CJ origin

[Sally Thomason]

I'm not sure which people Mike Cleven is referring to when
he talks about claims that CJ "must have arisen" before
contact with Whites; I haven't seen any claims like that,
but maybe that's because I don't always read all the
messages on this list.  Still, since I've argued in print
that the weight of the evidence favors a pre-contact origin
for CJ, I'd like to comment on the nature of the evidence.

Note that it's an empirical question, not a given: it's
perfectly possible that a real pidgin language existed
before White contact, and also perfectly possibly that
no real pidgin CJ existed until after Whites arrived on
the scene.  The fact that it's hard to come up with
hard and fast evidence on either side doesn't alter the
nature of the question.  A large influx of English &
French words into a pre-existing CJ might well have
produced what Mike refers to as "CJ as we know it".
For linguists, like me, lexical borrowing is very
interesting and important for tracing cultural
history, but it doesn't necessarily provide crucial
evidence for or against a particular origin hypothesis
-- and that's the trouble in this case: the European
vocabulary could've been part of CJ as it
crystallized into a pidgin, or it could've entered
CJ after (maybe long after) it crystallized into a
pidgin language.

When Mike says that "_our_ Chinook Jargon was OBVIOUSLY
a product of the interaction of cultures and peoples",
I don't think he's disagreeing with anyone: no interactions,
no pidgin, not here, not anywhere.  But the interactions
that produced CJ don't have to have involved Europeans;
there are other pidgins, in the Americas and elsewhere,
that didn't.

In any case, and very briefly, my argument for a pre-contact
origin goes like this, and I've tried to state it very
cautiously -- I am not, repeat not, claiming that this is
the only possibility.  If you compare CJ sentences and
texts, starting with the earliest ones available in the
19th century, you find a whole range of structural
features -- phonological and syntactic features -- that
are shared by all Native sources and some White sources
(the best White sources, i.e. those few Whites who clearly
learned the language as the Natives spoke it).  Almost
every one of these features is easy to explain as the
result of a cross-language compromise among the Native
languages of the region.  (The only possible exception
is the Subject - Verb - Object word order, since the
Native languages are mostly VSO; but even the SVO word
order can, I believe, be accounted for by reference to
the Native languages.)  In other words, there is no sign
at all of French or English STRUCTURAL contribution to
CJ in the early years, or (for that matter) since then.
Many French and English words in CJ, in fact, have been
altered phonologically to fit Native phonetic patterns
more closely.

What are the implications of this set of facts about
CJ structure?  Well, elsewhere in the world, the only
pidgins you find with a lot of  non-European structure
are those that developed in the first instance without
significant contribution from European languages.
Moreover, the general simplicity criterion -- if two
hypotheses fit the facts equally well, the simpler
of the two wins -- favors a pre-contact origin here:
if CJ post-dated contact, one needs to account for the
total absence (or near-total absence, if one doesn't
buy my explanation of the SVO word order) of European
languages' influence in its structure.  Another
argument for a post-contact origin for CJ, the one
proposed by Samarin, requires that CJ started out with
less Native and more European structure and only later
acquired more Native structure; that hypothesis too is
more complicated than the one involving a pre-contact
origin, and there isn't a shred of linguistic evidence
to support it.  It also doesn't make a lot of sense
socially, because Whites started using CJ as soon as
they arrived on the scene, to judge by the earlier
19th-century accounts, with wordlists from CJ; so
if CJ developed after contact, it's very hard to
explain why it would've lost European structural
features when Whites were using it regularly.

One final point: the 19th-century sources agree with
the earlier 20th-century sources structurally, so the
idea that there was a jargon, a pre-pidgin, or some
other "unfixed" speech variety before contact, instead
of a pidgin,  isn't compelling.  Possible, but not
(in my opinion) more likely than a pre-contact origin
for the pidgin itself.

I'm surprised that Mike, who has major historical
interests, is amazed that people are interested in the
origin question: pre-contact or post-contact, CJ is
a wonderful language; but a lot of us find the question
of when it arose fascinating, so why not discuss it?
(Well, like Mike I don't want to argue about it.  But I
don't think that all discussions have to be arguments,
even when the issues are controversial, as this one seems
to be for quite a few people.)

  -- Sally