Jargon

[Nadja Adolf]

Mike said:	

	I've also
	noticed that GR is particular about prononciation, which isn't the case
	in LJ (Low Jargon; my term for now), where nearly any prononciation will
	do.  I have some comments about this I should probably reply directly to
	Dave's post about rather than getting too far into it here; basically,
	simply that the phonology found in Grand Ronde ("High") Jargon is not
	necessary for fluency or "validity" (legitimacy?) as genuine Low Jargon,
	and of course there isn't the denser vocabulary and special words and
	ideoms (idioms?) found in GR usage,

I think I prefer the terms ahnkuttie and GR. The difference isn't the same
as between Plattdeutsch and Hochdeutsch - it's really that one seems to have
derived from the other.

Ahnkuttie is an older form that fell out of common use some 30 or 40 years
before GR; GR had two additional generations of Creolization IMO.

In contrast hill German became preferred over prarie German because
Luther wrote his Bible in it. And Plattdeutsch doesn't really describe
Bayarisch or some of the other dialects, or so I've been told by
people from there, who insist that their dialect is distinct from both
Hochdeutsch and Plattdeutsch.

My father's father spoke an Eastern German (Prussian) Plattdeutsch because
his grandfather came from Brienne in Bessarabia, a village of Prussians
who had accepted Czarist land grants. My father's mother spoke Hochdeutsch
because her father came from Odessa and her mother, family  from Danzig and
her Dad was a Lutheran preacher. At home they spoke Hochdeutsch, except for
some of my grandfather's more colorful farmer sayings.

My mother spoke English, Chinook Jargon, French, and Spanish. Her great-
grandmother owned a grocery and did chandling, and the language for that
in the 19th C. was often Chinook Jargon, used to communicate with both
the Indian people who sold her berries and fish and meat and with the
Scandinavians on the steam schooners, and the myriad of other peoples
who worked in the mills, boat yards, ship builders, coalers, and on the
ships and docks themselves.

One result of an offensive legal system was the exclusion of women from the
Phillipines, China, and Japan from the US, unless their husbands were men
of considerable property; the end result of this law was the intermarriage
of Lummi and other native peoples with the Asians, and the sad sight often
seen in Seattle and Portland until recently, of aged single Asian men who
had been unable to marry, living out their lives in single room occupancy
hotels.

This intermarriage resulted in Chinook Jargon being the "family" language,
as did the placement of people with different languages on the same
reservation.

Various Western states passed Nuremberg laws before the Germans did. In
Washington Indians could marry both whites and Asians, but Asians could
only marry other Asians or Indians. In Oregon, it was technically illegal
from the teens until the 1960s or early 1970s for for Indians to marry
anyone but Indians or Asians. The "definition" of "Indian" for the Oregon
laws was "more than 1/16th part of American Indian." My own childhood
was enlivened by being called a "bastard" by some of the local kids,
to which my only answer was "my parents were married back home in
Washington."

It is worth noting that in many parts of both Oregon and Washington, people
simply ignored the law, with the collusion of local governments.

nadja