Race and ChInUk Wawa (fwd)

[David Robertson]

Good day; this is forwarded because Sally's posting to the list may not
have reached all of you yet.  (Thank you, Sally, for critiquing my idea
about the missionaries!) --Dave

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 22:59:40 -0400
From: Sally Thomason <thomason at umich.edu>
To: David Robertson <drobert at TINCAN.TINCAN.ORG>
Cc: CHINOOK at LINGUIST.LDC.UPENN.EDU, thomason at umich.edu
Subject: Re: Race and ChInUk Wawa



Dave and all,

  I had a few comments about the recent flurry of email messages on the origin & structure
of Chinook Jargon.  Here they are, more or less in the order of the messages I read on
the topic:

1.  Chinook Jargon (CJ) can't really be viewed as a mixture of Chinook and Nootka and some
Salish, from a historical viewpoint at least.  It's certainly true that there's an important
component of words of Nootka origin in CJ, but they really can't  have gotten into CJ directly
from Nootka: it's clear from the phonology of those words that Whites transmitted them from
Nootka to CJ, not Natives.  The phonology of the Nootka-origin words is distorted in the way
that most Whites distorted the CJ lexicon; but Natives had (and still have) a consistent
pronunciation that fits well with Northwest areal features -- glottalized stops and affricates,
uvulars (back velars) as well as (front) velars, velar and uvular fricatives, lateral fricative
and affricates, ts affricate, etc.  That is, Natives who used CJ had a Native pronunciation that
most Whites didn't achieve (though some of the Jesuit missionaries did).  Sturtevant wrote a
while ago about evidence for a Nootka-based pidgin, or pre-pidgin at least, that was used by
Whites as well as Natives; that was almost surely the medium through which the Nootka-origin
words got to the Columbia and thus to CJ.



2.  It's not just the vocabulary and phonology of CJ that are like Native languages of the region;
it's also the grammar.  There is solid evidence even in the earliest extensive materials (e.g.
Hale 1846) of Native-like syntax -- "not" at the beginning of the sentence usually, an imperative
construction ("good if you do X") like the Native imperatives, VS word order in sentences with
adjectives as predicates (as in "Hungry John" , for instance, rather than "John hungry"), etc.


3.  There was lots of multilingualism in the Northwest, so the existence of extensive trade
netwworks and trading centers at the Dalles and elsewhere does not in itself provide evidence
that a pidgin was needed.   In fact, in other contact situations around the world, you can find
other examples of multilingualism & trade pidgins coexisting, or even two pidgins: in the East,
for instance, the Delaware-vocabulary pidgin coexisted for at least part of its life and in
at least part of its range with American Indian Pidgin English, and there was also a fair
amount of multilingualism in the area.  Note here that Peter Bakker's comments about the fur
trade and lack of pidgins are relevant ONLY if CJ emerged only after contact with Whites; but
I still don't think that's the most likely scenario, because the structure of the pidgin is
easiest to account for if only Natives were involved in its creation.  I *think* it was Dell
Hymes who first suggested that CJ might have had its origin in the mouths of the Chinooks'
slaves.  I have a reference somewhere to a Nez Perce "jargon" that was used by (and I think
to) slaves of the Nez Perce, so the scenario is not far-fetched.


4.  I don't think it is at all likely that the presence of the missionaries helped to
"stabilize" CJ, to "make [it] a language with regular rules".  Hale was there before there were
many missionaries around, and the typical CJ grammatical features are found already in his
1846 publication.  Also most of the missionaries never learned CJ phonology, at least; that means
that the language, at least its words with their pronunciations, *had* to have been learned by
Natives from other Natives.  Some of the Jesuit missionaries *did* learn real CJ, and no doubt
a few other missionaries did too; but most didn't.  You can tell by the early missionary
publications on the language.  Le Jeune, in any case, arrived much too late to have had any
effect on the fixing of the grammar.   My own view, admittedly based on indirect evidence (since,
as someone pointed out, we don't have any actual documentation of CJ before the Whites arrived,
and no hope of any), is that CJ probably pre-dated any settled White presence in the region,
and that its grammar (phonology and syntax) was already formed before any Whites were around.
There is no evidence of any formative period, in the sense of a stage of CJ before it had
"regular grammatical rules".


5.  I don't know of any evidence that English was significantly influenced at all by a Celtic
substratum.  And French (not to mention Latin) influence, though significant, was quite
limited -- I know that seems an odd claim, given all those words from French (and Latin), but
they aren't mainly basic vocabulary words -- the basic vocabulary of English is overwhelmingly
inherited from Proto-West-Germanic.  About 7% comes from other languages, specifically French
and Norse.  (Outside the basic vocabulary, the percentage leaps up much higher, but that's a
different, and far more superficial, kind of borrowing.)  Moreover, the structure of modern
English is still Germanic.  The number of French-origin features outside the non-basic
vocabulary is surprisingly limited: the phoneme "zh" (as in "pleasure") is partly of French
origin, for instance (and it is the rarest phoneme in English).   There are also a few
grammatical features, but again, not very many.  By contrast, if you compare English grammar
with German grammar, you find very deep and close correspondences in such things as the
so-called strong verbs (sing, sang, sung vs. German sing-en, sang, ge-sung-en).  Etc.  Lots of
differences, too, of course; not surprising, with 1500-2000 years of divergence.  (English also
borrowed vocabulary from Norse after the Viking invasions, and there are grammatical changes in
the east & north of England that indicate influence from Norse.  But again it wasn't a huge
amount of influence, though maybe more than French *structural* influence.)  Sorry to be so
long-winded!  I realize English isn't the topic of this list, but someone brought it up, and...



    -- Sally