Thus the Norman-French _uncle_, _aunt_, _cousin_, _nephew_, and _niece_, have wholly ousted their Anglo-Saxon equivalents.

In other instances the Romance words have enriched the language with symbols for really new ideas.

This is still more strikingly the case with the direct importations from the classical Greek and Latin which began at the period of the Renaissance.

Such words usually refer either to abstract conceptions for which the English language had no suitable expression, or to the accurate terminology of the advanced sciences.

In every-day conversation our vocabulary is almost entirely English; in speaking or writing upon philosophical or scientific subjects it is largely intermixed with Romance and Graeco-Latin elements.