Native tongue

[Sean M. Burke]

At 11:11 AM 2003-04-23 -0600, Matthew Ward wrote:
>One comment, though:  when reading articles about minority languages in in
>the mainstream press, I frequently find that the writer sees loanwords as
>an example of language loss.  [...]

I bet the writers are not the source of that idea -- I bet it comes from
some people in the community.  In New Mexico, I certainly heard a lot of
that idea; I heard some Navajos express the idea that people who spoke
dialects with the fewest loanwords spoke "pure Navajo"; and I heard Apaches
complain that their languages have "too much Spanish", so that (they said)
when the same thing can be expressed with an Apache-derived word and a
Spanish-derived word (no matter how much it has been adapted to Apache
phonology by centuries of use), the Apache-derived word is always the
better one to use.


Personally, I think it's the linguistic equivalent of "in the old days,
everything was better (except that life was so hard and you don't know how
easy you kids have it today)" -- interesting, possibly true, but a waste of
time to think about.

While time spent inventing words for "waffle iron" in (insert Native
language here) may give a sense of progress ("we're modernizng the
language!"), I think the time would be MUCH better spent instead compiling
a general-purpose dictionary -- to name just one language preservation task
that exercises similar parts of the brain.

--
Sean M. Burke    http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/