In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the real "Middle Ages," the French poets, scholars, and writers were the greatest in Europe. The greatest doctors, lawyers, and scholars of the western lands of Europe had often been educated at schools or universities in France. Those who wrote about medicine and law often used French words to describe things for which no English word was known. The French writers borrowed many words from Latin, and the English writers did the same. Sometimes they took Latin words from the French, but sometimes they only imitated the French writers, and took a Latin word and changed it to seem like a French word. If we were to count the words used by English writers in the 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_.