524 Evolution and Language 



in the present day ? Some communities, like the Germans, prefer to 

 construct new words for new ideas out of the old material existing 

 in the language ; others, like the English, prefer to go to the ancient 

 languages of Greece and Rome for terms to express new ideas. The 

 same chemical element is described in the two languages as sour stuff 

 (Sauerstoff) and as oxygen. Both terms mean the same thing etymo- 

 logically as well as in fact. On behalf of the German method, it may 

 be contended that the new idea is more closely attached to already 

 existing ideas, by being expressed in elements of the language which 

 are intelligible even to the meanest capacity. For the English practice 

 it may be argued that, if we coin a new word which means one thing, 

 and one thing only, the idea which it expresses is more clearly defined 

 than if it were expressed in popularly intelligible elements like sour 

 stuff. If the etymological value of words were always present in the 

 minds of their users, oxygen would undoubtedly have an advantage 

 over sour stuff as a technical term. But the tendency in language is 

 to put two words of this kind which express but one idea under a 

 single accent, and when this has taken place, no one but the student 

 of language any longer observes what the elements really mean. 

 When the ordinary man talks of a blackbird it is certainly not present 

 to his consciousness that he is talking of a black bird, unless for some 

 reason conversation has been dwelling upon the colour rather than 

 other characteristics of the species. 



But, it may be said, words like oxygen are introduced by learned 

 men, and do not represent the action of the man in the street, who, 

 after all, is the author of most additions to the stock of human 

 language. We may go back therefore some four centuries to a 

 period, when scientific study was only in its infancy, and see what 

 process was followed. With the discovery of America new products 

 never seen before reached Europe, and these required names. Three 

 of the most characteristic were tobacco, the potato, and the turkey. 

 How did these come to be so named? The first people to import 

 these products into Europe were naturally the Spanish discoverers. 

 The first of these words — tobacco— appears in forms which differ only 

 slightly in the languages of all civilised countries : Spanish tabam, 

 Italian tobacco, French tabac, Dutch and German tabak, Swedish 

 tobak, etc. The word in the native dialect of Hayti is said to have 

 been tabaco, but to have meant not the plant 1 but the pipe in which 

 it was smoked. It thus illustrates a frequent feature of borrowing — 

 that the word is not borrowed in its proper signification, but in some 

 sense closely allied thereto, which a foreigner, understanding the 



1 According to William Barclay, Nepenthes, or the Virtue of Tobacco, Edinburgh, 1614, 

 "the countrey which God hath honoured and blessed with this happie and holy herbe 

 doth call it in their native language Petum." 



