late reply (was Re: Mitchif vs. French vs. English

[Mike Cleven]

At 12:01 AM 3/7/99 -0800, Inge Genee wrote:
>> >>
>> >>Anyway, the mixing of peoples and tongues is what brought about the
Jargon
>> >>(and its Michif "cousin") into being, so this to me is on-topic.  It's a
>> >>pity that there weren't Gaelic and Erse words added to the Jargon's mix,
>> >>considering the amount of Celt-native intermarriage in the early
years......
>> >
>> >Really? That seems rather surprising, considering the prominent role that
>> >Scots and Irish generally played in the expansion of the British Empire. I
>> >seem to remember anecdotes about British traders assimilating fairly
quickly
>> >into the pre-existing societies of the Pacific Northwest.
>>
>> Yes, they did - but none of their ancestral languages did, apparently,
>> although there was a time at the turn of the century when Vancouver must
>> have been part Scots-speaking (what I mean is that Scots must have been
>> spoken in a lot of bars and private saloons).  It's very true that the
>> British traders (mostly Scots and Irish and some Welsh) assimilated well
>> into local society for years before the railway, even moreso before the
>> gold rush.
>>
>
>>
>> All the main British figures in BC were by and large Scots or Irish (or
>> Welsh) - even if they were American in character.  "Anglo-Saxon" is a term
>> bandied about rather loosely to describe "British Canadian" culture, but in
>> reality it was a Scots-dominated effort....
>>....  The Gaelic presence in BC remains strong even today
>> with a large expatriate population
>
>I'm not sure about the details of who and when exactly immigrated into
>the West from "Celtic" areas of the British Isles, but we must not forget
>that they are unlikely to have all spoken a Celtic language: people from
>the Scottish lowlands are likely to have spoken Lowland Scots rather than
>Scottish Gaelic, and people from the eastern parts of Ireland presumably
>often spoke English as their first language, not Irish. Before we are
>surprised about a possible surprisingly small number of "Celtic" loans in
>CJ, we need to have detailed information about which languages were
>spoken exactly by the new arrivals.
>Interestingly, although linguists now assume there must have been
>widespread biligualism in Britain after the Anglo-Saxon invasions between
>British Celtic and the new Anglo-Saxon tongue, very few confirmed Celtic
>loans appear in English.

One last thought on this (sorry I didn't reply before but lost track of the
group while travelling whenever this was...)....

It's indeed quite odd that there is very little trace in English of any of
the Celtic languages, except for straightforward loan words and certain
archaic terms and phrases (Auld Lang Syne, Erin Go Bragh, etc.; actually
Auld Lang Syne is Scots English rather than Gaelic, isn't it?).  It's not
as if Brythonic speakers were wiped out during the Anglo-Saxon and Jutish
invasions; they were dominated and absorbed; but it's interesting that
their language did not survive in any recognizable influence on the tongue
that emerged; very much unlike what happened after 1066.

But in the case of the Jargon - and Michif - you'd think that the dominance
of Scots within the Hudson's Bay and Northwest Companies would be evident.
Not all company employees were Scots, certainly - i.e. the management,
explorers, traders etc.; the majority of company employees were Metis, with
a smattering of natives and Hawaiians and others.  Chinook was a language
that developed for trading, though, rather than for management; the use of
Gaelic in earshot of natives was not likely if it was spoken at HBC posts
and encampments at all; French on the other hand would have been widely
used in public, as would (by Gov. Simpson's own account) Hawaiian.  But
reading the above item reminded me that it was a very particular kind of
Scot who worked for the HBC - Orkneymen and Shetlanders, who were not
Highlanders and whose daily language was/is much more Nordic than it is
Gaelic.  Orkneyinga and Sketlandisk are long extinct (although I've heard
there's been an effort to revive Orkneyinga based on Faeroese and
Icelandic); English with a thick North Sea accent has dominated the Isles
since sometime in the 1600s; I don't know to what degree the Islanders ever
spoke Gaelic - perhaps one of you linguists out there knows.  So this
prevalence of English speaking among Scottish HBC/NWC employees - which
persisted into the 1800s, although not so dominantly Orkneyese.....

Speaking of Scotsmen on the Hiyu Frontier - anyone happen to know the story
of how it is that the explorer Simon Fraser had a sun tattoo on his forehead?