Origins of CJ

[Nadja Adolf]

	Indians had trade, quite extensive trade, before contact with European
	peoples. The Fraser and Columbia rivers were huge interconnected trading
	zones. How did they speak to one another? Indian sign language doesn't
	really answer the question and CJ seems the most reasonable answer.

Yes. West coast shells were found among the Iroquois, and there are stories
of people crossing the continent on foot and coming back. Given the amount
of goods transfer across the continent from East Coast to West Coast and
vice versa, no one should be surprised that North Coast people came down by
boat to trade at the mouth of the Columbia long before the Europeans had
arrived.

	>To say that _CJ_ existed before Contact is a fallacy, as CJ "as we know
	>it" is the intercultural argot summed up in Shaw, Gibbs and the other
	>sources, and in the forms that have come down to us from surviving
	>speakers, be they in Grand Ronde or somewhere in the hills of British
	>Columbia; to say that whatever intercultural argot/jargon existed
	>before Contact is "the real CJ" or "the pure native CJ" is a non
	>sequitur;

This is much like saying that English didn't exist before obtaining words
like "garage" from the French. Borrowing words from other languages is normal
language growth. I do think that the use of CJ by non-natives is underestimated
by most researchers, though.

	>  What strikes me as
	>most odd about this "there must have been a pre-Contact CJ" argument is
	>that native historians themselves don't have any comment on it; and
	>that >in a vast region of very similar languages (such as the
	>Straits-Fraser-Puget) there was no such "common tongue" that anyone
	>knows of, either now or back then.......

Have you read the "Narrative of the Adventures and Suffferings of John R.
Jewitt while a Captive of the Nootka Indians on Vancouver
Island -- 1803-05?" This narrative is entitled "White Slaves of the
Nootka." Mr. Jewitt seemed to believe that the Nootka spoke two languages,
one of them bearing a suspicious resemblance to wawa.

Since trade was about two decades old at the time of Jewitt, it would seem
unlikely that a "new, invented language" could have taken over the coast in
that brief time.

nadja