Jewitt etc

[Henry Kammler]

Sally wrote:
> If (as the phonology indicates) it was whites who introduced Nootka
> Jargon words into CJ, it would've been the prestige of the whites,
> not the Nootkas themselves, that helped explain the incorporation
> of those words into everyone's CJ.
I think it might be both. The peoples at the mouth of the Columbia were
probably the most mobile traders but the Nootkans also had a wide
trading range, the Makah Tootooch and Maquinna at Friendly Cove both
controlled huge areas of coast and inland trade. A simplified
pronunciation in "trade Nootka" must have been in place even before the
first Whites arrived, the three Nootkian languages alone -- Makah,
Nitinat and Nuuchaahnulh --, though closely related,  having diverging
sound systems. That "pre-CJ" was probably used with other neighboring
peoples, too, like Northern Straits Salish, Quileute, Quinault and
several Kwakiutl groups. BTW Quileute has quite a bit of Makah
loanwords.

As for European loanwords other than English and French in CJ one could
consider the number of trade vessels that had contact with the First
Nations. During the boom time of the maritime fur trade (1795 - ca.
1803), only 8 Russian and 3 Portuguese ships made it to the West Coast
of Vancouver Island, as opposed to about 200 American, 100 English and
maybe 60 Spanish vessels. While the French voyageurs seemed to have
quite an impact on intercultural communication inland, the scattered
Russian and Portuguese ships and crew members probably made no big
impression and had to use a trade language already established on the
coast.

A diffusion of Russian into CJ can only have happened via the Tlingit
with whom the Russians had permanent contact. But Russian-Tlingit
relations were rather cool if not hostile most of the time and the
Tlingit only turned to the Russian Orthodox Church when the US takeover
of Alaska put a much more serious threat to their souvreignty.

Henry