CJ phonemes

[Sally Thomason]

Henry,

  Yep, the fact that sounds generally not produced by Whites are
(or were) used consistently by Native CJ speakers has to mean
that the transmission of the pidgin was primarily Native to Native;
I've used this as part of my argument that Whites probably weren't
involved in the genesis of CJ at all -- that it developed (in a
restricted area, for use in trade and perhaps for use among slaves of
the Chinooks) before, or at least independent of, White contact.  This
isn't a necessary conclusion; CJ could still be post-contact and
there could have been Whites involved from the beginning; but I
think the weight of the evidence supports a no-Whites-involved
hypothesis: it yields the simplest origin scenario, and it accounts
nicely for the data.  On this hypothesis, the Nootka words (quite
possibly from the Nootka Jargon that is known to have existed) would
have entered CJ sometime after its period of origin.

   But I don't think that Interior Salishan speakers were major
CJ users at all -- the Montana Salish (Flatheads) apparently didn't
use it; they used the Plains Indian Sign Language instead, for
intergroup communication.  Other Southern Interior Salishan tribes
may have used CJ, since they were closer than the Montana tribes
to primary CJ territory.  But the materials transcribed from
Natives by linguists are all from tribes at or near the coast: Twana
(Elmendorf), Upper Chehalis (Harringon), Snoqualmie (Jacobs), Saanich
(Jacobs), Santiam Kalapuya (Jacobs), Upper Coquille Athabaskan
(Jacobs), Nootka (Boas), and Tsimshian (Boas) -- and of course Chinook
itself.  There were certainly lots of local variations in CJ usage.
Still, there are enough consistent grammatical features (phonology &
syntax) to establish grammatical norms for CJ across its range, *except*
for "Chinook-CJ", that is, CJ as used by Chinookan speakers (or their
immediate descendants, and possibly their neighbors in Grand Ronde).

  There *are* some loanwords from CJ in Interior Salishan languages,
including a few in Montana Salish; but there's no particular reason
to assume that they came directly from CJ itself -- they may have
come by way of other languages.  Occasionally there's evidence for
that (though not as far as I know in the Interior), as when CJ
latab `table' turns up in Upper Chehalis as latam -- the result, clearly,
of UCh speakers' application of a correspondence rule (a "borrowing
routine", in Heath's terminology) to a borrowing from a nearby
nasal-less language.  (The rule would be something like "those
guys say b where we say m, so if we use their word, we should
replace their b with an m".)

   -- Sally