2 BEACH-LA-MAR. 
inflection, a shade of meaning, a canon of grammar—he is perfectly 
ready to sacrifice them all if only he may succeed in making himself 
in some sort comprehended. Placed in the same situation the phil- 
ologist, the amateur of the preciosity of speech, would be dead in the 
misunderstanding in about the time that it would take the sailor to 
establish a thriving business on the beach in which iron nails serve 
each as price for a log of sandalwood worth its weight in silver. 
Under this stimulation—and beads are good trade, too—the savage 
is avid to acquire the sailor’s speech and to teach his own. Thus 
jargon best, most commonly, begins. * 
Of the jargons, artificial yet valuable languages, we list the follow- 
ing as among the most conspicuous examples. 
First in order of time, and ona Latin base, was the Lingua Franca 
of the Venetians and Genovese in the Levant, when those Italian 
ports served empires of commerce. By an odd portage among the 
crews of the adventurous fleets of Prince Henry the Navigator, the 
Portuguese (Portingales in the speech of their English rivals) carried 
this jargon to the Malay seas, where it underwent new growth in the 
admixture of Indonesian elements and lives in ready currency. 
Next arose the trade language of the treaty ports of China, the 
still existing Pidgin. Here the base is English. The conditions under 
which it came into being are beautifully typical. The English were 
not of that order of mind which might set itself to the task of acquir- 
ing the highly cultivated language of the Middle Kingdom; nor on 
the terms of their scantily tolerated residence at a few mean points, 
whose infamy was notorious matter of local knowledge, did they 
have the time to engage upon such study. Scorning the inferior 
foreign culture which was so lacking in the dignity of courtesy, the 
Chinese were disposed to acquire only so much of the new language 
as might serve them in business, and a sympathy which can see 
beneath the unruffled calm of Chinese benignity will have no diffi- 
culty in discerning the pleasures of disdain with which consciously 
they mutilated the English speech and when they charily added a 
word or two of their own were sedulous to draw it from the polluted 
speech of the most ignoble classes. 
Of about the same period, but on the other shore of the Pacific, we 
next note the Chinook, the jargon of the fur trade, of the sailors upon 
the sea and the no less adventurous voyageurs du bois. Here the 
conditions were somewhat different; the fur-trader usually estab- 
lished himself in approximately permanent relations with some 
nomadic community of Indians and accompanied them in their wan- 
derings over somewhat well delimited territory. For this reason the 
great mass of this jargon is derived from several Indian languages— 
each, however, subjected to the typical and necessary mutilation. 
The external element is fairly divisible between an English and a 
