Nasalless languages & CJ; was Re: Tlingit CJ sound system? Q's about S.V. Johnson thesis

[Dave Robertson]

Lhush chxi wam ili7i uk san, wikna?

Sally Thomason <thomason at UMICH.EDU> wrote:
> For instance, CJ as spoken
> by speakers of "nasalless" languages had all the usual
> CJ nasals in the usual places.

Just a skooch more on this point:  We have excellent evidence to back up Sally's comment in some Coast Salishan languages' word for "table", which I'll "normalize" (sorry, Mike, but I've been reading through my old assignments in Church Slavonic palaeography from grad school) as /lEtam/.

This word uncontroversially derives from (some variety of French), where it was /latabl/, i.e. <la table>.  Stress was on the second vowel, we presume.

Via a process of simplifying its final consonant cluster, this almost surely became /latab/ at some (early) intermediate time between first contact and appearance in the form cited above in Salishan.

A perhaps unresolvable question, which is of none the less interest, might be whether this cluster was simplified *because* [b] in Salishan at the time of CJ's establishment on Puget Sound -- circa 1830 or 1840 -- was still psychologically the phoneme /m/, with final clusters in {nasal} + {lateral} being disallowed.  I do know that Nile Thompson has written a very compelling paper on the probable stages in the evolution of Twana Salishan /m/ into [b] in the same geographical region.  (It's in the volume in honor of Larry Thompson, from UMOPL.)

Also, due to an extremely widespread Salishan sound-rule, the latter form likely mutated its unstressed vowel to schwa (E).

All in all, we have good reason to see in the history of CJ in Puget Sound, the epicenter of nonnasality, a handy mastery of the foreign nasal sounds in the Jargon, to the extent that some Jargon words that didn't even contain nasals were pronounced with them.

Hence my curiosity about Tlingit speaker's reputed (but only by Johnson, to my knowledge) inability to pronounce certain equally unmarked sounds of CJ.

The video documentary "Carved from the Heart" has in its soundtrack a "Chinook Chant", and I am in the process of trying to find a good recording of that chant (likely sung by Tlingits of Craig, AK), as one avenue of investigating Johnson's claims.

Dave
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