Posted on: Sunday, February 1, 2004

COMMENTARY
Languages thrive or die by design

By Bob Dye

More than a billion people speak English as a primary or secondary language. This is astounding growth since English derived from Germanic dialects spoken by about 150,000 tribesmen in the fifth century. The language's rise to world eminence was fraught with problems, the main one being that people preferred to speak their native tongue.

The struggle to make

English a dominant language

is described in violent terms in "The Adventure of English." Author Melvyn Bragg writes, "For English to grow to its full power, others had to be felled or chopped back savagely."

The book's subtitle is "Biography of a Language."

To write about languages as if they were people is nonsense, answers Dublin City University professor Michael Cronin in the Irish Times.

"Seeing a language as a

living organism suggests that what happens to it is somehow inscribed in the natural order

of things."

It is unreasonable to claim, he insists, that the near-extinction of the Irish language was "the inevitable if regrettable outcome of old age rather than the explicit result of social, political and economic decisions made by human beings." The reason English is a lingua franca is not the result of "Darwinian bloody-mindedness."

The native language of the Hawaiian Islands was nearly made extinct by English-speaking adventurers who arrived here in the 19th century. Their motivations, too, were social (assimilation), political (annexation) and economic (land ownership).

At first, there was a kind

of admixture of tongues that

resulted in a "commercial English" called haole (now pidgin). But it was insufficient for communicating in counting houses and warehouses.

English-language instruction in Honolulu got a big boost from Hawaiian mothers who wanted their sons to be bilingual. To learn to speak and write English as well as Hawaiian would land them good jobs in commerce. To help achieve that goal, the Oahu Charity School was founded in 1831

by the boys' fathers and their merchant colleagues.

Later, Hawaiian lost its commercial utility, and English-

language chauvinists tried to annihilate it. Today, thankfully, Hawaiian is staging a comeback.

A notable sign of recovery

is a compilation of Hawaiian words approved by the Hawaiian Lexicon Committee. Recently released by UH Press, "Mamaka Kaiao: A Modern Hawaiian Vocabulary" lists new words not found in the standard Hawaiian dictionary compiled by Pukui and Elbert and published a half-century ago with borrowed money from the Territorial Legislature.

Reading the word lists is instructive and fun. For example, many of the new Hawaiian words describe sports. Basketball is pohina'i. The ball is kinipopo pohina'i. And to

sink a shot is ho'okomo i ke kinipopo. The sport of volleyball is popa'ipa'i, and the ball is kinipopo popa'ipa'i. Sportscaster Kimo Leahy might study the book and give us a bilingual play-by-play of the upcoming ho'okuku popa'ipa'i.

The title of this 383-page word list translates into English as "carrying forward into the dawning of a new era." Brisk sales of both hardcover and paperback editions, as reported by Bill Hamilton of UH press, indicates the title is prophetic.

Frequent contributor Bob Dye is a Kailua writer and

historian.