NATIVE ROOTS

Through thousands of years of linguistic evolution, the languages of Europe grew rich and heavy in nouns, but poor in verbs. English, like the other European languages, shows a strong proclivity toward naming objects and thus easily takes in foreign words as nouns. It borrows far fewer verbs. Instead, English speakers seem content to use weak verbs such as to be and to have, both of which are vague almost to the point of meaninglessness. The verb to be serves as little more than a linking verb joining two nouns or a noun and adjective. Some European languages, such as Russian, have gone so far as to drop the verb to be in the present tense and simply string together nouns and their modifiers.

In adopting Native American words into English, the colonists usually made the word into a noun, no matter what type of speech part the word may be in the native language; thus virtually all the Indian words came into English as nouns, the names of things. English speakers adopted virtually no native verbs, adjectives, or adverbs.

Many of the Native American languages lacked the flexibility of English in admitting foreign words. These agglutinative languages added meaning through the extensive uses of prefixes, suffixes, and infixes, which could be lumped together in long trains of syllables. Because the precise placement and sequence of these syllables bore such importance, speakers of many of these languages found it almost impossible to adopt European words or even other Indian words with the same facility that English incorporated Indian words.

In an agglutinative language such as Paiute, spoken in Utah, a single, albeit very long, word could convey what requires a whole phrase in English. The phrase “they who are going to sit and cut up a black cow” becomes a single word, wii-to-kuchum-punkurugani-yugwi-va-ntu-m, which literally means “knife-black-buffalo-pet-cut-up-sit-future-participle-animate-plural” (Sapir, p.30). The sentence “I will go” in Hoopa, a language of northern California, becomes a short word, te-s-e-ya-te, consisting of a root, three prefixes, and a suffix (Sapir p.68).

Because of the difficulty in taking foreign words into the agglutinative languages, most of the native languages invented new descriptive terms that combined older words in new ways.

A train could be an “iron horse” in one language and a “fire wagon” in another. In Menominee, for example, the modern idea of “telephoning” was translated into the Menominee word sequence meaning literally “little-wire-speech” (Bloomfield p.455). American Indian languages had a highly metaphorical aspect in which a fish might be known as a “deer of the water,” or thunder could be called “his glance,” referring to some unknown entity in the sky.

Many Algonquian languages expressed a new concept by combining apparently opposite entities such as water and fire to make the word scoutiouabou, “firewater,” for the whiskey introduced by the European settlers. The Ojibwa people, who also spoke an Algonquian language, made wabinesiwin, or “paleface,” to represent the people of European descent.

English speakers soon adopted the Indian practice of combining opposing concepts or highly implausible combinations of words to make new words. Thus, such very different creatures as the frog and the bull became bullfrog, or “fish” and “cat became catfish. - author, James Welch