Its customary method of feeling and handling words. It is as though this

unconscious mind said: "I am perfectly willing to accept _kredibel_ if

you will just tell me what you mean by _kred-_." Hence German has

generally found it easier to create new words out of its own resources,

as the necessity for them arose.

The psychological contrast between English and German as regards the

treatment of foreign material is a contrast that may be studied in all

parts of the world. The Athabaskan languages of America are spoken by

peoples that have had astonishingly varied cultural contacts, yet

nowhere do we find that an Athabaskan dialect has borrowed at all

freely[166] from a neighboring language. These languages have always

found it easier to create new words by compounding afresh elements ready

to hand. They have for this reason been highly resistant to receiving

the linguistic impress of the external cultural experiences of their

speakers. Cambodgian and Tibetan offer a highly instructive contrast in

their reaction to Sanskrit influence. Both are analytic languages, each

totally different from the highly-wrought, inflective language of India.

Cambodgian is isolating, but, unlike Chinese, it contains many

polysyllabic words whose etymological analysis does not matter. Like

English, therefore, in its relation to French and Latin, it welcomed

immense numbers of Sanskrit loan-words, many of which are in common use

to-day. There was no psychological resistance to them. Classical Tibetan

literature was a slavish adaptation of Hindu Buddhist literature and

nowhere has Buddhism implanted itself more firmly than in Tibet, yet it

is strange how few Sanskrit words have found their way into the

language. Tibetan was highly resistant to the polysyllabic words of

Sanskrit because they could not automatically fall into significant

syllables, as they should have in order to satisfy the Tibetan feeling

for form. Tibetan was therefore driven to translating the great majority

of these Sanskrit words into native equivalents. The Tibetan craving for

form was satisfied, though the literally translated foreign terms must

often have done violence to genuine Tibetan idiom. Even the proper names

of the Sanskrit originals were carefully translated, element for

element, into Tibetan; e.g., _Suryagarbha_ "Sun-bosomed" was carefully

Tibetanized into _Nyi-mai snying-po_ "Sun-of heart-the, the heart (or

essence) of the sun." The study of how a language reacts to the presence

of foreign words--rejecting them, translating them, or freely accepting

them--may throw much valuable light on its innate formal tendencies.

[Footnote 166: One might all but say, "has borrowed at all."]

The borrowing of foreign words always entails their phonetic

modification. There are sure to be foreign sounds or accentual

peculiarities that do not fit the native phonetic habits. They are then

so changed as to do as little violence as possible to these habits.

Frequently we have phonetic compromises. Such an English word as the

recently introduced _camouflage_, as now ordinarily pronounced,

corresponds to the typical phonetic usage of neither English nor French.

The aspirated _k_, the obscure vowel of the second syllable, the precise

quality of the _l_ and of the last _a_, and, above all, the strong

accent on the first syllable, are all the results of unconscious

assimilation to our English habits of pronunciation. They differentiate

our _camouflage_ clearly from the same word as pronounced by the

French. On the other hand, the long, heavy vowel in the third syllable

and the final position of the "zh" sound (like _z_ in _azure_) are

distinctly un-English, just as, in Middle English, the initial _j_ and

_v_[167] must have been felt at first as not strictly in accord with

English usage, though the strangeness has worn off by now. In all four

of these cases--initial _j_, initial _v_, final "zh," and unaccented _a_

of _father_--English has not taken on a new sound but has merely

extended the use of an old one.

[Footnote 167: See page 206.]

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

line 6329.]

Occasionally a new sound is introduced, but it is likely to melt away

before long. In Chaucer's day the old Anglo-Saxon _ü_ (written _y_) had

long become unrounded to _i_, but a new set of _ü_-vowels had come in

from the French (in such words as _due_, _value_, _nature_). The new _ü_

did not long hold its own; it became diphthongized to _iu_ and was

amalgamated with the native _iw_ of words like _new_ and _slew_.

Eventually this diphthong appears as _yu_, with change of stress--_dew_

(from Anglo-Saxon _deaw_) like _due_ (Chaucerian _dü_). Facts like these

show how stubbornly a language resists radical tampering with its

phonetic pattern.

Nevertheless, we know that languages do influence each other in phonetic

respects, and that quite aside from the taking over of foreign sounds

with borrowed words. One of the most curious facts that linguistics has

to note is the occurrence of striking phonetic parallels in totally

unrelated or very remotely related languages of a restricted

geographical area. These parallels become especially impressive when

they are seen contrastively from a wide phonetic perspective. Here are a

few examples. The Germanic languages as a whole have not developed

nasalized vowels. Certain Upper German (Suabian) dialects, however,

have now nasalized vowels in lieu of the older vowel + nasal consonant

(_n_). Is it only accidental that these dialects are spoken in proximity

to French, which makes abundant use of nasalized vowels? Again, there

are certain general phonetic features that mark off Dutch and Flemish in

contrast, say, to North German and Scandinavian dialects. One of these