Dakelh ("Carrier" Athabaskan) loan from CJ; reflects Indian-Indian transmission?

[coyotez]

Dear Chinook-L,
The Indian trade networks are a certainty, as we argued in the Ourigan paper
last summer in OHQ. And, languages were as much a part of the trade as any
other resources. The following text comes from the Carrier-Sekani nation
website http://www.cnc.bc.ca/yinkadene/dakinfo/contact.htm.
David

The Languages of Contact
When Europeans first entered our territory in 1793, our people did not speak
European languages, and no European could speak any of our languages. Indeed,
even now, there are very few outsiders who can speak our languages. How did
the Europeans communicate with us?

The fur traders brought three languages with them. The officers or "gentlemen"
generally spoke English as their first language; most of them were Scotsmen
and spoke a Scots dialect of English. The men were mostly French-speaking
Canadians. The officers could often speak French, which they learned as they
worked their way Westward from Montreal. Many of the fur traders learned to
speak Cree on the prairies. Cree was also one of the languages of the métis
people who over time came to represent a significant portion of the Hudson's
Bay Company people. The fur traders employed small groups of Iroquois hunters,
but they could all speak French or Cree.

In the earliest days, it appears that communication was via Cree. Some members
of the fur trading parties spoke Cree, which they had learned on the Prairies.
Some Sekani people could speak Cree, and many could speak Dakelh. Sekani
people served as interpreters between Dakelh and Cree. Very few Dakelh people
could speak Cree, so communication using Cree was apparently always via Sekani
interpreters.

As time went on, some Dakelh people learned English or French through contact
with the fur traders and could communicate with them directly. Until European
settlement intensified toward the end of the nineteenth century,these were a
small minority, almost invariably men who worked extensively with the fur
traders or, in a few cases, people who associated closely with the Catholic
missions.

Europeans sometimes learned a small amount of Dakelh, but in almost all cases
this consisted of the names of objects; very few Europeans ever learned to
understand Dakelh or carry on a real conversation. Daniel Harmon, who was the
Northwest Company factor at Fort Saint James and Fort Fraser between 1809 and
1819, gives a list of about 300 Dakelh words that he learned in his Journal.
(Interestingly, Harmon mentions that he ordinarily spoke French with his Cree
wife and Cree with his children.)

The Roman Catholic missionaries who arrived at Fort Saint James in 1865 needed
to communicate more extensively and in greater depth with our people in order
to spread their religion. They therefore made an effort to learn to speak our
languages. Some of them learned to speak a little bit, and many of them
memorized prayers, but hardly any of them really learned any of our languages
well. The great exception is Father Adrien-Gabriel Morice, who was stationed
at Fort Saint James from 1885 until 1904. Father Morice began to study Dakelh
in Williams Lake with Jimmy Alexander, the son of the Hudson's Bay factor and
a Dakelh woman, who was sent to school at St. Joseph's school. Father Morice
learned Dakelh well. He later published a number of works about Dakelh
language and culture.

When the missionaries arrived in 1865 none of them knew any Dakelh, and few
Dakelh people knew much French. The language in which they communicated was
Chinook Jargon. Some Dakelh men knew Chinook Jargon; the missionaries would
speak in Chinook Jargon and one of these men would interpret the speech into
Dakelh. Chinook Jargon came to be widely used by Europeans coming up from the
south, who were accustomed to using it to communicate with native people. As a
result, a certain number of Dakelh people, mostly men who freighted on the
Fraser River, learned Chinook Jargon. The Dakelh word for "chief" dayi comes
from Chinook Jargon.

Chinook Jargon is no longer in use in our territory. Older people remember
hearing it used when they were young, and some people know a few words. Many
older people can still sing the Chinook Jargon song that they used to sing
when the Bishop came to visit, but they do not understand it. Hardly anyone
can actually speak it. Many people recall elders who could speak Chinook
Jargon. For example, in her book The Carrier, My People Lizette Hall reports
that her father, Louis-Billy Prince (1864-1962), could speak Chinook Jargon,
as well as Dakelh, English, French, Sekani and Beaver.


<>
>We can't reconstruct an entire contact situation from one word, and I'll have
to go through the dictionaries of the Dakelh dialects in order to discern more
clearly the mechanisms of borrowing there, but this is food for thought with
regard to the hypothesis that Chinuk-Wawa's geographical expansion owes a
significant debt to Indian-Indian contact.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Dave
>
>
>--
>"Asking a linguist how many languages she knows is like asking a doctor how
many diseases he has!" -- anonymous
>
>
>
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David Lewis
Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde
Department Of Anthropology
University of Oregon