American Language Supplement 2 (43 page)

Lewis and Marguerite Shalett Herman, in their “Manual of Foreign Dialects,”
³
say that “the ordinary young Hawaiian speaks an American form of English with the exception of a few vowel and consonant variations and a smattering of grammatical changes,” but add that “there is an infiltration of a slight Portuguese intonation, from which the Hawaiian dialect obtains its lilt and emphasis, as well as some Pidgin English and Beche le Mar.” The first English spoken on the islands was undoubtedly Pidgin, but it began to give
way to more orthodox English at least a century ago,
¹
and, as I have noted, English has been taught in the schools since 1853. By an act of 1896, when Hawaii was still a more or less independent republic, English was declared to be “the medium and basis of instruction in all public and private schools,” but in 1919
²
this law was amended to provide that “the Hawaiian language shall be taught in all normal and high schools.” In 1931, however, a further act reduced Hawaiian to the estate of an elective in junior and senior high-schools, and in 1935 a law providing that it should be taught in the grade-schools set up on land occupied by natives under a Homestead Act of 1921 was turned into absurdity by a provision that daily instruction in it should be for “at least ten minutes.”
³

The Hermans list the following as the most frequent vowel changes in Hawaiian English: the
a
of
take
and that of
bat
become the
e
of get; the
a
of
father
, that of
ball
, and the
aw
of
off
become the
u
of
but
; the
i
of
sit
becomes the
ee
of
seat
; the
oi
of
oil
becomes the
a
of
palm
. The sounds of long
ee
, as in
bee
, of
i
in
nice
, of
o
in
bone
, of
oo
in
food
and of
u
in
up
remain unchanged. Inasmuch as Hawaiian has but five vowels,
a, e, i, o
and
u
, and but seven consonants,
h, k, l, m, n, p
and
w
, with no diphthongs and no consonant clusters, for “no two consonants can be pronounced without at least one vowel between them,”
⁴
the older natives have difficulty with many American words. But their Americanized juniors are learning to use
b, d, f, g, r, s
and
t
, though
d
and
t
are commonly dropped when preceded by another consonant, the
th
of
there
is changed to
d
, that of
thought
is changed to
t
, and
v
is changed to
w
. Also, diphthongs are creeping into such loans from the Hawaiian as
lai
, in which the vowels were clearly separated in the original.
⁵

375
. [Those Filipinos who have acquired American English in the public schools of the archipelago … make changes in it. It is most unusual for one of them to speak it well.] This statement, with
the specifications following, was based upon an article by Emma Sarepta Yule, of the College of Agriculture, Los Baños, published in 1925.
¹
A later report indicates that the Filipinos have made some progress, though not much, since the time of Miss Yule’s paper. That report appeared in the Manila
Graphic
for September 22, 1938, in the form of an interview with Alice Mary Johnson, professor of English at Union College, Manila. She said:

Of Filipino pronunciation her informant, Jose Luna Castro, said:

Miss Johnson predicted that a distinctively Filipino form of English would evolve in the islands. “The great body of it,” she said, will be “essentially American,” and “the variations from the mother-tongue will be more evident in speech than in writing.” At the end of 1945 it was estimated that no less than 5,000,000 of the 16,500,000 inhabitants spoke what is known locally as Bamboo English, as against but 500,000 speaking Spanish. Article XIII, Section 3 of the constitution approved by President Roosevelt on March 23, 1935 ordained:

A great many proposals for carrying this mandate into effect were made in the Assembly during the years following, and in the end Tagalog was chosen to become official on July 4, 1945 alongside English and Spanish,
¹
but it has made little more actual progress than Gaelic in Ireland, and the chances seem to be good that English will prevail in the long run. The Americans in the Philippines have taken a number of Spanish and Tagalog loans into their everyday speech, and some of them are in frequent use,
e.g.
, the Spanish
lavandera
, a laundress;
dulce
, sweet;
basura
, a garbage can;
sala
, a living-room;
aparador
, a clothes-press;
hombre
, man, and
komusta
, how are you? (Sp.
como esta?
), and the Tagalog
tao
, man, used of a native peasant. I am informed by a correspondent that there have been some miscegenations between Spanish and English,
e.g., shoehombre
, a member of the native white-collar class – literally, one high enough in the world to wear shoes regularly.
²
A white man married to a native woman is a
squaw man
and half-breeds are
mestizos. Chit
(a check or note) and
tiffin
(lunch) have been borrowed from the vocabulary of the English in the Far East.
³

“The Puerto Ricans,” writes a correspondent, “are the only people in the world who have no language. They speak Spanish wretchedly and English twice as wretchedly.” The first half of this was supported by Dr. Victor S. Clark, an economist who was the first president of the Insular Board of Education under the military government which followed the Spanish-American War, 1898–1902 “A majority of the people,” he said, “do not speak pure Spanish. Their language is a patois almost unintelligible to the native of Barcelona and Madrid. It possesses no literature and little value as an intellectual medium. There is a bare possibility that it will be nearly as easy to educate these people out of their patois into English as
it will be to educate them into the elegant tongue of Castile.” This “bare possibility” was the foundation of the educational scheme adopted for the island by its American saviors, and by 1912 98.4% of all the urban public schools were being taught in English exclusively. It worked very badly, and in 1930 Spanish was restored in the four lower grades, but English was retained through the higher grades and into the high-school and university. In that year a new commissioner of education, Dr. José Padín, made Spanish the sole medium of instruction in the first eight grades. But at some time before 1940 Roosevelt II ordered that English be given first place once more. A year later a native spokesman declared that “the system of education in Puerto Rico has been reduced to an absurdity, and our people are losing their own language without acquiring another.”
¹

Thereafter the language question became an important part of the Puerto Rican movement for independence, and the discussion of it aroused bitter animosities. A minority of native Uncle Toms, derisively termed
pitiyanquis
(petite Yankees), declared themselves to be in favor of teaching even Spanish in English, but the overwhelming majority of Puerto Ricans demanded that all elemental teaching be in Spanish, with English taught only as a second language and in the higher grades. In May, 1946 the Puerto Rican Legislature passed an act adopting the latter programme, but it was vetoed by the Governor, Rexford G. Tugwell. The Legislature then repassed it over his veto, and under the Organic Act of March 2, 1917 it went for final decision to President Truman, who vetoed it on October 25. This second veto set off a fresh uproar, for under the same Organic Act the President was required to act upon such a repassed act within ninety days, failing which it became a law. Truman’s defense was that it had not reached him until August 5, but the Puerto Rican Senate insisted that the ninety days should have been counted from the day the act was repassed, and accordingly appealed to the United States District Court of the island, which decided in its favor in March, 1947. The government thereupon appealed to the Supreme
Court of Puerto Rico, and by the time these lines get into print the case may be before the Supreme Court of the United States.
¹

How many Puerto Ricans have acquired a working knowledge of American English is not known with certainty. In 1935 Padín estimated that 400,000 in a population of 1,600,000 had done so,
²
but in 1945 the Puerto Rican Teachers’ Association (Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico) was still estimating the same number “ten years of age and over” in a population grown to 2,000,000.
³
Not many of these speak the language correctly, for most of them have been taught it by native teachers who are themselves far from at home in it. Spanish, indeed, is still the prevailing tongue of the island, save only in a narrow circle of Federal jobholders. Even the intellectuals educated in the United States speak it among themselves, and in the interior English is scarcely known at all. There was no English newspaper until March 7, 1940, when
El Imparcial
of San Juan began publishing a morning tabloid in the language of the liberators. The next day
El Mundo
followed with an afternoon
World Journal
, but it expired in 1946.
⁴
For the following notes upon the insular English I am indebted to Lewis C. Richardson, of the English Institute of the University of Puerto Rico: