512 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Let us now see under what conditions does one race or people borrow 

 the language of another. Slaves, of course, take over the language of 

 their masters, but we have to consider (1) the adoption by a conquer- 

 ing people of the language of the conquered, (2) the adoption by a con- 

 quered people of that of their conquerors, and (3) the adoption by a 

 people themselves unconquered of the language of their neighbors. 

 Under what conditions do the conquerors adopt the language of the con- 

 quered? Ireland affords us at least two certain examples. Cromwell 

 planted large bodies of his English soldiers in Tipperary, but they had 

 no English women, and therefore took as wives the daughters of the 

 land, who spoke the Irish language. From this union resulted a 

 splendid offspring, who spoke chiefly the language of their Irish 

 mothers, and not their fathers' English. So it came to pass that in a 

 single generation the progeny of Cromwell's Puritans were in language 

 as Irish as the purest-blooded aboriginal of Munster. Yet this adop- 

 tion of the Irish language by the great majority of the children of 

 these settlers took place in spite of the effect which the reading of books 

 in English must have exerted to counteract the tendency to adopt the 

 Irish language. Let us go back five hundred years in Irish history and 

 we find exactly the same process going on. The Normans who followed 

 Strongbow into Ireland, like their captain, frequently married native 

 women. It is a matter of common knowledge that the Anglo-Norman 

 settlers in a short time became Hiberniores ipsis Hibernis. 



These and other examples too numerous to cite here prove that the 

 children of bodies of conquerors who marry the women of the land will 

 have an inevitable tendency to follow their mothers' speech. We may 

 also lay down as a solid factor in the tendency of the conqueror to 

 merge into the conquered the isolation of the conquerors from their 

 original homes and from the great mass of those who speak the same 

 language. 



Next we come to the case where the conquerors bring with them 

 some women of their own race. This of course helps to keep their own 

 language alive, as a certain number of the children speak it as their 

 mothers' tongue. But even in these circumstances the invaders are 

 liable to drop their own language and practically adopt that of the 

 natives. Thus the Northmen who settled on the coast of France 

 gradually abandoned their national tongue for French, though modify- 

 ing dialectically their adopted language. When under the name of 

 Normans they conquered and settled in England, they again adopted 

 the language of the conquered, though modifying the English tongue 

 by many words and phrases brought with them from Normandy, and 

 we have just seen how some of their descendants who settled in Ireland 

 for the third time changed their speech for that of the conquered. 



Hitherto all our examples show the adoption by the conquerors of 



