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.