A thesis you may not have known of: Stender

[Sally Thomason]

Dave,

  Thanks for posting the reference to Stender's MA thesis --
it sounds interesting.  But it also sounds hard to get
hold of, so if you've read it, can you tell me (us) how she
deals with the fact that even the earliest CJ materials
have clear Native (non-English, non-French) phonology and
syntax?  That's a major problem  for any post-contact
origin hypothesis for the pidgin -- not necessarily a
killer, but it's a problem that has to be addressed in some
satisfactory & explicit way.  Samarin more or less ignores
it, for instance, arguing that those Native features must
have arisen later in the history of CJ.  This is possible,
of course; but because the oldest materials are structurally
Native, with no solid evidence of any European structural
influence, it means that there's no empirical evidence for
any `pre-Nativized' CJ.  This is particularly striking in
view of the fact that the Nootka words in CJ *do* show
influence of European use & transmission: phonologically,
they are anglicized, with none of the Native features of
(for instance) the Chinookan words in CJ.  So it's obvious
that the Nootka words got into CJ via White transmission.
That conclusion, however, indirectly strengthens the case
for a no-Whites-involved genesis of CJ itself; the Nootka
words would've entered the pidgin later, when Whites
brought them.

  I assume that Stender doesn't argue that CJ arose as
a *Nootka*-lexicon pidgin, and that all the Chinookan
words entered it later on (together with all the Native
syntax)??

  -- Sally