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.]