Baird,Dennis W. (ed.) "faithful to their Tribe & friends: SamuelBlack's 1829 Fort Nez Perces Report"

[Mike Cleven]

Dave Robertson wrote:
>
> (Moscow:  University of Idaho Library, 2000)
>
> No, the title does not have initial capitalization.
>
> Page 83:  "The Waylet or Cayouse have altogeather a different Language, but there appears many Words borrowed from the other language (Willa Walla &c) or the Willa Walla &c from them; creeping into their Dialects imperceptibly; by the by I have to remark that we are not sure of having the real Cayouse Language, they perhaps have _Patois_, they communicate, besides what we do, pickup is often from underlings about their Camps, not wishing to trouble themselves too much...from the Dalls to the Sea its Chinook they Talk."
>
> The 'Chinook' mentioned here would seem to mean the Chinookan languages, and not Jargon; the geographical and linguistic description stands at the end of a pretty complete cataloging of peoples, territories and languages of the Inland NW as well as the 'Shasty' or 'Streaked Faces' on the Klamath River.  [All spellings sic.]

But if it's the Cayuse/Waylet who are speaking, and it's underlings of
the Chinook proper that they're dealing with, doesn't it seem more
likely they'd use the Jargon, or an un-Europeanized proto-Jargon of some
kind, a simplified form of Chinook spiked with loanwords from upriver.
This seems to me what he's meaning by "they perhaps have _Patois_".
It's interesting to me that this French word would crop up in an HBC
report - the word Jargon not having been coined for the intertribal
pidgin yet - and perhaps reflects the strong French influence within the
Company.

Or in the last phrase is it the Indians =in=that=region= who speak
Chinook; i.e. he's not talking about the Cayuse or people upriver from
the Dalles; the context doesn't sound that way, but these _are_ notes,
and not a publication, right?
>
> The note on a possible non-native-directed (not 'real') variety of the Cayuse language reflects real astuteness on the part of this British observer, who mentions in the same passage his acquaintance with both Cree [Algonquian] and 'Chipewean' [Athabaskan], and includes in his report a quite extensive trilingual vocabulary, of 'Willa Walla' and 'Nez Perces' [both Sahaptian] and 'Cayouse', the latter affiliated perhaps with Molale--has this question or the larger Penutian family idea been worked out satisfactorily?

I thought the Cayuse were related to the Syilx/Okanagan?  Guess not....

Isn't he meaning that the language he's hearing the Cayuse use is the
_Patois_ (and/or Chinook, depending on how that last line fits], rather
than the true Cayuse language.  Just as the Jargon superseded tribal
languages elsewhere; they remained spoken within the tribe only, and so
were unknown to casual if educated observers such as Mr. Black, who
heard them speak on the intertribal vernacular, the Patois.  To me, it
seems he's saying he doesn't think this is their _true_ language, but
rather all that he's heard them use given the nature of his encounters
with them.  Or are we both saying the same thing?
>
> Aren't there other mentions in early records of the Cayuse people's reluctance to make their language known to outsiders?  What, I wonder, is known or surmised of the variety that was recorded at that time?  Might it have been a contact variety?

Given their geographical/social location relative to neighbouring
languages, you'd think there must have been some kind of common tongue
in the Plateau.....just as there seems to have been on the Coast, prior
to the evolution of the Jargon proper.

MC