... cf. Tlingit CJ discussion

[Dave Robertson]

Hello,

I agree with Sally that the documentation of native Tlingit speakers' Chinook Jargon is scanty.  In my papers are very few items having possible reference to this.

One is a short Jargon vocabulary published in the naturalist John Muir's account of his travels in Southeast Alaska, whose only unusual feature as I recall is the presence of the word "Friday" with a gloss like "inshore" or "to home port".  No phonological peculiarities, although instead of a spelling like <klahowya>, Muir gives ~ <sa-ha-ya>, which I have taken to be a sincere attempt at representing the voiceless lateral initial -- what I write as <lh> or <L>.

Another is a handwritten Jargon instruction manual by Fr. Rene', S.J., from the Gonzaga University Library special collections.  Rene' was posted in Sitka for some years, and we may assume that this manual was used by him in order to establish some direct communication with Indian, largely Tlingit, people there.  Again, there are no phonological peculiarities evident, despite certain textual clues (like the presence in Rene's CJ practice dialogues of <sah> "sir") suggestive of a composition postdating his arrival in Sitka.

It would be marvelous to be able to see S.V. Johnson's Tlingit CJ data.

Best,
Dave

Sally Thomason <thomason at UMICH.EDU> wrote:
>
> Dave's idea is interesting and quite possibly correct.
> My own analysis of those m's in loanwords from CJ in
> languages of the region has been a bit different:
> often, when borrowing words from another language,
> sophisticated multilinguals will apply "correspondence
> rules" (or, as Jeff Heath has called them, "borrowing
> routines").  Roughly, though I certainly wouldn't
> claim that speakers are always conscious of doing so,
> the process would be this: Those guys' sound X
> corresponds to sound Y in my language, so I'll replace
> X with Y in this word I'm borrowing from their
> language.  Sometimes speakers actually do articulate
> this: well, it's X in their language, so it ought to
> be Y in ours.
>
> I think that's what happened to produce loanwords
> like latam.  That is, I think languages that have
> latam instead of latab (or latap) have m because that's
> their sound that corresponds to the nasalless languages'
> b -- in other words, they borrowed the CJ word not
> directly from CJ, but from one of the nasalless languages.
> (Indirect borrowings are common throughout the Americas,
> and no doubt elsewhere too: language A borrows from, say,
> Spanish; language B borrows the word from A, C borrows
> from B, etc.)
>
> Tlingit is beyond the main CJ area, which might be
> relevant in considering why Tlingit speakers nativized
> CJ phonology: maybe there was a distinctive northern
> variant of the pidgin, even.  I'd be astonished to find
> that *any* group of speakers were unable to reproduce the
> CJ sounds they heard; but it's quite common for speech
> communities to have their own habits of reproducing words
> borrowed from other languages, and even of speaking other
> languages.  Another possibility is that Johnson was
> mistaken about Tlingit-CJ; unless I'm remembering wrong,
> there isn't much data on it.
>
>   -- Sally
>
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