Everyone knows I'm a nerd...but I figured I'd prove it anyway...

This is a response to a reading I had to do for my Early American Lit. class about the history of early American development and interactions between the ethnic groups. We just had to name three things that we didn't know or that specifically interested us.

I was extremely surprised to learn that "the Natives at first found the scale of European warfare appalling. (2)" I knew that the way Native Americans are often exhibited as complete savages was probably a very narrow, biased opinion, but I knew nothing that could back up an opinion depicting the invading Europeans as "savage." I was also unfamiliar with the idea that the Natives were part of large organizations of multiple tribes that interacted on a highly official level with the European appointed government members in the colonies. (3) I loved seeing an allusion to a theory I've always had about the English language on page 11. I lived in the third world country of Papua New Guinea for awhile and learned their trade language, called "Tok Pisin," which is pronounced like "talk pidgeon." This language is a conglomerate of the hundreds, even thousands, of tribal languages, or "Tok Plece" that are prominent, along with many words taken from the various languages of countries they've interacted with, such as Japan, who occupied P.N.G. during W.W.II, Holland, another occupying country, the United States, who does some business there, and various bits of Australian and British slang all mixed in and distorted into an entirely new language. I view English as a version of "Tok Pisin." It can not truly claim to be a romantic language descended from Latin, like Spanish, French, and Italian, nor is it entirely Germanic, or any number of the other languages that have influenced it. Some words are distortions of words that were made up in the not-too-distant past when English was even more highly restrictive than it currently is, by none other than William Shakespeare. His plays required a larger variety of word choice for the sake of keeping an audience's attention. English is a language still in its developmental stages, as is the nature of trade languages: to adapt over time to the societies that adopt it in order to interact with a larger number of people, most importantly within the economic circles. Some English words today, if the etymology were to be traced, would find their roots in Native American words that the settlers adopted and probably massacred, and various foreign words from other settlers as they sought to communicate in order to survive the harsh reality of life in an underdeveloped country.