"American Indian Pidgin English" (continued)

[Emanuel J. Drechsel]

Aloha,

It is quite possible to argue, as I have acknowledged on previous occasions,
that single communities deprived of their native languages and other
traditions (e.g. the "Praying Indians" of early historic New England or
students of
Indian boarding schools such as Carlisle and Haskell) spoke something like
AIPE; but incidental reliable attestations would hardly make a pidgin that
extended across entire regions of North America or much of the continent. As
regards Flanigan's dissertation to which Sally refers below, I would not
only raise some of the very points already made in my preceding response,
but mention another fundamental difference between AIPE on the one hand and
indigenous pidgins such as Delaware Jargon, Eskimo Jargon, Mobilian Jargon,
Chinook Jargon, etc. on the other: Europeans and their American descendants
could literally put some English or AIPE into the Indians' mouth (as
suggested by the Simms quote in my response yesterday). Such would not have
been possible for indigenous pidgins on any regular or grand scale, simply
because Europeans and their American descendants would have been
ill-prepared to make up realistic samples of Delaware Jargon, Eskimo Jargon,
Mobilian Jargon, or Chinook Jargon. If they let their fantasy roam, they
would have inadvertently reverted to their experiences with other peoples
speaking English such as African slaves. In other words, Europeans and their
American descendants could easily make up AIPE, but would have had a much
greater difficulty to do the same for any indigenous pidgin. For this
reason, I also contend that historical data for Delaware Jargon, Eskimo
Jargon, Mobilian Jargon, and Chinook Jargon are much more reliable than
those for AIPE.

Yet what about the argument of fairly regular patterns in AIPE phonology and
syntax that Sally raises below? I would have no problem recognizing these,
for we should indeed expect such by any theory of linguistic stereotyping,
which I argue applies to AIPE. Structural regularities thus do not
necessarily provide a good argument for the accuracy of AIPE attestations.
There is another aspect worthy of consideration here. The very structural
uniformity of AIPE attestations renders them suspect from a variationist
perspective, for by any theory of second-language learning we would actually
expect AIPE to have shown a much greater range of linguistic variation than
is evident from the historical record because of first-language interference
from the many different languages spoken by Native Americans. Accordingly,
we would expect a Delaware to would have spoken a distinctly
Algonquian-"flavored" form of AIPE, while Muskogean patterns and loans
should have appeared in the AIPE speech of, let's say, a Chickasaw. Still
other semantactic and lexical differences would have been evident in the
AIPE by Southwestern Indians. Yet I regret to say that I have failed to find
any such major regional variations in AIPE so far.

However, my reservations about AIPE as a pidgin would not disagree with what
Sally suggests in the third paragraph below; quite on the contrary, it is
fully consistent with my arguments. I would like add on this occasion that I
am not on a campaign challenging Sally. I believe that both theoretically
and methodologically she and I are closer in our thinking than our exchange
might suggest. In my opinion, her work on Delaware Jargon and Chinook Jargon
are exemplary, and her book _Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic
Linguistics_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988/co-authored
with Terrence Kaufman) stands out as a cornerstone in the study of contact
languages.

Best regards, Manny


----- Original Message -----
From: Sally Thomason <thomason at UMICH.EDU>
To: <CHINOOK at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
Sent: 13 March 2000 11:52
Subject: Re: "American Indian Pidgin English"


> I note that several of Drechsel's references are to varieties
> spoken in the Southwest. That may account for the difference
> between Drechsel & me, at least in part; AIPE is reliably
> attested only from east of the Mississippi, and from an earlier
> period (not surprisingly) than the Southwest examples.  It isn't
> likely that AIPE itself got much farther than the Mississippi,
> from what I've seen of the documentation.
>
> As for Drechsel's comments about it, you wouldn't have much
> trouble finding similar comments about Chinook Jargon in the
> literature.  But as soon as you start looking closely at the
> 19th-century CJ data (that is, even without the benefit of more
> recent data documented more reliably), it's easy to find consistent
> structural features (both syntax and phonology).  And similarly
> for AIPE, as long as you stick to the eastern documentation and
> ignore the diffused semi-AIPE versions found farther west.  You
> don't need to take my word for it; look at Flanigan, for instance,
> and other studies of the eastern (the real) AIPE.
>
>   But yes, no doubt whites (like other European-origin explorers
> & colonizers and surely other people elsewhere in the world too)
> would have tried to use their notion of Pidgin English with Natives
> everywhere, assuming that it was the only thing Natives would
> understsand.  Hence occasional words like "katchem" in CJ.
>
>   -- Sally