LANGUAGE AND RACE. 407 



ously idiomatic ; and the individuality of each is so distinct 

 from that of the other as constantly to render their literal 

 inter-translation impossible. Grerman colloquial idioms may 

 be paraphrased into English, and vice versd j to render 

 them word for word is to deprive them not only of point 

 and force, but of intelligibility. Men of ripe scholarship, 

 who may be said to have thoroughly mastered both lan- 

 guages, are not infrequently perplexed by the apparent 

 inadequacy of the one to reproduce the inner feeling or 

 sentiment, as well as the textual meaning or significance 

 of the other." 



With regard to Idioms, which may be defined as " modes 

 of expression peculiar to a language," I shall say no more 

 than that they may be borrowed by one tongue from another 

 belonging to the same great group ; but that if the lan- 

 guages in contact belong to different types — Isolating, 

 Agglutinate, Inflectional — such exchanges do not occur. 

 Thus the Finnic idioms are still agglutinative, although the 

 verbal forms are inflectional. 



To proceed, — we find that, as a rule, when two or more 

 peoples speaking different dialects are fused into one nation, 

 the future spoken language will in the main be that of the 

 more numerous race. A good example of this is the case 

 of the Norman-French dialect, which gradually disappeared 

 before the Anglo-Saxon, so that at the present day our 

 spoken language is mainlj'' a derivative of the latter. 



Professor Meiklejohn says that though only about one- 

 third of the 100,000 dictionavTj words are of Anglo-Saxon 

 origin, yet " the spoken social language is almost entirely 

 Anglo-Saxon ; it borrows only here and there from foreign 

 tongues." 



It has been found that 96 per cent, of the words in 

 St. John's Gospel (A.V.) are pure English (A.-S.) : the pro- 



