208 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 



only a minority of them have in English cast off the literary im- 

 print. 



Much more philological interest is attached to the older strata of 

 Latin loan-words, the oldest of which were adopted before the 

 Angles and Saxons left the Continent. Here we have to do with an 

 oral influence, and the forms of these words therefore reflect the 

 pronunciation of the Latin-speaking communities with which the 

 various Germanic tribes came into contact. The deviations from the 

 classical forms found in the English shapes of these early loans must 

 therefore be due partly to changes in the language from which they 

 were borrowed, partly to the subsequent alterations they have 

 undergone in the borrowing language. Rightly interpreted, they 

 consequently shed light on the development of Latin into Romance 

 as well as on that of Germanic into English, and inversely, in order 

 to be rightly interpreted, they require familiarity with both languages 

 on the part of the investigator. As contemporary monuments are 

 totally wanting, at any rate for the borrowing language, the subject 

 is extremely difficult of treatment; but most of the phonological 

 difficulties have been surmounted in an important work by A. 

 Pogatscher. 1 The cultural side of these early loans as well as of the 

 somewhat younger loans due chiefly to the conversion to Christian- 

 ity has been treated of by Kluge and others, especially MacGilli- 

 vray. 2 



The Danish and Norwegian vikings and especially those Scandi- 

 navians who settled in England for good, left a deeper mark on the 

 English language than is very often supposed. It is evident, therefore, 

 that the student of English should not neglect the Scandinavian 

 languages, the less so as their close relationship with English and the 

 early development in them of a literary style enable the scholar to 

 clear up a great many points in English, even apart from those points 

 where the protracted contact between the two nations has left its 

 marks on either nation's language and civilization generally. Hitherto 

 it has chiefly been Scandinavian scholars who have grappled with 

 the numerous problems connected with this contact. The Dane 

 Johannes Steenstrup has traced much of juridical importance back 

 to Scandinavian institutions, his chief criterion being the loan-word 

 test. 3 The Swede Erik Brate gave us the first account of the fates 

 of Scandinavian sounds in Early Middle English, 4 and lately his 

 countryman Erik Bjorkman has given us a very full and extremely 



1 Pogatscher, Zur lautlehre der griechischen, etc., lehnworte im AUenglischen. 

 Strassburg, 1888. 



1 F. Kluge, in Paul's Grundriss der germanischen philologie, i, 2d ed. Strass- 

 burg, 1899. MacGillivray, The Influence of Christianity on the Vocabulary of Old 

 English. Halle, 1902. 



3 Job. Steenstrup, Danelag. Normanneme, vol. rv. Copenhagen, 1882. 



4 Erik Brate, Nordische khnworter im Orrmulum. Paul und Braune's Beitrage zur 

 geschichte der deutschen sprache, x (1884). 



