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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It's funny, I was just saying at work yesterday that seeing as how Trump has renamed the Gulf Of Mexico to the Gulf Of America, it won't be long before he renames our English Language to American Language. That way we'll all be speaking American instead of English.[/quote]

It would get too confusing. Which Native American language?  Navajo, Nahuatl, Quechua?  English is a European language. [/quote]

It's ironic that the Germans couldn't crack Navajo when we Americans used Navajo as code talkers.

American English has diverged quite a bit from English, especially Old English.  British English sounds almost like a romantic language to me.  I think Americans picked up some language from the long gone Eastern tribes in the early days, especially clipped and truncated words.  American is much more analytic very little variation in structure less emphasis on conjugation.

This is what chatGPT had to say:Yes, several Native American tribes on the East Coast used language structures that involved truncating or shortening words, but this practice was not universal and varied depending on the specific language group. Many Native American languages, including those spoken by tribes on the East Coast, are polysynthetic, meaning they often create complex words by combining multiple smaller morphemes (the smallest units of meaning). These combinations could involve truncation or abbreviation for grammatical purposes, though it would be somewhat different from how truncation works in English grammar.

For example:

Iroquoian Languages (such as those spoken by the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy, including the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca tribes): These languages are highly synthetic, meaning that a single word could carry the meaning of an entire sentence in English. In these languages, parts of words might be shortened or omitted in certain grammatical contexts to fit the structure of the language. However, these are often more about efficiency in the use of roots and affixes rather than truncation for its own sake.

Algonquian Languages (such as those spoken by the Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Powhatan tribes): These languages also employ a structure where many affixes (prefixes, suffixes, etc.) are added to roots, and while some forms of truncation may occur for ease of communication, they are part of the larger morphological system. Certain words or parts of words can be dropped or shortened in conversational or colloquial usage, depending on context.

Siouan and Muskogean Languages: Although not directly on the East Coast, neighboring tribes from these language families, like the Cherokee (which is a Iroquoian language), also exhibited polysynthetic structures where words could be shortened or modified in different grammatical contexts.

So, while it wasn't necessarily "truncated words" in the way we might think of abbreviations or slang in English, many East Coast Native American languages did have ways of shortening or modifying words for grammatical efficiency, often in the form of affixation, contraction, or elision of sounds.

Each language's approach to this would be different, rooted in the specific grammatical rules of that language.[/quote]

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