AIPE

[Sally Thomason]

Emanuel Drechsel and I agree on the probable lack of a consistent
grammar for an AIPE  from coast to coast.  He's much more familiar
with the Southeast than I am; I've worked more on the Northeast than
he has, and that's likely to be a major reason for our disagreement
-- the best (as in "most consistent grammatically") attestations
I've seen of AIPE are from the Northeast, which is where AIPE is
usually claimed to have developed.  Of course there are problems
with interpreting the documentation, and I would never assert that
I'm certainly right about it: too many gaps in the historical record,
as always with a historical linguistic analysis of any kind.  My
approach is that of a historical linguist, too, which tends to
make my interpretations different from those of most pidgin/creole
specialists.  All I'm saying is that philological analysis of the
northern east-of-the-Mississippi AIPE documentation (I'll bow to Drechsel's
greater knowledge of the Southeast) shows consistent grammatical
features that are *un*-like English (and other European languages)
and also in part unlike features of English-vocabulary pidgins and
creoles elsewhere (which some of the early settlers may well have
had some knowledge of), and for which therefore the best historical
explanation is that they reflect a pidgin language, not a hodgepodge
invented ad-hoc by each imaginative European writer.

For those interested in a more detailed account of the philological
reasoning underlying this view, see my article "Chinook Jargon in
Areal and Historical Context", which appeared in the journal
Language in December 1983.  The problems of interpretation for
19th-century CJ are, as I say, basically the same as for 18th-century
AIPE -- European recorders, mostly non-scholars and often
fanciful -- though the much richer 19th-century documentation of CJ
makes the philologist's task easier.

  -- Sally Thomason