should adopt the Latin words for the strange beverage (vinum, English wine, German Wein) and the unfamiliar type of road (strata [via], English street, German Strasse).  Later, when Christianity was introduced 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 role 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