twelfth
and thirteenth centuries, we should find that quite one-tenth of these
are words borrowed from other languages. After this time fewer words
were borrowed, but still the English language has borrowed much more
than most languages.

Some people think that it is a pity that we have borrowed so many
words, and say that we should speak and write "pure English." But we
must remember that Britain has had the most wonderful history of all
the nations. She has had the greatest explorers, adventurers, and
sailors. She has built up the greatest empire the world has ever seen.
It is only natural that her language should have borrowed from the
languages of nearly every nation in the world, even from the Chinese
and from the native languages of Australia and Africa.

Ever since the middle of the sixteenth century England has been a
great sea-going nation. Her sailors have explored and traded all over
the world, and naturally they have brought back many new words from
East and West. Sometimes these are the names of new things brought
from strange lands. Thus _calico_ was given that name from _Calicut_,
because the cotton used to make calico came from there. From Arabia we
got the words _harem_ and _magazine_, and from Turkey the name
_coffee_, though this is really an Arabian word. We had already
learned the words _cotton_, _sugar_, and _orange_ from the Arabs at
the time of the Crusades. From the West Indies and from South America
many words came, though the English learned these first from the
Spaniards, who were the first to discover these lands. Among these
words are the names of such common things as _chocolate_, _cocoa,
tomato_. The words _canoe_, _tobacco_, and _potato_ come to us from
the island of Hayti. The words _hammock_ and _hurricane_ come to us
from the Caribbean Islands, and so did the word _cannibal_, which came
from _Caniba_, which was sometimes used instead of Carib.

Even the common word _breeze_, by which we now mean a light wind,
first came to us from the Spanish word _briza_, which meant the
north-east trade wind. The name _alligator_, an animal which
Englishmen saw for the first time in these far-off voyages, is really
only an attempt to use the Spanish words for the lizard--_al lagarto_.

When the English at length settled themselves in North America they
took many words from the native Indians, such as _tomahawk_,
_moccasin_, and _hickory_.

In England and in Europe generally history shows us th