[fwd from G. Lang] Re: "For Love & Bears"............Re: Note on "Note on the Chinook Jargon"

[David D. Robertson]

Hi Dave,

I wrote the bit below to respond to your message but when I tried to post
it
on the Listserv, I ran into some snafu.  Fortunately I didn't lose the
text.
So when you get time, could you upload it to the list.

Thanks,
George


MESSAGE:

A couple of years ago I saw the Love and Bears microform (can't remember if
it was interlibrary loan or in the vast microfiche archives of the Canadian
Govt).  I photocopied the cover page and the passages in Jargon I could
quickly find in the text - microforms give me vertigo.

I can dig them up if anyone is interested, but let me assure you that the
Jargon in Love and Bears was absolutely conventional in its time and place,
that is already well taken in hand by editors who had at hand the numerous
dictionaries Johnson computerized in 1978, and who knew how to write it for
publcation, even of the paraliterary sort to which Boas refers.  It was,
however, the first Jargon he admits to having seen.

There would be a great book or even thesis, though not in linguistics, on
how Jargon was edited by Yankee publishers from the early missionary texts
on, since whatever the manuscripts actually submitted, they were rewritten
for commercial and ideological purposes, and someone or other could be
consulted to standardize Jargon according to the dictionary tradition which
is so stable from the mid-nineteenth centuries on. How did all those people
living in New York or Boston know how to write Jargon the way they did?

As for poor Franz, I tend to give his English a break - those are just his
jottings, of which he made way more tons than ordinary mortals can even
imagine.

Poetic or idiomatic translations of those songs might be interesting, but
what would be great, if there were someone with world enough and time,
would
be to find out what those songs sounded like.  Boas gives some simple
musical notations, since his was a well-trained mind (originally a
physicist
and the geologist),  but .... where is the book on the multicultural world
of the salmon canneries in New Westminster in the 1890s and the role Jargon
played there, and the state of First Nations' music at the point in time?

But all that would require interdisciplinary expertise of a most demanding
sort ...

Now, what would be interesting for some young whippersnapper of a linguist
to do would be to find Boas's original fieldnotes in Jargon on, not only
Charles Cultee, but the rest of folks with whom he talked in it.  And to
publish them with notes.  I think they are in Philadelphia somewhere.  Or
at
least where they ought to be is there ;-)

Sorry for running on.

Happy New Year!

George