CJ in Flathead (Interior Salish)

[Sally Thomason]

The words Phil Cash Cash mentions as potential CJ words in
Montana Salish (a.k.a. Flathead, but the tribes no longer use
that name) may ultimately be from CJ, but it's also possible
that the French-origin words came into the language directly from
French, along with the numerous French personal names that one
finds among tribal members.  If they are from CJ itself, it's likely
that they got into Montana Salish from other tribes to the west, not
directly from CJ.  I haven't been able to find any solid evidence
that CJ was ever used in Montana Salish territory, either among
Bitterroot Salish speakers (from the Bitterroot Valley south of
Missoula) or among Pend d'Oreille speakers (from around St. Ignatius
on what is now the Flathead Reservation).  The elders I've asked all
say that they've never heard that Chinook Jargon was ever used there.
On the other hand, the Plains Indian Sign Language *was* used there;
some of the elders I've known still knew it, and they told me
that it enabled them to talk to people from all tribes.

I've wondered if perhaps the use of the Plains Indian Sign
Language -- which served the purpose of a pidgin language -- helped
keep CJ from spreading eastward into Montana.  Of course it can
(and does) happen that two or more different pidgins can be spoken
in the same territory by some of the same people, but it's still true
that widespread knowledge of the sign language would've made CJ less
useful/less necessary for communication with outsiders.

In any case, CJ was used by tribes with whom the Montana Salish
people formed defensive alliances on their regular travels to the
plains to hunt buffalo -- tribes whose homelands are west of
Montana, especially in northern Idaho and eastern Washington.

Of the words Phil mentions, `salt' may be accidentally similar
to CJ (and English).  It's well embedded into the Montana Salish
morphological system (unlike the other words in Phil's list), and a
replacement of [s] by [c] would be somewhat surprising.  Pus is surely
a loanword from somewhere -- no kitty-cats before contact with Whites,
I assume, and the word doesn't resemble Montana Salish words for species
of wild cats -- and lkep and lkwosh and lmot are of French origin, maybe
via other Native languages, including CJ.  (The initial l with underdot
is a syllabic l, pronounced like the second l in English little.)  The
word for coffee, kapi, is more likely to be from French than from
English, because the accent is on the second syllable.

  -- Sally