Trip of the Tongue (39 page)
Read Trip of the Tongue Online
Authors: Elizabeth Little
Chapter Nine: New Mexico
226  The majority of America's Latino population: Silva-Corvalán, “Spanish in the Southwest,” 206.
226 Â Spanish had for several generations been established: Ibid., 207.
227 Â Though the demographics of the region changed: Lipski,
Varieties of Spanish in the United States
, 192.
227 Â more than 45 percent of its population: U.S. Census Bureau, “QT-P10 Hispanic or Latino by Type: 2010,” generated by American FactFinder.
227 Â Today there are approximately 750,000: Limonic,
The Latino Population of New York City
, Table 1, 2.
228 Â oldest community of European-language-speakers in the United States: Lipski,
Varieties of Spanish in the United States
, 193.
228  Oñate left Zacatecas in 1598: The specifics of Oñate's expedition are taken from exhibit notes at the El Camino Real International Heritage Center (visited August 2008).
230 Â There were Castilian-speakers, to be sure: This and other details in this paragraph about the peculiarities of New Mexican Spanish from Cobos,
A Dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish
, ixâx.
230 Â Some New Mexican Spanish words are radically different: New Mexican Spanish and English equivalents from Lipski,
Varieties of Spanish in the United
States, 207; Standard Spanish equivalents from
Diccionario de la Lengua Española
, 22nd ed., s.v.v. “ardilla,” “murciélago,” “ganso,” and “colibri,” and
Collins Spanish Dictionary
, 8th ed., s.v. “mazorca.”
231 Â Cobos, in fact, suggests: Cobos,
A Dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish
, xi.
231 Â Some, such as
bequenpaura
: Ibid., xv.
231 Â Moreover, ongoing hostilities: Lipski,
Varieties of Spanish in the United States
, 196.
232 Â as linguist John M. Lipski has pointed out: Ibid., 201.
233 Â Although by 1790 Germans only made up 8.6 percent: Daniels,
Coming to America
, 66.
233 Â In fact, the first newspaper to announce: Liberman, “English Under Siege in Pennsylvania.”
233 Â of the fifty-eight language policies adopted before 1880: Linton, “Language Politics and Policy in the United States,” 12.
234 Â Roger Sherman, a delegate to the Continental Congress: Baron,
Grammar and Good Taste
, 13.
234 Â “I am perfectly of your mind”: Benjamin Franklin to Peter Collinson, May 9 1753, in
The Papers of Benjamin Franklin
, 4:483â84. Editor Leonard Labaree notes on page 477 of this volume that this particular letter “has never been printed accurately, nor can it be here, for no Franklin autograph has been found.” The version cited by Labaree and here is the version included in the Hardwicke Papers at the New York Public Library.
234 Â The myth of this close brush with German: Baron, “The Legendary English-Only Vote of 1795.”
235Â Â Â In fact, early language policy generally encouraged: This observation and subsequent details from Linton, “Language Politics and Policy in the United States,” 13â15.
235Â Â Â In 1919, Nebraska passed a law: An Act Relating to the Teaching of Foreign Languages in the State of Nebraska, sec. 7, chap. 249 of the Session Laws of Nebraska for 1919.
235Â Â Â Speaking for the majority:
Meyer v. State of Nebraska
, 262 U.S. 390 (1923).
236Â Â Â “Neither the United States nor any State”: SJ Res 72, 97th Cong., 1st Sess.
236Â Â Â “It is the sense of the Congress that”: Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1982, S 2222, 97th Cong., 2nd Sess.
236Â Â Â since 1981 twenty-six states: English First, “States”; Crawford, “Language Legislation in the U.S.A.”
236   Lucy Tse ⦠looked at: Tse,
“Why Don't They Learn English?”
2â5.
236n  With one quasi-exception: Tatalovich,
Nativism Reborn?
, 65â69.
237Â Â Â “By encouraging people to communicate”: Testimony of Senator Richard Shelby on January 9, 1995, Introduction of Bills and Joint Resolutions, 14th Cong., 1st Sess.
237Â Â Â According to a 2003 Pew Hispanic Center survey: Pew Hispanic Center, “Hispanic Attitudes Toward Learning English.”
240Â Â Â almost 92 percent of Laredo's population: U.S. Census Bureau, 2000 Census Summary File 3, generated by the MLA Language Map Data Center, www.mla.org/map_data.
241Â Â Â “As a descriptive term”: Santiago,
Pardon My Spanglish
, 17.
243Â Â Â But Veltman has found that the younger a person: Veltman, “Modelling the Language Shift Process of Hispanic Immigrants,” 549â50.
243Â Â Â A 1998 survey of eighth and ninth-grade students: Portes and Hao, “E Pluribus Unum,” Table 1, 274.
243Â Â Â Meanwhile, in an analysis of data: Rumbaut, Massey, and Bean, “Linguistic Life Expectancies,” 455.
244Â Â Â “Children whose cultural background includes Spanish”: Portes and Rumbaut,
Legacies
, 140â41. See also Alba et al., “Only English by the Third Generation?”
244Â Â Â The proportion of the population ages five and over: Shin and Bruno, “Language Use and English-Speaking Ability,” 3.
244Â Â Â According to the most recent available estimates: U.S. Census Bureau, “QT-P16 Language Spoken at Home,” generated by American FactFinder.
244Â Â Â In Alabama, 89 percent of voters supported an official-English measure: Nunberg, “Lingo Jingo.”
244Â Â Â less than 3 percent of the state's population: U.S. Census Bureau, “DP-2 Social Characteristics: 1990,” generated by American FactFinder.
245Â Â Â political scientist Raymond Tatalovich concluded: Tatalovich,
Nativism Reborn?
, 246.
246Â Â Â these early analyses failed to account for socioeconomic differences: Portes and Hao, “E Pluribus Unum,” 271.
246Â Â Â only 47 percent in 2000: Greybeck, “The Effectiveness of an After-School Intervention Program,” 2.
246 Â Median household income in the Laredo metropolitan era: U.S. Census Bureau, “S1901 Income in the Past 12 Months,” generated by American FactFinder for Laredo, Texas, Metro Area.
246 Â a full quarter of the city's families: U.S. Census Bureau, “S1702 Poverty Status in the Past 12 Months of Families,” generated by American FactFinder for Laredo, Texas, Metro Area.
246 Â 45 percent of Laredoans lack a high school diploma: Greybeck, “The Effectiveness of an After-School Intervention Program,” 2.
247 Â There are protections already in place: Details about legal protections for those with limited English proficiency from Linton, “Language Politics and Policy in the United States,” 18â20.
248 Â By 1994, however, attitudes toward bilingual schooling: Ibid., 22.
248 Â In what they call a “meta-meta-analysis”: Krashen and McField, “What Works?” 10.
249 Â “We should replace bilingual education”: Hunt, “Gingrich: Bilingual Classes Teach âGhetto' Language.”
249 Â In a post on
Language Log
: Zimmer, “Gingrich's âGhetto' Talk.”
Epilogue: Los Angeles
256 Â it has been home to speakers: Bayley, “Linguistic Diversity and English Language Acquisition,” 269.
256 Â a 1975 paper: Lieberson, Dalto, and Johnston, “The Course of Mother-Tongue Diversity in Nations.”
a
   This is the most common spelling as well as the spelling used by federal agencies. If you ever travel to North Dakota, however, you will much more frequently encounter the spelling
Sakakawea
. Born a Shoshone, Sacagawea was kidnapped as a young girl by the Hidatsa, who gave her a name from their own language:
Tsakáka wÃa
, “bird woman.”
Sakakawea
is the Hidatsa's preferred anglicization.
b
   Interestingly, Harvard might not still exist were it not for its admission of Native students. Shortly after its creation, the school found itself in some financial difficulties. Luckily, the English Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England was willing to give the college money if it would provide tuition and housing for American Indian students. Accordingly, Harvard's founding 1650 charter explicitly mentions its mission to educate the “Indian Youth of this Country.”
c
   Recent and fascinating work by the linguist Edward Vajda suggests that Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit languages are actually genetically related to Yeniseian, a mostly extinct family of languages in central Siberia.
d
   Or, perhaps more absurd, that there are two Native languages: “Eskimo” and everything else.
e
   Unfortunately, these sorts of words often get thrown around without thought for their provenance.
Moccasin
and
tomahawk
are Algonquin words and therefore not something you'd use as a descriptor in Alaska any more than you would call a kimono a bathrobe. Sometimes, however, a Native word can become associated with a general concept that is then used cross-culturally. The word
totem
comes from Ojibwe, for instance, but it is used in English for the totem poles constructed by speakers of very different languages, such as Tlingit and Kwak'wala.
f
   There is some debate as to whether
OK
, that most quintessential of American words, also comes from Choctawâspecifically, the Choctaw expression
okeh
, which means something like “it is so.” However, most experts seem to agree with Allan Metcalf, the author of
OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word
, who contends that the word was coined first in English before making its way into Choctaw.
g
   The accents over double vowels in Crow words indicate tone. If the accent is on the first vowel, then the tone is rising; if the accent is on the second vowel, the tone is falling.
h
   In the
Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World
, Graczyk provides a complete gloss of the word:
baawaashbaaléewiawaassaak
baa-w-aash-baa-lée-wia-waa-ssaa-k
INDEF-1-hunt-1-go-want.to-1-NEG-DECL
I'm not going to go hunting.
i
   Susan Stewart, the park manager at Plenty Coups State Park taught me another bit of slang:
eegaawaa
. Used only by women, she told me, it pretty much means “OMG.”
j
   Some verbs require not just the stem in position X but also a mandatory prefix in positions I or VI. So while the verb stem for “play” is -
né,
you also have to include the prefix
na-
. “You're playing,” then, is
naniné
.
k
   I am brand-loyal in very few ways, but I happen to feel very strongly about the cinnamon rolls served at the Holiday Inn Express free breakfast.
l
   The word
Navajo
itself appears to come from the Tewa word
navahú
, which means a “large area of cultivated fields.” (The Spanish appreciated the agricultural skills of the Navajo from very early onâin a 1630 letter to the king of Spain, Fray Alonso de Benavides called the Navajos “very great farmers.”) The Navajo, however, call themselves Diné, or “the People.”
m
   It is not entirely clear how enthusiastically Carson followed Carleton's orders. Carson had ignored Carleton's commands in the past, and the first time Carleton had asked Carson to go after the Navajo, Carson had tried to resign. Even so, reports of Carson's comparatively humane treatment of his prisoners hardly absolve him of his part in the campaign.
n
   This original reservation consisted of about 5,200 square miles, but since then it has been gradually expanded by executive order and congressional act. Navajo efforts to reclaim the bulk of their traditional lands represent the most successful such Native campaign in U.S. history.
o
   Native-language instruction was banned in all government schools from 1800 until 1888. And between 1888 and 1934, Native languages were permissible only in Bible study.
p
   Katharine Drexel was the niece of the founder of Drexel University in Philadelphia and herself founded Xavier University of Louisiana. She was sainted by Pope John Paul II in 2000.
q
   I refer particularly to the forced livestock reductions of the 1930s and 1940s. While some of these policies may have been well intentioned, their implementation was disastrous.
r
   Not that I would know anything about this.
s
   Technically, Hess and Hilbert classify
alap
as a second-person-plural clitic. A clitic, very broadly, is a morpheme that is more independent than an affix but less independent than a stand-alone word. Although a clitic has independent meaning, it's usually mushed up with another word. The
'm
in
I'm
or the
's
in
she's
would be two such examples.
t
   There is not, by the way, a single language called Eskimo. Nor, for that, matter are all Alaskan/Arctic languages called Inuit. The Eskimo part of the Eskimo-Aleut language group includes both Inuit and Yup'ik languages. The Inuit prefer not to be called Eskimo; the Yup'ik don't object to the use of
Eskimo
as a catchall term, but they definitely prefer not to be called Inuit.
u
   An epenthetic is a sound that is slipped onto or into a word without changing its meaning. You see it fairly often when adding affixes: sometimes the root and stem clash a little bit in your mouth. Think about plurals of English words ending in an “ess” soundâyou don't say
glasss
, but rather
glasses
.
