CJ phonemes

[Sally Thomason]

Some comments on CJ phonemes:

   When, around 1980, I checked all the CJ sources I could find to
try to figure out what the CJ phonemic inventory was, I used the
following criteria for deciding what to include: (1) usage by
Native American speakers of CJ (as transcribed by a variety of
linguists, primarily Melville Jacobs, William Elmendorf,
J.P. Harrington, and Franz Boas); (2) for most of the distinctions,
the spellings of Demers et al. 1871, the only non-linguist White
authors who heard & represented most of the non-European phonemic
distinctions; and, crucially, (3) agreement in at least two
independent sources, which provided evidence for some sort of
general CJ norm.  (For instance: if two sources consistently represented
the velar vs. uvular -- or, perhaps, pre-velar vs. back velar --
distinction, i.e. consistently transcribing velars in certain words
and uvulars in others, I counted that consistency as evidence for
a grammatical norm in the pidgin.)  All the distinctions in the
inventory I posited in a 1983 article in Language were in fact
attested in numerous words.  The resulting phonemic inventory is an
almost perfect match for the one Terry Kaufman set up much earlier,
in 1968 (but his 1968 ms. is still unpublished).

   Below is the inventory, with two doubtful phonemes in parentheses.
It's not quite the phonemic spelling I've been using, because I can't
transcribe the barred l here, or the hachek over the "sh" fricative
& affricates, or the "eng" nasal, or the schwa (@).


              p   t        ts    tS    k   kw   q   qw   ?

              p'  t'  tL'  ts'  (tS')  k'  kw'  q'  qw'

              b   d                    g

                       L    s     S    x   xw   X    Xw

              m   n                   (N)

                  r    l

              w                      y



                    i       u

                    e   @   o

                        a


     Stress is also phonemic in CJ, though it most often falls on
the first syllable.

    Except for the voiced oral stops and the eng, this phoneme
set is quite a typical one for a Pacific Northwest language; there
is no visible simplification or other distortion in words derived
from Chinookan (no phonetic distortion, that is -- Chinookan
morphology doesn't appear in CJ).  There IS significant distortion
in all words derived from Nootka, showing, I've argued, that those
words entered CJ via Whites, not directly from speakers of Nootka.
Words from Salishan languages also don't seem to show significant
distortion.

   It's clear from the Native sources that many Natives did not
have voiced oral stops in their versions of CJ.  Speakers of the
several "nasal-less" languages of the Northwest had nasals in their
CJ, however -- though not in loanwords from CJ into their own
languages.  The CJ phoneme /r/ is confined to words of English and
especially French origin (though some English words in CJ have /l/
instead of English /r/, e.g. in /dlai/ `dry'); the instability of
/r/ in Natives' CJ is no doubt due to the absence of an /r/ phoneme
in most of the relevant Native languages.

   According to Kaufman, /x/ is pronounced [h] word-initially, [x]
elsewhere.

   As far as one can tell from the older sources, most White speakers
of CJ did not use the "non-European" phonemes -- no velar/uvular
distinction, no labialized phonemes, no glottalized phonemes, and
no lateral fricative or affricate.  They fairly rarely used the
/ts, ts'/ affricates.  Demers et al. were the notable exceptions, and
of course there may have been others as well (but if there were, they
didn't write anything down that showed the distinctions, as far as I
was able to discover).  The only phonemic opposition that is not
directly attested in ANY non-Native source (even in Demers et al.)
is the velar/uvular distinction.

   Finally, the research on which I based this inventory, and of
course Kaufman's research as well, preceded Henry Zenk's publications
of Grand Ronde material.  If Boas was right about Mrs. Howard's usage
being very different from that of other (non-Chinookan) CJ speakers,
perhaps we need to posit separate systems anyway -- Grand Ronde vs.
elsewhere.  But there might not be any significant differences in the
inventory; I didn't find any in the text(s) from Mrs. Howard that
Jacobs published.  There are certainly some significant differences
elsewhere in the grammar, though.

   -- Sally