Language by Edward Sapir

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[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
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 _ue_ (written _y_) had
long become unrounded to _i_, but a new set of _ue_-vowels had come in
from the French (in such words as _due_, _value_, _nature_). The new _ue_
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 _due_). 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
is the presence of unaspirated voiceless stops (_p_, _t_, _k_), which
have a precise, metallic quality reminiscent of the corresponding French
sounds, but which contrast with the stronger, aspirated stops of
English, North German, and Danish. Even if we assume that the
unaspirated stops are more archaic, that they are the unmodified
descendants of the old Germanic consonants, is it not perhaps a
significant historical fact that the Dutch dialects, neighbors of
French, were inhibited from modifying these consonants in accordance
with what seems to have been a general Germanic phonetic drift? Even
more striking than these instances is the peculiar resemblance, in
certain special phonetic respects, of Russian and other Slavic languages
to the unrelated Ural-Altaic languages[168] of the Volga region. The
peculiar, dull vowel, for instance, known in Russian as "yeri"[169] has
Ural-Altaic analogues, but is entirely wanting in Germanic, Greek,
Armenian, and Indo-Iranian, the nearest Indo-European congeners of
Slavic. We may at least suspect that the Slavic vowel is not
historically unconnected with its Ural-Altaic parallels. One of the most
puzzling cases of phonetic parallelism is afforded by a large number of
American Indian languages spoken west of the Rockies. Even at the most
radical estimate there are at least four totally unrelated linguistic
stocks represented in the region from southern Alaska to central
California. Nevertheless all, or practically all, the languages of this
immense area have some important phonetic features in common. Chief of
these is the presence of a "glottalized" series of stopped consonants of
very distinctive formation and of quite unusual acoustic effect.[170] In
the northern part of the area all the languages, whether related or not,
also possess various voiceless _l_-sounds and a series of "velar"
(back-guttural) stopped consonants which are etymologically distinct
from the ordinary _k_-series. It is difficult to believe that three such
peculiar phonetic features as I have mentioned could have evolved
independently in neighboring groups of languages.

[Footnote 168: Ugro-Finnic and Turkish (Tartar)]

[Footnote 169: Probably, in Sweet's terminology, high-back (or, better,
between back and "mixed" positions)-narrow-unrounded. It generally
corresponds to an Indo-European long _u_.]

[Footnote 170: There seem to be analogous or partly analogous sounds in
certain languages of the Caucasus.]

How are we to explain these and hundreds of similar phonetic
convergences? In particular cases we may really be dealing with archaic
similarities due to a genetic relationship that it is beyond our present
power to demonstrate. But this interpretation will not get us far. It
must be ruled entirely out of court, for instance, in two of the three
European examples I have instanced; both nasalized vowels and the Slavic
"yeri" are demonstrably of secondary origin in Indo-European. However we
envisage the process in detail, we cannot avoid the inference that there
is a tendency for speech sounds or certain distinctive manners of
articulation to spread over a continuous area in somewhat the same way
that elements of culture ray out from a geographical center. We may
suppose that individual variations arising at linguistic
borderlands--whether by the unconscious suggestive influence of foreign
speech habits or by the actual transfer of foreign sounds into the
speech of bilingual individuals--have gradually been incorporated into
the phonetic drift of a language. So long as its main phonetic concern
is the preservation of its sound patterning, not of its sounds as such,
there is really no reason why a language may not unconsciously
assimilate foreign sounds that have succeeded in worming their way into
its gamut of individual variations, provided always that these new
variations (or reinforced old variations) are in the direction of the
native drift.

A simple illustration will throw light on this conception. Let us
suppose that two neighboring and unrelated languages, A and B, each
possess voiceless _l_-sounds (compare Welsh _ll_). We surmise that this
is not an accident. Perhaps comparative study reveals the fact that in
language A the voiceless _l_-sounds correspond to a sibilant series in
other related languages, that an old alternation _s_: _sh_ has been
shifted to the new alternation _l_ (voiceless): _s_.[171] Does it follow
that the voiceless _l_ of language B has had the same history? Not in
the least. Perhaps B has a strong tendency toward audible breath release
at the end of a word, so that the final _l_, like a final vowel, was
originally followed by a marked aspiration. Individuals perhaps tended
to anticipate a little the voiceless release and to "unvoice" the latter
part of the final _l_-sound (very much as the _l_ of English words like
_felt_ tends to be partly voiceless in anticipation of the voicelessness
of the _t_). Yet this final _l_ with its latent tendency to unvoicing
might never have actually developed into a fully voiceless _l_ had not
the presence of voiceless _l_-sounds in A acted as an unconscious
stimulus or suggestive push toward a more radical change in the line of
B's own drift. Once the final voiceless _l_ emerged, its alternation in
related words with medial voiced _l_ is very likely to have led to its
analogical spread. The result would be that both A and B have an
important phonetic trait in common. Eventually their phonetic systems,
judged as mere assemblages of sounds, might even become completely
assimilated to each other, though this is an extreme case hardly ever
realized in practice. The highly significant thing about such phonetic
interinfluencings is the strong tendency of each language to keep its
phonetic pattern intact. So long as the respective alignments of the
similar sounds is different, so long as they have differing "values" and
"weights" in the unrelated languages, these languages cannot be said to
have diverged materially from the line of their inherent drift. In
phonetics, as in vocabulary, we must be careful not to exaggerate the
importance of interlinguistic influences.

[Footnote 171: This can actually be demonstrated for one of the
Athabaskan dialects of the Yukon.]

I have already pointed out in passing that English has taken over a
certain number of morphological elements from French. English also uses
a number of affixes that are derived from Latin and Greek. Some of these
foreign elements, like the _-ize_ of _materialize_ or the _-able_ of
_breakable_, are even productive to-day. Such examples as these are
hardly true evidences of a morphological influence exerted by one
language on another. Setting aside the fact that they belong to the
sphere of derivational concepts and do not touch the central
morphological problem of the expression of relational ideas, they have
added nothing to the structural peculiarities of our language. English
was already prepared for the relation of _pity_ to _piteous_ by such a
native pair as _luck_ and _lucky_; _material_ and _materialize_ merely
swelled the ranks of a form pattern familiar from such instances as
_wide_ and _widen_. In other words, the morphological influence exerted
by foreign languages on English, if it is to be gauged by such examples
as I have cited, is hardly different in kind from the mere borrowing of
words. The introduction of the suffix _-ize_ made hardly more difference
to the essential build of the language than did the mere fact that it
incorporated a given number of words. Had English evolved a new future
on the model of the synthetic future in French or had it borrowed from
Latin and Greek their employment of reduplication as a functional device
(Latin _tango_: _tetigi_; Greek _leipo_: _leloipa_), we should have the
right to speak of true morphological influence. But such far-reaching
influences are not demonstrable. Within the whole course of the history
of the English language we can hardly point to one important
morphological change that was not determined by the native drift, though
here and there we may surmise that this drift was hastened a little by
the suggestive influence of French forms.[172]

[Footnote 172: In the sphere of syntax one may point to certain French
and Latin influences, but it is doubtful if they ever reached deeper
than the written language. Much of this type of influence belongs rather
to literary style than to morphology proper.]

It is important to realize the continuous, self-contained morphological
development of English and the very modest extent to which its
fundamental build has been affected by influences from without. The
history of the English language has sometimes been represented as though
it relapsed into a kind of chaos on the arrival of the Normans, who
proceeded to play nine-pins with the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Students are
more conservative today. That a far-reaching analytic development may
take place without such external foreign influence as English was
subjected to is clear from the history of Danish, which has gone even
further than English in certain leveling tendencies. English may be
conveniently used as an _a fortiori_ test. It was flooded with French
loan-words during the later Middle Ages, at a time when its drift toward
the analytic type was especially strong. It was therefore changing
rapidly both within and on the surface. The wonder, then, is not that it
took on a number of external morphological features, mere accretions on
its concrete inventory, but that, exposed as it was to remolding
influences, it remained so true to its own type and historic drift. The
experience gained from the study of the English language is strengthened
by all that we know of documented linguistic history. Nowhere do we find
any but superficial morphological interinfluencings. We may infer one of
several things from this:--That a really serious morphological influence
is not, perhaps, impossible, but that its operation is so slow that it
has hardly ever had the chance to incorporate itself in the relatively
small portion of linguistic history that lies open to inspection; or
that there are certain favorable conditions that make for profound
morphological disturbances from without, say a peculiar instability of
linguistic type or an unusual degree of cultural contact, conditions
that do not happen to be realized in our documentary material; or,
finally, that we have not the right to assume that a language may easily
exert a remolding morphological influence on another.

Meanwhile we are confronted by the baffling fact that important traits
of morphology are frequently found distributed among widely differing
languages within a large area, so widely differing, indeed, that it is
customary to consider them genetically unrelated. Sometimes we may
suspect that the resemblance is due to a mere convergence, that a
similar morphological feature has grown up independently in unrelated
languages. Yet certain morphological distributions are too specific in
character to be so lightly dismissed. There must be some historical
factor to account for them. Now it should be remembered that the concept
of a "linguistic stock" is never definitive[173] in an exclusive sense.
We can only say, with reasonable certainty, that such and such languages
are descended from a common source, but we cannot say that such and such
other languages are not genetically related. All we can do is to say
that the evidence for relationship is not cumulative enough to make the
inference of common origin absolutely necessary. May it not be, then,
that many instances of morphological similarity between divergent
languages of a restricted area are merely the last vestiges of a
community of type and phonetic substance that the destructive work of
diverging drifts has now made unrecognizable? There is probably still
enough lexical and morphological resemblance between modern English and
Irish to enable us to make out a fairly conclusive case for their
genetic relationship on the basis of the present-day descriptive
evidence alone. It is true that the case would seem weak in comparison
to the case that we can actually make with the help of the historical
and the comparative data that we possess. It would not be a bad case
nevertheless. In another two or three millennia, however, the points of
resemblance are likely to have become so obliterated that English and
Irish, in the absence of all but their own descriptive evidence, will
have to be set down as "unrelated" languages. They will still have in
common certain fundamental morphological features, but it will be
difficult to know how to evaluate them. Only in the light of the
contrastive perspective afforded by still more divergent languages, such
as Basque and Finnish, will these vestigial resemblances receive their
true historic value.

[Footnote 173: See page 163.]

[Transcriber's note: Footnote 173 refers to the paragraph beginning on
line 5037.]

I cannot but suspect that many of the more significant distributions of
morphological similarities are to be explained as just such vestiges.
The theory of "borrowing" seems totally inadequate to explain those
fundamental features of structure, hidden away in the very core of the
linguistic complex, that have been pointed out as common, say, to
Semitic and Hamitic, to the various Soudanese languages, to
Malayo-Polynesian and Mon-Khmer[174] and Munda,[175] to Athabaskan and
Tlingit and Haida. We must not allow ourselves to be frightened away by
the timidity of the specialists, who are often notably lacking in the
sense of what I have called "contrastive perspective."

[Footnote 174: A group of languages spoken in southeastern Asia, of
which Khmer (Cambodgian) is the best known representative.]

[Footnote 175: A group of languages spoken in northeastern India.]

Attempts have sometimes been made to explain the distribution of these
fundamental structural features by the theory of diffusion. We know that
myths, religious ideas, types of social organization, industrial
devices, and other features of culture may spread from point to point,
gradually making themselves at home in cultures to which they were at
one time alien. We also know that words may be diffused no less freely
than cultural elements, that sounds also may be "borrowed," and that
even morphological elements may be taken over. We may go further and
recognize that certain languages have, in all probability, taken on
structural features owing to the suggestive influence of neighboring
languages. An examination of such cases,[176] however, almost invariably
reveals the significant fact that they are but superficial additions on
the morphological kernel of the language. So long as such direct
historical testimony as we have gives us no really convincing examples
of profound morphological influence by diffusion, we shall do well not
to put too much reliance in diffusion theories. On the whole, therefore,
we shall ascribe the major concordances and divergences in linguistic
form--phonetic pattern and morphology--to the autonomous drift of
language, not to the complicating effect of single, diffused features
that cluster now this way, now that. Language is probably the most
self-contained, the most massively resistant of all social phenomena. It
is easier to kill it off than to disintegrate its individual form.

[Footnote 176: I have in mind, e.g., the presence of postpositions in
Upper Chinook, a feature that is clearly due to the influence of
neighboring Sahaptin languages; or the use by Takelma of instrumental
prefixes, which are likely to have been suggested by neighboring "Hokan"
languages (Shasta, Karok).]

X

LANGUAGE, RACE AND CULTURE

Language has a setting. The people that speak it belong to a race (or a
number of races), that is, to a group which is set off by physical
characteristics from other groups. Again, language does not exist apart
from culture, that is, from the socially inherited assemblage of
practices and beliefs that determines the texture of our lives.
Anthropologists have been in the habit of studying man under the three
rubrics of race, language, and culture. One of the first things they do
with a natural area like Africa or the South Seas is to map it out from
this threefold point of view. These maps answer the questions: What and
where are the major divisions of the human animal, biologically
considered (e.g., Congo Negro, Egyptian White; Australian Black,
Polynesian)? What are the most inclusive linguistic groupings, the
"linguistic stocks," and what is the distribution of each (e.g., the
Hamitic languages of northern Africa, the Bantu languages of the south;
the Malayo-Polynesian languages of Indonesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and
Polynesia)? How do the peoples of the given area divide themselves as
cultural beings? what are the outstanding "cultural areas" and what are
the dominant ideas in each (e.g., the Mohammedan north of Africa; the
primitive hunting, non-agricultural culture of the Bushmen in the south;
the culture of the Australian natives, poor in physical respects but
richly developed in ceremonialism; the more advanced and highly
specialized culture of Polynesia)?

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