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 owygen 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 tabaco, 
Italian tabacco, 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’ 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.” 
