NAUTICAL LANGUAGE. I 59 



These foreign words have either not been introduced into 

 standard English or else, if introduced, they appear in a dif- 

 ferent form. The latter proposition may be illustrated by the 

 sailor's word lateen. It is the name of a sail spread upon a 

 long yard slung at an oblique angle to the mast, a rig origi- 

 nally peculiar to the Mediterranean. When the English 

 sailor added this kind of sail to his knowledge he naturally 

 gave it the name of the people from whom he acquired it — 

 the Latin — by which was meant the people we now differen- 

 tiate as Italians, Spanish and French. Lateen, therefore, is 

 the nautical form of the word Latin, its accent and spelling 

 showing that it was adopted by ear. It retains its accent on 

 the last syllable because it has not had sufficient general use 

 in English to subject it to the tendency toward accent on the 

 first syllable which has produced the standard Lat'in from 

 Lati'ntis and Lati'no. So the Dutch jol and Danish jolle, 

 where j is equivalent to English y in sound, become the 

 sailor's yaxvl, while the written word, converted to our sound 

 of the letter j , produces the word jolly-boat, in which jolly 

 has acquired an English significance as descriptive of the 

 light, easy character of the little craft, and the word boat has 

 been added to complete the sens6 to English ears. 



Sometimes the nautical and standard forms differ because 

 of diverse origin. Cargo for example, is a Spanish and Port- 

 uguese form of charge. The latter comes to us through the 

 French, as an item of our Anglo-Norman vocabulary, while 

 cargo and such words as stevedore, compass, binnacle, mizzen, 

 are foreign terms introduced from the Italian, Spanish and 

 Portuguese peoples who preceded the English in commerce 

 and navigation. Binnacle and compass represent the use of 

 the needle adopted by the northern from the southern sailor. 

 Mizzen ^^- like lateen, names a particular kind of sail used in 

 Southern Europe. Cargo and stevedore represent the commer- 



* See Proc. Del. Co. Ixst. Sci., Vol. II, p. 29. 



