Indian Influence Essay

This report aims to discuss the question of to what utter to the highest degree the Indians have bowd adjust call and the verbiage of American English. Considering that Native American Indians ar the oldest people in America, it is natural that their linguistic communication and culture have had some charm upon the development of American English, as wholesome as upon place name in America. It is believed that the first Native Americans arrived during the last ice-age, about 20,000 30,000 years ago .There are a great number of American place label, including those of self-aggrandizing cities and states, which have been named after(prenominal) Indian tidingss its estimated that at least half of the states get their names from Indian row. These include Arizona, which comes from the Indian word Arizonac, which means little spring or young spring. Arizona has a biography rich in legends of pertaining to the West. Here Indian chiefs Geronimo and Cochise led the fight against the frontiersmen.Tombstone, Arizona, was the site of the most famous shootout in the West, this be the gunfight at the O. K. Corral. name of former(a) states influenced by the Indians include Arkansas which comes from the Quapaw Indians, Iowa, which in all probability comes from an Indian name means this is the place or the Beautiful Land, Oklahoma, which is from ii Choctaw Indian words meaning inflammation people, and Wyoming, which is from the Delaware Indian word meaning mountains and valleys alter, just like the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania.It can therefore be seen that the influence of American Indians has had quite a large impact on the naming of places in America. The vocabulary of American English has besides been quite profoundly impacted. In a similar way that thousands of place names have been impacted by Indian words, so have many US English words have their grow in American Indian.These help in making the language the rich, cultural contest that it i s today, and include not only words such as tomahawk from the Virginia Algonkian tamahaac, totem from the Ojibwa nindoodem, my totem, wampum from the Massachusetts wampumpeag , wigwam from the east Abenaki wikwom but also moccasin from the Virginia Algonquian moose from the Eastern Abenaki mos, papoose from the Narragansett papoos, child, pecan from the Illinois pakani which are used with relevance to commonplace American things.The word Podunk, meant to describe an peanut town out in the shopping mall of nowhere, comes from a Natick Indian word meaning swampy place. Many of these words borrowed from American Indians are nouns from the Algonquian languages that used to be common and widely spoken along the Atlantic coast. English colonists, who came across iar plants and animals which were freaky to them at the time named them based on Indian terms. Naturally enough orthoepy changed and words were shortened in redact to make them easier for the English tongue.But the fact r emains that their roots are in American Indian words. Conclusion This paper shows that the Indians have influenced both place names and the vocabulary of American English to a large degree.REFERENCESInfoplease, 2005 American Indian lend Words, retrieved 8 May 2006 from the website http//www. infoplease. com/spot/aihmwords1. hypertext mark-up language Native Americans, 2005, The Bravest of the Brave, retrieved 8 May 2006 from the website http//www. nativeamericans. com/ feature Monster, 2005, American Indian Place Names retrieved 8 May 2006 from the website http//www. factmonster. com/spot/aihmnames1. hypertext mark-up language