TWO DOZEN LANGUAGES

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LIII, Issue 14, 19 February 1932, Page 5

TWO DOZEN LANGUAGES

MIXED IN ONE SENTENCE,

ABSORBENT ENGLISH

LINGUISTIC CURIOSITY

Who would like to speak twentyfour languages? Who would like to converse with equal ease in Japanese, Arabic and Hungarian? Well/ then, read this:— The ugly thug loafed at a damaskcovered table on the cafe balcony Wednesday, eating goulash and drinking hot chocolate with a halfcaste brunette in a kimono-sleeved lemon-yellow gown and a crimson angora wool shawl, while he deciphered a code notation from a canny smuggler of silk cargoes on the back of the paper menu. The language sources of this unusual sentence are:— Ugly—Danish. Thug—Hindu. Loafed—German. Cafe, brunette, menu—French. Balcony—ltalian. Damask —Syrian. Covered, table, code, notation.— Latin. Wednesday, drinking, hot, half.— Scandinavian. Eating, with, yellow, wool.—Sanskrit. Goulash—Hungarian. Chocolate —Mexican. Caste—Portuguese. Lemon, shawl —Persian. Kimono—Japanese. Sleeved, back —Anglo-Saxon. Gown—Celtic. Crimson, deciphered—Arabic. Angora—Turkish. While —Greek. Canny—Scotch or Icelandic. Silk—Chinese. Cargo—Spanish. Smuggler—Dutch. The most absorbent language in the world is English, according to one language expert, who finds in this quality of absorption the basic reason for its rapid spread throughout the! world.

Our language grows with each innovation brought from foreign shores. Java's art of decorating cloth came, and with it the word batik. A new game from China established ma jong. The czars of Russia have gone, but their title creeps into our speech as baseball, motion pictures, and other business associations engage "czars." The Sanskrit words in this manytongued sentence are words Noah probably shipped on board the Ark, since they antedate the Greek. Sanskrit is the oldest written Indo-Euro-pean language, so scholars believe that many of our common words are kin to terms preserved only in ancient Indian classics. English words similar to Sanskrit can be said to have had their origin in Turkestan and the Near East.