Native tongue

[Sarah Supahan]

I feel that the concern should really be for keeping the world view of
the language intact. In other words, keeping the sense of the culture
and it's expression though the language. If this can be done using
English loan words, then great . Using another tribal language may or
may not be the solution either. However, it seems that it's best to
always first turn to the original language itself to look for a way to
express the new item. After all, this has been done forever in all
languages. It is how a language grows. Don't most Native Languages now
include their own term for 'white people'?

Sarah Supahan




On Friday, April 25, 2003, at 01:55 PM, Jordan Lachler wrote:

> I think Matthew is right on with his post.  But I also think there's a
> potential danger with using too many loanwords (or even nativized
> loanwords) in a given semantic domain...
>
> While Israeli auto mechanics could get away with using large numbers of
> English loanwords during their daily discussions, I think this would be
> less successful for Native American auto mechanics, because the natural
> question would be: "If so many of the words in this conversation have
> to be
> borrowed from English, why don't we just have this conversation in
> English
> to begin with and save ourselves the bother?"
>
> While borrowing a couple of terms in a given semantic domain poses
> little
> problem -- and, as Matthew said, is actually a good thing, since it
> helps
> to spread the use of the language into new areas -- 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.
>
> So, as Matthew also said, coming up with Native words from Native
> roots to
> describe new vocabulary items is usually your best bet, even though
> this is
> often not an easy task.  Another option -- although I haven't seen it
> happen very much -- is to borrow from some language other than English
> (or
> French or Spanish, etc...).  So, for example, if you were looking to
> coin a
> term for, let's say, "airplane", instead of borrowing the English term
> and
> making it fit  the Native pronunciation, you could borrow the Navajo
> word
> or the Lakhota word.  Sure, it's still an artifical solution, but at
> least
> doing it this way helps keep English from encroaching any further into
> the
> language.
>
> ---
> Jordan Lachler
> Sealaska Heritage Institute
>