,
religion. It would be difficult to point to a completely isolated
language or dialect, least of all among the primitive peoples. The tribe
is often so small that intermarriages with alien tribes that speak other
dialects or even totally unrelated languages are not uncommon. It may
even be doubted whether intermarriage, intertribal trade, and general
cultural interchanges are not of greater relative significance on
primitive levels than on our own. Whatever the degree or nature of
contact between neighboring peoples, it is generally sufficient to lead
to some kind of linguistic interinfluencing. Frequently the influence
runs heavily in one direction. The language of a people that is looked
upon as a center of culture is naturally far more likely to exert an
appreciable influence on other languages spoken in its vicinity than to
be influenced by them. Chinese has flooded the vocabularies of Corean,
Japanese, and Annamite for centuries, but has received nothing in
return. In the western Europe of medieval and modern times French has
exercised a similar, though probably a less overwhelming, influence.
English borrowed an immense number of words from the French of the
Norman invaders, later also from the court French of Isle de France,
appropriated a certain number of affixed elements of derivational value
(e.g., _-ess_ of _princess_, _-ard_ of _drunkard_, _-ty_ of _royalty_),
may have been somewhat stimulated in its general analytic drift by
contact with French,[164] and even allowed French to modify its phonetic
pattern slightly (e.g., initial _v_ and _j_ in words like _veal_ and
_judge_; in words of Anglo-Saxon origin _v_ and _j_ can only occur after
vowels, e.g., _over_, _hedge_). But English has exerted practically no
influence on French.

[Footnote 164: The earlier students of English, however, grossly
exaggerated the general "disintegrating" effect of French on middle
English. English was moving fast toward a more analytic structure long
before the French influence set in.]

The simplest kind of influence that one language may exert on another is
the "borrowing" of words. When there is cultural borrowing there is
always the likelihood that the associated words may be borrowed too.
When the early Germanic peoples of northern Europe first learned of
wine-culture and of paved streets from their commercial or warlike
contact with the Romans, it was only natural that they should adopt the
Latin words for the strange be