To follow the history of interpreting, political, commercial and social, in those distant ages, would be to trace the course of migration, of conquest, of trade and of colonization over a great part of the then known world. It is only here and there, however, and incidentally that we are brought face to face with a class of men, whose presence we feel in all this moving to and fro of humanity. Often between two or among several contiguous but alien communities there grew up, as in later times, a sort of lingua franca intelligible to both or all. Such a service was rendered, as Prof. Sayce tells us (The Ancient Empires of the East, p. 174), by the Aramaic which, after the fall of Tyre and Sidon under the second Assyrian Empire, superseded the older forms of speech and became the language of trade and diplomacy over a considerable portion of the Hither East. What is called a lingua franca must, of course, be looked at separately from that other outcome of the effort to do without interpreters, among nationalities thrown constantly together, which has been fitly designated jargon. This class of speech-to which, perhaps, philologists have not paid sufficient attention as a factor in the formation of new tongues-has generally come into existence under circumstances which would ordinarily call for the services of an interpreter. As well-known instances of it, may be mentioned the Chinook jargon of the northern Pacific coast, the Nahua-Spanish of Mexico, and the Pigeon English of the Anglo-Chinese.* That lingo of this kind was not un

* I have just received through the courtesy of the learned author, an extremely valuable contribution to the elucidation of this branch of linguistics from the pen of the most accomplished master of the philology of the aboriginal languages of this continent, Mr. Horatio Hale, M.A., F.R.S. Can., Ethnographer and Philologist of the U. S. Exploring Expedition. It is entitled "A Manual of the Oregon Trade Language, or 'Chinook Jargon' "- -a subject with which Mr. Hale was the first to deal scientifically some forty years ago. The volume is published by Messrs Whittaker & Co., White Hart Street, Paternoster Row, London.

known to the ancient world, we have hints, more or less significant, scattered through the authors of antiquity.

It would be interesting to know whether there was any such common tongue to the hosts of mercenaries from all parts of the world that served under the Carthaginians in the Punic wars, such as we find so vividly depicted in "Salammbo."

Some of the kings and generals who reigned over a variety of races were accomplished linguists. Mithridates, king of Pontus and Bithynia, spoke, according to Aulus Gellius (Noct. Att. xvii. 17), no less than twenty-five distinct languages, never seeking the aid of an interpreter when he had to communicate with any of the people under his sway. The Roman Senate, for centuries, prompted by pride and in order to maintain its dignity before outsiders, pursued just the opposite course. We learn from Valerius Maximus (ii 2. 2) that even to the Greeks they insisted on speaking Latin, "so that the latter, casting aside that volubility in which they excelled, were forced to speak through an interpreter, not in Rome only, but throughout the empire, and even in Asia and Greece, that reverence for the Latin language might be diffused through all nations." "Who, then," he continues, "opened the door to that usage which now deafens the ears of the Senate with Greek pleadings? Molon, the rhetor, I believe, who was such a spur to the literary ambition of Cicero. He it was who first of all foreigners was heard without an interpreter."

At

Nevertheless, for purposes of trade, there was no lack of interpreters in the outlying parts of the empire. Dioscurias (now Iskuria), an old Milesian colony in Colchis, there were as Pliny (Hist. Nat. vi. 15) informs us, at one time no less than one hundred and thirty persons acting in that capacity, so great was the concourse of various tribes and tongues who came to trade in that locality. We know also that interpreters were constantly employed in connection with war and diplomacy.

Polybius refers to them in his history of the relations between Rome and Carthage. In one passage he makes a Celtic chief act as interpreter between the Carthaginians and his own people. In another he says that a Gaul, Anbaritus, had learned to speak Punic so well that the Carthaginians found no difficulty in understanding him. Livy (xxvii 43) states that a letter from Hasdrubal to Hannibal, which had been despatched through certain Gaulish and Numidian horsemen, had been intercepted near Metapontum and brought to Quintus Claudius, the propraetor, who had it read to him by an interpreter-the captives being also questioned as to its contents. Cæsar, (i. 19) in describing his private interview with Divitiacus, uses an expression which makes it plain that the interpreter was an official of primary importance on his campaigns (quotidianis interpretibus remotis.) Cicero, in his treatise on Divination (De Divinatione, ii, 64) compares the obscurity of so-called revelations from the Gods to the use of their own tongue in the Roman Senate by Carthaginians or Spaniards without an interpreter; and in the De Finibus (v. 29) he uses the same illustration in deriding the wordy darkness of certain philosophers. "As in the Senate," he says, "there is always some one who asks to speak through an interpreter, so we require an interpreter in listening to them." Under the Empire the interpreter was still more necessary. He continued to be, in the western half of it, a person of prominent usefulness until the inrush of the Barbarians. The story of Vigilius, the would-be assassin, of Attila, so dramatically told by Gibbon, shows that he was still a man of influence for good or evil when the spirit and the power of Imperial Rome were in the last stages of decay. In the Eastern Empire and in the realms beyond and in the states that rose upon the ruins of Rome his functions were exercised as actively as ever, while the preaching of Christianity to the nations of the world added to his consequence and dignity. The story of his labors as a missionary, or the companion.

and helper of missionaries, forms one of the most interesting chapters in the history of Christendom-a chapter not yet completed. Between the fall of the western empire (A.D. 476) and the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, the growth of nations, languages and states in Europe, the rise of Islam, the raids of the Northmen, the conquests of the Arabs, the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire, the Crusades, the spread of commerce to the distant East, the sending of embassies and the exchange of courtesies between sovereigns of realms remote from each other-as between Charlemagne and Haroun al Raschid, and between the latter and the King of Corea, pilgrimages and voyages -these and countless other incidents in the progress of civilization tended to keep alive the influence of the interpreter.

It is not unworthy of mention that the extremely common word "talk" is a perpetual reminder to all of English speech of a time when their Scandinavian ancestors conversed with their Lithuanian neighbors through an interpreter-tulkas, in the tongue of the latter people having that meaning. "Talk" has the distinction of being the only word of Lithuanian origin in the English language. In like manner, the word "slave" points back to a time when "from the Euxine to the Adriatic and away north to the Baltic, in the state of captives or subjects, the Slavonians overspread the land." A word, much less common, but equally pertinent to the subject of this paper, is chouse," meaning to "cheat," which is simply the Turkish term for interpreter. It was at first slang and its use arose from a fraud having, in 1609, been practised by an official of that class and nation on several English merchants. The dragoman (a word allied to the Chaldee targum, interpretation or version) may be a cheat in his own land but there he is or was a much less audacious fellow than the turbaned Turk, who swaggered in the England of King Jamie. De Busbecq, one of the earliest of the ambassadors sent to Con

stantinople after the conquest, has left an account of his presentation to Solyman the Magnificent, and of the awe which his presence imposed among the courtiers and officials of the palace. The tradition was kept up-though foreigners had long ceased to cower at the Sultan's name-even as late as the beginning of the second quarter of this century. In describing the visit of Lord Strangford and his suite to Mahmoud in 1826, the Rev, W. Walsh says that the ambassador's speech was translated to the Sultan by his trembling dragoman, and that his majesty's reply, after be ing hesitatingly repeated by the Vizier, was by the drago man stammered out in French to the ambassador. The dragoman's terror," he adds, "was deplorable; the perspiration dropped from his countenance and no wonder: his predecessor had just been executed and he had no hope of escaping the same fate, nor did he." A much less melancholy account of the manner in which the Levantine interpreter discharges his duty will be found in Kinglake's "Eothen."

In Sir John Mandeville's time it would appear that intercourse was sometimes facilitated by the unexpected linguistic accomplishments of the believers in the prophet. The old English traveller was surprised to discover that the Sultan of Babylon (Cairo) and his courtiers could speak French perfectly well. Marco Polo learned to read and write, as well as to converse in four Tartar dialects. Though some have jealously denied that he understood Chinese, he must have been fairly well acquainted with it to administer a province of the empire for three years-the only instance, according to Williams, of a foreigner holding a civil office in China until the present century.

(To be Continued.)