CJ development path (was Race and ChInUk Wawa)

[Jeffrey Kopp]

Bravo!  Thanks to Dave for forwarding this smashing message.  I
follow Sally's path on the CJ ascendancy and it makes perfect sense
to me, though she stepped quickly through a couple stages.

What I gathered from her message is this:

CJ developed among the natives prior to contact, most likely among
and alongside other intertribal communication methods now lost to
memory.

The likely role of the exchange of slaves in the development of CJ is
noted.

The Nootka Jargon came into the CJ via the whites, as the Nootkan
vocabulary in the CJ bears marks of white pronunciation.

The missionaries got here after CJ was established and relatively
stable.

Next we need to determine when and where the Nootkan/Chinook jargons
became merged, and to what extent the North West/Hudsons Bay
activities influenced it.  I think the legend (now regarded as myth)
that the CJ was a product of the Hudsons Bay camps might have a bit
of truth in it in this regard; perhaps the admixture of Nootka and
French to the preexisting CJ occurred there.

I got excited when it occurred to me that in light of this
development path, we might be able to reconstruct the pre-contact CJ
by filtering out the Nootka, English and French vocabulary and
marking off the non-native structure and grammar, but Dave thinks it
will still be a bit of a stretch.  However, I now think the
precontact CJ might not be as distant and unrecoverable as I had
previously supposed.

I asked Dave if this is a new theory (as I hadn't heard of it), and
he replied that Sally had developed this about 20 years ago, and
shared with me the name of her paper:  "Chinook Jargon in Areal and
Historical Context", _Language_, 59:820-870 (1983), and me also
mentioned Sally Thomason's and Terrence Kaufman's book "Language
Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics."

Regards,

Jeff

On Thu, 24 Jun 1999 19:36:15 -0700, you wrote:

>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
>
> *VISIT the archives of the CHINOOK jargon and the SALISHAN & neighboring*
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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