Native tongue

[Sarah Supahan]

These are wonderful comments on the issue, backed up with good evidence.

I want to clarify what I meant - if the "world view" in the last
paragraph refers to my posting:

It would seem important to use or create words from the world view of
the language, if not using borrowed words that fit. In this way, the
concepts and attitudes of the culture are embedded within the words.
For example, in Karuk the word for teacher is "one who points" and a
school is "the pointing place". Within this identification is a
cultural world view: At the time white teachers came to this area,
pointing was not considered a polite thing to do. Yet, here were these
people with their pointing sticks pointing to things on the school room
boards and pointing at people.  The Karuk words to identify schools and
teachers, therefore, don't have anything to do with teaching or
knowledge, but instead bring forth a cultural understanding. On the
other hand, the Karuk word for telephone, which basically means
"shouting from a distance" is not so very different than the original
Greek root words tele and phone. Therefore, if words are to be created
or used, the most important thing, it seems to me, is if the ideas come
from within the context of the language's culture.





On Monday, April 28, 2003, at 03:26 PM, Matthew Ward wrote:

> "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...
>