Loan-Words in Latin (Classic Reprint)

By E. R. WHARTON, iT.A. {M ead at theS ocietys Meeting, Bee. 21, 1888.) (1) The percentage of borrowed words in English is about 75, in Persian 62, in Latin 14, in Greek 2|. English is probably the most composite of all languages: to judge by the lists at the end of Skeat sdictionary, half our vocabulary comes from Latin, and a quarter from other foreign sources. Next in order comes Persian, in which about five-eighths of the words are A rabic. In classical Greek, down to 300 B.C., there are 41,100 words, of which perhaps 1000 are foreign :in classical Latin, down to a.d. 117, there are 26,300 words, of which about 3500 are from Greek and perhaps 300 from other languages, In all these figures Proper Names are excluded. These proportions of course refer only to the CM words as given in a dictionar}-, not to their actual use inH literature :a page of Demosthenes or Cicero taken at random will probably show no borrowed words at all, a page of a modernE nglish novel will contain onl} about 20 per cent. of Latin words. For our present purpose it may suffice to consider only theL atin authors of the first rank (excluding in each case fragments) :viz., in chronological order, Plautus, Terence, Cicero Caesar Catullus Lucretius Sallust, Yergil Horace Livy Tibullus Propertius Ovid, Persius, Tacitus, Juvenal. These sixteen authors use 16,900 words, of which 1080 are from Greek and perhaps 200 from other languages, making a proportion of about 8per cent, of loan-words. The Greek loan-words in Latin have been catalogued by The fifjures given in this essav I have arrived at bj simple countinc:, a task which, so tar as I know, no one of my predecessors has attempted: as Douse says iu his Grimm sL aw, it is much easier to use statistics than to make them.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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