CJ phonemes

[David Gene Lewis]

Regarding usage of CJ in Oregon: Hymes has stated that he believe that CJ
crystallized before White contact. And in my own research i have found
that there are many loan words from CJ into Kalapuya. I believe the
Kalapuyans knew it and they participated in large gatherings with peoples
of the whole region in The Dalles, at Chemeketa and other meeting places.

Also Gibbs encountered a CJ speaking young man in Northern California, a
member of Athapaskans in Oregon during the McKee treaty making expedition
in 1851. The language file from National Archives is labelled Athapaskan
but only the first page is, while the rest is all CJ. CJ must have been
wider spread than currently known and there were likely to be partial
speakers even further afield.

Partial speakers may have learned the
language only partially to facilitate travel through Chinook lands,
communication during ceremonial gatherings, wives from other tribes,
slavery, etc.


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.


On Tue, 13 Apr 1999, Sally Thomason wrote:

> 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
>