[…] the deadening of the native processes of composition and derivation and inflection, caused in part by the same great historical event [the Norman invasion], made the language more incapable of meeting out of its own resources any great call for new expression. So, when the pressing exigencies of the last century or two, almost unexampled in their urgency, arose, the resource of borrowing, already much availed of, was drawn upon almost to excess.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.118

[…] there is another kind and rate of borrowing in which our language indulges, more or less in common with others. All the leading nations of Europe have received their culture and their religion, directly or indirectly, from Greece and Rome.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.116

[…] though a nation may borrow culture from its neighbours, it does not in the same way borrow linguistic development; no race ever adopted a new mode of structural growth for its native speech by imitation of another; though many a community has, under sufficient external inducement, exchanged its native speech for another; and borrowing […] especially accompanies transfer of culture, and is capable of going on to such an extent as vastly to enrich the borrowing speech and fit it for higher uses.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.225

Borrowing, in greater or less degree, is well-nigh universally resorted to; there is hardly a dialect in the world, of which the speakers ever come in contact with those of another dialect, which has not taken something out of that other. What comes most easily after this fashion is names for articles and institutions of foreign growth, which on making their acquaintance, and deeming them worthy of introduction or adoption, we often find it convenient to call by the names given them by their former possessors. So the ‘banana’ is a tropical fruit, with its own tropical title […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.114

There are degrees of kind as well as of extent in the process of borrowing. What is most easily taken out of the stores of one language to be added to those of another is the names and epithets of things, nouns and adjectives; verbs, much less easily; particles, hardly at all; apparatus of derivation, prefixes and suffixes, very sparingly; and apparatus of inflection, endings of declension and conjugation, least of all.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.119