CJ use among Interior Salish ...was... Re: CJ phonemes

[Lisa Peppan]

On Tue, 13 Apr 1999 19:44:39 -0700 David Robertson
<drobert at TINCAN.TINCAN.ORG> writes:

>Certain Northern Interior Salishan speakers i.e. among the Shuswap,
Thompson and Okanagan must >have known CJ quite well, because they heard
sermons in it regularly and at one point created quite >the fashion of
reading and writing CJ in the Duployan shorthand.

>Southern Interior Salishans i.e. the Moses-Columbia, Coeur d'Alene, and
Spokane-Kalispel-Montana->Flathead-Pend d'Oreille, as a rule apparently
knew much less CJ.

>The extent of knowledge of the Jargon among the Northerners sorta
remains to be figured out.

This one of those "for what it's worth" comments.

I was born and raised in the Seattle area.  The first time I heard CJ was
from my mother.  It was a bit muddled but it was a phrase she had learned
from her grandfather, who had brought his family to Washington state from
Idaho in a covered wagon sometime during the late 1880s/early 1890s.
IIRC, what *she* said was "Klahowya, klat-ta wat-ta klum stuk" but it had
been a number of years since she had heard it from her grandfather; he
died in 1957.  I now know that the "klahowya" part was right, but I'm
still puzzling over the rest of it ... perhaps a variation of "khata
mika, sihks"...?

According to Mom, her grandfather, George Washington Pennington, spoke
fluent CJ, which was of "great assistance" getting himself and his young
family safely through the wilds of Idaho and Washington.  I remember my
grandmother, daughter of George, talking about how when they'd stop, they
had to keep their eyes open for Indians and if any appeared, her father
went and talked to them, and then they would leave.  The only clue I have
as to the route they took was comments made by Gramma and Great Aunt
Georgia about how they would "play house", using rocks that looked "just
like a pan of biscuits, fresh from the oven".

 After following the conversation here, I do have to wonder where a man
born in the somewhere in the midwest in 1862 learned to speak CJ *before*
getting to western Washington.

As I said, for what it worth.

Lisa Peppan
IBSSG
Edmonds WA USA
lisapeppan at juno.com
Genealogy Research at http://members.tripod.com/~LisaPeppan/index.html



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