Variants of "handkerchief" in CJ & /n/ - /l/ - stop relations

[Dave Robertson]

So how about the CJ word for "handkerchief", as an illustration of the lively variation among nasal, lateral, labial, and stop sounds in the indigenous Pacific Northwest?

Here are a few of the recorded forms of the CJ word:

hekchum
hikchEm
khikchEm
henkEchim
anikchim

We can see that the nasal was dropped from the first two forms.

Interestingly for a linguist, that nasal could easily be heard as either nasalization on the preceding vowel -- and French nasal vowels were realized very, very frequently by indigenous speakers as oral, cf. Demers' & Blanchet's materials -- or else as homorganic ("eng") prenasalization of the following stop, which perhaps also would make it highly susceptible to being dropped in pronunciation -- by analogy with the perhaps free or at least liberal variation between "m-like" and "b-like" sounds in Lower Chinookan.

Also interestingly for a linguist, all the forms shown above display a pronunciation [m] for the English original's final [f].  While, excepting K'alapuyan, the indigenous languages' common phoneme /xw/ might be *acoustically* the most similar correspondent to [f] in a Native's language repertoire, perhaps Native people had a high awareness of the tighter stricture at the labial articulator in this European sound than in /xw/, leading them to opt for the most labially strictured indigenous correspondent, /m/.  Was this solution optimal only in early contact days?  Later, we generally find [p] as a Native realization of etymological /f/.

If anyone read the preceding two paragraphs, give a holler.  :-)

Dave
--
"Asking a linguist how many languages she knows is like asking a doctor how many diseases he has!" -- anonymous



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