CJ phonemes

[Henry Kammler]

HAYU MEHSI, Sally!

> All the distinctions in the
> inventory I posited in a 1983 article in Language were in fact
> attested in numerous words.

I knew it! - simply forgot to get the journal from the library and check the
article before asking too many questions...

> The resulting phonemic inventory is an
> almost perfect match for the one Terry Kaufman set up much earlier,
> in 1968 (but his 1968 ms. is still unpublished).

Now, as interest in CJ is growing -- wouldn't there be a way to get some of
the unpublished or rare material into printing?

>    Below is the inventory, with two doubtful phonemes in parentheses.
> It's not quite the phonemic spelling I've been using, because I can't
> transcribe the barred l here, or the hachek over the "sh" fricative
> & affricates, or the "eng" nasal, or the schwa (@).
>
>               p   t        ts    tS    k   kw   q   qw   ?
>
>               p'  t'  tL'  ts'  (tS')  k'  kw'  q'  qw'
>
>               b   d                    g
>
>                        L    s     S    x   xw   X    Xw
>
>               m   n                   (N)
>
>                   r    l
>
>               w                      y
>
>                     i       u
>
>                     e   @   o
>
>                         a

Perfect!
Looks like a very good way to write CJ, email-wise, too.

>     Except for the voiced oral stops and the eng, this phoneme
> set is quite a typical one for a Pacific Northwest language;

:-)

>   As far as one can tell from the older sources, most White speakers
> of CJ did not use the "non-European" phonemes -- no velar/uvular
> distinction, no labialized phonemes, no glottalized phonemes, and
> no lateral fricative or affricate.

Thus, White speakers must have formed a distinct group of CJ speakers,
maintaining sort of an ethnic dialect (cf. "Indian English" among
monolingual anglophone natives). I would also take this to mean that at any
rate CJ spread through native people among the tribes, not through Whites,
otherwise CJ would have arrived in, say, the Kamloops area similarly
distorted as Nootkan elements entered CJ in a restructured shape through
transmission by Whites.

> They fairly rarely used the
> /ts, ts'/ affricates.  Demers et al. were the notable exceptions,

But if I recall correctly, Demers spoke one or two native languages, too? So
he had probably developed an "ear" for this.

> If Boas was right about Mrs. Howard's usage
> being very different from that of other (non-Chinookan) CJ speakers,
> perhaps we need to posit separate systems anyway -- Grand Ronde vs.
> elsewhere.  But there might not be any significant differences in the
> inventory; I didn't find any in the text(s) from Mrs. Howard that
> Jacobs published.  There are certainly some significant differences
> elsewhere in the grammar, though.

OK, dialectology: I understand that we will find at least two
"quasi-standards" - Grand Ronde and Interior Salish/Kamloops. What about
Puget Sound, Olympic Peninsula, Vancouver Island, would that be a third
area?
Furthermore I would guess from the info I got from Dave and Sally that in
each area we will find at least two parallel "sociolects" - one native and
one nonnative. They would basically share the same regional lexicon but
differ in phonology.

Henry