Making the sounds?

[Nadja Adolf]

	Wel, wek dret khakwa nayka na tEmtEm, Nadja.
	I beg to differ.

	Some of the sounds of Grand Ronde Chinuk-wawa would be hard to imitate
	exactly, based only on written explanations of them.  But I think a
	person would have a good idea of what they must sound like, and would
	recognize them when they're spoken, given only that amount of exposure.

I still stand by my statement if that one is not a linguist and one has not
attended a conference at GR, understanding and differentiating these sounds
is very difficult. Exposure is unlikely if one hasn't attended a conference.

	And if you've heard Sechelt, or Georgian, or Amharic (et al.) spoken,
	you've heard nearly all the sounds in GR Chinuk already.

No offense, but unless you work for customs, immigration, or are a linguist,
hearing those languages is kind of an unusual experience.

	I'm very interested in the recordings I've heard of BC Jargon.
	They're all or nearly all spoken by Indians, and have a sound pattern
	recognizably closer to what's represented in the "ahnkuttie"/"White"/
	whatchamacallit CJ books.  This is still only in the educated-guess
	stage for me, but I suspect this represents a pretty well-crystallized
	North Coast CJ.  By that impromptu label I mean the coastal areas of
	Puget Sound, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the Georgia Strait, northern
	Vancouver Island, the Fraser River, and some others.

Eastern Washington comes to mind as a similar sounding area.

	In many ways this variety of CJ looks systematically different from
	(let's call it) Columbia CJ.  The latter would include perhaps areas
	from Grays Harbor through Chehalis and Cowlitz territories, thence
	upriver to Wishram and Wasco lands, and downstream to the mouth of the
	Columbia and southerly to say Tillamook areas.

I question this, because I don't think that the folks at Yakama sounded
like the folks at GR. And if I understood Bernice and Dan, I think that
the folks there sounded more like the folks at Yakama, who didn't sound
that different from the folks on Puget Sound. But my memories all date
from the early 1970s back; and I hadn't heard spoken jargon after my
mom died in the late 1970s, except for my father's popping up with some
a couple of years ago.

It is possible that my memories have become flawed over time, but I really
think that the only way an objective determination of dialectical areas can
really be made is with some sort of physical measurement of speech.

Are there CJ recordings from all areas? I have been thinking that it might
be possible using Fourier transforms to try and compare sounds from the
different areas to see if there are distinctive, quantifiable physical
differences in the sounds made in different areas.

My own personal interest is in learning to speak the GR dialect, and then
continuing my study of ahnkuttie. GR is more Creolized, and more expressive,
so it is the dialect that would be more challenging to learn and use.
What about further south, into Northern California? Are there recordings of
CJ speakers from down south, say circa Umpqua and Grants Pass?
	
	This is just an informal characterization of the well-documented
	CJ-speaking areas; a third distinct variety would seem to have
	centered on Kamloops, British Columbia, if only because Father Le Jeune
	did his work there.  His Chinuk was perhaps idiosyncratic, perhaps
	more-or-less representative of how indigenous people used it in
	interior BC (I suspect the latter, for various reasons).

	Lots of fascinating exploration of CJ remains to be done.  It's good
	to see the renaissance of serious interest in the language in the last
	very few years.

It would be better to see a revival happen, something that is very
difficult without adequate instructional materials.

nadja





	Nadja Adolf <nadja at NODE.COM> wrote:
	>
	> LaXayEm,
	>
	> Spose ma wik Latuwa Lu?lu pi ma wik lalang man ma tu?wEn hilu tEmtEm
	> munk-laLah.
	>
	> Na Latuwa,
	>
	> nadja
	>
	>
	> Howdy,
	>
	> If you didn't go to the conference and you aren't a linguists, you have
	> no idea of how to make the sounds.
	>
	> I go,
	>
	> nadja
	>

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