Tlingit CJ sound system? Q's about S.V. Johnson thesis

[Sally Thomason]

I can't answer any of Dave's questions specifically
about Tlingit-CJ, but there's solid evidence that
many (most?) Natives who spoke CJ did in fact use
even those CJ phonemes/sounds that didn't exist in
their native languages.  For instance, CJ as spoken
by speakers of "nasalless" languages had all the usual
CJ nasals in the usual places. But when CJ words were
borrowed into the languages of the region, their
pronunciation was "nativized" where necessary, so that
(for instance) CJ nasals were replaced by voiced oral
stops.

The only general exceptions to this pattern were in
non-Native phonemes in words borrowed from English or
French, most notably the replacement of French /r/ in
CJ by /l/ (most Native languages of the region lack
/r/).

My evidence for this analysis comes from examination of
19th-century CJ wordlists and a few 19th-century texts,
and 20th-century CJ texts, mainly but not only Jacobs',
from speakers of various Native languages.

Of course Tlingit speakers could've differed from other
CJ speakers, replacing non-Native phonemes with their own
phonemes even in speaking CJ.

  -- Sally