HUMAN SPEECH 59 



may exert upon another, generally summed up in the word borrowing, 

 are also apt to be of importance. As a rule such influence is limited 

 to the taking over or borrowing of certain words of one language by 

 another, the phonetic form of the foreign word almost always adapting 

 itself to the phonetic system of the borrowing language. Besides this 

 very obvious sort of influence, there are more subtle ways in which one 

 language may influence another. It is a very noteworthy phenomenon 

 that the languages of a continuous area, even if genetically unrelated 

 and however much they may differ among themselves from the point of 

 view of morphology, tend to have similar phonetic systems or, at any 

 rate, tend to possess certain distinctive phonetic traits in common. 

 It can not be accidental, for instance, that both the Slavic languages 

 and some of the neighboring but absolutely unrelated Ural-Altaic lan- 

 guages (such as the Cheremiss of the Volga region) have in common 

 a peculiar dull vowel, known in Russian as yeri, and also a set of 

 palatalized or so-called " soft " consonants alongside a parallel set of 

 unpalatalized or so-called " hard " consonants. Similarly, we find that 

 Chinese and Siamese have in common with the unrelated Annamite 

 and certain other languages of Farther India a system of musical 

 accent. A third very striking example is afforded by a large number 

 of American Indian linguistic stocks reaching along the Pacific coast 

 from southern Alaska well into California and beyond, which have in 

 common peculiar voiceless Z-sounds and a set of so-called " fortis " 

 consonants with cracked acoustic effect. It is obvious that in all these 

 cases of comparatively uniform phonetic areas embracing at the same 

 time diverse linguistic stocks and types of morphology we must be deal- 

 ing with some sort of phonetic influence that one language may exert 

 upon another. It may also be shown, though perhaps less frequently, 

 that some of the morphologic traits of one language may be adopted 

 by a neighboring, sometimes quite unrelated, language, or that certain 

 fundamental grammatical features are spread among several unrelated 

 linguistic stocks of a continuous area. One example of this sort of 

 influence will serve for many. The French express the numbers 70, 

 80 and 90, respectively, by terms meaning 60-10, 4 twenties and 4 

 twenties 10; these numerals, to which there is no analogy in Latin, 

 have been plausibly explained as survivals of a vigesimal method of 

 counting, that is counting by twenties, the numbers above 20, a method 

 that would seem to have been borrowed from Gallic, a Celtic language, 

 and which still survives in Gaelic and other modern Celtic languages. 

 This example is the more striking as the actual lexical influence which 

 Celtic has exerted upon French is surprisingly small. So much for the 

 influence of borrowing on the history of a language. 



We may turn now to take up the matter of the varieties of human 

 speech. One method of classifying the languages of the world has been 



