verage (_vinum_, English _wine_, German
_Wein_) and the unfamiliar type of road (_strata [via]_, English
_street_, German _Strasse_). Later, when Christianity was introduced
into England, a number of associated words, such as _bishop_ and
_angel_, found their way into English. And so the process has continued
uninterruptedly down to the present day, each cultural wave bringing to
the language a new deposit of loan-words. The careful study of such
loan-words constitutes an interesting commentary on the history of
culture. One can almost estimate the role which various peoples have
played in the development and spread of cultural ideas by taking note of
the extent to which their vocabularies have filtered into those of other
peoples. When we realize that an educated Japanese can hardly frame a
single literary sentence without the use of Chinese resources, that to
this day Siamese and Burmese and Cambodgian bear the unmistakable
imprint of the Sanskrit and Pali that came in with Hindu Buddhism
centuries ago, or that whether we argue for or against the teaching of
Latin and Greek our argument is sure to be studded with words that have
come to us from Rome and Athens, we get some inkling of what early
Chinese culture and Buddhism and classical Mediterranean civilization
have meant in the world's history. There are just five languages that
have had an overwhelming significance as carriers of culture. They are
classical Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Greek, and Latin. In comparison
with these even such culturally important languages as Hebrew and French
sink into a secondary position. It is a little disappointing to learn
that the general cultural influence of English has so far been all but
negligible. The English language itself is spreading because the English
have colonized immense territories. But there is nothing to show that it
is anywhere entering into the lexical heart of other languages as French
has colored the English complexion or as Arabic has permeated Persian
and Turkish. This fact alone is significant of the power of nationalism,
cultural as well as political, during the last century. There are now
psychological resistances to borrowing, or rather to new sources of
borrowing,[165] that were not greatly alive in the Middle Ages or during
the Renaissance.

[Footnote 165: For we still name our new scientific instruments and
patent medicines from Greek and Latin.]

Are there resistances of a more intimate nature to t