Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. WHAT ENGLISH OWES TO FOREIGN TONGUES. The changes in grammatical structure, which were the subject of the preceding chapters, are only a part of the changes by which Old English has been transformed into Modern English. The changes in vocabulary are equally important. Although we still use many of the old words ? chiefly, it is true, very much altered in pronunciation and spelling ? yet a very considerable proportion of them have become obsolete; and many thousands of new words have been introduced. Of those new words which have been formed in English itself we shall have to speak later; in the present chapter we shall treat of those which have been adopted from foreign languages. The adoption of foreign words into the English language began before the English came to thisisland. The Germanic people, of which the Angles and Saxons formed part, had long before this event been in contact with the civilisation of Rome; and several Latin words, denoting objects belonging to that civilisation, or foreign articles of use or luxury, had already found their way into the language of all or many of the Germanic nations. The Latin strata, a paved road, survives in English as street, and in German as strasse. Other words of Latin origin, which were learnt by the English people while still dwelling on the continent, and which remain in the modern language, are wine, butter, pepper, cheese, silk, alum, pound, inch, mile, mint (from Latin moneta, money). When the English were settled in Britain, they learned a few more Latin words from the Romanised people of the towns. The Latin castra, for instance, became, under the form ceaster, the Old English word for a Roman fortified town, and it survives in the place-name Chester, and in the ending of many other names such as Wi…
