Indian borrowings in english

      This last example, however, violates one tendency almost as clearly as it shows another. In general, the English habit of hitching a preposition to a verb is carried to even greater lengths in America than it is in England. The colloquial language is very rich in such compounds, and some of them have come to have special meanings. Compare, for example, to give and to give out, to go back and to go back on, to beat and to beat it, to light and to light out, to butt and to butt in, to turn and to turn down, to show and to show up, to put and to put over, to wind and to wind up. Sometimes, however, the addition seems to be merely rhetorical, as in to start off, to finish up, to open up, to beat up (or out), to try out, to stop over (or off), and to hurry up. To hurry up is so commonplace in America that everyone uses it and no one notices it, but it remains rare in England. Up seems to be essential to many of these latter-day verbs, e. g., to pony up, to doll up, to ball up; without it they are without significance. Sometimes unmistakable adverbs are substituted for prepositions, as in to stay put and to call down. “Brush your hat off” would seem absurd to an Englishman; so would “The Committee reported out the bill.” Nearly all of these reinforced verbs are supported by corresponding adjectives and nouns, e. g., cut-up, show-down, kick-in, come-down, hand-out, start-off, wind-up, run-in, balled-up, dolled-up, bang-up, turn-down, frame-up, stop-over, jump-off, call-down, buttinski.¹⁶

      The rapidity with which words move through the parts of speech must be observed by every student of American. The case of bum I have already cited: it is noun, adjective, verb and adverb. The adjective lonesome, in “all by her lonesome,” becomes a sort of pronoun. The verb to think, in “he had another think coming,” becomes a noun. Jitney is an old American noun lately revived; a month after its revival it was also an adjective, and before long it will be a verb. To lift up was turned tail first and made a substantive, and is now also an adjective and a verb. Joy-ride became a verb the day after it was born as a noun. So did auto and phone. So did the adjective, a. w. o. l. Immediately the Workmen’s Compensation Act began to appear on the statute-books of the States, the adjective compensable was born. Other adjectives are made by the simple process of adding -y to nouns, e. g., classy, tasty, tony. And what of livest? An astounding inflection, indeed—but with quite sound American usage behind it. The Metropolitan Magazine, of which Col. Roosevelt was an editor, announces on its letter paper that it is “the livest magazine in America,” and Poetry, the organ of the new poetry movement, used to print at the head of its contents page the following encomium from the New York Tribune: “the livest art in America today is poetry, and the livest expression of that art is in this little Chicago monthly.”

      We have seen how readily new prefixes and affixes are adopted in America. Often a whole word is thus put to service, and such amalgamations produce many new words. Thus smith threatens to breed a long series of new agent nouns, e. g., ad-smith, joke-smith; and fiend (a characteristic American hyperbole) has already produced a great many, e. g., movie-fiend, drug-fiend, bridge-fiend, golf-fiend, coke-fiend, kissing-fiend. Moreover, there is no impediment to their almost infinite multiplication. If some enterprising shoe-repairer began calling himself a shoe-smith tomorrow no one would think to protest against the neologism, and if some new game were introduced from abroad, say the German Skat, the corresponding fiend would come with it. Always the effort is to dispose of a long explanatory phrase by substituting a succinct and concrete term. This effort is responsible for many whole classes of compounds, e. g., the hospital series: doll-hospital, china-hospital, camera-hospital, pipe-hospital, etc. It is responsible, too, for many somewhat startling derivatives, e. g., mixologist and tuberculogian. And it lies behind the invention of many words that are not compounds, but boldly put forth new roots, many of them etymologically unintelligible, e. g., jazz, jinx, hobo,  woozy, goo-goo (eyes), hoakum, sundae. A large number of characteristic Americanisms are deliberate inventions, devised to designate new objects or to clothe old objects with a special character. The American advertiser is an extraordinarily diligent manufacturer of such terms, and many of his coinages, e. g., kodak, vaseline, listerine, postum, carborundum, klaxon, jap-a-lac, pianola, victrola, dictagraph and uneeda are quite as familiar to all Americans as tractor or soda-mint, and have come into general acceptance as common nouns. The Eastman Kodak Company, indeed, has sometimes had to call attention to the fact that kodak is its legal property, and in the same way the Chesebrough Manufacturing Company has had to protect vaseline. Dr. Louise Pound has made an interesting study of these artificial trade-names. They fall, she finds, into a number of well defined classes. There are the terms that are simple derivatives from proper names, e. g., listerine, postum, klaxon; the shortenings, e. g., jell-o, jap-a-lac; the extensions with common suffixes, e. g., alabastine, protectograph, dictograph, orangeade, crispette, pearline, electrolier; the extensions with new or fanciful suffixes, e. g., resinol, thermos, grafanola, shinola, sapolio, lysol, neolin, crisco; the diminutives, e. g., cascaret, wheatlet, chiclet; the simple compounds, e. g., palmolive, spearmint, peptomint, auto-car; the blends, e. g., cuticura, damaskeene, locomobile, mobiloil; the blends made of proper names, e. g., Oldsmobile, Hupmobile, Valspar; the blends made of parts of syllables or simple initials, e. g., Reo, nabisco; the terms involving substitution, e. g., triscut; and the arbitrary formations, e. g., kodak, tiz, clysmic, vivil. Dr. Brander Matthews once published an Horatian ode, of unknown authorship, made up of such inventions.

      One of the words here used is not American, but Italian, i. e., fiat, a blend made of the initials of Fabbrica Italiano Automobili Torino; most of the others are quite familiar to all Americans. “But only a few of them,” says Dr. Matthews, “would evoke recognition from an Englishman; and what a Frenchman or a German would make out of the eight lines it is beyond human power even to guess. Corresponding words have been devised in France and in Germany, but only infrequently; and apparently the invention of trade-mark names is not a customary procedure on the part of foreign advertisers. The British, although less affluent in this respect than we are, seem to be a little more inclined to employ the device than their competitors on the continent. Every American, traveling on the railways which converge upon London, must have experienced a difficulty in discovering whether the station at which his train has paused is Stoke Pogis or Bovril, Chipping Norton or Mazzawattee. None the less it is safe to say that the concoction of a similar ode by the aid of the trade-mark words invented in the British Isles would be a task of great difficulty on account of the paucity of terms sufficiently artificial to bestow the exotic remoteness which is accountable for the aroma of the American ‘ode’.”¹⁷

      Of analogous character are artificial words of the scalawag and rambunctious class, the formation of which constantly goes on. Some of them are telescope forms: grandificent (from grand and magnificent), sodalicious (from soda and delicious) and warphan (age) (from war and orphan [age]). Others are made up of common roots and grotesque affixes: swelldoodle, splendiferous and peacharino. Yet others are stretch forms or mere extravagant inventions: scallywampus, supergobsloptious and floozy. Many of these are devised by advertisement writers or college students and belong properly to slang, but there is a steady movement of selected specimens into the common vocabulary. The words in -doodle hint at German influences, and those in -ino owe something to Italian or maybe to Spanish.

3.2. Foreign tendencies

      The extent of such influences as those last noted upon the development of American, and particularly spoken American, is often underestimated. In no other large nation of the world are there so many aliens, nor is there any other in which so large a proportion of the resident aliens speak languages incomprehensible to the native. Since 1820 nearly 35,000,000 immigrants have come into this country, and of them probably not 10,000,000 brought any preliminary acquaintance with English with them. The census of 1910 showed that nearly 1,500,000 persons then living permanently on American soil could not speak it at all; that more than 13,000,000 had been born in other countries, chiefly of different language; and that nearly 20,000,000 were the children of such immigrants, and hence under the influence of their speech habits. No other country houses so many aliens. In Great Britain the alien population, for a century past, has never been more than 2 per cent of the total population, and since the passage of the Aliens Act of 1905 it has tended to decline steadily. In Germany, in 1910, there were but 1,259,873 aliens in a population of more than 60,000,000, and of these nearly half were German-speaking Austrians and Swiss. In France, in 1906, there were 1,000,000 foreigners in a population of 39,000,000 and a third of them were French-speaking Belgians, Luxembourgeois and Swiss. In Italy, in 1911, there were but 350,000 in a population of 35,000,000.

      This large and constantly reinforced admixture of foreigners has naturally exerted a constant pressure upon the national language, for the majority of them, at least in the first generation, have found it quite impossible to acquire it in any purity, and even their children have grown up with speech habits differing radically from those of correct English. The effects of this pressure are obviously two-fold; on the one hand the foreigner, struggling with a strange and difficult tongue, makes efforts to simplify it as much as possible, and so strengthens the native tendency to disregard all niceties and complexities, and on the other hand he corrupts it with words and locutions from the language he has brought with him, and sometimes with whole idioms and grammatical forms. We have seen, in earlier chapters, how the Dutch and French of colonial days enriched the vocabulary of the colonists, how the German immigrants of the first half of the nineteenth century enriched it still further, and how the Irish of the same period influenced its everyday usages. The same process is still going on. The Italians, the Slavs, and above all, the Russian Jews, make steady contributions to the American vocabulary and idiom, and though these contributions are often concealed by quick and complete naturalization their foreignness to English remains none the less obvious. I should worry, In its way, is correct English, but in essence it is as completely Yiddish as kosher, ganof, schadchen, oi-yoi, or mazuma.

      The extent of such influences remains to be studied; in the whole literature I can find but one formal article upon the subject. That article deals specifically with the suffix -fest, which came into American from the German and was probably suggested by familiarity with sängerfest. There is no mention of it in any of the dictionaries of Americanisms, and yet, in such forms as talkfest, gabfest, swatfest and hoochfest, it is met with almost daily. So with -heimer, -inski and -bund. Several years ago -heimer had a great vogue in slang, and was rapidly done to death. But wiseheimer remains in colloquial use as a facetious synonym for smart-aleck, and after awhile it may gradually acquire dignity. Far lowlier words, in fact, have worked their way in. Buttinski, perhaps, is going the same route. As for the words in -bund, many of them are already almost accepted. Plunder-bund is now at least as good as pork-barrel and slush-fund, and money-bund is frequently heard in Congress. Such locutions creep in stealthily, and are secure before they are suspected. Current slang, out of which the more decorous language dredges a large part of its raw materials, is full of them. Nix and nixy, for no, are debased forms of the German nicht; aber nit, once as popular as camouflage, is obviously aber nicht. And a steady flow of nouns, all needed to designate objects introduced by immigrants, enriches the vocabulary. The Hungarians not only brought their national condiment with them; they also brought its name, paprika, and that name is now thoroughly American, as is goulash. In the same way the Italians brought in camorra, pad-rone, spaghetti, chianti, and other substantives, and the Jews made contributions from Yiddish and Hebrew and greatly reinforced certain old borrowings from German. Once such a loan-word gets in it takes firm root. During the first year of American participation in the World War an effort was made on patriotic grounds to substitute liberty-cabbage for sauer-kraut, but it quickly failed, for the name had become as completely Americanized as the thing itself, and so liberty-cabbage seemed affected and absurd. In the same way a great many other German words survived the passions of the time. Nor could all the ardor of the professional patriots obliterate that German influence which has fastened upon the American yes something of the quality of ja, or prevent the constant appearance of such German loan-forms as “it listens well” and “I want out.” Many American loan-words are of startlingly outlandish origin. Hooch, according to a recent writer, is from a northwestern Indian language, and so is skookum. Cuspidor, a typical Americanism, is from the Portuguese cuspador, one who spits. ¹⁸

      Constant familiarity with such immigrants from foreign languages and with the general speech habits of foreign peoples has made American a good deal more hospitable to loan-words than English, even in the absence of special pressure. Let the same word knock at the gates of the two languages, and American will admit it more readily, and give it at once a wider and more intimate currency. Examples are afforded by café, vaudeville, revue, employé, boulevard, cabaret, exposé, kindergarten, dépât, fête, and menu. Café, in American, is a word of much larger and more varied meaning than in English and is used much more frequently, and by many more persons. So is employé, in the naturalized form of employee. So is toilet: we have even seen it as a euphemism for native terms that otherwise would be in daily use. So is kindergarten: during the war I read of a kindergarten for the elementary instruction of conscripts. Such words are not unknown to the Englishman, but when he uses them it is with a plain sense of their foreignness. In American they are completely naturalized, as is shown by the spelling and pronunciation of most of them. An American would no more think of attempting the correct French pronunciation of depot (though he always makes the final t silent), or of putting the French accents upon it than he would think of spelling toilet with the final te or of essaying to pronounce Münchner in the German manner. Often curious battles go on between such loan-words and their English equivalents, and with varying fortunes. In 1895 Weber and Fields tried to establish music-hall in New York, but it quickly succumbed to vaudeville-theatre, as variety had succumbed to vaudeville before it. In the same way lawn-fete (without the circumflex accent, and sometimes, alas, pronounced feet) has elbowed out the English garden-party. But now and then, when the competing loanword happens to violate American speech habits, a native term ousts it. The French crèche offers an example; it has been entirely displaced by day-nursery.

      The English, in this matter, display their greater conservatism very plainly. Even when a loan-word enters both English and American simultaneously a sense of foreignness lingers about it on the other side of the Atlantic much longer than on this side, and it is used with far more self-consciousness. The word matinée offers a convenient example. To this day the English commonly print it in italics, give it its French accent, and pronounce it with some attempt at the French manner. But in America it is entirely naturalized, and the most ignorant man uses it without any feeling that it is strange. Often a loan-word loses all signs of its original foreignness. For example, there is shimmy, a corruption of both chemise and chemin (de fer), the name of a card game: it has lost both its original forms and, in one sense, its original meaning. The same lack of any sense of linguistic integrity is to be noticed in many other directions—for example, in the freedom with which the Latin per is used with native nouns. One constantly sees per day, per dozen, per hundred, per mile, etc., in American newspapers, even the most careful, but in England the more seemly a is almost always used, or the noun itself is made Latin, as in per diem. Per, in fact, is fast becoming an everyday American word. Such phrases as “as per your letter (or order) of the 15th inst.” are met with incessantly in business correspondence. The same greater hospitality is shown by the readiness with which various un-English prefixes and affixes come into fashion, for example, super- and -itis. The English accept them gingerly; the Americans take them in with enthusiasm, and naturalize them instanter.

      The pressure of loan-words, of course, is greatest in those areas in which the foreign population is largest. In some of these areas it has given rise to what are almost distinct dialects. Everyone who has ever visited lower Pennsylvania must have observed the wide use of German terms by the natives, and the German intonations in their speech, even when they are most careful with their English. In the same way, the English of everyday life in New Orleans is full of French terms, e.g., praline, brioche, lagniappe, armoir, kruxingiol (= croquignole), pooldoo (= poule d’eau), and the common speech of the Southwest is heavy with debased Spanish, e.g., alamo, arroyo, chaparral, caballero, comino, jornada, frijole, presidio, serape, hombre, quien sabe, vamose. As in the early days of settlement, there is a constant movement of favored loan-words into the general speech of the country. Hooch, from the Chinook, was for long a localism in the Northwest; suddenly it appeared everywhere. So with certain Chinese and Japanese words that have, within late years, entered the general speech from the speech of California. New York has been the port of entry for most of the new Yiddish and Italian loan-words, as it was the port of entry for Irishisms seventy years ago. In Michigan the natives begin to borrow from the Dutch settlers and may later on pass on their borrowings to the rest of the country; in the prairie states many loan-words from the Scandinavian languages are already in use; in Kansas there are even traces of Russian influence.   

      The immigrant in the midst of a large native population, of course, exerts no such pressure upon the national language as that exerted upon an immigrant language by the native, but nevertheless his linguistic habits and limitations have to be reckoned with in dealing with him, and the concessions thus made necessary have a very ponderable influence upon the general speech. Of much importance is the support given to a native tendency by the foreigner’s incapacity for employing (or even comprehending) syntax of any complexity, or words not of the simplest. This is the tendency toward succinctness and clarity, at whatever sacrifice of grace. One English observer, Sidney Low, puts the chief blame for the general explosiveness of American upon the immigrant, who must be communicated with in the plainest words available, and is not socially worthy of the suavity of circumlocution anyhow. In his turn the immigrant seizes upon these plainest words as upon a sort of convenient Lingua Franca—his quick adoption of damn as a universal adjective is traditional—and throws his influence upon the side of the underlying speech habit when he gets on in the vulgate. Many characteristic Americanisms of the sort to stagger lexicographers—for example, near-silk—have come from the Jews, whose progress in business is a good deal faster than their progress in English. 
 
 
 
 

CONCLUSION

      Four hundred years ago, Carew correctly characterized the tendency of anglophone speakers to profit from the selective appropriation of other languages. Except for novel loanwords reflecting the curiosities of settlers, borrowings from Indigenous languages rapidly decreased as Europeans consolidated power in North America (Bailey 71). Instead of loanwords, settlers adapted English to describe the world they attempted to anglicize; many of those adaptations survive in the lexicon as Indianisms, which can carry significant racial overtones. In visually representing Indianisms, American Indian team names and mascots (as well as corporate logos) reveal embedded, often unconscious national perceptions of the mythical Indian. The continued use of such mascots is not, as the Honor the Chief Society argues, a matter of educating the American public of “its” Native heritage. Truly valuing Indigenous survival, culture, and language means quite the opposite.

      Anglophone speakers have long mediated Indigenous loanwords through Spanish, French, Portuguese, and other European languages. Unlike French fur traders, for instance, who experienced frequent cultural exchanges with American Indians and First Nations people of Canada, English settlers shared little two-way contact with North America’s oldest residents. Generally, interactions were brief, and often militant in nature, as English adventurers suppressed and supplanted Aboriginal populations. Consequently, despite more than four sustained centuries on the continent, the English language has only superficial borrowings from North America’s Indigenous languages.

      Indigenous words borrowed secondhand from European languages include bayou, canoe, Caribbean, caribou, chocolate, hammock, hurricane, potato, tobacco, toboggan, tomato, and totem. Though English did borrow some words and place names directly – skunk, manitou, and Roanoke are examples – the lexicon’s Indigenous loanwords reflect a long-standing racial bias toward North America’s Aboriginal populations. Richard Bailey argues, “English has accumulated its [Indigenous] wordstock as an incidental consequence of the extension of anglophone power”.

      Some of these words are easily recognizable as Indian words. There are others, though a part of modern day spoken English, which are seldom recognized as being of Indian origin. Most of these words were assimilated during the period of 16th to 20th century, when the British were following an aggressive imperial policy abroad, especially the Indian subcontinent. India, was what made the English empire great and mighty, and was appropriately called 'the jewel of the imperial crown'.

      However the British were not the only European nation, interested in India as a colony; but French, Portuguese and even Spanish, wanted to establish this country - rich in resources and manpower- as one of their own colonies. Consequently there are some words that have come to English from French and Portuguese, which in turn had been absorbed to those languages by a native Indian language.

      It is often discussed the intellectual benefits - among many others - the British colonizer imparted to the Indian natives, but seldom is talked about the benefits reaped by the colonizer from a language & "a literature (Arabic, Sanskrit and other literary languages) admitted to be of small intrinsic value." 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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