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Say it ain’t so.

Many native languages are still spoken. One of them is Navajo, which earned a special place for itself with the Marines in World War II. Without any alphabet or symbols, it proved ideal as a code that can’t easily be deciphered. For starters, consider its equivalent of the word navy: “tsah wol-la-chee ah-keh-di-glini tsah-ah-dzoh.” Another Indian language, Choctaw, served the same purpose in World War I.

ASIAN CONNECTIONS

Little noticed was the ability of many Indian tribes to understand each other, a fact indicating that their languages had a common Asian connection. According to the Smithsonian Institution, Siberian ancestors of American Indians crossed the Aleutian chain by dogsled about 14,000 years ago when sea levels were some three hundred feet below present levels. They then spread throughout the Western Hemisphere.

An Asian flavor can easily be detected in many Indian words and phrases, as well as in the names of the tribes themselves, everywhere from Alaska to Brazil. Verbal likenesses include tangwaci and mamaci (“father” and “mother”) in Southern Paiute, and the words for “two” and “three” in Innu (related to Algonquin), nishu and nishtu. To eat in Innu is mitshu.

According to Polat Kaya, a former Turkish government official and researcher for Bell-Northern Research in Ontario, there are numerous similarities between Indian words and Turkish ones.30 He claims that ancestors of Turks and others shared central and northern Asia with ancestors of American Indians. Kaya adds that many ethnic Turks still live in Siberia up to the Kara Sea and the Bering Strait, as well as in central Asia, illustrating the broad sweep of Turkish influence.

His comparison of the words for father (ata, apa, baba) in Turkish with forty-seven American Indian languages shows many similarities. Close parallels to the Turkish words for father include atataq in Eskimo, adaq in Aleut, atotuh in Cherokee, tatag in Algonquin, ta in Navaho, and apa in various South American tribes. The Turkish words for mother (ana, anne) also have many Indian likenesses, according to his research.

Today’s lingo, of course, also contains flotsam from the early arriving Spanish, French, Dutch, and Germans, as well as others. Words include crevasse, carryall, prairie, and -ville, the suffix to many place names, from the French; banana, cockroach, lasso, corral, mosquito, and ranch from the Spanish; boss, pie, stoop, and spook from the Dutch; noodles and sauerkraut from the Germans; goober (peanut), gumbo (soup), and hoodoo from African slaves; and butternut, bullfrog, eelgrass, and lightning bug from the English.

This chapter has described how Amglish is becoming the common language of the United States. The next chapter will tell about how teachers, musicians, poets, comedians, advertisers, and others have unconsciously prepared the new language for shipment to the rest of the world.

Teachers and Other Pioneers

The teaching of formal grammar has a negligible . . . even harmful effect on the improvement of writing.

—The National Council of Teachers of English, 1963

The national swing toward Amglish is due to many factors, particularly the dedicated work of groups and individuals who see a future for less formal language.

Among the groups, none has been more supportive than the leading organizations of English teachers in the United States. With the awkwardly worded sentence above, the National Council made clear that it knew nearly half a century ago which way the linguistic wind was blowing, and it wasn’t toward more formal instruction.1

Bravely reversing 2,500 years of grammar tradition, the group claimed “in strong and unqualified terms” to have “about a century of research” to back up its theory that the best way to teach grammar is not in a separate class devoted to it but only incidentally to teaching reading and writing.

Since then, the NCTE, which says it has about 60,000 K–12 English teachers as members, plus some 500,000