Into England, a number of associated words, such as _bishop_ and

_angel_, found their way into English. And so the process has continued

uninterruptedly down to the present day, each cultural wave bringing to

the language a new deposit of loan-words. The careful study of such

loan-words constitutes an interesting commentary on the history of

culture. One can almost estimate the rôle which various peoples have

played in the development and spread of cultural ideas by taking note of

the extent to which their vocabularies have filtered into those of other

peoples. When we realize that an educated Japanese can hardly frame a

single literary sentence without the use of Chinese resources, that to

this day Siamese and Burmese and Cambodgian bear the unmistakable

Imprint of the Sanskrit and Pali that came in with Hindu Buddhism

centuries ago, or that whether we argue for or against the teaching of

Latin and Greek our argument is sure to be studded with words that have

come to us from Rome and Athens, we get some inkling of what early

Chinese culture and Buddhism and classical Mediterranean civilization

have meant in the world's history. There are just five languages that

have had an overwhelming significance as carriers of culture. They are

classical Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Greek, and Latin. In comparison

with these even such culturally important languages as Hebrew and French

sink into a secondary position. It is a little disappointing to learn

that the general cultural influence of English has so far been all but

negligible. The English language itself is spreading because the English

have colonized immense territories. But there is nothing to show that it

Is anywhere entering into the lexical heart of other languages as French

has colored the English complexion or as Arabic has permeated Persian

and Turkish. This fact alone is significant of the power of nationalism,

cultural as well as political, during the last century. There are now

psychological resistances to borrowing, or rather to new sources of

borrowing,[165] that were not greatly alive in the Middle Ages or during

the Renaissance.

[Footnote 165: For we still name our new scientific instruments and

patent medicines from Greek and Latin.]

Are there resistances of a more intimate nature to the borrowing of

words? It is generally assumed that the nature and extent of borrowing

depend entirely on the historical facts of culture relation; that if

German, for instance, has borrowed less copiously than English from

Latin and French it is only because Germany has had less intimate

relations than England with the culture spheres of classical Rome and

France. This is true to a considerable extent, but it is not the whole

truth. We must not exaggerate the physical importance of the Norman

invasion nor underrate the significance of the fact that Germany's

central geographical position made it peculiarly sensitive to French

influences all through the Middle Ages, to humanistic influences in the

latter fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and again to the

powerful French influences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

It seems very probable that the psychological attitude of the borrowing

language itself towards linguistic material has much to do with its

receptivity to foreign words. English has long been striving for the

completely unified, unanalyzed word, regardless of whether it is

monosyllabic or polysyllabic. Such words as _credible_, _certitude_,

_intangible_ are entirely welcome in English because each represents a

unitary, well-nuanced idea and because their formal analysis

(_cred-ible_, _cert-itude_, _in-tang-ible_) is not a necessary act of

the unconscious mind (_cred-_, _cert-_, and _tang-_ have no real

existence in English comparable to that of _good-_ in _goodness_). A

word like _intangible_, once it is acclimated, is nearly as simple a

psychological entity as any radical monosyllable (say _vague_, _thin_,

_grasp_). In German, however, polysyllabic words strive to analyze

themselves into significant elements. Hence vast numbers of French and

Latin words, borrowed at the height of certain cultural influences,

could not maintain themselves in the language. Latin-German words like

_kredibel_ "credible" and French-German words like _reussieren_ "to

succeed" offered nothing that the unconscious mind could assimilate to