An idea re nonnasality & Puget CJ; cf. Tlingit CJ discussion

[Dave Robertson]

Qhata mEsayka?

Nonlinguists may be mildly amused to know that there's a technical book in print titled "Nasalfest"...

About nasality in Puget Sound-area Chinook Jargon, as a case in point that speakers of indigenous languages there *did* apparently pronounce the Jargon without making major changes in its sound system:

Nile Thompson has written a paper, "An Analysis of Diachronic Denasalization in Twana", i.e. how Twana Salishan lost its nasal sounds.  This paper appeared in the volume "American Indian Linguistics and Ethnography in Honor of Laurence C. Thompson", UMOPL 10, 1993.

In his paper, N. Thompson notes (and I'm condensing his argument) that in his Stage I of the denasalizing process, "nasals were both underlying and surface segments" (page 306), and were geminated between vowels.  This is recorded from around 1833-39.

In Stage II, nasal geminates were dissimilated into sequences of NASAL + VOICED STOP.  This was around the 1840's.

In Stage III, these sequences were replaced by geminated voiced stops.  This stage began around 1850, and continued to the latest recordings of Twana.  "Nasals, although no longer underlying, were allophones of voiced stops, being optionally introduced as the first member of a geminate prior to a stressed syllable." (page 310)

I assume that Lushootseed, Chimakum, and Makah also underwent denasalization at about the same time, in similar ways.

Coincidentally, Chinook Jargon would appear to have been introduced to the Puget Sound territories of those languages also in about the same time frame.  (However, it's easily imaginable that Makah may have partaken of the "Nootka Jargon" preceding CJ proper.)

Now, while we find CJ forms attested from those times and places, such as

[TABLE 1]
/liyam/  ~ /liyab/ "devil"  <  <le diable>
/lEtam/ ~ /lEtab/ "table"  <  <la table>
/mit/ ~ /bit/ "10 cents"  <  <bit>

-- each of these showing a confusion of /m/ for /b/ -- we do not however seem to find the reverse situation, which would give (hypothetical) forms like

[TABLE 2]
* /supEda/ ~ /supEnda/ ~ /supEdda/ "jump" (we only find /supEna/)
* /baba/ ~ /mamba/ ~ /bamba/ ~ /babba/ "mother" (we only find /mama/)

In other words, etymological non-nasals were sometimes hypercorrected into nasal counterparts, but, crucially, nasals weren't incorrectly denasalized, ^although^ the Native languages in question were undergoing a massive denasalization.

>From this I conjecture that during the time when Puget Sound-area indigenous people were being exposed to Chinook Jargon, and changing their own languages from having nasals (but no voiced stops) to having voiced stops (but no nasals),  these people did not have difficulty perceiving the distinctions /m : b/ or /n : d/ in CJ.  (The question of whether a distinction /ng : g/ was present I omit from consideration here.)

Further, I conjecture that the reason etymological voiced stops of CJ were realized as nasals (but in free variation with their voiced-stop underlying forms)  is that in the respective indigenous languages, voiced stops were still, as new members of the Native sound inventories, unstable.  Periphrasing, the indigenous languages' voiced stops were not yet the sole occupants of their respective slots in the phonemic inventories.

(It may be of additional interest to establish whether the sound-substitutions exemplified in Table 1 occurred only non-medially, that is, only initially and finally.)

So it would appear that Puget Sound Native language speakers were able to deal quite well with Chinook Jargon's phonemic inventory, foreign as parts of it were to them.

My surprise is thus great upon reading Samuel V. Johnson's claim in his 1978 thesis that Tlingit speakers of CJ, many of them presumably already acquainted with the major CJ lexifier English (and thus possessing, if anything, quite a sophisticated repertoire of pronunciation skills), could or would not replicate the CJ sound system - in particular, when it came to such universally highly ^unmarked^ sounds as /m/, /p/.

These speakers' purported inability would be one matter of compelling psycholinguistic interest.

Their possible ^refusal^ to speak CJ (a contact language, mind you!) without radically modifying its phonology, and thus changing the equilibrium of distinctiveness among CJ's phonemes and lexemes, would be the material for a significant work in pidgin/creole linguistics, I feel.

These are just some ideas off the top of my head.  Comments?
Dave

__________________________________________________________________
Get your own FREE, personal Netscape Webmail account today at http://webmail.netscape.com/