The simplest case is the adoption of a foreign name of an animal or product hitherto unknown ; thus kangaroo is from some Australian tongue, zebra from an African, tea from Chinese, coffee from Arabic, chocolate from Mexican, and punch from Hindustani. A certain type of carriage was intro duced from Hungary and is known in most European languages by its Magyar name, English coach, German kutsche, etc. While such loan-words are isolated, there are others which come in larger quantities and bear witness to the cultural superiority of some nation in some one specified sphere of activity or branch of knowledge ; such are the Arabic words relating to mathematics and astronomy, algebra, zero, cipher, zenith; the Italian words relating to music, piano, allegro, soprano, etc., and to commerce, bank, balance, ducat, florin. It is possible to read whole chapters of the cultural history of the English nation out of the successive strata of important loan-words. Before the migration from the continent came commercial and domestic words from Latin, mint, monger (fishmonger, etc.), pound, inch, wine, dish, cook, kitchen, pear, plum. Next came words connected with the Chris tian religion, pope, bishop, nun, shrive. Then we have Scandinavian words connected with law and with peaceful settlement, law, by law, thrall, crave, wapentake, egg, skirt, numerous place names in -by, -thorp, etc. The Norman French words show the conquerors as the ruling and refined upper class, crown, reign, sovereign, duke, court, judge, jury, summon, grace, beauty, flower, dinner, supper, etc. And finally we have the learned words from the classical tongues after the revival of learning, intellect, abstract, educate, preternatural, biology, heterodox, metamorphosis, encyclopaedia and innumerable others. In the same way we are able to draw inferences from loan-words with regard to the nature of pre historic contacts between various races, e.g., Scandinavian and Baltic words in Finnic.
The study of loan-words is important in other respects as well. As phonetic development does not follow the same lines in all languages, loans of ten retain traces of a pronunciation which is lost in the country from which they came. English w in wine shows the old Latin pronunciation, which has been given up in all the Romanic languages ; vine from French vigne shows the later French development into v. English words often preserve
consonants which have been dropped in French, beast, feast from old French, beste, feste, now bete, fete; ch in chief, chair, charm, etc., shows the Old French sound, which in Modern French has been simplified through dropping of the first element; chef, champagne are later loans after the change in French pro nunciation. In this way Finnic loans from their western neigh bours show us forms that are older than the oldest runic inscrip tions and than the Gothic translation of the Bible, e.g., kuningas for "king." Indirect loans are found when a compound term is translated from one language to another; this is the case with some words of ethical or religious import ; Greek am/dawns and were translated into Latin conscientia and compassio and those again into German Gewissen (ge= con), and Mitleid, Danish samvittighed and medlidenhed. Again phraseological and syntac tical combinations are in this way transferred from one language to another. Very intricate borrowings of this kind in the Balkans have been studied by Sandfeld ; thanks to them, Greek, Bulgarian, Rumanian and Albanian, despite their different origins, present a certain homogeneity in syntactical structure. It is highly prob able that certain peculiarities in the flection of Armenian and Tokharian must be similarly ascribed to the neighbourhood of Turkish.
Contact between races with mutually unintelligible languages has given rise to makeshift languages of a curiously similar type in various parts of the globe, however different the underlying language may be. Such are Pidgin English and Beche-de-Mer in the East, various Creole languages such as Creole French of Mauritius, Negro-Portuguese, Negro-Dutch, "El Papiamento" in Curacao and the Chinook trade language in North America. In all these is an extreme simplicity of grammatical structure, which together with a minimum of vocabulary gives them a pro nouncedly childish character. Such languages are not mixed languages, properly speaking, but arise from the first bungling attempts at learning a difficult language, the Europeans having very often met the natives half-way by using broken English, etc., themselves. Generally these minimum languages are in a very fluctuating state, but under favourable circumstances they may become more fixed and even be used for expressing all the ideas of a cultured mind.