Note 47 — Chapter XI · THE FOREIGNER

I use the terms loan-words and borrowed words because they are convenient and firmly established, not because they are exact. There are two essential respects in which linguistic borrowing differs from the borrowing of, say, a knife or money: the lender does not deprive himself of the use of the word any more than if it had not been borrowed by the other party, and the borrower is under no obligation to return the word at any future time. Linguistic ‘borrowing’ is really nothing but imitation, and the only way in which it differs from a child’s imitation of its parents’ speech is that here something is imitated which forms a part of a speech that is not imitated as a whole.