 643
(160) amXrjv	(solen)	pipe	— solenoid , solenocyte ( 143 ), Solenogaster (290)
(161) arsyi]	(sUge)	roof, tent	— Stegocephali (310)3 Stego¬ saurus (434)3 Stegostoma (363)
(162) arfjh]	(stele)	pillar	— stelar, monostely (570)3 po- lystely (593)
(163) CTe<f>avo£	(stephanos)	wreath	— Stephanoceros (309)3 Ste- phanops (338), Stephano- trochus (172)
(164) <tvpty£.	(syrinx.	shepherd’s	— syringe , syrinx
cvpiyyot;	syringos)	pipe
(165) (xrvXog	(stylos)	pillar	— . endostyle (660)3 heterostyly (545)
l66) <X<f>T)V	(sphen)	wedge	— sphenoid 3 Sphenodon (328)3 zygasphene (131)3 Sphenop- tens (507)
(167) a%oXrj	(schole)	school	— scholastic, scholar
(168) ra^og*	(taphos)	grave	— epitaph (661)
(169) TGL7TY)g	(tapes)	carpet	— tapestry
(170) rpairsCoL	(trapeza)	table	— trapezoid
(I7l) TpO(f>7]	(trophe)	food	— atrophy, autotrophic (6), trophoblast (484)
(172) rpoxoe'	(trochos)	wheel	— trochophore (649)3 Troch- helminthes (396)
(173) rpvrravov	(trypanon)	gimlet	— Trypanosoma (367)
(174) zvpog	(tyros)	cheese	— Tyroglyphe (618)
(175) Kitow	(chiton)	tunic	— chiton. Chiton
(176) %XaiAVZ	(chlamys)	cloak	— Chlamydomonas (45)3 mo - nochlamydeous (570)
(177)	(chorde)	cord	— Chordata, notochord (327)3 Hemichorda
(178)	(chymos)	juice	— parenchymatous (665, 659)3 mesenchyme (5683 659)

(<J) MATERIALS and SUBSTANCES

(179) avdpaS	(anthrax)	coal	— anthracite
(180) apyvpog	(argyros)	silver	— Argyrodes *
(181) dAc	. (Ms)	salt	— halogen (10)3 hodometer (629)3 halophyte (518)
(182) rjXeKTpov	(electron)	amber	— electricity
(183) epiov	(erion)	wool	— Eriocaulon (494)3 Eriophyes (650)3 Eriobotrya (486)
(184) 0£tO1>	, (thion)	sulphur	— thiosulphate, thiourea (335;
(185) Kepapcog	(ceramos)	clay	— ceramics
(186) Kivvapapt	(cinnabari)	vermilion	— cinnabar
(187) /coAAa	(colla)	glue	— colloid, collencyte (6593143)3 collenchyma (6593 178)
(188) Ai0o£	(litkos)	stone	— monolith (570), eolith (93)3 lithograph (619)
(189) ptayvrjc	(magnes)	lodestone	— magnet
(190) fjLapyaptvrjg	(margarites)	pearl	— Margaret

644	The Loom of Language
C 191) jueraXXov	(metallon)	mine	— metals metallic
(192) juoXvfidoc	(: molybdos )	lead	— molybdenum
(193) virpov	(nitron)	saltpetre	— rdtrics nitrogen (10)
(194) irerpa	(petra)	rock	— petrology (36)
(195) TTvpiTrjg	(pyrites)	flint	— pyrites
(196) oreap	(stear)	tallow., fat	— stearates stearic , stearin
(197) Xpvaog	(chrysos)	gold	— Chrysopas Chrysosmonas
(198) lft7]<f)0g			(45)5 Chrysochloris (614)
. (psephos)	pebble	— Psephurus (334)

0) HUMAN	SOCIETY— LAW and FAMILY, OCCUPATIONS
(199) adsX<f>o£	(adelphos)	brother	— Philadelphia (648), mona- delphous (570)3 polyadel - • phous (593)
(200) avdpog*	(andro •	male	— polyandry (593)3 andro¬ gynous (206)3 androecium (149)
(201) avdpamog	(anthropos)	human being	— philanthropy (648)3 anthro¬ pocentric (31)3 Pithecan¬ thropus (431)3 lycanthropy (422)
(202) apxcov	(archon)	ruler	— patriarch (222), heptarchy (271)3 monarch (570)3 oli¬ garch (577)
(203) fiovfcoXog	(bukolos)	herdsman	— bucolic
(204) ySVSTT]	.(genete)	birth	— geneticss eugenics (546)
(205) yecopyog	(georgos)	farmer	— georgks George
(206) yvv?], ‘ yvvatKQg	(gynes gynaecos)	woman	— gynaecology (36)3 epigynous (661)3 perigynous (666)3 polygyny (593)3 gynandro - morph (2003 47)
(207)	(demos)	people	— democracy (625)3 graphy (619)3 endemic (659)3 epidemic (661)
(208) deGpLOg	(desmos)	fetter	— Polydesmus (593)3 desmids, desmognathous (293)
(209) diaKovog	(diaconos)	servant	— deacony archdeacon (202)
(210) dvvacnrjg	(dynastes)	ruler	— dynasty
(21 1) kXsttttig	(cleptes)	thief	— kleptomania (321)
(212) KpiTiqz	(crites)	judge	— cnrz'cj criticisms hypercri¬ tical (669)
(213) Aaoc	(laos)	people	— Zoya laity
(214) payoc	(magos)	magician	—
(215) iirjXTjp	(meter) ,	mother	— matriarchy (202)
(216) vavrrjg	(nautes)	sailor	— nauticals aeronautics (82)
(217) VO/JOS'	(nomos)	law3 custom	— astronomy (86), autonomy (6)> antinomical (654)
(218) WpL^tj	(nymphe)	bride	— nymphomania (321)
(219) OlKOVOpLOg	(oekonomos)	steward	— economical) economics (149, 217)

Language Museum 645

(220) rratdos* ( paidos ) child — pederasty (24), pediatrics

(551), orthopaedic (582)

(221) TrapdsvoQ (parthenos) virgin — parthenogenesis (9)

(222) rraxrjp (pater) father — patriarchy (202)

(223) irXovxog (plum) riches — plutocracy (625)

(224) noXig ( polis ) city, state — policy, cosmopolis (99)

(225) TToXirrjt; (polites) citizen — politics

(226) , TTpeofivg (presbys) an old man — presbyopia (338), Presby¬

terian

(227) TTpo<f>r}rr}<; (prophetes ) interpreter — prophet

(228) xskxcov (tectori) builder — architect (202)

(229) xvpavvog ( tyrannos ) dictator — tyrant, tyrannical

(230) VTTOKpirrjg (hypocrites) actor — hypocrite

(231) 6vXrj (phyle) tribe, clan — phylum, phyletic, phylogeny

(id)

	.60
(232) aoi ng, aamdog	(aspis, aspidos)
(233) npw	(heros)
(234) dcopat (235) Ovpeog (236) KoXeog	(thorax) (thyreos) (coleos)
(237) KOpVg	(corys)
(238) KOpVVtj	(coryne)
(239) KCOTTTj (240) (241) OKCL^fj	(cope) (xiphos) (scaphe)
(242) axiyog	(stichos)
(243) noXe/Liog (polemos) (244) oxpaxrjyoG (strategos) (245) wafts' (*«*»)

ARMY and NAVY

round — Aspidocotyle (140), Hemi-

shield aspis, Pteraspis (348)5

Anaspidacea demi-god, — heroic , hero

warrior

breast-plate — thoracic, metathorax (664)

shield — thyroid, parathyroid (66$)

sheath — Coleochaete (378)5 Goleop-

tera (348)

helmet — Corymorpha (47)5 Goryden-

drium (488), Corylophidae

(319)

club — Syncoryne (668), Podo-

coryne (346)

oar — Copepoda (346)

sword — Xiphosura (334)5 Xiphias

boat — scaphognathite (293), Sea -

phopoda (346)

row, line, verse — Polystichum (593)5 Sticho- pus (346), Stichaster (86) war — polemic

commander strategy, strategic

battle array, . — phototaxis (119)5 rheotaxis

order (635)5 phyllotaxis ($17)

(246) ayyeXog

(247) aovXov

(248) pipxoe

(249) ypawa

(250) etdcoXov

(g) LITERATURE and

(angelos) messenger

(asylori) sanctuary

(biblos) book

(gramma) letter

(idolon) image

RELIGION „

— angel, evangelical

— asylum

— bibliophile (648), biblio¬ graphy (619)

— epigram (661), telegram (601), phonogram (7 6)

— idol, idolize

646	The Loom of Language
(25l) €7TL(XK07T0g	( episcopos )	bishop —	episcopal
(252) deoc	(theos)	god —	theosophy (64), polytheism (593)3 pantheism (584), theocracy (625)
(253) lepsvg	C hiereus )	priest —	hieratic, hierarchy
(254) Aarpsca	(latria)	worship —	idolatry (250), Mariolatry
(255)	(mythos)	fable —	mythical^ mythology (36)
(256) fJLVGXYjpLOV	(mysterion)	secret — doctrine, sacrament	mystery , mystic
(257) TTaTTVpog	( papyros )	paper —
(258) Q7]T0ptKf]	C rhetorice )	rhetoric —
(259) cvAXafir}	0 syllabe )	syllable —
(260)	(hymnos)	hymn —
(261) %opog	C choros )	dance, chorus —	choric , chorus, terpsicho-
(262) xpiarog	(1 christos )	anointed —	rean Christ , Christian
(263) iftaAfiog	(psalmos)	psalm, song —

(ti) NUMBERS and TIME (Numbers given as they occur in derivatives.)

(264)	cipidfioz	(arithmos)	number	— arithmetic
(265)	TTpOOTOg	( protos )	first	— Protozoa (399), Protista,

Protococcus (501), protan - drous (200), protogynous

(266) <5^	(dis)	twice	— Dibranchiata (287)
(267) rpia	{trio)	3	— trilogy (36), Triarthrus (284), trimerous (40)
(268) rerpa	(tetra)	4	— tetramerous (40)
(269) T7SVTS	(pente)	5	— pentadactyl (294)
(270) if	(hex)	6	— hexagon (12), Hexapoda (34© — heptameter (629)
(271) i7rra	(hepta)	7
(272) o/crct)	(octoj	8	— Octobothrium (89), octopus (34© — decalogue (36), Decapoda (346) — dodecahedron
(273) <5s/ca	(deco)	10
(274) <5co<5e/ca	(dodeca)	12
(275) ifcaTov	(hecaton)	100	— hectogram , hectometer (629)
(276)	(chilioi)	1,000	— kilogram , kilometer (629), Chilopoda (346)
(277) ifidojuag	( kebdomas )	week	— hebdomadal
(278) Scrrrepa	. (hespera) .	evening	— Hesperorms (427)
(279) copa	(hora)	hour	— horoscope (639)
O') ANATOMICAL	and MEDICAL TERMS
(280) aSrjv	(aden)	glandule	— adenoid, adenuma
(281) af/za	(haema)	blood	— haemal , haemoglobin, haemocyanin (607)
(282) aAyo-	(algos)	pain	— analgesic

647

Language Museum

(283) aoprrj	{aorte)	aorta	— aortic
(284) apOpov	{arthron)	joint	— Arthropoda (346), Xenar- thra (575)
(285) aprrjpia	{arteria)	artery	— arterial
(286) j$Xe(j>apov	(blepharon)	eyelid	— Monoblepharis (570), Poly- blepharis (593), Blephari- poda (346)
(287) fipayxia	{branchia)	gills	— branchial, Branchiopoda (34 6), Branchiura (334)
(288) ppa%tcov	(brachiori)	armpit	— brachial
(289) ($poy%o<;	(bronchos)	throat	— bronchi, bronchitis
(290) yacnrjp	{gaster)	belly	— gastric, epigastric (66 1), Gasteromycetes (504)
(291) yaaxpoKvrjfjbr}	{ gastrocneme ) calf of leg	— gastrocnemius
(292) yAco(7<ja	(gtea)	tongue	— hypoglossal (670), epiglottis (661)5 glossopharyngeal (376), Ophioglossum (429)
(293)	{gnathos)	jaw	— gnathite, prognathous (667), Gnathobdella (392)
(294) daictvXog	{dactylos)	finger	— hexadactyl (270), polydac- tyly (593)5 Pterodactyl (348)5 Syndactyly (668)
(295) %a	{derma)	skin	— epidermis {661), mesoderm (568)5 dermatitis
(296) Siaira	{diaeta)	regimen	— diet, dietetics
(297) eyice(f>a\og	(1 mcephalos )	brain	— mesencephalon (568), en¬ cephalitis, anencephaly
(298) SKTOfirj	(ectome)	cutting out, castration	— thyreodectomy (235), hypo- physectomy (75, 670)
(299) sjuppvov	{embryon)	embryo	— embryonic, polyembryony (593) — emetic
(300) efiexoc;	(emetos)	vomit
(301) evrspov	(enteron)	gut	— enteritis, coelenterate (560), mesentery (568)
(302) ^7rap, ^uaros'	(hepar, hepatos )	liver	— hepatic
(303) SjjAj?	{thele)	teat	— thelin
(304) ter tor	{ischion)	thigh	— ischial
(305) KaptavoG	(carcinos)	i crab	— carcinoma
(306) icavdog	(canthos)	comer of eye — epicanthial
(307) Kapdta	{car did)	heart	— cardiac
(308) KdpTTOQ	{carpos)	wrist	— carpal
(309) /Capas'	{ceras)	horn	— keratin. Rhinoceros (355)
(310) Ke<j>aXri	{cephale)	head	— acephalic. Cephalopoda (346) -r~ condyle, Condylarthra (284)
(311) /co^^Aog'	{condylos)	knuckle
(312) Kopr)	{core)	girl, pupil	— corea (of eye)
(313) /epees'	{areas)	flesh	— creatine, creatinine, pan¬ creas
(314) Kpaviov	{cranion)	skull	— cranial, Craniata , chondro- cranium (384)
(315) Kvcmg	{cystis)	bladder, bag — cystitis, nematocyst (148)
(316) XsklBoz	Qedthos)	yolk	— lecithin, aleathal

648

(317) Xapvyg, Xapvyyog (3*8) Xemgy Xemdog

The Loom of Language

— laryngeal

0 larynx, , gullet

laryngoi)

{lepist • scale

lepidos

(319) A0560? (fopfew) comb, crest

(320) pwg', pvog

(321) ptavta

(322)

(323) vapKTj

(324) vavata

(325) vevpov

(326) ve<j>pog

(327) m>-roj> (wfo»)

wz>w) mouse, muscle — {mania) frenzy _

( tnyxa) phlegm _

( narce ) {nausia) {neuron) {nephros)

(328) o<5on^, odovzog

(329) otcrofiayog

(330)

(33 *) oazeov

(332) oarpaKov

(333) oj>u£,

{odous,

odontos)

{oesopkagos)

{orchis)

{osteon)

{ostracon)

{onyx,

numbness seasickness nerve, tendon kidney

back

tooth

oesophagus

testicle

bone

shell

(334) ovpa	onychos) (urd)	tail
(335) owpcw (336) o^OaXpog	{uron) urine {ophthalmos) eye
(337) o<f>pvg	{ophrys)	eyebrow
(338)	{opsis)	appearance, eyesight
(339) Tiapeia (340) (34^) ir&pig (342) viXog	{pareia) (pelma) (pepsis) {pilos)	cheek sole digestion wool
(343) rrXevpa	{pleura)	side, rib
(344) ttvevpa	(pneuma)	lungs, breath

• Lepidoptera (348), Lepi- dostet (331), Osteolepis (331)3 Lepidonotus (327), Lepidodendron (488) *

lophodont (328), Lophopus (346)5 Lophogaster (290) (4o),

maniac, hypomania (670)

(643)

Myxomycetes (504), Mjyxococc&s (501), Myxosporidia (512)

— narcosis, narcotic

— nauseating

— neural, neurosis

— nephridium, mesonephros (568), nephritis

— notochord {17 j),notopodium

(346), Notostraca (332)

— Odontophore (649), theco¬ dont {135), Odontoceti (410)

— oesophageal

•— cryptorchid (626)

osteology (36), periosteal

(666)

Ostracoda, Conchostraca (411)5 Entomostraca (398)

— Onychophora (649), Owy- chomonas (45)

— urostyle (1 65), Ophiura (429), Anura

uric, urea, hippuric (401)

— ophthalmic, ophthalmoscope (639)3 exophthalmos (657)

— Actinopkrys (83), Ophryo- eystis (315), Ophrytrocha (172)

— autopsy (6), Bryopsis (487),

Sauropsida (434 )>Ichthyop- sida (402) '

— pareital

• Pelmatozoa (399)

■ pepsin, eupeptic (546)

Pilochrota (386), Pilocarpus (492), Piloholus (8) pleural, pleurocentrum (31), pleurisy

pneumonia, pneumatic, pneumatophore (649), pneu¬ mococcus (501)

Language Museum 649

(345) TtpOOKXOg	(proctos)	anus
(346) TTOVg, TTodog	{pons.	foot
podos)
(347) TTTspva	(ptema)	heel
(348) ITTSpov	(pteron )	wing
(349) trxepvyiov	C pterugion )	fin
(350) TTTlXoV	(ptilon)	feather
(351)	(pyge)	buttocks
(352) TTVpSZOZ	{ puretos )	fever
(353) WVOf	(pyos)	discharge
(354) tfow	(rhachis)	backbone
(355) eV,	(rhis.	nose
QlVOg	rhinos)
(3 56) §vy%iov	{rhynchion)	snout
(357) crapf, aapKog	(sarx, sarcos ) flesh
(358) avaapog	( spasmos )	spasm
(359) fffirAay^m	( splanchna )	bowels
(360) ctttA??)'	{spleri)	spleen
(36l) 0TTOVdvko£	{spondylos)	vertebra
(362) orepvov	(stemon)	breast
(363) axopta	{stoma)	mouth
(364) CTo[Aa%oc	{stomachos)	opening of stomach
(365) avjuTTzeojua	{symptomd)	symptom
(366) a<j>vypLog	{sphygmos)	pulse
(367) creates	{soma)	body
(368) t payeia	{tracheia)	windpipe
(369) r pavpa	{trauma)	wound
(370)	{thrix,	hair
	trichos)
(371) vyisia	{hygiia)	health
(372) fyrjv	{hymen)	membrane

X*

— proctodeum, aproctous, Ec- toprocta (658)

— Amphipoda (52 6), Platypus (588)3 Isopoda (553)3 Che- nopodium (453)3 Lycopo¬ dium (422)

— Litopterna { A nog — smooth)

— Aptera, Hymenoptera (372)3 Neuroptera (325)

— archipterygium (5)3 acthiop- terygicd (83)

— coleoptile (236)3 Trichop - tilum (370)

— pygostyle (165)

— antipyretic (654)3 pyrexia

— pyogenic (10)

— rachitis, rachitomous, and Rachiiomi (643)

— rhinitis , Rhinoceros (309)3 Antirrhinum (654)

— Rhynchota, Rhynchocepha- lia (310)3 Rhynchobdellida (392)

— perisarc (666)3 sarcoma

— spasmodic

— splanchnic , splanchnopleure (343)

— splenetic

— diplospondylous (540}

— sternal

— stomata, Gnathostomata (293)3 Bdellostoma (392)

— stomach

— symptomatic

— sphygmcdd, spnygmomano- meter (5663 629)

— somatic, centrosome (31)3 Pyrosoma (111)3 Sphaero- soma (62)

— tracheal, tracheate, tracheide

— trauma, traumanasty

— Polytrichum (593)3 Tn- china, Ophiothrix (429)3 Trichomastix (628)

— hygiene, hygienic

— Hymenoptera (348), Hy- menomycetes (504)3 menophyllaceae (517)

650

(373) ^aAayl

(374) 0aAAoc

(37 5) <f>apfiaKov

(376) <f>apvyg, (jiapvyyoc

(377)

0As/?oc

(378) za£TJ?

(379) Z“Aafa

(380)

(381) %ei\o;

(382) ^£1/)

(383) Z°h]

(384) yovSpo;

(385) xopiov

(386) XP<°Sy

%p(DXO£

(387) COO)'

(388) OVg , ft)TOC

The Loom of Language

(phalanx)	joint of toe or finger
(phallos)	penis
(pharmakon) drug
(pharynx,	throat
pharyngos)
(phleps.	vein
phlebos)
(chaite)	long hair, mane
(chalaza)	tubercle, pimple
(chele)	talon
(chilos)	lips
(chir)	hand
(chole)	bile
(chondros)	cartilage
(chorion)	skin, leather
(chros,	skin
chrotos)
(oon)	egg
(ous, otos)	ear

— phalanges , phalangeal

— phallic

— pharmacist, pharmacology (36)

— glossopharyngeal (292), Pharyngohranchii (287)

— phlebitis

— Polychaeta (593), Chaetog - natha (293), Chaetocladium (495)

— chalaza, chalazogamic (6x7)

— chela, chelate, chelicera($09)

— GMlognatha (293), Chilo- don (328)

Chiroptera, chiropodist(346 ) glycocholate (536), mefe- cholia (610)

Chrondrial, Chondrostei (33i)i Chondrichthyes (402) chorion, chorionic, choroid Chrotella

oogenesis {9), oogonium (11), oospore (512)

periotic (666), otolith (188), otocyst (315)

(£) ANIMALS

(389) apa%V7]	(arachne)	spider
(390) apKTOg	(arctos)	bear
(391) aGTCLKOG	(astacos)	lobster
(391a) parpaxoz	(batrachos)	frog
(392) pdsAAa	(bdella)	leech
(393) fioppvg	(bombyx)	silkworm
(394)	(glaux)	owl
(39 5)	(elephas)	elephant
(396)	(helmis.	worm
iX/Luvdog (397)	helminthos) (echinos)	hedgehog
(398) evjopa	(entoma)	insect
(3 99)	(zoon)	animal
(400) 6rjp	( ther )	beast
(40l) i7T7T0£	(hippos)	horse
(402)	(ichthys)	fish
(403) KaprjXog	(camelos)	camel
(404) KOLpLTTrj	(campe)	caterpillar
(405) mpKivog	(carcinos)	crab
(406) Kapig, mpidog	(caris,	shrimp
caridos)

Language Museum

(4O7) KCLOTCOp	(< castor )	beaver
(408) Kavdapoz	( cantharos )	beetle
(409) KepKomOrjKOG	(cm:0pzYAcc0$)monkey
(410) KYfZQg	(ccros)	whale
(41 1) Koyxoc	( conchos )	shellfish
(412) kokkv£	(coccyx)	cuckoo
(413) Kopa%	(corax)	crow
(414) ko% Xtag	(cochlias)	snail
(415) Kopig	icons)	bug
(416) KpOKodeiXog	icrocodeilos)	crocodile
(417) KVKVOC	(cycnos)	swan
(418) KVCOV,	(cyon> cunos) dog
KVVOg
(419) Xayoog	(lagos)	hare
(420) XctfJLTTOVpQg	{lampuros)	glowworm
(421) Xscov	ileori)	lion
(422) XvKOg	ilycos)	wolf
(423) fjLsXiGaa	(melissa)	bee
(424) pvppriS,	{myrmexy	ant
flVpjLlTJKOg	myrmekos )
(425) five	(mys)	mouse
(426) VVKTSpig	inykteris)	bat
(427) opvig,	(ornis ,	bird
opvidog	ornithos)
(428) oarpsov	(ostreori)	oyster
(429) 0<f>LC	(ophis)	snake
(430) irspdii	(perdix)	partridge
(431) mdrjKog	ipithecos)	ape
(432) TToXvTTOVZ	(polypos)	octopus
(433) oaXafxavdpa	C salamandrd ) salamander
(434) oavpa	(sawra)	lizard
(435) csXaxo 5	(selachos)	shark
(436) G7]7Tia	i sepia )	cuttlefish
(437) CKlOVpOg	(sciuros)	squirrel
(438) GKOJLlppOG	{scombros)	mackerel
(439) GKopmo c	(. scorpios )	scorpion
(440) Giroyyia	(, spongia )	sponge
(441) GtpovOoG	(struthos)	ostrich
(442) t avpoe	(tauros)	bull
(443) reprjdcov	iteredon)	timberworm
(444) rapes’	(tigris)	tiger
(445) tpa/yog	(tragos)	goat
(446) VGTplg	(hystrix)	porcupine
(447) <f)aGiavoz	(phasianos)	pheasant
(448) <f>pvvri	(phryne)	toad
(449) <jxx>Kaiv a	( phocaena )	porpoise
(450) <j>Q)Kr)	(phoce)	seal
(451) x^oyvrj	( chelone )	tortoise
(452) xnv	(chert)	goose
(453) ijtlTtaKT)	(psittace)	parrot
(454) ifjvXXa	(psylla)	flea
(455)	( psyche )	butterfly

652 The Loom of Language

(/) PLANTS AND THEIR PARTS

(456) aypcoorig	( agrostis )	grass
(457) apLTTsXog	(ampelos)	vine
(458) avejicovr}	( anemone )	anemone
(459) aarrapayop	(asparagos)	asparagus
(460) sX\efiopo£	(helleboros)	hellebore
(461) epeiKYj	( ereice )	heather
(462) 6 v flog	(thymos)	thyme
(463) iptx ;	(iris)	iris
(464) icapdafiov	(cardamon)	watercress
(465) Ksdpog	(cedros)	cedar
(466) Kivapa	(cinara)	artichoke
(467) Kpajtifai	(crambe)	cabbage
(468) KpOKQg	(crocos)	saffron
(469) KV77apLCGO£	(cuparissos)	cypress
(470) puvda	(mintha)	mint
(471) juopea	(morea)	mulberry
(472) VapKlGGOQ	(narcissos)	daffodil
(473) opx^	(orchis)	orchid
(474) TTGTTSpi	(peperi)	pepper
(475) mcoc	(pisos)	pea
(476) 7 lAaxavog	(platanos)	plane tree
(477) Qa<f>avi£	(rhaphanis)	radish
(478) mvrjm	(sinepi)	mustard
(479) CVKOV	(sycon)	fig
(480) vcuavdog	(hyacinthos)	hyacinth
(481) vavomoG	(hyssopos)	hyssop
^482) aKavda	(acantha)	spine	Acanthocephali (310), hexa- canth (270)
(483) cLvdog,	(anthos or	flower	Helianthus (95), Anthozoa
avOe/iov	amhemon)		(399)3 perianth (666)
(484) $Aaaxr\	(blaste)	bud	— blastoderm (295), meroblas- tic (40), hypoblast (670), blastocoele (560), holoblastic (578)3 epiblast (661)
(485) fiozavr)	(botane)	herb	— botanical
(486) fiozpvg	(botrys)	bunch	— Botryllus, Botrydium
(487) fipvcovrj	(bryone)	moss	— Bryophyta (518), Bryopsis (338)3 Dinobryon (539)
(488) Ssvdpov	(dendron)	tree, branch	— dendrite, Dendrocoelium (560) .
(489) £Aig	(helix)	tendril, spiral	— helicoid, helicopter (348)
(490) gvjuq	(zyme)	yeast	— enzyme, zymotic, zymase
(491) KoXapiog	(calamos)	reed	— Calamoichthyes (402)
(492) KCLpTTOg	(carpos)	fruit	— carpal, pericarp (666), syn- carpous (668)
(493) Kapvcov	(caryon)	nut	— Caryophyllaceae (517), Caryopsis (338)
(494) KavAog	(catdos)	stalk	— caidine

Language Museum 653

(495) tcAadog	[dados)	bough		Cladaphora (649)3 phyllo- clade (517)3 Tricladida (267)3 Gladothrix (370)
(496) kAcov	{cion)	shoot	—	clone
(497) Kvidrj	(cntde)	nettle	—	cnidocil3 cnidoblast (484)
(498) KplVOV	(crinon)	lily	—	Grinoidea
(499) Kcoveiov	{coneion)	hemlock	—	coniine
(500) KCOVOg	(corns)	COne 4	—	conifer 3 Conidiospores (51I)
(501) KOKKOg	(coccos)	berry3 grali	—	Pleurococcus (343)3 Diplo- coccus (540)
(502) KOpVptfiog	(corymbos)	cluster of flowers	—	corymb3 Corymbocrinus
(50 3)	( linon )	flax	—	linen3 Unde
(504) fiVKrjc, jLLVKTjTOQ	(myces)	mushroom	—	Oomycetes (387)3 mycetozoa (399)
(505) £vAo?>	(xylon)	wood	—	xylem , xylonite, xylophone (76)
(506) TieraAov	( petalon )	petal	—	polypetalous (593), sym- petalous (668)
(507) 7TT€/)^	(pteris)	fern	—	Pteridophyta (518)3 Pteris
(508) gapdoc:	(rhabdos)	stick	—	rhabdite3 Rhabdocoelida (560)
(509)	( rhiza )	root		rhizome3 mycorhiza (504), Rhizopus and Rhizopoda (346)
(510) ^o(5ov	(rhodon)	rose		rhododendron (488)3 Rho- dites
(511) arrepfxa	(sperma)	seed		Spermaphyta (518)3 sper¬ matozoa (399)3 polyspermy (593)3 Batrachospmnum (391a)
(512) airopog	(sporos)	seed		sporocyst (315)3 Sporozoa (399)5 ascospore (123)3 zy¬ gospore (131)
(513) ara<f)vArj	(staphyle)	bunch of grapes	—	staphylococcus (501)
(514) GTpV%VO<Z	( strychnos )	nightshade	—	strychnine
(515) t5At;	Qiyle)	timber	—	Hyla
(516) <£u/coC	(phykos)	seaweed		Phycomycetes (504)3 Rhodo- phyceae (510)3 Chlorophy- ceae (614)
(517) <j>vAAov	( phyllon )	leaf	—	mesophyll (568)3 phyllode
(518) <f>VT ov	(phytoii) plant — (m) ADJECTIVES*	holophytic (578)3 phytology (36)
(519) ayaOoc	(agathos)	good	—	Agatha
(520) dyto?	(hagios)	holy	—	hagiolatry (254)

* Nominative singular masculine forms.

'^54

(52 1 ) ayXaog

(522) CLKOVGTOg

(523) aKpog

(524) aX Aoc

(525) afifiAvg

(526) ajn<f>o)

(527) avdrjpog

(528) a7rAoo£

(529) aptazog

(530) ap-nog

(531) avGTYjpoz

(532) fiaOvg

(533) jSapt*

(534) Ppa%v£

(535) ytyavrtKog

(536) yXvKvg

(537) yvpLvog

(538) c^Aoc

(539) <5^ivog'

(540) 6i7rXooG

(541) ^oA^oc

(542) eAfuflepog'

(543) evavTiog

(544) ecrxaroz

(545) itspog

(546) £*>

(547) evpvg

(548) svdvg

(549)

(550) dsp/zog (55*) larpiKog

The Loom of Language

(aglaos) ( acoustos ) (acros)	bright audible high
(alios)	other
(amblys)	~ blunt
(ampho)	both
(antheros) (haploos)	flowering simple
(anstos) (artios) (austeros) (bathys)	best perfect austere deep
(barys) (brachys)	heavy short
( gigantikos ) Crfy<3w)	gigantic sweet
(gjwwww)	naked
(delos) (dims)	manifest wonderful
(diploos)	double
(dolichos)	long
(eleutheros)	free
(enantios) (eschatos) (heteros)	opposite remote different
(eu — adv.) (ezzryj)	well broad
(euthys) (hedys) (thermos)	straight sweet hot
(iatricos)	medical

— Aglaophenia

— acoustic

— Akrogyne (206), acropetal (506), acromegaly (567), acrodont (328)

— allotropic (70)3 allogamy (617), allopathy (50)3 allergy

(23)

— Amblypoda (346)3 (363)

— - Amphibia (7)3 Amphineura (325)3 Amphicoelous (560)

— antheridium 3 anther

— haploid 3 Haplosporidia (512)3 Haplodiscus (129)

— aristocracy (625)

— Artiodactyl (294)

— austerity

— bathymetric (629), Bathy- crinus3 Bathynectes

— barometer (629)3 isobar(s$ 3)

— brachydactyly (2^4)shrachy- cephalic (310)

— Gigantosaurus (434)3 £za«r

— glycogen (io\glycolysis(yf)> glucose

— gymnastics s Gymnoblastea (484)3 Gymnosperm (51 1)

— i Urodela (334)

— Dinosaur (434), Dinornis (427)> Dinopsis (338)3 Dino- phyceae (516)

— diplococcus (501)3 diplo- blastic (484)

— dolichocephalic (310)3 Do- lichoglossus (292)

— Eleutheria , Eleutheroblastea

(4»4) #

— enantiomorph (47)

— eschatology (36)

— heterogeneous (io), hetero¬ dyne (17)3 heterozygote( 13 1) eulogy (36)3 euphony (76)

— Euryaie , Eurypterida (348)3 Eurylepta (563)3 Eurynotus (327)

— Euthyneura, (325)

— hedonism

— thermal > thermometer (629)3 isotherm (553)

— paediatrics (220)

(552) idiot;

(553) wo;

(554) ia%vo;

(555) koko;

(556) kclBoXiko;

(557) Kaivo;

(558) /caAog*

(559) KapnrvXo; (559tf) /capos'

(560) koiXo;

(561) koivo;

(562) Kojuipo; (562a) Kpvo;

(563) Altos'

(5^4) paKpo;

(565) piaXaKo;

(566) ^avoc

(567)

(568) ^eorog:

(569) puKpo;

(570) /jovoc

(571) ^vptoc

(572) ^copoc

(573) ve/epoc

(574) veos'

(575) ffivpg'

(576) £r]po;

(577) oAtyof

(578) <5Aosr

(579) o>oc

Language Museum

655-

(idios)	proper* private
(isos)	equal
(ischnos)	lean
(cocos)	bad
(catholicos)	general
(cainos)	new
(calos)	beautiful
(campylos)	curved
(cenos)	empty
(coelos)	hollow
(coenos)	common
(compsos)	elegant
(cry os)	frozen* cold
(leptos)	thin
(macros)	long
(malacos)	soft
(manos)	scanty
(megas)	big
(mesos)	middle
(micros)	small
(monos)	alone
(myrios)	innumerable
(moros)	foolish
(necros)	dead
(neos)	new
(xenos)	foreigi
(xeros)	dry
(oligoi)	few
(holos)	whole
(homos)	similar

■ idiosyncrasy (668)* idiot

• isosceles^ isomerism (40)* Isoptera (348)

Ischnochiton (175) cacodyl , cacophony (76)* Cacops (338) catholic

cainozoic (399), Oligocene (57A -Eocene (93) callisthenics (57) campy lotropo us (70) cenotaph^ Kenocis acoelous * coelom\ Coelen- terata (301)

coenocyte (143), Coeno- nympha (218)* Coenurus (334)

Compsognathus (293) cryohydric (114)

Leptostraca (332)* Lepto- cephalus (310)* Leptothrix (370)

macroscopic (639)* Macro- oyszzs (315)3 macronucleus Malacostraca (332), Mala- cocotylea (140) manometer (629) megalithic (188)* megaphone (7 6)3 megaspore (512)* Megatherium (400)

Mesozoic (399) microscope (639), micro¬ meter (629)

monosyllable (259)* monolith (188)* Monocystis (315) Myriapoda (346)* Myriads moron

necrotic * necromancy * necro¬ philia

neolithic (188)* neologism (36)

xenophobia (72)* Xenopus

(346)

xerophilous (648)* xerophyte (518)

OligocarpouS) Oligochaete holoblastic (484)* Holoce - phali (310)5 holozoic (399) homology (36)* Homoptera (348)

• 656 The Loom of Language

(580) OTTicds	(opisthe)	hindmost	— Opisthobranchiata (287)* opisthosoma (367)* Op«- thocoelous (560)
(581) olvg	0 oxys )	sharp* acid	— oxygen (10), Amphioxus (526), Oxyurus (334)
(582) opdog,	( orthos )	straight	— orthogenesis (9), orthodoxy (15)* orthotropous (70)* Orthoptera (348)
(583) vaXaiog	( palaios )	old* aged	— palaeozoic (399), palaeo¬ graphy (619)* palaeolithic (188)
(584) 77 av (neut.)	(pan)	ah	— pangenesis (9)* panmixia(qi)
(5S5) 7ia%vg	(pachys)	thick	— pachydermatous (295)* pa- chymeter, (629)
(586) rrXayiog	(plagios)	crooked	— Plagiostomi (363)
(587) ttXcigtoc	( plastos )	modelled	— plasticine^ plastic * chloro- plast (614)* leucoplast (609)
(5 8 8) TrXarvg	(platys) '	fiat	— amphiplatyan (52 6), Platy- helminthes (396)
(589) TrXeiGToz	(pleistos)	most	— Pleistocene (559 a)
(59o) ttXsoc	(pleos)	full	— pleopod (346)
(591) TrXrjGioz %	( plesios )	near	— Plesiosauria (434)* Plesian- thus (483)
(592) 7 TOUClXog	(, poecilos )	various	— poecilothermic
(593) ^-oA^g	(polys)	much	— polygon (12), polygamy (617)
(594) irvKVog	( pycnos )	compact	— pycnic3 Pycnogonida (11)* pycnidia
(595) crairpoz	(sopros)	putrid	— saprophyte (518)* Sapro- legnia
(596) gkXtjpoc	(scferos)	hard	— sclerite, sclerosis, megasclere (567)* Scleranihus (483)* Scleroderma (295)
(597) GTevog		narrow	— Stenodictya (128)* steno¬ graphy (619)
(598) Gtspsoc	(stereos)	solid* stiff	— stereoscopic (639)* stereo¬ isomerism (553* 40)
(599) GTpoyyvXoz	(strongylos)	round	— Strongylus, Strongylocen - rrotar (31)
(600) GTpSTTTOC;	(streptos)	twisted	— streptococcus (501)* srrep- siptera (348)
(601) xrjXe	(tele — adv.)	afar	— telescope (639)* telegram (249)* telepathy (50)
(602) r pax vC	(trachys)	rough	— Trachymedusae * Trachy- soma (367)* Trachypterus (34*) — typhlosole, Typhlops
(603) rvfiXoc	(typhlos)	blind
(604) vypoc	(hygros)	wet	— hygroscopic (639)* hygro¬ meter (629)
(605) <j>avepo£	(phaneros)	visible	— Phanerogam (617)* Phone - rocephala (310)

Language Museum 657-

(ft) COLOURS

(606) epvOpog	(erythros)	red	— erythrocyte (143), erythema erythrophore (649)
(607) fcvavog	{cyanos)	azure	— cyanosis, Gyanophyceae (5*6) — iodine, iodoform
(608) ioeidr)<;	{ioedes)	violet
(609) Xsvkoc	( leucos )	white	— leucocyte (143), Leucoso- lenia
(610) fjLeXavoq (gen.) ( melanos )	black	— melanic, melanophore (649), Melampyrum (111)
(61 1) gavdog	{xanihos)	yellow	— xanthia, xantkoderma{29s), xantkophyll (517)
(612) compos*	(ochros)	sallow, pale	— ochre, ochreous
(613) <j>atoc	{ phaeos )	dusky, gray	— Phaeophyceae (516), Phaeo- sporales (512)
(614) ^Acopoc	(chloros)	green	— chlorine, chlorophyll (517), Chlorophyceae (516)

(0) VERBSf

(615) faXXco	{hallo)	throw	— ballistics
(616) faiTTCD	(bapto)	dip	' — baptism, baptize. Baptist
(617) yajaeco	(gameo)	marry	— gamete, monogamy (570)
(618) yXv<f>co	(glypho)	tunnel	— Tyroglyphe (174), siphono- glyph (158)
(619) ypafco	{grapho)	write	— phonograph (76), photo¬ graph (119)
(620) (5<2£0>	(daeo)	distribute	— geodesy (91)
(621) KaXvTTTCD	{cdlypto)	cover	— Calyptoblastea (484)
(622) Ktveco	(cineo)	move	— kinesis, cinema, kinetic
(623) /cAtKt)	{clino)	bend	— klinostat (59), syncline{66Z), anticline (654)
(624) Koifiaxj)	{coemao)	sleep	— cemetery
(625) Kparsco	{crateo)	govern	— plutocratic (223), demo¬ cratic (207), technocracy (67)
(626) KpVTTTCQ	{crypto)	hide	— cryptogram (249), crypto- zoic (399), Cryptocepkala (3io)
(627) XajLlTTCJO	{lampo)	shine	— /amp
(628) ptacFTiyoay	{mastigoo)	whip	— Mastigophora (649), Ato- tigamoeba, Polymastiginae (593)
(629) fJLBTpeO}	{metreo)	measure	— metric, meter
(630) vrjxco	{necho)	swim	— Notonecta (327)3 Necturus (334), nectocalyx
(631) Sppaco	{hormao)	rouse	— hormone
f All forms given are first person singular, present indicative, unless other¬ wise stated.

•65B

(632) TTOIBCO

(633) ttcoAsoo

(634) ITplCO

(635) Q£CO

(636) QTjyVV/LU

(637) Qim£a>

(638) arjiffco*

(639) GKorreco

(640) CTpofieco

(641)

(642) Kepavvvfu

(643) reaves

(644) ro^evco

(645) ^ayetrf

(646) <f>aivco

(647) (ffofteco

(648) ^Aea>

(649) <f>opeco

(650) ^1*0

(651) iftevdco

(652)

(653) am

(654) am

(655) awo

(656) Sta

(657) e/c,

(658) BKXOg

(659) ev

(660) svdov

The Loom of Language

( pceeo )	create,	— poetry , poem, pharmaco -
	compose	poeia (375)
(poleo)	sell	— monopoly (570)
(prio)	saw	— prism , prismatic
(rheo)	flow	— rheostat (59), rheotropism (70)
(rhegnymi)	burst	— haemorrhage (281)
(rhipizo)	fan	— Rkipidoglossa (292), Rhipi- dium
(sepso)	putrefy	— sepsis, antiseptic (654)
(scoped)	look at	— gyroscope (13), telescope (601), periscope (666), laryngoscope (317)
(strobed)	spin	— stroboscope (639)
(schizd)	split	— schizocarpous (492), Schizo- mycetes (504)
(cerannymi)	mix	— idiosyncrasy (552)
(temno)	cut	— Temnocephali (310), ana¬ tomy (653), atom
(toxeuo)	to shoot arrows	— foxzc, toxaemea
(phagein)	devour	— phagocyte (143), entomo- phagous (398), Myrmeco- phaga (424)
(phaeno)	show	— phenotype (71), phenomenon
(phobeo)	frighten	— phobia , hydrophobia
(phileo)	love	— philology (36), philanderer , entomophilous (398), philo¬ progenitive (66 7, 10)
(phoreo)	wear.	— chromatophore (77), xan-
	carry	thophore (61 1)
(phyo)	grow	— symphysis (668), hypo¬ physis (670)
(pseudo)	deceive	— pseudopodium (346)

0) PARTICLES

(amphi)	around
(and)	(a) up (b) again
(anti)	opposed to
(apo)	away from
(did)	among, through
(ec or ex)	out of
(ecros)	outside oppos. to entos — inside
(on)	in
(endon)	within

— amphitheatre (134)

— (a) anabolism (8)

(b) anabaptist (6x6)

— antiseptic (638)

— apocarpous (492)

— diapedesis (346)

— ecstasy (59)

— ectoplasm

— endemic (207)

— endosperm (511),, endogenous (10)

t Infinitive.

I

* Future.

Language Museum

659’

(66l) S7TL		on
(662) earn	(650)	within
(66 3) /earn	(cata)	down, by
(664) ^era	(meta)	after
(665) 77apa	C para )	beside
(666) Tjspt	(pm)	around
(667) 7TpO	(pro)	before
(668) aw	(syn)	together* with
(669) vrrep	(hyper)	above* over and beyond
(670) W70	(hypo)	under

— epiblast (484)

— esoteric

— catastrophe (6 r)* catabolism

(8) .

— Metatheria (400)

— parabiosis (7)

— perianth (483), perimeter (629)

— prologue (36)

— syndrome (16)

— hyperaesthesia (4)

— hypogastric (290)

INDEX

ablaut, 206

Academia pro Interlingua, 467-8 Accadian, 421-2 accents, 259

accents, circumflex, 225, 245-6, 256 accents, Portuguese, 345 accidence, 93, 184 accusative, 117, 262, 314, 326 active, 117, 120, 150 address, formal and intimate, 146, 235, 263 n., 369-71

address, polite, in Romance, 369-71 address, pronouns of, German, 235, 263 n.

Adelung, 179

adjective, 110-11, 124, 268-70; see also comparison adjective, attributive, 156 adjective, Dutch, 284-5 adjective, German, 269, 293-6 adjective, Latin, 318 ff., 327 adjective. Old Teutonic, 69 adjective, predicative, 156 adjective, Romance, position, 328-31,

355-8

adjective, Scandinavian, 279-80

adverb, 32, m

adverb, German, 296-7

adverb, Romance, 336

adverb, Scandinavian, 280

adverbial expressions, position, 157-8

adverbial particles, 143

advertisements, language of, 13 1

affirmative particles, Romance, 399

affixes, 53-5, 67* 93a ff., 272

affixes, borrowed, 184-5

affixes, in Esperanto, 464-6

affixes, in interlanguage, 490-1

affixes, in Novial, 472

affixes, in Volapiik, 457-8

affixes, Romance, 400-2

affixes, Teutonic, 227

African languages, 193

Afrikaans, 285

agglutinating languages, 67, 196 ff. agglutination, 53, 93 agglutination, in Celtic languages, 418 agreement, 112 Albanian, 193, 194, 406 alphabet, 47 ff., 423

alphabet, origins, 69-70 amalgamating languages, 197, 200 ff. Amerindian languages, 194, 215 Amharic, 424

analogical extension, 53-5, 93, 168, 188, 203-4 analogists, 204 analytical languages, 107 Anglo-American, 195, 405 Anglo-American, advantages, 16, 221 Anglo-American, as auxiliary lan¬ guage, 470-80, 483 Anglo-American, future of, 441 Anglo-American, Latin and Teutonic elements, 222 Annamese, 425 anomalists, 204 Arabic, 193, 194, 421 ff.

Arabic script, 73-4, 75 Arabic words in Europe, 423-4 Arabic words in Spanish, 344 Aramaic, 193, 421-2 Armenian, 193, 194, 406 article, 157, 172, 184; see also definite article; indefinite article article, agglutination with preposi¬ tions, 1 19, 360-1 article, Dutch, 284 article, German, 293 article, partitive, 361-2 article, Portuguese, 345 article, Romance, 329-30, 358-62 article, Rumanian, 348 article, Scandinavian, 279, 280 Aryan languages, 189, 214, 406 aspect, 103

associative directives, 147 Assyro-Babylonian, 193, 421-2 Ataturk, Kemal, 75, 436 attributive adjectives, 156 Australian languages, 194 auxiliary language, 443 ff. auxiliary language, need of, 17 auxiliary verbs, see helper verbs Avestan, 407 Aztec script, 52

Bacon, F., 313, 470

Baltic languages, 194, 406, 412-13

Index

Bantu languages, 193, 195, 200, 209- 21 1, 320

Basic English, 30-1, 451, 474 ff.3 503-4

Basque, 193, 194, 195, 342-3

Beach la-Mar, 441

Bengali, 407, 411-12

Berber languages, 193, 194, 420 n.

Bible translations, 17S

Bopal, 459

Bopp, F., 179-80, 188 borrowing, 51 Braille code, 78, 86 Breton, 193, 194, 346, 417 Bright, Timothy, 87 Brythonic, 417 Bulgarian, 193, 194, 413, 414 Bulgarian, Old, 414 Burmese, 193, 194 Bushman language, 193

C, in Romance languages, 259 Canaanite dialects, 421 ff.

Canadian French, 346 Cape Dutch, see Afrikaans capital letters, in German, 235 case, 1 15-19, 261, 267, 488 case-forms, in Latin, 314-18, 321 cases, in Old French, 327 cases, in Romance, 327 cases, Latin, decay of, 325 ff. Castilian, 343 Catalan, 194, 343, 346 causative verbs, 150, 206 Celtic languages, 193, 194, 406,

416 ff.

Celtic languages, person in, too characteristic meaning of particles, 135 ff.

Chaucer, 224, 264 chemical terminology, 452-3 Chinese, 193, 194, 195, 425-41 Chinese, and English, compared, 122, 124-53 132, 428, 441 Chinese characters, 426, 427, 435, 436

Chinese, romanization of, 436-7 Chinese writing, 57, 63 ff., 444 Christianity, and language, 177-8 Christianity, and Latin, 31 1 Church Slavonic, 414 Cid, 312, 343

circumflex accent, 225, 245-6, 256 classification, basis of, 182 ff.

661 •

classification of languages, 41, 176 ff. classificatory languages, 195, 209-13 classifiers, 65 classifiers, Chinese, 436 clicks, 209 clog almanacs, 76 comparative method, 182 comparison, 110-11 comparison, in Teutonic languages, 187

comparison, irregular, Romance, 336, 337

comparison, Latin, 320 comparison, Scandinavian, 190, 280 comparison, Teutonic, 190 complex sentences, 162 ff., 172 compound tenses, 104 compound words,' 53-5, 93 compound words, Romance, 400-1 concord, 112 concord, rules of, 166 conditional clauses, German, 307 conditional, Romance, 395 ff. congresses, international, 482 conjugations, 36, 201 conjugations, French, 37 n., 378-9 conjugations, Italian, 382 conjugations, Latin, 107 conjugations, Portuguese, 380-1 conjugations, Romance, 378 conjugations, Spanish, 380-1 ‘ conjunctions, 134, 161 ff. conjunctions, coordinate, 161-2 conjunctions, Romance and Teutonic, 141

conjunctions, subordinate, 161 ff. consonant clusters, 214, 506 consonant symbols, phonetic, 83 consonants, 56, 60, 70 ff. consonants, English, 226 ff. contact vernaculars, 441-2 contracted words, 500 coordinate conjunctions, 161-2 copula, 15 1, 169 Cornish, 417

correspondence between words, 134 Creole patois, 442 Cretan writing, 59, 77 culture-contacts, 183-4 cuneiform, 22, 36, 48, 422 cursive scripts, 74 Cushite, 194, 420 n Cypriot writing, 48, 64, 72 Czech, I93> *94> 4*3

662 The Loom of Language

Dalgarno, G., 87, 444 ff., 494 Danish, 276 ff.; see also Scandinavian Danish spellings 237-8 dative, 117-18, 262, 314, 326 dative, German, 290 declensions, 36, 115, 118, 201, 267, 326 declensions, Latin, 316-17, 319 definite article, 184; see also article definite article, French, 352, 361 definite article, Romance, 184, 331, 361

demonstratives, 90, 145, 157, 331 demonstratives, Latin, 329-32 demonstratives, Romance, 371 ff, demonstratives, Teutonic, 274 Descartes, R., 444 dialect, 222

dictionary, use of, 34, 92 difficulties, in natural languages, 485 Dilj 459

diminutives, 401 direct method, 37-8 direct object, 118, 153-4 directives, 31, 39, 119, 134; see also prepositions

directives, associative, 147 directives, classification of, 143 directives, in interlanguage, 504-5 directives, instrumental, 145 directives, of motion, 144 directives, of place, 142 directives, of time, 146 doublets, Latin-French, in English, 238-9

dual, 108-9, 262, 425 durative construction, 139-40, 350, 387

Dutch, 194, 223, 283 ff.

Dutch, Cape, see Afrikaans Dutch grammar, 284-6 Dutch spelling, 236

editorship, self-, 171-3 education, auxiliary language and, 481 Egyptian, ancient, 193, 420 n. Egyptian writing, 61 Encyclopedie^ 453

English, 194; see Anglo-American English, peculiarities of, 261 English speakers, why bad linguists, 15-16

Erse, 193, 194, 417 Esperantido, 467

Esperanto, 443, 453, 460-7 Esquimaux, language of, 195, 215 Esthonian, 193, 194, 200 Ethiopian, 194, 421, 424 Etruscan, 340 Etruscan script, 77 evolution of languages, 23

Faiguet, 453

families of languages, 192 ff. families of languages, characteristics,

195 £

Fijian, 194

Finnish, 161, 193, 194, 197-8, 408 Finno-Ugrian languages, 193, 194, 197 Flemish, 284, 346 flexional languages, 195, 196-205 flexions, agglutinative character of, 188

flexions, decay of, 121-2 flexions, in interlanguage, 487 ff. flexions, origins of, 203 ff. flexions, Sanskrit, 408-9 form and function, relation of, 169 Franks, 310

French, 194, 202, 203, 238 fit., 309 ff., 346-7, 349 ff.; see also Romance French, Canadian, 346 French, early, 312 French, German elements in, 310 French elements in English, 238 French, Latin book-words in

modem, 238, 240 French pronunciation, 254-9, 357 French vowels, 256 future, 106, 184

future, French and Spanish, 391 future, German, 297-8 future, Latin and Romance, 338-9 future perfect, 322, 338 future, Rumanian, 339

G, in Romance languages, 259

G sounds, 229-30

Gaelic, Scots, 193, 194, 417 ,

Galician, 343

Gaul, Latin in, 309-10

Ge’ez, 424

gender, 1 12-15, 146, 184, 209, 213. 268

gender, German, 291-3 gender, Latin, 318-720, 327-8

663

Index

gender, Romance, 328, 352-6 gender, Scandinavian, 281 gender, Semitic, 425 generic words, 502 genitive, 115, 261, 267, 314, 325 genitive, Dutch, 285 genitive, German, 291 genitive, Latin, 315-16 genitive, objective, 316 genitive, partitive, 316 genitive, qualitative, 316 genitive, Teutonic, 187 Georgian, 194

German, 194, 202, 206-9, 230 If., 263 ff., 283 ff.

German, capitals in, 235 German dialects, 284, 289-90 German, Low and High, 232-4, 284 German, reasons for conservative character, 288-9 German spelling, 234-5 German, stress in, 235 gerund, 139, 387-9 Gessner, Conrad, 443 gesture, 85 Goidelic, 417 Gothic, 102, 105 Gothic verb, 265 grammar, comparative, 92 grammar, essential, 34 grammar, of auxiliary language, 486 If. gramophone records, 28 Greek, 193, 194, 251, 253, 309, 406, 409, 636 If.

Greek, contribution to English, 250 If. Greek letters, 72, 334, 340 Greek, modern, 253-4, 406 Greek roots, and technics, 496-9, 636 If.

Greenlandic, 194, 215 Grierson, Sir G., 411 Grimm, J., 200, 454 Grimm’s law, 188 growth of words, 93 Gujarati, 407, 41 1 Gwoyeu Romatzyh, 437 Gypsy language, 407

A, French, 258

Hamitic languages, 193, 194, 420 n. Hawaiian, 214 headline language, 129, 13 r Hebrew, 193, 194, 421 If.

Hebrew characters, early, 196 helper verbs, 104, 123, 150-1 helper verbs, and word order, 155 helper verbs, German, 299-302 helper verbs, Romance, 384 If., 393-4 helper verbs, Teutonic, 152 Hervas, L., 179 Hindi, Eastern, 407 Hindi, Western, 407, 41 1 Hindustani, 199, 412 Hiragana syllabary, 438, 439 history of language study, 176 If. Hittite writing, 36, 56 holophrastic languages, 215 homophones, 51, 63, 65 homophones, Chinese, 432-3 Hottentot language, 193 Hungarian, see Magyar

Iberian dialects, 342 Icelandic, 190, 262, 276, 278 ideograms, 54, 58 idiom, 27

Idiom Neutral, 460 idiomatic use of particles, 139 Ido, 466-7 imperative, 120, 124 imperative, Romance, 393-4 imperfect, 103, 321, 338, 391-2 impersonal constructions, 130 impersonal pronouns, Romance, 37 iff. impersonal verbs, 169, 171 incorporating languages, 215 Indie dialects, modem, 194 Indie languages, 406-12 Indie, Old, 190 indefinite article, 332-3, 361 indicative, 119 indirect object, 118, 153-4 indirect object, position of, 154-6 indirect questions, German, 307 Indo-Chinese languages, 193, 194, 425 Indo-European languages, 189, 193,

194

Indo-Iranian languages, 193 infinitive, 120, 263

infinitive, agglutinative, Portuguese,

394

infinitive, Dutch and German, 284 infinitiye, of request, 398 infinitive, Romance, 393-4 initial mutations, Celtic, 420 instrumental, 118

664 77te Loom of Language

instrumental case, 31S instrumental directives, 145 interdictionary, 494 ff. interlanguage, essential features, 509- 510

Interlingua, 450, 467-70 international language, 88 interphonetics, 506-9 interrogation, 158, 161, 169 interrogation, Romance, 399-400 interrogative particles, 158, 161 interrogatives, 145

interrogatives, Romance, 371 ff., 375 interrogatives, Teutonic, 276 intransitive, 149

intransitive and transitive, in German, 306

inversion, 158 Iranian, Old, 407 Irish, see Erse

irregular verbs, French, 380 irregular verbs, Latin, 323 isolating languages, 195-6 Italian, 194, 200, 203, 214, 242 ff., 309 ff., 347, 349 If.; see also Romance

Italian and Latin, compared, 315 Italian, early, 312 Italic dialects, 309

James, Lloyd, 508 Japanese, 193, 194, 200, 215 Japanese writing, 63, 66 ff., 435, 438-9

Jespersen, O., 117, 213-14, 466, 470-2, 485-6, 488, 509 Jones, Sir W., 180-1 Joyce, J., 324

Kafir- Sotho languages, 209

Kana, 48, 67-8, 438

Katakana syllabary, 435, 438, 440

Kirghiz, 193, 194

Kiriwinian, 212

koine, 253

Koran, 423

Korean, 193, 194

Kyrillic alphabet, 414, 416

Language study, uses of, 16 ff. Langue Bleue, 459

Lappish, 193, 194, 200 Latin, 200-1, 309 ff.

Latin, and Interlingua, 468-9 Latin and Italian, compared, 315 Latin, as interlanguage, 313 Latin, classical, 314 ff.

Latin, disuse as language of culture 443

Latin, in Gaul, 309-10 Latin inscription, early, 311 Latin languages, sound changes, 238ff.

Latin letters, 72

Latin, ‘logicality” of, 315-18

Latin, popular, 310-11

Latin, pronunciation, 254

Latin roots in English, 238, 314

Latin, vulgar, Romance words from,

' 341-2

Latinesce, 472

Latinization of English, 223-4 Latino sine flexione, see Interlingua Latvian, 193, 406, 413 League of Nations, 462 learning a language, and flexions, 125 ff.

learning a language, three skills re¬ quired, 25

learning a language, what it involves, 24 ff.

Leibniz, 179, 444, 449 ff., 468 Lenin, V. I., 88 Lettish, see Latvian liaison, 257

link-words, 32; see also conjunctions Linnaeus, 452

literary and non-literary languages, 405

Lithuanian, 188, 193, 194, 406, 413 locative, 315, 318 Lockhart, Miss L. W., 499 logograms, 57 ff. logographic writing, 48, 57 ^ '

Luther, M., 289

Magyar, 193, 194, 197, 200 Malay, 194, 196

Malayo-Polynesian languages, 194 Malinowski, B., 169, 170, 212, 451 Maltese, 194, 424 Manchu, 193, 194 Manutius, Aldus, 50 Manx, 417

Index

Maori, 194

Marathi, 407, 411

Maya writing, 54

meaning, changes of, 239

metaphor, 502-3

metaphorical extension, 65

missionaries and script systems, 203

Moabitic, 421

Mongolian, 193

monosyllabic languages, 426 ft, 441 monosyllables, 63, 122 mood, 1 19-2 1 mood, Latin, 322 mood, Romance, 394-9 Morse code, 76, 78 motion, directives of, 144 motion, expression of, in German, 262, 304

Mundolingue, 460 Museums, language, 23 Muslims in Spain, 343

nasals, French, 257-8

negation, 159-61

negation, double, 399

negation, Latin and Romance, 339-

341

negation, Romance, 399-400 negation, Scandinavian, 281 Nestorian stone, 422 neuter, Latin, disappearance of, 328 Nobilibus, Robertus de, 180 nominative, 1 1 5, 117, 261, 3x4 Norwegian, 276 if.; see also Scandi¬ navian

Norwegian spelling, 237 Novial, 470-2, 495 noun, Dutch, 285 noun, Finnish, 198 noun, German, 266-8, 290-3 noun, Latin, 314 if. noun. Old English, 266-8 noun, Romance, 350-8 noun, Scandinavian, 279 number, 96, 108-10, 489 number, in Romance, 350-2 number, Latin, 316 number of languages, 405 number symbols, 58-9 numerals, 192 numerals, Russian, 415 numeratives, 211 numeratives, Chinese, 435-6

665 *

object, X17, 149, 170

object, indirect, 118, 153-6

objective, 115-16, 261

objective, genitive, 316

oblique case, 115, 326

Occidental, 468

Ogam script, 75, 417

Ogden, C. IC., 20, 30, 139, 473 ffi,

494a 499 operators, 503

oral recognition of language, difficulty in, 25-26

origins of language, 89-90 Oscan writing, 325

Pali, 407 Pallas, 179 Panini, 408 Panjabi, 407, 41 1 Papuan, 194, 212, 213 participle, 104, 120, 139, 171 participle, past, 264 participle, past, Dutch and German, 284

participle, present, Romance, 387-9 particles, 32-3, 134 ff. particles, interrogative, 158, 161 partitive article, 361-2 partitive genitive, 316 parts of speech, 129 Pasilingua, 221, 442 passive, 117, 120-1, 150, 171 passive, French, 386 passive, German, 298 passive, Latin, 322 passive, Latin and Romance, 337-8 passive, Scandinavian, 120, 278 past definite, 292-3, 392 past, immediate, in French and Spanish, 391 patois, French, 441-2 Peano, G., 450, 467-70 Pehlevi, 407 perfect, 103

perfect and imperfect, 321-2, 338 perfect, synthetic, disuse of, 338 Persian, 188, 190, 194, 406, 407, 408, 410-11

Persian, Old, 407 person, 95 if.

person, in Celtic languages, 100 personal pronouns, see pronquns, per¬ sonal

666 The Loom of Language

Phoenician., 193, 421, 423 Phoenician letters, 72 phonetic patterns, 213-15 phonetic symbols, 83, 84 phonetic writing, 48 phonetics, 28 phonograms, 61, 65 pictograms, 36, 56-7 picture writing, 48, 52, 56 ff.

Pidgin English, 441-2 Pitman, Sir Isaac, 87 place, directives of, 142 Plattdeutsch, 284 pluperfect, 322, 338 plurals, Romance, 350-2 pointer-words, see demonstratives * pointer-words, indefinite, Romance, 377

pointer-words, indefinite, Teutonic, 283

Polabian, 413 Polish, 193, 194, 413 Portuguese, 194, 242 ff., 309 ff., 343-6, 349 ff. ; see also Romance Portuguese, spelling and pronuncia¬ tion, 345

possessive, 115; see also genitive possessive genitive, 316 possessive pronouns, Romance, 368- 369

possessives, reflexive, Scandinavian, 282

possessives, Teutonic, 127 predicative adjectives, 156 prefixes, 53; see also affixes prefixes, dassificatory, 209-1 x i? prefixes, Greek, 252 prefixes, verbal, German, 306-7 prepositions, 199, 412 prepositions, after infinitive, 394 prepositions, agglutination with articles, 119, 360-1 prepositions, Celtic, fusion with pro¬ nouns, 418-19

prepositions, German, and case-forms, 262

prepositions, Latin, 318 prepositions, Romance, 137 prepositions, Teutonic, 136 primitive speech, 204 principal clause, 162 prolixity, German, 305 pronoun objects, position, Romance, 3 66

pronouns, 34; see also personal pro¬ nouns

pronouns, as link-words, 61 pronouns, emphatic, 147 pronouns, French, 199 pronouns, fused, Romance, 365-6 pronouns, impersonal, Romance, 371 ff. pronouns, indefinite, Romance, 378 pronouns, personal, 96-9, 109, 146-7, ( x66-8

pronouns, personal, changes in use, 168

pronouns, personal, Icelandic, 167 pronouns, personal, Latin, 320-1 pronouns, personal. Old English, 167 pronouns, personal, Persian, 410 pronouns, personal, Romance, 331, 332-3> 362-8

pronouns, personal, Teutonic, 126 * pronouns, reflexive, 147-8, 333, 371 pronouns, relative, 144, 371 pronouns, stressed, 363-4 pronunciation changes, and spelling, 80-1

pronunciation, French, 254-9, 357 pronunciation, Italian, 254-5 pronunciation, Latin, 254 pronunciation, Portuguese, 345 pronunciation, Spanish, 254-5 proto-Aryan, 190-2 Proven?al, 343, 346 Punic, 423 punctuation, 50

questions, 158-9; see also interro- gatives

questions, indirect, in German, 307 questions, negative, 160

Rask, R. K., 188 reading, skill needed for, 27 reflexive, 120

reflexive construction, German, 306 reflexive pronouns, 147-8, 333 reflexive pronouns, Romance, 371 related languages, correspondences, 38-9

related languages, learning, 20-21 relative pronouns, 144 relative pronouns, Romance, 371 reported speech, German, 307 request, infinitive of, 398

667

Index

Richards, I. A., 473 ff.

Rig-Veda, 407 Rivarol, 346 Romanal, 468

Romance languages, 193, 194, 309 ff., 349 ff.

Romance languages, common features, 313

Romance languages, Latin and, 181 Romance speakers, number, 406 romanization, desirability of universal, 88

Romansch, 347

root-inflected languages, 195, 205-9 roots, 53, 169-70 roots, Greek, and technics, 496-9 roots, international, 494 ff. roots, Semitic, 71, 424-5 Rosetta stone, 77-8 Royal Society, 443, 446-7 rules in language-learning, 34-6 Rumanian, 194, 347-8 Runic script, 75-6, 265 Russian, 193, 194, 406, 415-16 Russian, Great, 413, 416 Russian, Little, 413, 416 Russian, White, 413, 416

Samoyede, 198

Sanskrit, 180-1, 406, 407-10

Sapir, E., 493

Sassetti, 180

Scaliger, J. J., 178

Scandinavian languages, 194, 276 ff.

Schlegel, F., 181

Schleyer, J. M., 455 ff.

scientific terminology, 251

Scots, 223

Scots Gaelic, see Gaelic script forms, circumstances influen¬ cing, 74

script forms, missionaries and, 203 self-expression, skill needed for, 27 semaphore code, 78 Semitic languages, 70-1, 193, 194, 420-5

sentence, complex, 162 ff., 172 separable verbs, 302-3 Septuagint, 253 Serbo-Croatian, 193, 194, 413 sermo urbanus and sermo rusticusy 311 sex and gender, 114 short sentences, advantages, 164-5

shorthand, 86, 87 Siamese, 193, 194, 425 signalling, 85

signposts of Latin origin, 240-1 signposts of Teutonic origin, 227 Sindhi, 41 1

Slavonic languages, 193, 194, 413-16 Slavonic speakers, number, 406 Slovak, 193, 194, 413 Slovene, 194, 413 Somali, 193, 194, 420 n.

Sorbian, 413 sound changes, 47-8 sound changes, in Latin languages, 238 ff., 242 ff. sound changes, Latin, 326 sound-replacement, 185-6, 187, 188 sound-shifts, 224 ff., 231, 235, 284 sounds apd symbols, 228 Spanish, 194, 242 ff., 309 ff., 343-6, 349 ffo see also Romance Spanish, Arabic elements in, 313, 344

Spanish pronunciation, 254-5 Spanish spelling, 383-4 speech communities, small, 15 Spelin, 459

spelling changes, English, 82-3 spelling, comparative, 47-8 spelling, Danish, 237-8 spelling, Dutch, 236 spelling, German, 234-5 spelling of auxiliary language, 486 spelling, rational, 78 ff. spelling reform, 88 spelling, Scandinavian, 237-8 spelling, Spanish, 383-4 Strasbourg, Oaths of, 312 stress, in German, 235 stress, in Romance languages, 259 stressed pronouns, French, 363-4 strong verbs, 107 subject, 116-17

subject-object distinction, words and, 170, 488

subject-predicate relation, 130 subjunctive, 120 subjunctive, German, 307-8 subjunctive, Romance, 394-5 subordinate clause, 162 subordinate conjunctions, 161 ff. substantives, 90, 125 Suetonius, 318 suffixes, 53 ; see also affixes

The Loom of Language

668

Sumerians, 422 4 superlative, no Swahili, 193, 209 Swedish, 206, 276 ff.; see also Scandi¬ navian

Swedish, literary, 281-2 Swedish spelling, 237-8 syllable writing, 48, 61 syllables, 53, 69, 214 synonyms, in conversation, 27 synonyms, unnecessary, 500 syntax, 122, 129 ff., 184 syntax, and good writing, 17 1 syntax, changes in, 168 syntax, German, 302 ff. synthetic languages, 107

Tahitian, 194 Tamil, 195 Tartar, 193, 194 Tasconian, 253 technical terms, 24, 496 ff. telegraphic codes, 85 Telugu, 195

tense, 103, 105-8, 321, 489 tenses, compound, 104 tenses, Romance, 337-9, 390-3 Teutonic language, parent, 181, 186- 187

Teutonic languages, 194, 206-9 Teutonic languages and English, differences, 273

Teutonic speakers, number, 406

Tibetan, 193, 194, 441

Tibeto-Burmese group, 425

Tigr^, 424

Tigrina, 424

til* 345

tilde, 255

time, directives of, 146 Tokharian, 189 tone, interrogative, 159 tones, 63, 425, 433-4 Tooke, Horne, 179-80 traffic signs, 49, 57 transitive, 149

transitive and intransitive, in German, 306

tricks of language-learning, 20, 24 triliteralism, 70, 424 Turco-Tartar languages, 194 Turkish, 193, 194, 200, 489 Turkish script, 416, 436

Ukrainian, 416 Ulffias, 102, 178, 265 Umlaut, 206 Universal-Sprache, 459 Urdu, 4x2

Vandals, 343 Vedic, 407, 408 Vedic hymns, 190 Veltparl, 459

verb, 31, 1 19-2 1, 148 ff.; see also irregular verbs4 verb, causative, 150, 206 verb, Celtic, 418-19 verb, Dutch, 285 verb economy, 474-5, 477 verb, Burnish, 198

verb flexions, Dutch and German, 283-4

verb flexions, English, 262-5 verb flexions. Gothic, 265 verb flexions, Scandinavian, 277 verb, French, 378-80 verb, German, 297 ff. verb. Gothic, 265 verb, Greek and Sanskrit, 409 verb, impersonal, 169, 171 verb, in Basic English, 503-4 verb, in Interlingua, 469-70 verb, Italian, 382 verb, Latin, 321 ff. verb, Persian, 410 verb, Portuguese, 380-4 verb prefixes, German, 302 verb, Romance, 378 ff. verb, Russian, 415-16 verb, separable, 302-3 verb, Spanish, 380-4 verb, strong and weak, 104, 107, 270 verb, Teutonic, 187, 191, 206-9,270 ff. verb, vagueness of meaning, 148 verbal noun, 139 vernaculars, rise of, 443 vestiges, grammatical, 35-6 vocabulary, basic, 29 ff. vocabulary, basic, number of words needed, 24, 30

vocabulary, conversational and writ¬ ten, 27

vocabulary, for auxiliary language,

‘ *494 ff.

vocative case, 314, 318 vocatives, 90

Index

voice, 1 19-21

voiced and voiceless consonants, 81, 271, 506-8

Volapiik, 454, 455-60 vowel change, German, 207 vowel change, Semitic, 424-5 vowel symbols, phonetic, 84 vowels, 56, 62, 70 ff., 81 vowels, English, 233 ff. vowels, French, 256 vowels, in interlanguage, 508-9 vowels, Romance, 256 Vulgate, 3 1 1, 324, 362

Wade, Sir T., 437 war, and interlanguage, 511 weak verbs, 104 Welsh, 102-3, 193, I94> 417 Wilkins, Bishop, 87, 444 If., 494 word-economy, 499-506 word-lists, how to learn, 219 ff. word-lists, making, 33 ff.

669

word-order, 40, 153 ff., 273, 492 ff. word-order, Anglo-American, 492-3 word-order, Chinese, 430-1 word-order, conjunctions and, 162-6 word-order, German-Dutch, 163-6, 286 ff.

word-order, Latin, 323-4

word-order, Scandinavian, 162, 277

word-similarity, 182-4

writing and speech, 174-5

writing, good, 170 ff.

writing, kinds of, 48

writing, separation of words in, 50

Yiddish, 406

Zamenhof, L. L., 460 ff.

Zend, 407

Zoological Nomenclature, Interna¬ tional Commission on, 484 Zulu, 193, 195

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