词汇大师(Wordmaster)--Native American Influence on Englis

Broadcast on COAST TO COAST: September 23, 2004

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: with the National Museum of the American Indian opening in Washington, we look at Native American influence on the English language.

RS: Linguist¹ Marianne Mithun is author of the book "The Languages of Native North America." She's a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

AA: Professor Mithun says the Europeans who came to North America had to borrow native words to describe lots of things, including places.

MARIANNE MITHUN: "One of the first contacts the Europeans made when they came to the New World (involved) Jacques Cartier, who sailed up the St. Lawrence River and ran into some people and said 'where is this?' or 'where are we?' And they said something like 'ganada,' which is the Mohawk word now and the word in other related languages for a settlement or a town. And so they wrote it down and said 'we must be in Canada.' Ohio, that's another Iroquoian word, which means large river or large creek². And so it was the name of the river first and then became the name of the state. Kentucky is another one, which means prairie or meadow³ or garden."

RS: "So the people who came to this land, they didn't have names for places and they probably didn't have names for some of the plants (because) they didn't know what they were."

MARIANNE MITHUN: "That's right. So some of those are things like squash⁴ and hickory -- these are Algonquian, so these are from the east -- hominy, persimmon, pecan."

RS: "Are there any idioms that may endure now that have gone through or ways of describing things that are not either places or animals or plants."

MARIANNE MITHUN: "That's tricky⁵. I should say there are cultural things; the other kind of thing that gets borrowed a lot is, if you want a name for something that only the native people use, and so we have a lot of those -- like moccasin, for example. That's a regular word for shoe, but now it means a special kind of shoe. Things like powwow, tomahawk. Eskimo gives us things like kayak and mukluk and anorak."

AA: "And what's interesting is that I suppose in modern times now to use some of these terms, perhaps in jest or however, might actually be considered offensive⁶ to Native Americans."

MARIANNE MITHUN: "Absolutely. In fact, a very good example of that is squaw. That's a regular Alongquian word for woman."

RS: But Professor Mithun says the term squaw as used by Europeans took on different connotations over the centuries, so that now people often think of it as being derogatory.

AA: Marianne Mithun is not Native American herself, but she works with different native languages to help document them.

MARIANNE MITHUN: "A lot of people don't realize how many languages there were here and still are here. There were probably around 300 different languages in North America."

AA: "How many of those 300 languages still exist?"

MARIANNE MITHUN: "About 180 right now -- and I say about, because we're losing them all the time. It's not how many speakers you have, it's how old they are. So if all of your speakers are over 80, you can see how many years you might have left. Almost all of the languages in North America are endangered. There's only one (native) language in North America that isn't endangered, and that's Greenlandic. What this means is that either children are no longer learning them as a first language, which is the case for almost all of them, or fewer children are learning them every year.

"So we think of Navajo, for example, as being very healthy because there are more Navajo speakers than of all other North American languages combined. There are over 100,000 Navajo speakers. But in the early '90s most children came to school knowing Navajo as their first language. Now very few come to school with Navajo as their first language. So even Navajo, which seems to be the strongest outside of Greenlandic, is in danger.

"It's sort of obvious parents want to help their children get ahead, and they themselves had a hard time because they didn't speak English, so they want their children to speak English. And the problem is that people haven't realized that being bilingual can be a very powerful thing."

RS: Marianne Mithun is a linguistics⁷ professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of "The Languages of Native North America." Now, in case you're wondering, mukluks are animal-skin boots that Eskimos wear. And an anorak? It's a type of jacket with a hood⁸.

AA: And that's all for us this week. Our e-mail address is。。。。。。and you can find all of our segments⁹ at voanews.com/wordmaster. If you'd like to visit the new National Museum of the American Indian online, go to americanindian.si.edu. With Rosanne Skirble, I鈥檓 Avi Arditti.

 

1 linguist   

n.语言学家；精通数种外国语言者

参考例句：

• I used to be a linguist till I become a writer.过去我是个语言学家，后来成了作家。
• Professor Cui has a high reputation as a linguist.崔教授作为语言学家名声很高。

2 creek   

n.小溪，小河，小湾

参考例句：

• He sprang through the creek.他跳过小河。
• People sunbathe in the nude on the rocks above the creek.人们在露出小溪的岩石上裸体晒日光浴。

3 meadow   

n.草地，牧草地

参考例句：

• The children ran free across the meadow.孩子们在草地里自由地奔跑。
• The meadow is peopled with wild flowers.草地长满了野花。

4 squash   

n.壁球，摺皱不堪，拥挤嘈杂的人群，浓缩果汁，美国南瓜；vt.压扁，压制；vi.变扁，压榨

参考例句：

• He is drinking lemon squash.他正在喝柠檬露。
• She sprained her ankle playing squash.她在打软式墙网球时扭伤了脚踝。

5 tricky   

adj.狡猾的，奸诈的；(工作等)棘手的，微妙的

参考例句：

• I'm in a rather tricky position.Can you help me out?我的处境很棘手，你能帮我吗？
• He avoided this tricky question and talked in generalities.他回避了这个非常微妙的问题，只做了个笼统的表述。

6 offensive   

adj.令人不快的，侮辱的，攻击用的；n.进攻

参考例句：

• His mode of doing business is offensive to me.他干事情的方式叫我很不喜欢。
• If all else fails,I will take the offensive.如果其他方法不行，我将采取攻势。

7 linguistics   

n.语言学

参考例句：

• She plans to take a course in applied linguistics.她打算学习应用语言学课程。
• Linguistics is a scientific study of the property of language.语言学是指对语言的性质所作的系统研究。

8 hood   

n.头巾，兜帽，覆盖；v.罩上，以头巾覆盖

参考例句：

• She is wearing a red cloak with a hood.她穿着一件红色带兜帽的披风。
• The car hood was dented in.汽车的发动机罩已凹了进去。

9 segments   

部分( segment的名词复数 )； 瓣； [计算机]（字符等的）分段； [动物学]节片

参考例句：

• He is eating oranges in segments. 他正在一瓣瓣地吃橘子。
• Gene cloning provides a means of purifying and propagating specific DNA segments. 基因克隆化提供了一种纯化和扩增特定DNA片段的方法。