Dakelh ("Carrier" Athabaskan) loan from CJ; reflects Indian-Indian transmission?

[Dave Robertson]

Hello,

Reading Bill Poser's fine paper "The Carrier Syllabics", which is available on his website (see Mike C.'s recent post about the Yinka Dene Institute site, which links to Bill's), I see the Carrier word <balhats>, meaning a potlatch.  (Presumably referring to the common NW ritual.  This is among the "very rare instances of syllable-final ts" in Dakelh, and it's not surprising that it's in a loanword from Chinuk-Wawa.)

Note that /p/ isn't a native sound in Dakelh, so the usual Chinuk-Wawa initial sound [p] is rendered by the only native bilabial, /b/.

Note also that final <ts> is apparently to be read just so -- Dakelh has a full series of hushing affricates <ch>, <j>, <ch'> and hissing ones <ts>, <dz>, <ts'>.  So one presumes that if the Dakelh had learned this Chinuk-Wawa word in a pronunciation ending in the typical /ch/ sound, they'd have preserved that sound.  (Cf. the following paragraph: [patlach] seems to be the common non-Indian pronunciation.]  They either heard it originally with final /ts/, which in some Pacific NW languages (e.g. St'at'imcets, Secwepemctsin) is a plausible event, or their language has more recently undergone a phonological change e.g. from hushing to hissing sounds.  I should point out that Dakelh is excellent at preserving fine distinctions among series of fricatives & affricates, having in fact a third group I'll call "slit" (written by the Carrier Linguistic Committee as underlined <s>, <z>, and so forth).  It's interesting, too, that Dakelh didn't perceive the Jargon word as ending in a phonologically marke`d "slit" sound, which few if any non-Athabaskan languages of the region have.

And note the medial consonant, <lh> (voiceless lateral fricative).  The Dakelh apparently received the Chinuk-Wawa word in a form different from the common, indeed nearly uniform non-Indian realization ~ [patlach].  The presence of /lh/ here again suggests either that Dakelh received an "Indian-sounding" version of "potlatch", or that it re-analyzed the medial consonant(s) from /tl/ or /tlh/ to a perhaps more marke`d /lh/!

We can't reconstruct an entire contact situation from one word, and I'll have to go through the dictionaries of the Dakelh dialects in order to discern more clearly the mechanisms of borrowing there, but this is food for thought with regard to the hypothesis that Chinuk-Wawa's geographical expansion owes a significant debt to Indian-Indian contact.

Cheers,

Dave


--
"Asking a linguist how many languages she knows is like asking a doctor how many diseases he has!" -- anonymous



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