Why it sounds Indian ("He Reads Chinook With Ease")

[David Robertson]

Lhush pulakli!

By request, here's a very brief idea why I think the Chinook Jargon in
that 1896 newspaper article sounds like it was spoken by an Indian.

-->	Omission of "if".  This is not a strong argument, but I suspect
	that a White who understood the Jargon and quoted an Indian's
	speech would include "if" ("spose", presumably, in CJ) when he
	understood a sentence to be conditional.  On the other hand, a
	language like Mandarin Chinese creates conditional sentences
	without an "if" word, as I recall, and perhaps Whites hearing
	Pidgin English spoken by Chinese immigrants could have equated
	it with Jargon, and so on and so on.  This is an interesting and
	complicated issue.

-->	Omission of prepositions.  Much as we hear Grand Ronde and Puget
	Sound-area indigenous speakers of CJ using wording like /mash
	cEqw/ for "to throw into the water", we see here e.g. <wake
	mitlite ocoke illehe>, "don't stay in this country!"  A trait of
	at least several NW languages is that they have few true
	prepositions (as they can express the role of an event -
	participant within the verb).

--> 	Fairly consistent use of the word order [NEGATIVE] [PRONOUN]
	[VERB], as in <wake mica potlatch>, "you won't give".

There are other features of the Jargon speech quoted that don't seem very
Indian, and may hint that we're getting a version rather tinged with
English influence.  But the selection in question does not have the look
of "White Jargon", I feel.  (For an extreme illustration of that, look at
Laura Belle Downey-Bartlett's compositions.)

My best wishes to all of you.

Alta na lhatEwa.
Dave



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