[Fwd: Re: We're seeing a key problem: Lack of explicit connectionbetween "ahnkuttie" and Grand Ronde materials]

[Sally Thomason]

Sorry to be getting into this discussion late (I've just returned from
a week-long trip out of town), and apologies if someone else has already
made this point in response to Mike Cleven's message of Oct. 18, but
the available evidence really doesn't support his proposal that Chinook
Jargon was any kind of compromise between English & Native language(s).
Even Horeatio Hale, one of the earliest reliable sources on the pidgin,
has clearly Native phonological features, such as consonant clusters that
aren't found in English or French; and the consistency in transcriptions
of *Native* speakers of the pidgin shows beyond a doubt that the inventory
of sounds and also the syllable structure were/are Native, not European,
in  nature.  It's true that Anglo speakers of CJ usually (apparently)
didn't use all the non-English sounds when they spoke CJ, but the Natives
did, because all those sounds were familiar to them.

Of course not all the Native languages of the Northwest have the same
phonology.  But the Pacific Northwest is one of the best-established
linguistic areas in the world, with many structural features -- including
phonological features -- recurring from language to language, and across
language families.  ALL the consistent phonemes of Chinook Jargon are found
in almost all the Native languages of the region: glottalized stops,
lateral fricatives & affricate(s), velar vs. uvular stops, and then a number
of phonemes common to Native and also European languages (like p, t, k, l,
etc.).

  -- Sally