Tlingit discussion

[George Lang]

I don’t have any raw data on Tlingit Jargon, but I thought I might put the
following notes into the record, for whatever use they might have for those
interested in the far northern versant of Jargon.  After the Johnson
summary immediately below, they deal with others than the Tlingit, but
point towards things which remain to be explored. I hope I haven't skipped
too many steps.

Johnson offered some rules to explain various phonological shifts displayed
in the glossaries, for example that kinds of simplication which substituted
Jargon /p/ for English /b/, /p/ and /f/, and Jargon /k/ for Chinook proper
/k/, /kw/, /q/, and /qw/, as well as alternative rules showing how a
Tlingit speaker would deal with Jargon /l/ or /m/, transposing them
respectively to /n/ and /w/ (Johnson 1978:3).

In the newly founded colony of Britsh Columbia, Jargon had such currency
that it was used evidentially in court proceedings. In 1860, for example,
one Alfred Waddington published "a four page broadsheet entitled "Judicial
Murder" in which he complained that a Tsimshian man had been hanged on
evidence obtained through an interpreter who spoke Chinook [Jargon] but who
was not competent in either Tsimshian or English" (Fisher 1977:150) —
though Waddington's point was the Tsimshian did not have Jargon while the
interpreter, who had did, was ignorant of the former's Tsimshian.

Sir Hector Langevin's 1871 report to the Canadian government on the new
Province of of the Dominion, which British Columbia had just entered,
recommended the learning of Jargon as its "language of commerce... which
was indispensable to all who trade with Indians" (1872:30).

In British Columbia Protestant missionaries, who began to arrive in number
from 1858, also adopted Jargon, sometimes not without regret. The Rev.
William Duncan "was not satisfied with the Chinook jargon as a means of
communicating his ideas... [He] aspired to a different kind of influence
over the Tsimshian than the fur traders had" (Fisher 1977:129). Indeed,
this drive for absolute control over native life lead him to found the semi-
autonomous cannery-mission of Metlakatkla just outside of British territory
in Alaska. [An interesting anecdote for Canadians to meditate upon].

Seventeen years later, when the Anglican Rev. W.H. Collison undertook his
mission to the Haida on the Queen Charlotte Islands, he was obliged to
attempt to learn that language. While acquiring it, Collison passed his
time "evangelizing from house to house, [making] use of Chinook [Jargon]
and Tsimshian" (Collison 1981:83). Like Duncan, Collison thought that
though Jargon "may be adapted for trading purposes, it is...a poor medium
for communicting religious instruction" (Collison 1981:84). For their part,
the Haida "had only contempt for the Chinook Jargon, which they
characterized as siwash talk" (Grant 1945:227). As couple of pages later,
Collison quotes an angry Haida muttering memaloose, memaloose, murder,
murder (Collison 1981:87).

For the record, I have no predilection for missionaries of any sort, though
I have to admit that some of them were skilled practical linguists.