CJ phonemes -Reply

[Tony Johnson]

Kanawi-Laksta,

I've been a little intimidated by the conversation here (I'm not exactly
a linguisT), but I've got a few comments that will go back aways on this
topic, so here it goes:

Regarding aspects of our phonology that are phonemically distinctive.

First much of the phonology of Chinook is not phonemically distinctive
but is very important to its being "good ChInUk."

Secondly, elements that I can think of being phonemically distinctive
(off-hand) are aspiration:

phus vs. pus (of course these have differnet root languages, but the
distinction is important).

glottalized/ejective:

k!anawi vs. kanawi

glottal stop can be:

lulu vs. lu?lu  /  p!u? vs. p!u

and as Sally noted stress is phonemically distinctive:

kha'pa vs. khapa'  /  sku'-kum vs. sku-ku'm

Regarding voicing as phonemically distinctive:  I can't think of any
example where it is, but again it is important to the language "sounding
right."

Regarding vowel quality and phonemically distinction:  The vowels of
Chinook are pretty well influenced by English and shifts like /i/ to /I/
are phonetic only.  However, These are once again important to the
language "sounding right."

Hey, Henry Z. correct me if I'm wrong here.

We are dealing with the issue of varying pronunciation systematically.
We simply gather all the variant forms, compare them to the root and
generally speaking it is easy to determine which we will consider our
"primary  form."

Regarding Eula's writing.  She at times clearly marked aspirated vs.
unaspirated and glottalized vs. non glottalized.  Regarding her spelling
of t!u?wan she, and her sisters only pronounce the glotallized /t/ where
as their father denoted the stop also.  I have seen where Eula wrote
'tdowan' which reflects her, and her sisters pronunciation.

Regarding our writing system.  We could undoubtedly write with a
standard ASCII keyboard such as Henry's thought of 'dtu'wen.'  However,
my general feeling is that it is nice to have an alphabet that looks, at
least a little, different.  In other words we want something that looks
more 'Indian' and less like English.

Dave, in regards to your suggestion of /d/ /g/ ds/ and /b/ for
glottalized /t/ /k/ /c/ and /p/:  These voiced stops are distinctive in
ChInUk.  This in not a phonemic distinction, but again is important to
"sounding right."  'dakta' and 'gIdEp' are examples.

Regarding Sally's inventory:

What about dipthongs and /h/?  We note /ay/ /aw/ /uy/ and /h/.  We don't
note 'eng,' and in our orthography we note the phonetic distinction in
vowels we add /I/ /U/ /eh/ kakwa 'bet.'  Oh and as you'll have noticed
me are noting aspiration.

Regarding the Nootka derived words:  I still don't know why the "lateral
fricative?"

G.R. ChInUk:  While Victoria Howard's ChInUk was different than that
spoken in other areas, and perhaps this is attributable to her being a
Chinook speaker, it clearly is not significantly different than any
other speaker of ChInUk in Grand Ronde.  In other words it is just good
G.R. ChInUk, and was perfectly intelligible to G.R. tIlIXam.

By the way I'm glad to see mentioned again the pre-contact origins of
ChInUk-wawa.  An interesting conversation yesterday with Scott DeLancey
of the U of Oregon centered around the fact that we should likely see an
English based Jargon/Pidgin/Creole in our area if there was not a
pre-contact Native one already filling the need.  He stated that sailors
had a Jargon that they used throughtout the world for trade, and the
fact that a Native based Jargon survived here shows that it was serving
the function just fine.

Forgive me if I have anywhere stated the obvious, and I'm enjoying this
conversation.

LaXayEm pi hayu mehrsi,

Tony A. Johnson
Grand Ronde, OR


>>> Sally Thomason <sally at THOMASON.ORG> 04/13/99 09:55am >>>
Henry,

  Yep, the fact that sounds generally not produced by Whites are
(or were) used consistently by Native CJ speakers has to mean
that the transmission of the pidgin was primarily Native to Native;
I've used this as part of my argument that Whites probably weren't
involved in the genesis of CJ at all -- that it developed (in a
restricted area, for use in trade and perhaps for use among slaves of
the Chinooks) before, or at least independent of, White contact.  This
isn't a necessary conclusion; CJ could still be post-contact and
there could have been Whites involved from the beginning; but I
think the weight of the evidence supports a no-Whites-involved
hypothesis: it yields the simplest origin scenario, and it accounts
nicely for the data.  On this hypothesis, the Nootka words (quite
possibly from the Nootka Jargon that is known to have existed) would
have entered CJ sometime after its period of origin.

   But I don't think that Interior Salishan speakers were major
CJ users at all -- the Montana Salish (Flatheads) apparently didn't
use it; they used the Plains Indian Sign Language instead, for
intergroup communication.  Other Southern Interior Salishan tribes
may have used CJ, since they were closer than the Montana tribes
to primary CJ territory.  But the materials transcribed from
Natives by linguists are all from tribes at or near the coast: Twana
(Elmendorf), Upper Chehalis (Harringon), Snoqualmie (Jacobs), Saanich
(Jacobs), Santiam Kalapuya (Jacobs), Upper Coquille Athabaskan
(Jacobs), Nootka (Boas), and Tsimshian (Boas) -- and of course Chinook
itself.  There were certainly lots of local variations in CJ usage.
Still, there are enough consistent grammatical features (phonology &
syntax) to establish grammatical norms for CJ across its range, *except*
for "Chinook-CJ", that is, CJ as used by Chinookan speakers (or their
immediate descendants, and possibly their neighbors in Grand Ronde).

  There *are* some loanwords from CJ in Interior Salishan languages,
including a few in Montana Salish; but there's no particular reason
to assume that they came directly from CJ itself -- they may have
come by way of other languages.  Occasionally there's evidence for
that (though not as far as I know in the Interior), as when CJ
latab `table' turns up in Upper Chehalis as latam -- the result,
clearly,
of UCh speakers' application of a correspondence rule (a "borrowing
routine", in Heath's terminology) to a borrowing from a nearby
nasal-less language.  (The rule would be something like "those
guys say b where we say m, so if we use their word, we should
replace their b with an m".)

   -- Sally