Indian borrowings in english

Content 

INTRODUCTION

1. General characteristic of American Indian language

1.1. Investigation and scolarship of American Indian language

1.2. Classification of South American Indian languages

1.2.1. Indian languages and dialects

2. The main features of American Indian language

2.1. Grammatical peculiarities

2.2. Phonological characteristics

2.3. Vocabulary

2.4. Indianisms

2.5. Writing and texts

3. The Indian borrowings in contemporary American

3.1. Processes of word-formation

3.2. Foreign tendencies

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

INTRODUCTION

      Topicallity. American Indian language is a group of languages that once covered and today still partially cover all of South America, the Antilles, and Central America to the south of a line from the Gulf of Honduras to the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica. Estimates of the number of speakers in that area in pre-Columbian times vary from 10,000,000 to 20,000,000. In the early 1980s there were approximately 15,900,000, more than three-fourths of them in the central Andean areas. Language lists include around 1,500 languages, and figures over 2,000 have been suggested. For the most part, the larger estimate refers to tribal units whose linguistic differentiation cannot be determined. Because of extinct tribes with unrecorded languages, the number of languages formerly spoken is impossible to assess. Only between 550 and 600 languages (about 120 now extinct) are attested by linguistic materials. Fragmentary knowledge hinders the distinction between language and dialect and thus renders the number of languages indeterminate.

      Because the South American Indians originally came from North America, the problem of their linguistic origin involves tracing genetic affiliations with North American groups. To date only Uru-Chipaya, a language in Bolivia, is surely relatable to a Macro-Mayan phylum of North America and Mesoamerica. Hypotheses about the probable centre of dispersion of language groups within South America have been advanced for stocks like Arawakan and Tupian, based on the principle (considered questionable by some) that the area in which there is the greatest variety of dialects and languages was probably the centre from which the language groups dispersed at one time; but the regions in question seem to be refugee regions, to which certain speakers fled, rather than dispersion centres.

      South America is one of the most linguistically differentiated areas of the world. Various scholars hold the plausible view that all American Indian languages are ultimately related. The great diversification in South America, in comparison with the situation of North America, can be attributed to the greater period of time that has elapsed since the South American groups lost contact among themselves. The narrow bridge that allows access to South America (i.e., the Isthmus of Panama) acted as a filter so that many intermediate links disappeared and many groups entered the southern part of the continent already linguistically differentiated.¹

     The theme of the research is the use of Indian borrowings in contemporary American.

     The object of our research is Indian borrowings. The subject is its main peculiarities, stylistic features and usage in colloquial American speech.

     Nowadays we have a lot of theoretical and practical materials about this notion, but only some of them are effective.

     That’s why it is important for us to analyze the works of famous American writers, on the basis upon theoretical knowledge we’ve got during our research.

     The aim of our research is:

• to find out the difference between different types of American Indian language and their peculiarities;
• to analyze methods of their linguistic analysis;
• to find out the place which these Indian borrowings occupy in contemporary American;
• to analyze the influence of cultural factor in analyzing Indian borrowings in contemporary American.

      The tasks of our research are:

• to give the general characteristics of Amerian Indian language;
• to define the main peculiarities of the usage of Indian borrowings in contemporary American;
• to examine different examples of Indian borrowings in contemporary American.

      The practical aim implies that it can be used by teachers while teaching students the notions of stylistics and interpretation of a text.

      The theoretical aim implies that it can be used by young students who want to analyze oral language and its peculiarities while studying famous work of American writers.

      The description of Indian borrowings was made long time ago in works of ancient grammarians and medieval rhetoricians.

      Nowadays Indian borrowings in contemporary American are more vividly interpreted both in general semiotic and linguistic researches.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

1. General characteristic of American Indian language

     Language is central to Indian identity. Although there are exceptions, in general, aboriginal group identity corresponded to the language that its members spoke. This tradition continues in that tribal designations often refer to language, even though in some cases few if any of its members may know the language.

     At the time of the European contact, some 300 languages are estimated to have been in use among the indigenous habitants of the area north of Mexico and a surprisingly large number of these survive to the present day. In the 1990 U.S. census, 136 such languages were identified as household languages by respondents. Although census figures may involve overreporting and underreporting of both languages and their numbers of speakers, by adding in a conservative additional figure for languages found only in Canada, it can be asserted that perhaps half of the estimated number at the European contact are still in use.

      The starting point for discussions of Indian languages is usually their relationships to one another or their classification. The primacy of this concern grows out of the tradition of historical and comparative linguistics, particularly with respect to many European languages in the Indo-European family. The success of the Indo-European tradition is based to some extent on the availability of data over time (as much as four thousand years) in some of the languages. Since no comparable record exists for Indian languages, however, their relationships and their classification have been more problematical.²

      Early students of Indian languages included Thomas Jefferson, who engaged in fieldwork and asked Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to bring back information on the languages of the tribes they encountered on the 1804–1806 expedition. Albert Gallatin, Jefferson's secretary of the Treasury, is also credited with later making the first serious attempt at a comprehensive classification. The definitive classification of Indian languages was produced by the Bureau of American Ethnology under the leadership of John Wesley Powell in 1891 and recognized fifty-eight distinct language families. Since then, generally accepted modifications of the Powell classification have been made that involve mergers of languages and groups with other groups and other rearrangements. However, the view of a large number (more than fifty, including isolates) of distinct language groups in North America has remained the orthodox one. There have, however, been attempts to reduce radically the number to as few as three stocks for the entire New World by postulating remote relations showing genetic unity among numbers of the Powellian families. This has led to considerable and sometimes acrimonious debate among experts. Substantial progress has been made in determining the internal relations within families and relating these to prehistoric and historic migrations. Advances have also been made in the reconstruction of earlier stages of the languages.

      It is important to note that genetic classification of languages does not necessarily correspond to other classifications such as geographic or cultural. The geographic diversity of the Algonquian languages, which are spread over a huge part of the North American continent in several noncontiguous locations, including the high plains and both the east and west coasts, illustrates this well. Another kind of linguistic relationship among languages is illustrated by the Pueblo languages, which derive from three quite distinct families but show parallel patterns of expression and use because of the close geographic and cultural relations of their speakers. This kind of nongenetic relationship is called a linguistic area.³

      Although Indians recorded information using pictograms before contact with Europeans, they had no writing in the sense of a graphic system with which to directly represent language. The singular accomplishment of the Cherokee Sequoyah, who created a syllabary for his language in the early nineteenth century, is without parallel within the Indian world. Writing systems using the Latin alphabet and, in the case of Cree and Ojibwe, a geometric syllabary were developed initially by white missionaries and anthropologists, but Native speakers have taken responsibility for promulgating standardized orthographies. The strong tradition of orality has given many Indian languages as rigorous a set of conventions about usage as exists for formal, written English.

      Central to any discussion of Indian languages is the relationship between language and culture. Here, the focus has been the debate on the hypothesis associated with the linguist Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf that language can determine ways in which its speakers view the world. Early evidence given by Whorf in support of the hypothesis has been rejected as untenable, but the debate continues to surface in scholarly discussions.

      There can be no doubt, however, that Native culture is richly reflected in the Indian languages. Elaborate kin-ship systems found in these languages not only illustrate specific views of kinship, but also show the centrality of such relations to Indian life. Native systems of classification for the natural world are often subtle and complex.

      American English has been greatly enriched by borrowing from Indian languages. Aside from the many place names, the two most commons types of borrowing are terms for native flora and fauna and for objects and concepts of the Native culture.

     We study loanwords from the three main spoken Malaysian languages which are the Malay language, Chinese dialects and Indian languages in local English newspapers. This research is confined to two English language newspapers namely New Straits Times and The Star. This study seeks to identify the loanwords from the three Malaysian languages which are the Malay language, Chinese dialects and Indian languages in the English language newspapers and to investigate the types of lexical items or loanwords found in the English language newspapers.⁴ The data for this study has been culled from 141 newspaper articles which comprise 194 loanwords from the period of October 2005 to August 2006. The loanwords from the three Malaysian languages are also categorized and analysed to show the extent to which the Malay language, Chinese dialects and Indian languages are used in the English newspapers. The extent of the borrowing of the Malay language, Chinese dialects and Indian languages was analysed by calculating the percentages. The percentages revealed the number of borrowings in the Malay language, Chinese dialects and Indian languages and determined the most predominant language in which the highest number of loanwords comes from. Loanwords from the Malay language, Chinese dialects and Indian languages used in the English local newspapers differed in terms of quantity and types of lexical borrowings. The findings of this study prove that the need to use the loanwords from the three main Malaysian languages is mainly to express the ideas which exist in the multiracial society in Malaysia with the readers. Borrowing from the local languages show that the English language is still in contact with other languages to express new ideas and concepts. Hence, it is prone to change according to the users’ needs and to express themselves with respect to their needs. This nativization process is therefore inevitable in the outer circle countries where English is used as a second language mainly. It is hoped that this study will assist in some measure towards an understanding of the way local words, phrases and ideas are borrowed into the English language and the extent of using these loanwords in the local English newspapers.

     Kajian ini adalah berkenaan ‘non-English language borrowings’ atau ‘loanwords’ daripada tiga bahasa utama yang digunakan di Malaysia iaitu Bahasa Malaysia, dialek-dialek Cina dan Bahasa-bahasa India yang dipinjam ke dalam Bahasa Inggeris di Malaysia. Tesis ini merupakan kajian tentang ‘non-English language borrowing’ daripada Bahasa Malaysia, dialek-dialek Cina dan beberapa Bahasa-bahasa India yang dipinjamkan dalam Bahasa Inggeris khususnya, surat khabar Bahasa Inggeris. Hanya ‘loanwords’akan dikaji dalam disertasi ini. Data untuk kajian ini terdiri daripada 141 artikel suratkhabar Bahasa Inggeris daripada News Straits Times dan The Star. Terdapat sebanyak 194 ‘loanwords’ daripada Bahasa Malaysia, dialek-dialek Cina dan beberapa Bahasa-bahasa India dari bulan Oktober 2005 hingga Ogos 2006 yang dikaji. Tesis ini bertujuan mengenalpasti dan mengklasifikasikan ‘loanwords’ daripada Bahasa Malaysia, dialek-dialek Cina dan Bahasa bahasa India yang dipinjamkan dalam Bahasa Inggeris. Tesis ini juga bertujuan mengenalpasti keluasan peminjaman ‘loanwords’ atau ‘extent’ peminjaman ‘loanwords’ daripada Bahasa Malaysia, dialek-dialek Cina dan Bahasa-bahasa India dalam Bahasa Inggeris. Keluasan atau extent peminjaman dalam Bahasa Malaysia, dialek-dialek Cina dan Bahasa-bahasa India dikira dalam peratus. Kiraan peratus menunjukkan kekerapan peminjaman ‘loanword’ daripada bahasa mana yang kerap dijumpai dalam suratkhabar. Akibat dan kesan peminjaman dari segi ‘sociocultural’ dibentang. Secara keseluruhan, peminjaman ‘loanwords’ daripada Bahasa Malaysia, dialek-dialek Cina dan Bahasa-bahasa India menunjukkan yang Bahasa Inggeris masih dipengaruhi oleh bahasa-bahasa lain untuk memperkenalkan idea-idea dan konsep-konsep baru. Dengan itu, Bahasa Inggeris yang digunakan sekarang adalah mengikut kehendak pengguna dalam keperluan sehariannya. Namun demikian, proses ‘nativization’ tidak dapat dielakkan dalam penggunaan Bahasa Inggeris di negara-negara ‘Outer Circle’. Adalah menjadi harapan bahawa kajian ini dapat membantu sedikit sebanyak dalam memahami dengan lebih lanjut bagaimana dan mengapa perkataan-perkataan, frasa-frasa dan idea-idea asing dipinjamkan ke dalam Bahasa Inggeris.

      At the start of the twenty-first century, all North American indigenous languages were classified as endangered. Navajo had by far the largest number of speakers, about 150,000, while most had fewer than 1,000, and many had only a very small number of elderly speakers. The most devastating influence was the pressure of the anglophone milieu in which Indians lived, under which only a small percentage of Indian children learned to speak their Native language at home. This led tribes to introduce ambitious programs of language maintenance and renewal as they took control of their education systems from pre-school through graduate school.

 

1.1. Investigation and scolarship of American Indian language

      The first grammar of a South American Indian language (Quechua) appeared in 1560. Missionaries displayed intense activity in writing grammars, dictionaries, and catechisms during the 17th century and the first half of the 18th. Data were also provided by chronicles and official reports. Information for this period was summarized in Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro's Idea dell' universo (1778–87) and in Johann Christoph Adelung and Johann Severin Vater's Mithridates (1806–17). Subsequently, most firsthand information was gathered by ethnographers in the first quarter of the 20th century. In spite of the magnitude and fundamental character of the numerous contributions of this period, their technical quality was below the level of work in other parts of the world. Since 1940 there has been a marked increase in the recording and historical study of languages, carried out chiefly by missionaries with linguistic training, but there are still many gaps in knowledge at the basic descriptive level, and few languages have been thoroughly described. Thus, classificatory as well as historical, areal, and typological research has been hindered. Descriptive study is made difficult by a shortage of linguists, the rapid extinction of languages, and the remote location of those tongues needing urgent study⁵. Interest in these languages is justified in that their study yields basic cultural information on the area, in addition to linguistic data, and aids in obtaining historical and prehistorical knowledge. The South American Indian languages are also worth studying as a means of integrating the groups that speak them into national life.

 

2. Classification of the South American Indian languages

      Although classifications based on geographical criteria or on common cultural areas or types have been made, these are not really linguistic methods. There is usually a congruence between a language, territorial continuity, and culture, but this correlation becomes more and more random at the level of the linguistic family and beyond. Certain language families are broadly coincident with large culture areas—e.g., Cariban and Tupian with the tropical forest area—but the correlation becomes imperfect with more precise cultural divisions—e.g., there are Tupian languages like Guayakí and Sirionó whose speakers belong to a very different culture type. Conversely, a single culture area like the eastern flank of the Andes (the Montaña region) includes several unrelated language families. There is also a correlation between isolated languages, or small families, and marginal regions, but Quechumaran (Kechumaran), for instance, not a big family by its internal composition, occupies the most prominent place culturally.

      Most of the classification in South America has been based on inspection of vocabularies and on structural similarities. Although the determination of genetic relationship depends basically on coincidences that cannot be accounted for by chance or borrowing, no clear criteria have been applied in most cases. As for subgroupings within each genetic group, determined by dialect study, the comparative method, or glottochronology (also called lexicostatistics, a method for estimating the approximate date when two or more languages separated from a common parent language, using statistics to compare similarities and differences in vocabulary), very little work has been done. Consequently, the difference between a dialect and language on the one hand, and a family (composed of languages) and stock (composed of families or of very differentiated languages) on the other, can be determined only approximately at present. Even genetic groupings recognized long ago (Arawakan or Macro-Chibchan) are probably more differentiated internally than others that have been questioned or that have passed undetected.

      Extinct languages present special problems because of poor, unverifiable recording, often requiring philological interpretation. For some there is no linguistic material whatsoever; if references to them seem reliable and unequivocal, an investigator can only hope to establish their identity as distinct languages, unintelligible to neighbouring groups. The label “unclassified,” sometimes applied to these languages, is misleading: they are unclassifiable languages.

      Great anarchy reigns in the names of languages and language families; in part, this reflects different orthographic conventions of European languages, but it also results from the lack of standardized nomenclature. Different authors choose different component languages to name a given family or make a different choice in the various names designating the same language or dialect. This multiplicity originates in designations bestowed by Europeans because of certain characteristics of the group (e.g., Coroado, Portuguese “tonsured” or “crowned”), in names given to a group by other Indian groups (e.g., Puelche, “people from the east,” given by Araucanians to various groups in Argentina), and in self-designations of groups (e.g., Carib, which, as usual, means “people” and is not the name of the language). Particularly confusing are generic Indian terms like Tapuya, a Tupí word meaning enemy, or Chuncho, an Andean designation for many groups on the eastern slopes; terms like these explain why different languages have the same name. In general (but not always), language names ending in -an indicate a family or grouping larger than an individual language; e.g., Guahiboan (Guahiban) is a family that includes the Guahibo language, and Tupian subsumes Tupí-Guaraní.⁶

      There have been many linguistic classifications for this area. The first general and well-grounded one was that by U.S. anthropologist Daniel Brinton (1891), based on grammatical criteria and a restricted word list, in which about 73 families are recognized. In 1913 Alexander Chamberlain, an anthropologist, published a new classification in the United States, which remained standard for several years, with no discussion as to its basis. The classification (1924) of the French anthropologist and ethnologist Paul Rivet, which was supported by his numerous previous detailed studies and contained a wealth of information, superseded all previous classifications. It included 77 families and was based on similarity of vocabulary items. Jestmír Loukotka, a Czech language specialist, contributed two classifications (1935, 1944) on the same lines as Rivet but with an increased number of families (94 and 114, respectively), the larger number resulting from newly discovered languages and from Loukotka's splitting of several of Rivet's families. Loukotka used a diagnostic list of 45 words and distinguished “mixed” languages (those having one-fifth of the items from another family) and “pure” languages (those that might have “intrusions” or “traces” from another family but totalling fewer than one-fifth of the items, if any). Rivet and Loukotka contributed jointly another classification (1952) listing 108 language families that was based chiefly upon Loukotka's 1944 classification. Important work on a regional scale has also been done, and critical and summarizing surveys have appeared.