Daylia, where would we be without the White Man's contribution to vocabulary?

One answer: we'd be in the position of having no basis for scholarship. The words "because, how, expect, could, should" are all required for logical discussion of concepts, to represent cause and effect. If you can't represent cause and effect in your language, you either invent words to do that or you can't discuss those concepts.

On another theme of the language, I agree with Mudlark: Indians were *tribal* (as were Europeans, just a bigger tribe). If you have a tribe, by definition your language requires words for "those belonging to the tribe" and for "those not belonging to the tribe". Even if the "not belonging" words are specific in identifying which tribes the other people *do* belong to, the words are still there to represent the concepts of "those like us" and "those not like us". The words could only be absent from the language if the Indian tribes had no concept of this, and we know from historical evidence that this isn't the case.

And as far as "it" goes, that word is also missing from French and Romance languages. It doesn't mean that those people do not have the concept of "inanimate object", it's just that the language has assigned a gender semi-randomly to these words. German and Germanic languages are similar - they have three genders, but inanimate objects are semi-randomly assigned a gender.

Graham.