Concomly to Lewis and Clark

[Ross Clark (FOA LING)]

I haven't seen Ingraham's list, but the various other early Nootka
vocabularies that are sometimes cited as "jargon-like", are in my opinion
nothing of the kind. They are "jargon-like" only insofar as people recognize
some of the 30 or so Nootka words which eventually became part of CJ.
Basically they are (as you would expect) "Nootka-like".

As for Biddle's supposed interference: As far as I know, nobody writing
around 1810 had any clue that such a thing as CJ existed. L&C were under the
impression that they had learned the Clatsop language. As far as I can see,
the earliest visitor to perceive that a distinct jargon existed was
Alexander Ross, with his reference to the "lingo, or mixed dialect". He was
there from 1810 (?), but his book was not published until 1849, so that he
could well have been influenced by what Hale and others had said by that
time.

But to get back to Biddle -- what possible reason could he have had for
putting Nootka words in the mouths of Clatsop speakers? I can't see any
reason not to take what was written there at face value.

Ross Clark

-----Original Message-----
From: George Lang
To: CHINOOK at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Sent: 8/2/2001 4:21 AM
Subject: Concomly to Lewis and Clark

I can't help but hop on the "clouch musket" hobby horse too.

In honour of next week's Lu7lu, in which the role of Wakashan languages
in
Jargon will be of special interest, let me note that this phrase is in
what
I like to call the Nootka Lingo, the early "seed" of Jargon, the three
words apart from "musket" coming from Nootka and supposedly uttered
hundreds of miles away from the Nootka homeland.

Not that we shouldn't be careful with the quote as we have it, since it
not
a transcription in any strict sense of the word. Clark's manuscript was
actually reviewed and edited in 1810, five years after the event in
question, by his consultant Nicholas Biddle. My own theory is that
Biddle
or someone around him had previous acquaintance with written traditions
of
something "Jargon-like," probably one or another of the vocabularies of
Nootka which started with Cook, a likely candidate being the "Vocabulary
of
Nootka Sound" draw up by the Gray's ship's surgeon Robert Ingraham in
1792
- Ingraham's list has "cloush" and "commatax". Which doesn't mean Clark
didn't hear something like "Lhush musket, wek kEmtEks musket"




Those interested in this thread can point at the site I have up on the
Nootka Lingo: www.arts.ualberta.ca/~chinook/nootka.

Biddle's involvement in the L&C Journals is discussed in Donald Jackon,
_Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents 1783-
1854_ (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962) p. 497, and in Henry
Zenk's 1984 dissertation _Chinook Jargon and Native Cultural Persistence
in
the Grand Ronde Indian Commmunity_, pp. 28-29

George