BORROWING WORDS

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 32, 30 April 1927, Page 7

BORROWING WORDS

ENGLAND TAKES LEAD A French professor, lecturing in England, has been poiriting out how strangely words borrowed from one language into another may keep their meaning in the language into which they are borrowed but change it in the language from which they came. They may even be lost in the language in which they originated and be preserved in the language that has adopted them. English, for instance, has been a great borrower of words. It has a very large choice of them. Shakespeare is said to have used about 24,000 words, but Victor Hugo, the French poet and novelist who wrote 350 years later, used only about 9.000 words. Many words taken into English from French centuries ago, and used as English by Shakespeare, have now either been lost altogether in French or have changed their meaning, while in English they keep their old French meaning. Thus a French schoolboy reading French books written three or four hundred years ago finds words he does not know, or words whose meaning he mistakes because w heir meaning has changed; but he would know them and understand them, if he knew English, for they have retained their place and meaning in English. An English schoolboy can often understand Old French better than a French schoolboy because of the words English has absorbed and kept, but which French has either lost I altogether or altered in meaning.