Kanada = 'back East'; nothing = 'it'

[David Robertson]

I find a number of words like these in the shorthand texts.  

The two forms you refer to are common in the shorthand.  This has a lot to 
do with French-speaking priests having created the literary standard, which 
led to /h/ having pretty unpredictable distribution.  

Also, Indigenous people very successfully learned the resulting 
standardized forms.  (Ironically this was because they were learning by the 
whole-word method instead of the intended alphabetic system.)  So, wherever 
the French guys wrote "h", you usually find it in the Indian letters.  
Wherever "h" was left out, it's usually left out in the letters.  

There are many counterexamples, though, all of which have very good reasons 
for popping up.  

For one thing, "house" originally had an "h", obviously.  And pretty much 
everybody was pronouncing it that way in Jargon.  So there are lots of 
spellings like <haws> in these letters.

And sometimes you'll find <haiak> even though there was no "h" in the word 
originally (in Chinookan).  The reason for this is clear, too.  The 
pronunciation with "h" (hyak) was very frequent, especially among English-
speakers.  It was reinforced by those inescapable popular dictionaries of 
Jargon, that copied from each other.  Once in a while a shorthand letter 
writer shows awareness of this trend, and writes an "h" in this word.  

In short, there was variation between h-full and h-less versions of some 
words, but when the "h" was present etymologically, it seems it was also 
pretty much the norm for the letter writers.  Despite the French priests.  
One way we can tell this is from the words that aren't standard CJ--
therefore not transmitted via Frenchified standard spellings--that appear 
in these letters, always with "h" when expected: <halo> for "hello", <Hari> 
for "Harry", <Hai Bar> for "High Bar" (village), etc.  

Cheers, 

--Dave R



On Sun, 21 Jan 2007 12:23:39 -1000, James Crippen <jcrippen at GMAIL.COM> 
wrote:

>I'm curious here, were both "aws" and "aiak" lacking initial "h" in
>the original? Is this sort of initial aspiration loss common to BC
>Jargon users? I'm used to seeing them as "haws" and "hayak" or
>something similar.

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