probably influenced by the German /wagen/. He also says that the American use of /hold on/ for /stop/ was suggested by the German /halt an/, and White says that the substitution of /standpoint/ for /point of view/, long opposed by all purists, was first made by an American professor who sought "an Anglicized form" of the German /standpunkt/. The same German influence may be behind the general facility with which American forms compound nouns. In most other languages, for example, Latin and French, the process is rare, and even English lags far behind American. But in German it is almost unrestricted. "It is," says L. P. Smith, "a great step in advance toward that ideal language in which meaning is expressed, not by terminations, but by the simple method of word position." The immigrants from the South of Ireland, during the period under review, exerted an influence upon the language that was vastly greater than that of the Germans, both directly and indirectly, but their contributions to the actual vocabulary were probably less. They gave American, indeed, relatively few new words; perhaps /shillelah/, /colleen/, /spalpeen/, /smithereens/ and /poteen/ exhaust the unmistakably Gaelic list. /Lallapalooza/ is also probably an Irish loan-word, though it is not Gaelic. It apparently comes from /allay-foozee/, a Mayo provincialism, signifying a sturdy fellow. /Allay-foozee/, in its turn, comes from the French /Allez-fusil/, meaning "Forward the muskets!"--a memory, [Pg091] according to P. W. Joyce,[37] of the French landing at Killala in 1798. Such phrases as /Erin go bragh/ and such expletives as /begob/ and /begorry/ may perhaps be added: they have got into American, though they are surely not distinctive Americanisms. But of far more importance than these few contributions to the vocabulary were certain speech habits that the Irish brought with them--habits of pronunciation, of syntax and even of grammar. These habits were, in part, the fruit of efforts to translate the idioms of Gaelic into English, and in part borrowings from the English of the age of James I. The latter, preserved by Irish conservatism in speech,[38] came into contact in America with habits surviving, with more or less change, from the same time, and so gave those American habits an unmistakable reinforcement. The Yankees, so to speak, had lived down such Jacobean pronunciations as /tay/ for /tea/ and /desave/ for /deceive/, and these forms, on Irish lips, struck them as uncouth and absurd, but they still clung, in their common speech, to such forms as /h'ist/ for /hoist/, /bile/ for /boil/, /chaw/ for /chew/, /jine/ for /join/,[39] /sass/ for /sauce/, /heighth/ for /height/ and /rench/ for /rinse/ and /lep/ for /leap/, and the employment of precisely the same forms by the thousands of Irish immigrants who spread through the country undoubtedly gave them a certain support, and so protected them, in a measure, from the assault of the purists.