Um...

[Dave Robertson]

Aa,

1a) "English-*language* author".

1b) Minor point anyhow, just speculating idly.

2) My tandoori tofu is taking a while to bake, so I'll blab on:  While HBC
might plausibly have played a role in spreading Chinook Jargon in the Yukon
area, it's equally enticing to wonder whether the "Loucheux Jargon", the
"Broken Slavey", or even the "Eskimo Jargon", all documented contact
languages of the far North, might have been used at least as extensively as
CJ could ever have been in that region's fur trade.  The latter language I
doubt because it was apparently coastal, being used with sailors, and by
any metric foreign to indigenous Yukon people.  The two former, though,
based as they were on Athapaskan languages, could have been of tremendous
use.

3)  About French words in Carrier having come directly from French rather
than from CJ:  I'm fascinated to read the article (the abstract from
_International Journal of American Linguistics_ was posted here a few days
ago).  I'll take that claim with a grain of salt until I get a copy of the
article to peruse.  In many dictionaries of indigenous languages of the
Northwest, the etymology of French-derived words is given simply as
"French", and of English-derived words as "English", when in dozens and
hundreds of cases it can be shown that the only correct label for them is
"Chinook Jargon".  (The Lushootseed dictionary is an example.)  Moreover, I
sometimes wonder whether the varying forms of these "French" words among
said languages could indicate varying stages in the evolution of Chinook
Jargon.  It stands to reason that CJ isn't and wasn't a static entity, but
instead has grown and changed constantly; and it's uncontroversial that not
every indigenous NW language encountered CJ at the same point in history.
Thus we may find in these languages some documentation of the state of CJ at
the time each came into close contact with the Jargon.  Cool, eh?

Cheers,
Dave