Origin of Chinuk-wawa

[Emanuel J. Drechsel]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dave Robertson" <TuktiWawa at NETSCAPE.NET>
To: <CHINOOK at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
Sent: Monday, February 12, 2001 5:07 PM
Subject: Re: Origin of Chinuk-wawa


> I also admit that I (and the rest of the world) don't know whether comparable contact languages may have come into existence before contact
>  with Whites in the Americas.  As our fellow list-member Emanuel Drechsel has extensively documented, it's not impossible that the Mobilian Jargon, based largely on Muskogean languages of the Gulf Coast area, may have originated as an inter-Indian medium.  (Please correct me if I'm mistaken on this point, Manny.)  Also, in California, which is sometimes described as having been comparable to New Guinea in terms of indigenous ethnic diversity, and elsewhere in the New World, it's quite imaginable that contact languages existed "prehistorically".


Greetings from Hawai'i,

This is just to confirm that I have indeed argued for the pre-European origin of Mobilian Jargon or the Chickasaw-Choctaw trade language of the lower Mississippi River valley, on grounds of its semantactic pattern, especially its OsV word order, its pervasive functions in traditional Southeastern Indian societies, and its geographic distribution, overlapping quite closely with that of the pre-European Mississippian Complex (see my book Mobilian Jargon: Linguistic and Sociohistorical Aspects of a Native American Pidgin. Oxford University Press, 1997). You might be further interested that Sally Thomason has also argued for the pre-European origin of Delaware Jargon (see "On Interpreting 'The Indian Interpreter'" in Language in Society, Vol. 9, Pp. 167-93, 1980). As she has already explained in her response of yesterday, we cannot prove the pre-European existence of Mobilian Jargon or, for that matter, Chinook Jargon or Delaware Jargon by any rigid measure and it remains a hypothesis if the most convincing one to me at this time. 
    I am less confident about the existence of an indigenous pidgin in California simply because so far I have not come across any solid linguistic or other evidence for such in spite of the area's great linguistic diversity. This raises an interesting question: Why indigenous pidgins in northwestern, northeastern, and southcentral North America, but not in other areas such as native California and the Southwest with equal or even greater linguistic diversity? We don't have a clear answer yet, but we can be confident that it lies in the sociohistorical domain, i.e. how native groups of diverse linguistic backgrounds interacted with each other in terms of their economies and politics. Perhaps Sally has some comments to add on this topic.

Aloha, Manny


Emanuel J. Drechsel
Liberal Studies
University of Hawai'i
Honolulu, HI  96822

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