Native tongue

[Matthew Ward]

"Borrowing too many of  them can have the effect of reinforcing how
"restricted" or "unmodern" the Native language is, since everyone can
recognize the English loanwords for what they are."

This is a good point, and a genuine issue.  But, I think that part of
the problem is that many people don't recognize what loan-words are (new
vocabulary in the borrower language, not examples of use of the loaner
language) and that loan-words are very natural.  If there was a greater
understanding of loan-words, then people would be less likely to see
them as evidence that the Native language is somehow "restricted."

I remember reading an article by a linguist in New Zealand who had been
involved with the revival of Maori.  He complained that anti-Maori
forces would say things like "English is a flexible language because it
has been able to draw on other languages, while Maori is limited, and
this is shown by the fact that it has to borrow words from English."
 So, word borrowing is "flexibility" when English does it, but when
Maori does it, it is "limited."  This is outrageously unfair.

Actually, Maori, and every other language on the planet, can do anything
its speakers ask it to do--if vocabulary is lacking, and a words based
on native roots is not constructed fast enough and/or judged to be
acceptable by the speakers of that language, then then it will do what
English has done so very much of:  take words from other languages.
 Since this is natural and (to a certain extent) inevitable, then it is
very unfair and damaging to regard it as somehow  not legitimate.  If we
say that loan-words are degrading to native languages, then the
languages will be thought to be degraded by its speakers and by others,
which is, again, very unfair.

I do understand the point that if so many of the loan words are from
English, and if English happens to be the dominant language in the
particular society, then it brings up the issue "Why don't we just use
English?"  This issue is probably the same for Spanish loanwords in
Mayan languages, Chinese loanwords in Chinese minority languages, and
any other situation you can think of.  With that in mind, it would be
good if some borrowing for Native American languages was done from
languages other than English, although for obvious reasons, English
remains the most convenient language to mine for vocabulary for those
who live in countries where English is the dominant language.

But, the whole "Why don't we just use English" question reflects another
common misunderstanding:  "language = lexicon."  Lexicon is indeed one
important part of language, but structure and phonetics are equally
important.  And, lexicon is the most transitory aspect of languages; it
changes rapidly, while grammatical and phonetic properties change much
more slowly.  The native language of Jamaica, for example, is NOT
English, although more than 90% of its words come from English, its
structure and pronunciation are very different--so different that native
English speakers cannot understand it (though most Jamaicans can speak
their own distinctive variety of English as well, which confuses
people--your average Bob Marley song is not in Bob Marley's native
language).  Likewise, Haitian Creole is not French, although most of its
vocabulary is from French.  My point here is that no matter how many
English words various Native American languages (which, unlike the two
Creole languages cited above, have no historical relationship to English
at all) borrow, they will not become English.  The real danger, of
course, is that such languages will die out from disuse, and lack of new
lexical items is a common excuse for such lack of use.

Another, related issue is that languages do seem to differ in terms of
how easily they create terms based on native roots.  Two languages I
speak:  Japanese and Mandarin Chinese, differ very much in this regard:
 Japanese does not create new vocabulary from native roots easily, while
Mandarin does.  As a result, the lexicon of Japanese, like English,
seems to be largely comprised of loanwords, while Mandarin has very few
loanwords.  While native languages are obviously in a very different
situations as those two huge, dominant languages find themselves in,
they presumably still have to deal with this issue.  I would hope that
those which find a greater need to borrow words would not be subject to
negative stigma because of this fact.

All in all, I think that there are real advantages to creating words
from native roots, and not just for the reasons discussed above:  I
often do not understand why English words mean what they mean, while I
do understand why Chinese words mean what they mean, simply because the
root meanings are mostly from Chinese itself, although English is my
native language, and Chinese is not.  It is just that the ability to do
this seems to vary from language to language, and those which do not
easily create new terms from native roots should not be thought to be
somehow inferior to those which don't.

As for the issue of "world view" which another poster brought up:  for
me, this is more of a question of loss of existing vocabulary items,
rather than a question of how new items are created.  After all, all
cultures change all the time, and their languages change with them.
 But, language contain a wonderful wealth of knowledge about how a
culture developed--older words contain a great deal of history that
should not be tossed aside casually.  If the culture is preserved,
however, (by which I don't mean that it will not change--just that it
will go on) then the unique cultural words that all languages have will
tend to survive as well.  That is, if the language itself survives.  Of
course, one of the biggest tragedies of language death is the loss of
all of those unique words for feelings, ideas, concepts, etc.  Not to
mention the songs, stories, histories, ceremonies, and everything else...