Forced to speak English

Vincent J. Curtis

25 July 22

The coverage of the Pope’s visit to Canada features stories on so-called “survivors” complaining about being forced to attend schools.  (Image that, kids being forced to attend school!)  There, they were deprived of their culture, being forced to speak English. (Poor, pitiful me was forbidden to speak English in French class!)

But what of the deprivation of language and culture, the so-called “cultural genocide”?  The old Cree language, for example, had no words for ‘equation’, ‘x-variable’, ‘hundred,’ ‘thousand,’ botany and its technical terms, geography, and ‘sailing ship’.  The students could not learn to read and write in Cree because Cree had no letters, no literature, or written language of any kind.  Penmanship? Forget it!  English opened the door to the world.

Educating students in Cree would have left them illiterate, innumerate, and unable to communicate to the outside world – precisely the condition a true education would alleviate.  (Let’s not get into what Cree dialect they would be taught in!)

There was, and is, nothing stopping those allegedly deprived of their language and culture from learning that language and culture on their own time at home, after they finished school, and in adulthood.  There’s a lot of those initiatives in non-indigenous communities, so what’s stopping them?  Wallowing in self-pity is too easy, too profitable, and has too many white liberal sympathizers.

You don’t hear the English complaining about being deprived of their Latin and Anglo-Saxon language and culture.  They adapted to circumstances and thrived.

The modern Cree language is English, and that enables the Cree to thrive if they adapt to circumstances.

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The ancient Celts occupied Britain at the end of the last ice age, about 20,000 years ago.  In 43 AD, Rome conquered and occupied ‘Roman Britain’.  The ancient Celts learned Latin and adopted Roman ways.  When the Romans left, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes invaded, and the Romano-Britons learned Saxon and adopted Anglo-Saxon ways.  When the Normans invaded, the Anglo-Saxons learned French and adapted to Norman ways.

In the 14^th century, along came Geoffrey Chaucer who wrote “Canterbury Tales.”  The language he used was then an avant-garde tongue – English - which combined Anglo-Saxon, French, and Latin.  Today, we recognize Chaucer’s language as Middle English.  This language flourished, and by the time of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I it had transitioned from late Middle English into the Early Modern English of William Shakespeare.  Shakespeare’s plays are now performed in two styles of English, Received Standard Pronunciation, and Original Pronunciation, the latter being as Shakespeare would have heard it, and written it.

Events and dynamisms change things, and against this we are supposed to take pity on aboriginals who were “deprived” of their original language and culture?  Never mind that they were made obsolete by events.  The culture that enabled the survival of humans in Northern Ontario and the great prairies is no longer necessary, or “sustainable” as they say.

 

Are the English to lament their loss of Latin and early Saxon languages, and if so to whom do they complain?